Watching someone slowly turn on a light switch seems like an excruciatingly boring way to spend 30 seconds. But when the action is paired with a real-time graph charting the movement it turns soothing. For some reason Daihei Shibata’s short film Unendurable Line makes me want to watch mundane things play out for hours…
The Star Wars expanded universe is huge. Really huge. Like, you just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly huge it really is. To grasp the full extent of this hugeness, a team of data scientists used a new computer program to analyze it, revealing some unexpected things about the extended saga.
Oxford University’s Max Roser has meticulously pieced together a chart showing the global death rate from war over the past 600 years—and it paints a surprisingly optimistic picture.
This is God’s work. Or at the very least, the work of a Grand Maester. Joeltronics made this very useful graph that shows which episode of Game of Thrones the TV show corresponds to which chapter and which book in the A Song of Ice and Fire books (aka the Game of Thrones books). That way you know what’s been shown…
Last night, the world seemed exciting and you felt like you could achieve anything. This morning, all you want to do is go back to bed. Unless you’re at the right end of that error bar. [PHD Comics]
This rather clunky looking formula—made more clunky by its pixelated nature—is actually rather special. Because the formula is what's used to create the visual representation of the formula which is used to create the...
From the collection of the National Archives UK, this awesomely simple chart was drawn in 1969. Some of them look like classic scifi interpretations of flying saucers ... but we also see some hubcaps and hats in there, too.
Our moods ebb and flow with the seasons. They also change quite dramatically over the course of a single week. These visualizations show exactly when we can expect to be depressed, anxious, and stressed.
There are a lot of laptops out there. A lot. Too many to navigate easily. But this chart thrown together by Marek Gibney helps. It's called the Tourist Map of Laptops, and it can help you grok the whole wide range of available computers at least a little bit.
You might've thought that music is one thing that can escape the current 'big data' trend of mapping, charting and quantifying everything; but that's where you're so, so wrong — at least according to Flowing Data's Nathan Yau.
There are so many, many ways to graphically convey scientific data. But depending on how this information is presented, it can be perceived differently by different people — if not completely inaccurately. Here are 10 simple rules to help you convey your data more effectively.
It's not often that you get the chance to say, "You probably won't know this song, it's pretty obscure" about a hit song. Now, thanks to this graph, you can.
It's like the rabbit-duck illusion, but with directions. [via Qikipedia]
You're almost exactly as likely to skip a song while streaming music as you are to listen to the whole thing. This series of graphs explains what it is that makes it so hard to listen to a song through the end.
The Economist brought interactive datavisualization to its print edition this week with an unsettling infographic on Honduran murder rates.
Struggling to remember the affiliations of all the different characters on Game of Thrones and whether they're still alive? This massive chart keeps track of who is who on the show and what their current status is.
Here's some news to file under "dystopian future": Energy drink sales are skyrocketing so quickly that analysts are predicting it could replace coffee as America's preferred caffeine-delivery system. But there may yet be some light at the end of the caffeine-tunnel.
Here's some impressive planetary perspective: Last Wednesday, NASA's Kepler mission announced the discovery of 715 newly confirmed exoplanets, nearly doubling the total number of verified planets beyond our solar system. This animated graph, courtesy of NASA, helps put that discovery into context.
Good news! Mathematics has confirmed what we already suspected: You should most definitely be ordering a larger pizza.
Nathan Yau over at FlowingData has turned 100 of the most memorable movie quotes ever into chart form — and they are absolutely fantastic.
