Some basic demographic data on the United States and the World. Besides being able to drill down into the numbers several different ways there are a couple of interactive charts – like the population pyramid where you can watch the baby boomer bulge move over the years.
OK, this isn’t a chart. But it is an incredibly well designed and hilarious rap video about economic theory. Images and methods are are powerful communication tools. Check out EconStories for more music videos and mini-documentaries.
Note: Safe for work (no dirty pictures or obscenity).
John Millward analyzed meta data from the Internet Adult Film Database and came up with some interesting findings. Apparently. the average female porn star is 5’5″ tall, weighs 117lbs, has B-cup breasts, starts when they are 22 and has a 3 year career.
Hair color, against stereotype, is not dominated by blondes:

Race matches closely with the general population:

There are other findings, but even a blog named ChartPorn has some limits – so if you want to see them, head over to the original article.
Two different analyses of supreme court decisions. I didn’t dig into the methodology, but the papers are available if you’re interested.
The so-called Quinn-Martin scores show the court trending significantly to the right in recent years, with even its left flank being relatively middle-of-the-road, relative to history.
Bailey shows the court has become significantly more conservative since, for example, the 1960s, he still pegs the four more liberal justices as clearly to the left of the court, historically speaking. In addition, Bailey’s model actually suggests the court, while more conservative than in most of the last several decades, isn’t all that much more so than it was in the 1970s or when Sandra Day O’Connor was the swing vote in the 1990s and early 2000s.
In: Interactive Politics
26 Mar 2013The efforts that go into tracking civilian deaths in modern conflicts are admirable. The fact that we dismiss them so blatantly is crazy. Regarding the design, the annotations are a tad slow for my taste
I almost missed the histogram with links to details of each attack – select “victims” in the upper left.
In: Innovative Maps Science
25 Mar 2013Using location data from over 1 million photos taken by astronauts on the International Space Station provides us with another “revealed” map of the world. These big data meta analysis generally annoy me, but for some reason when they are done on a map I find them downright artistic.
The author, Nathan Bergey, has additional breakdown maps by mission, etc on his website if you’re interested.
In: Culture
24 Mar 2013Pick a chord, then another, then another – and it will display a list of songs written with that key, and a visualization of the notes and chords of that song. Below is GCGF.
The same site has other cool musical tools. You can test your ear and musical transcription:
and a basic multimedia music theory book for the iPad.
I don’t know that this works that great as a venn, but I like having list of nonsense all in one place to remind me how much of it there is.
Recent studies add to the evidence that we are changing the world:
If you want to see what “climate change” really means, as in what will be changing where, check out the 2013 National Climate Assessment report. It’s fantastic, and chuck full of visualizations:
One side effect: More shipping in the Arctic:
The effects of deregulation of the airline industry in the late 70s – from an article by the always insightful Steven Pearlstein.
Somewhat ironically, the original expansion of competition that deregulation was supposed to create has now entirely disappeared (the below could be updated to show the recent USAir/American merger).
I suppose you could argue about what metric to use to measure the effectiveness of the drug war – but I’ve never seen one that justifies the costs (probably true for most “wars”). Anyways, the author of the below chart does a great job detailing his sources and methodology on his website.
An addictive collection of beautiful charts, graphs, maps, and interactive data visualization toys -- on topics from around the world.