Last month, police in Hong Kong defused a 2000 pound (900 kilogram) bomb found undetonated since World War II. The South China Morning Post created a small graphic to diagram just what the bomb was and how it was delivered (by US aircraft) to Hong Kong.
Credit for the piece goes to Adolfo Arranz.
Today’s piece is from the Washington Post. However, it is less data visualisation and more of a neat little motion graphic explaining the formation of pot holes. Since it seems to be about that time of year when roads are destroyed by the things.
Credit for the piece goes to Sohail Al-Jamea and Bonnie Berkowitz.
This is an older piece from the fall, but with the talks going on about Syria this felt an appropriate time an infographic about sarin gas poisoning.
Credit for the piece goes to Jonathon Rivait, Mike Faille, and Richard Johnson.
Today’s post comes from a co-worker and looks at the increase of speed in speed skating in the Winter Olympics since 1924. It does a nice job of showing the increase in the speed. Because to a degree, the increase has not been linear. Instead, it really only increased in two spurts and recently has remained fairly constant.
Then to show how slight differences in speed impact an actual race. The times are plotted against the distance in a simulated race. That shows that seemingly incremental increases in speed can have a drastic impact on where one finishes a race.
Credit for the piece goes to Andrew Garcia Phillips.
Today’s post is more about a means of illustrating radiation, less about quantifying it. Unfortunately the article is in German and I speak none of it. But, the context is that of the Fukushima Disaster. Make sure you click through to see the illustrations in action.
Credit (I think) goes to Interactive Things and Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
…before any of this occurs. Courtesy of BBC Future and the New Year, welcome to the end of the world as we know it. (Sing it, Michael.)
Credit for the piece goes to iibStudio.
100 years ago we began to fly commercially. We moved beyond daredevil stunts and novelty and created air travel into a business. To commemorate the history, the Guardian commissioned this interactive graphic story to celebrate said history. It includes charts, narration, and near real-time data on actual flights mapped out as in the introductory element captured below.
Credit for the piece goes to Kiln.
We all know of the Flying V, the great hockey plan developed in the 1990s—wait, no, wrong one. I meant to talk about birds flying in formation. Because science is finally allowing us to understand the mechanisms of how and why birds fly in these tight, v-shaped formations. In a BBC article reporting on the most recent findings, the graphics team included a diagram showing just how formation flying works.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
If you live in the United States, you probably have heard the term polar vortex by now. People have been using the term to describe the bitterly cold temperatures affecting the eastern two-thirds of the country. But the term polar vortex is a meteorological term that means a specific phenomenon. In other words, it’s more than a hashtag along the lines of snowmageddon. The Washington Post explains what the polar vortex is.
My caveat for this piece is that from my understanding, it’s not entirely correct. Or perhaps not detailed enough. In brief, we turn to the National Weather Service out of New York for a more technically correct, but more poorly designed graphic.
Poor type, poor colours, poor hierarchy. Those are abundantly clear, but the important part is that the NWS wants to correct many of the popular misconceptions. Somewhere between the well-intended but less-than-entirely-clear Post piece and the accurate-but-also-unclear National Weather Service piece is an opportunity to explain the concept to the public.
Credit for the Washington Post piece goes to Bonnie Berkowitz, Richard Johnson, Katie Park, and Gene Thorp.
Credit for the National Weather Service goes to the graphics team at the National Weather Service of New York.
Earlier this week xkcd looked at the planets near Earth (within 60 light years) within their respective star system’s habitable zone. Turns out there are quite a few.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
