still not as bad as krakatoa

Via: Online MBA

Related: GDS Digital's Flickr Stream is an Infographic Wonderland »

big yellow taxi

The New York Times has posted an interactive heat map of the cab activity in Manhattan. Pickups and drop offs across time of day and day of the week using real data.

If you love information design, or simply love that feeling of mastery that arises from commandeering a cab in Midtown when it's your one hope of getting where you need to go within the brief window you have to get there (I love that feeling), you won't want to miss this »

visualizing empires decline

Video: Visualizing Empires Decline via @tylercurtain

Surface Area Required To Power The World (revision)

Surface Area Required To
Power The World (revision)
Originally uploaded by mkandlez

New information design crush. Mccandelish's whole stream is a dream.

Be sure to embiggen this one.

location, location, location

Planners, lenders, and most consumers traditionally measure housing affordability as 30 percent or less of income. The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, in contrast, takes into account not just the cost of housing, but also the intrinsic value of place, as quantified through transportation costs.

From the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, developed by CNT and the Center for Transit Oriented Development (CTOD), in an effort to accurately measure the true affordability of housing.

new widget

See sidebar. Courtesy of The Take Away. (Clickthrough to see it all big like and interact with it.)

The electoral college predictor visualization "provides an overview of the predicted outcome of the upcoming US presidential elections. rows depict the results as reported from different news agencies, such as the Washington Post, The New York Times or CNN, while the columns represent the different US states, with their width according to the number of votes. the swing states, & in particular the lack of consensus among the news agencies, can be easily discerned in the middle of the graph."

via Information Aesthetics

under wraps. in the rain.

I love the New York Public Library in Midtown Manhattan. I love the little hotel that I usually stay at because it's right there, near the library. I love that our NY office is just a block or two away. I love the Rose Reading Room, where I can camp out and get some work done in all that light and space and on those lovely long tables lit by those beautiful copper lamps.

A long long time ago I designed the information architecture for the Seattle Public Library's web site where I proposed a component of their site design that they still use today -- a library locator that, when selected, takes the visitor to a page that's dedicated to their local branch. I know: seems like a no brainer today. ;) But this was before MapQuest even (I'm pretty sure) and the Seattle Public Library was working hard to get the public behind funding of a new downtown library building, and they kept hearing complaints from folks who said "MY library is my LOCAL branch." So we wanted to make that idea clear and inclusive in the information architecture of the site. Which we did. [1]

I learned a few months after it went live from my SPL client that she met with the folks from NYPL and they commented that they really liked that locator feature. So guess what they did? Yep: got one of their own.

So yeah: there is a little piece of me that is over the moon happy to think that the NYPL has a little piece of me on their website. Because that part that's stored deep in my heart? The one that loves climbing those double branching stairways and double dog digs the marble washrooms: it's the deep heart parts that are often the hardest to see.


[1] And a footnote: The original execution -- which is not longer out there -- had all of the branches displayed as links on screen in the right hand rail. It's now a dropdown menu which I don't dig as much. It doesn't tell the story in the same way: It doesn't have the same heft that says "We are Us."

the mundaneum

From his armchair, everyone will hear, see, participate, will even be able to aplaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus, add his cries of participation to those of all the others.

Paul Otlet, father of the Mundaneum, a paper based system that prefigured the hyperlink in the early 1900s, speaking to what he imagined his device would make possible. The Mundaneum, and museum that honors it in Mons, Belgium, is featured in today's New York Times.

parse me

clash
Originally uploaded by Box and Arrow.

Flickrite Box and Arrow's posted an informatic take on the Clash -- and dropped it in the Flickr Song Chart Pool.

View the slideshow »


via Sourjayne

dante is wise, and also loves bacon.

In this, the season of gifts, I have just received a wonderful gift, and now I will share it with you: Enlightenment through Bacon »

Many thanks to Martin, for the link, and to Boing Boing, for the original post.


p.s. Re beggin' strips. My sister never misses the opportunity to remind me of the time I was babysitting a neighbor kid and rifled the kitchen for treats, coming up only with some dry jerky stashed on top of the fridge. I downed a few pieces. Thought little more of it.

Until the parents arrived home and, just before the dad gave me a lift, treated their yappy little dog to a dog treat -- the very same jerky that I had availed myself of earlier that evening.

Good times.


More on bacon »

in flight movie

US flight patterns, as recorded by the FAA and visualized by the Celestial Mechanics Project -- the (quicktime) Movie »

Beautiful, beautiful.


Here's the main index page, with several other visualizations »

via beebo_wallace & the Celestial Mechanics project.

curiosities of the sciences and marvels for the eyes [1]

a map as tall as me
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.[2]

Where am I? Where do I want to go? How do I get there?

—What Maps Tell Us, per the Field Museum

Maps, Finding our Place in the World, which opened up at Chicago’s Field Museum on November 2nd, is a peep show for the schematically inclined.

Caught it last night in a private showing put on by the good folks at the Anthropology Alliance, who also brought in Ryan Williams, one of the show’s curators, to speak on the technologies of mapping. (The buffet, for those who care most about these things, pulled in a meager 3 points out of 5. Full points for the open bar were offset by the unidentifiable Satay, which may or may not have been poultry product. Admittedly the score would have plummeted to 2.5 if the desserts weren’t as solid as they were: mini-carrot cakes, lemon bars and a molten brownie glazed in frosting, sprinkled with jimmies, and vaguely reminiscent of an uptown Hostess ding dong)

But to the exhibit.

All the big guns were there: Lindbergh’s Flight Chart for his historic New York to Paris trek. The first Mercatur projection (I know -- get out!). Cook’s chronograph (although no word on whether it was with him during that unfortunate incident in the Sandwich Islands in which the locals mistook him for Lono -- the second time).

Edmund Halley’s 17-hundred-something map of the magnetic North -- the very first graphical representation of the earth’s magnetic field, bifurcated by the lovely curvilinear “line of no variation” -- also put in an appearance; and Cortes’ map of the Aztec capitol he conquered was also in attendance.

Even a 15th century rendering of Ptolemy’s Geographia was there.

Fans of Edward Tufte will be sure to recognize John Snow’s 1855 Cholera Map of London and Minard’s Figurative Map of the Successive Losses in Men of the French Army in the Russian Campaign 1812-1813.

The freaking cool North/South digital military map of the Civil War conflict from the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, which I wrote about back in August of last year, was there, although it lost some of its impact on the small screen that it was afforded (about twelve inches across -- in Springfield it fills a wall).

Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin also put an appearance, mapping colonies and the Gulf Stream respectively, but it was the more obscure gems that were ultimately the most interesting.

• Places Visited by Emperor Yu by an unknown Chinese mapmaker in 1136 was one of the first maps to use uniform scale to represent distance. The map itself is carved in wood -- copies were made via ink rubbings. The image is a strict grid -- solid blocks of black outlined in concave lines of white -- intersected and overrun by the sinuous meanders of what I assumed was the Yangtze, but realize now that I failed to write it down



• A map of Oaxaca, Mexico, when it was still called Amoltepec -- drawn just like you would expect a Mixtec artist would draw it on paper in 1580 -- hauntingly reminiscent of the few remaining Mayan Codices



• A map drawn from memory by Wetallok, an Inuit, of the Belcher Islands in Canada, on request for Explorer Robert Flaherty, that in its harsh expressionistic lines appears to be strikingly abstract -- until you compare it with the satellite image of the area that hangs alongside it, and you realize that folks who work the land know the land better than any surveyor ever could



• A spectacular letterpress map of Venice executed across six panels on that gorgeous stout Italian-made paper, the upper rightmost of which, in all its peripheral abstraction, earned my award for “map I most want to take home to live with me and be my love”



• The beautiful mystery of seeing first, the 1863 map by John Hanning Speke, on behalf of the Royal Geographic Society expedition, that verifies Lake Victoria as the source of the Nile River and then rounding the corner to find Francesco Roselli’s 1508 map of the world -- the first one post-Columbus’ discovery -- that not only tries to make sense (and does so badly) out of North and South America, but also harbors a sweet little divot cut clean through the paper where the heart should be in Africa that is, in fact, Lake Victoria -- and is fed by all those marvelous rivers, including, yes, why isn’t that the Nile? Hey...waitaminute...

I only got two-thirds of the way through in the hour before we were called away to the lecture, and then again in the brief twenty minutes that we squeaked in after the lecture before we had to hit the road home. So I’ll return soon to finish it, and to circle back to see the rest of the exhibit and to visit my favorites again -- including the sweet little slash of blue turbulence, perfectly tamed, that caught my eye like the crystalline call of an eagle’s cry [3] just as we were heading out the door. A story beautifully told, a man’s plan to tame the Arno and turn Florence into an economic powerhouse to rival its sister city: The Plan to Regulate the Arno River in Florence drawn by the hand of Leonardo da Vinci.


p.s. If you’ve never read Stephen Jay Gould’s explication of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and the role that, he believes, water as an energy resource plays in that painting -- well, who am I to tell you what to read? But honestly -- you won’t be disappointed.

p.p.s. This map thing is going on all over the city for the next little while -- good times »


[1] Stole the title of this post from a remarkably beautiful Egyptian series of maps -- 13th century copies of 11th century originals by an unidentified mapmaker who turned out strikingly graphic and geometric representations of the European world that looked unlike anything the Europeans were producing at the time

[2] The image is illegal, taken by cameraphone before I saw the “no photography” sign, of an Italian book of maps, c. 1665, that, had it been standing, would have stood as tall as me -- and I’m 5 foot 12.

[3] Have you ever heard anything like it -- that clear blue chime that an eagle makes when it’s calling to its mate? I heard it once on Christmas Day walking through Seward Park in Seattle and it took me several disorienting minutes to realize that what I heard was a living breathing creature.

tools of the trade

Found, quite unexpectedly, in my Visio template files.

the moon is not yet dead

The moon is not yet dead, nor has it revealed all its secrets.

Found, and then quickly lost again, in digg labs' big spy.

The zeitgeist of which I could watch, mesmerized, for hours at a stretch.

(Swarmin' and stackin' are fun too.)

tufte love

What is the display about?
Losses in men of the French Army in the Russian Campaign 1812-1813

Who did the work?
Drawn up by M. Minard

Who’s that?
Inspector General of Bridges and Roads in retirement

Where and when was the work done?
Paris, November 20, 1869

What are the data sources?
The information which has served to draw up the map has been extracted from the works of M.M. Thiers, of Ségur, of Fezensac, of Chambray and the unpublished diary of Jacob, the pharmacist of the Army since October 28th.

Any assumptions?
In order to better judge with the eye the dimunition of the army, I have assumed that the troops of Prince Jérôme and of Marshall Davoush who had been detached at Minsk and Mogkilev and have rejoined around Orcha and Vitebsk, had always marched with the army.

What are the scales of measurement?
• For invasion and retreat flow-lines: one millimeter for every ten thousand men
• For the underlying map: Common leagues of France
• For the temperature: degrees of the Réaumur thermometer below zero

Who published and printed the work?
Autog. Par Regnier, 8. Pas. Ste. Marie St. Gain à Paris

Anything else?
Minard never mentions Napoleon.

If you’ve every attended one of Edward Tufte’s road shows, you’ve walked away with a reproduction of Minard’s Figurative Map of the Successive Losses in Men of the French Army in the Russian Campaign 1812-1813, and you’ve traced their route, reading right, heady in numbers (422,000 men) across the Nieman River through Vitebask and Gjat to Moscow.

And you watched their numbers dwindle by three-quarters (to 100,000 men) by the time they double back at Moscow, and you know already, at a glance, when you see that black recessive line and the plummeting temperature (21 below zero), that they will fade to nearly nothing (4,000 men) by their penultimate leg, before they meet up again with another emaciated arm (22,000 men reduced to 8,000) from their ranks.

And you just may agree with Tufte that this could be the best illustrative graphic ever designed. And you’ll undoubtedly agree with Minard that war is hell.

Another bonus of those road shows, which by corporate training budget standards are cheap at under $400/head: Tufte loads you up with his beautifully self-published books, and as he publishes more (Beautiful Evidence is his most recent title – it also contains a fold out page of Minard’s graphic – the excerpt above is from that title) you walk away with more – he’s now up to four.

Tufte’s feeling the love in the Stanford and New York Magazines this week.

Right there with you, baby.

a house divided

One of the most impressive presentations at a museum that strives to impress (that would be the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, IL – a multimedia spectacular that puts Disneyland’s robotronic Lincoln to shame) is a brief four minute movie -- an animated timeline, actually -- that plots the progress of the Civil War from the point of Lincoln’s election, through secession, his inauguration, and on to battle.

The Union and Confederacy are represented in blue and red (ya think they could have used blue and grey, but oh no -- had to be blue and red), and as the clock ticks -- with one second equal to one week -- the battlefront oscillates and morphs and serpentines, punctuated with the brief explosions of battles (Shilo, Antietam, Gettysburg), as the body count tallies in the corner (over 1 million before the war is done). Then Sherman marches to the sea and cuts the final gash that seals the surrender of the South.

The movie closes with Lincoln’s assassination.

Edward Tufte would be proud – it’s brilliant information design.

I, frankly, was a wreck.


[Image Credit: The flag graphic above is by Rolyn Barthelman of NYC who created it after the last presidential election.]