From a post by Dan Phiffer, an image by Adam Nieman and the Science Photo Library.

All the water in the world (1.4087 billion cubic kilometers of it) including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc. Right: All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as the Earth.

More information at the original post. (Thanks to Eugene for the link.)

Someday I want to write like Ludacris, but for now I’ll enjoy info graphics of his work. Luda not only knows a lot of young ladies, but can proudly recite the range of area codes in which they live. Geographer (and feminist) Stefanie Gray took it upon herself to make a map:

You’ll need background music while taking a look; and I found a quick refresher of the lyrics also informative. More discussion and highlights of her findings can be found on Strange Maps, who first published Stefanie’s image.

In related news, someone else has figured out Rick Astley:

I’ve added the album cover at left so that you can look into his eyes and see his honest face for yourself. If you’re not a proud survivor of the 80s (or perhaps if you are), the single can be had for a mere 99¢. Or if that only gets you started, you can pick up his Greatest Hits. Someone also made another version of the graphic using the Google chart API (mentioned earlier), though it appears less analytically sound (accurate).

More from song charts at this earlier post.

As much as snickering about computers in movies might make me feel smart, I’ve since become fascinated by how software, and in particular information, is portrayed in film. There are many layers at work:

1. Film is visual storytelling. As such, you have to be able to see everything that’s happening. Data is not visual, which is why you see symbols that represent data used more often: It’s 2012 but they’re still storing data on physical media because at some point, showing the data being moved is important. (Nevermind that it can be transmitted thousands of kilomteters in a fraction of a second.) This is less interesting, since it means a sort of dumbing-down of the technology, and presents odd contradictions. It can also make things ugly: progress bars are often full screen interface elements, or how many technology-heavy action flicks have included the pursuit of a computer disk? (On the other hand, the non-visual aspect can be a positive one: a friend finishing film school at NYU once pursued a nanotechnology thriller as his final film because “you can’t see it.” It would allow him to tackle a technical subject without needing the millions of dollars in props.)
2. Things need to “feel” like a computer. When this piece appeared in the Hulk, they added extra gray interface elements in and around it so that it didn’t look too futuristic. Nevermind that it was a real, working piece of software for browsing the human genome. To the consternation of a friend who worked on Minority Report, on-screen “windows” in the interface all had borders around them. If you have a completely fluid interface with hands, motion, and accessing piles of video being output from three people in a tank, do we really need…title bars?
3. It’s not just computers—anything remotely complicated is handled in this manner. Science may be worse off than software, though I don’t think scientists complain as loudly as the geeks did when they heard “This is UNIX, I know this!” (My personal favorite in that one was a scene where a video phone discussion was actually an actor talking to a QuickTime movie—you could see the progress bar moving left to right as the scene wore on.)
4. There’s a lot of superfluous gimmickery that goes on too. There’s just no way you’re gonna show important information in a film without random numbers twitching or counting down. Everything is more important when we have know the current time with millisecond accuracy (that’s three digits after the decimal point for seconds). Or maybe some random software code (since that’s incomprehensible but seems significant). This is obvious and sometimes painful to watch, except in the case of a talented visual designer who makes it look compelling.
5. Finally, the way that computers are represented in film has something to do with how we (society? lay people? them?) think that computers should work.

It’s that last one that is the fascinating point for me: by virtue of the intent to reach a large audience, a movie streamlines the way that information is handled and interfaces behave. A their best, it suggests where we need to go (at their worst, they blink “Access Denied”). It’s easy to point out the ridiculousness of the room full of people hunched over computers at CIA headquarters and the guy saying “give me all people with last name Jones in the Baltimore area” and in the next scene that’s tallied against satellite video (which of course can be enhanced ad infinitum). But think about how ridiculous those scenes looked twenty years ago, and the parts of that scenario that are no longer far-fetched as the population at large gets used to Google and having satellite imagery available for the price of typing a query. Even the most outrageous—the imagery enhancement—has had breakthroughs associated with it, some of which can be done by anyone using Photoshop, like the case of people trying to figure out if Bush was wearing a wire at the debates in 2004. (Contradicting their earlier denials, Bush’s people later admitted that he was wearing a bulletproof vest.)

That’s the end of today’s lecture on movie graphics, so I’ll leave you with a link to Mark Coleran, a visual designer who has produced many such sequences for film.

I recommend the large version of his demo reel, and I’ll be returning to this topic later with more designers. Drop me an email if you have favorite designer or film sequence.

As the .com shakeout loomed in the late 90s, I always assumed that:

1. Most internet-born companies would disappear.
2. Traditional (brick & mortar) stores would eventually get their act together and have (or outsource) a proper online presence. For instance Barnes & Noble hobbling toward a usable site, and Borders just giving up and turning over their online presence to Amazon. The former comical, the latter brilliant, though Borders has just returned with their own non-Amazonian presence. (Though I think the humor is now gone from watching old-school companies trying to move online.)
3. Finally, a few new names—namely the biggest ones, like Amazon—would be left that didn’t disappear with the others from point #1.

Basically, that not much would change. A couple new brands would emerge, but that there wasn’t really room in people’s heads for that many new retailers or services. (It probably didn’t help that all their logos were blue and orange, and had names like Flooz, Boo and Kibu that feel natural on the tongue and inspire buyer loyalty and confidence.)

But not only did more companies stick around, some seem to be successfully pivoting into other areas. From Amazon:

In January of 2008 we announced that the Amazon Web Services now consume more bandwidth than do the entire global network of Amazon.com retail sites.

This from a blog post with this plot of the bandwidth use for both sides of the business.

Did you imagine that the site where you could buy books cheaper than anywhere else in 1998 would ten years later exceed the bandwidth from that with services for data storage and cloud computing? Of course, this announcement doesn’t say anything about their profits at this point, but I don’t think anyone expected Steve Jobs to turn Apple into a toy factory and start turning out music players and cell phones to have it become half their business within just a few years. (That’s half as in, “beastly silver PCs and shiny black and white laptops seem important and all, but those take real work…why bother?”)

But the point (aside from subjecting you to a long-winded description of .com history and my shortcomings as a futurist) has more to do with Amazon becoming a business that’s dealing purely in information. The information economy is all about people moving bits and ideas around (abstractions of things), instead of silk, furs, and spices (actual physical things). And while books are information, the growth of Amazon’s data services business—as evidenced by that graph—is one of the strongest indicators I’ve seen of just how real the non-real information economy has become. Not that the information economy is something new; but that the groundwork has been laid in the preceding decades where something like Amazon Web Services can be successful.

And since we’re on the subject of Amazon, I’ll close with more from Jeff Bezos from “How the Web Was Won” in this month’s Vanity Fair:

When we launched, we launched with over a million titles. There were countless snags. One of my friends figured out that you could order a negative quantity of books. And we would credit your credit card and then, I guess, wait for you to deliver the books to us. We fixed that one very quickly.

Or showing his genius early on:

When we started out, we were packing on our hands and knees on these cement floors. One of the software engineers that I was packing next to was saying, You know, this is really killing my knees and my back. And I said to this person, I just had a great idea. We should get kneepads. And he looked at me like I was from Mars. And he said, Jeff, we should get packing tables.

Thanks to Eugene for passing along the links.

Just received this in a message from a journalism grad student studying information graphics:

I have looked at 2 years worth of Glamour (and Harper’s Bazaar too) magazines for my project and it shows that Glamour and other women’s magazines have less amount of information graphics in the magazines compared to men’s magazines, such as GQ and Esquire. Why do you think that is? Do you think that is gender-related at all?

I hadn’t really thought about it much. For the record, my reply:

My fiancée (who knows a lot more about being female than I do) pointed out that such magazines have much less practical content in general, so it may have more to do with that than a specific gender thing. Though she also pointed out that, for instance, in today’s news about the earthquake in China, she felt that women might be more inclined to read a story with the faces of those affected than one with information graphics tallying or describing the same.

I think you’d need to find something closer to a male equivalent of Glamour so that you can cover your question and remove the significant bias you’re getting for the content. Though, uh, a male equivalent of Glamour may not really exist… But perhaps there are better options.

And as I was writing this, she responded:

Finding a male equivalent of Glamour is hard but they actually do have some hard-hitting stories near the back in every issue that sometimes might be overshadowed by all the fashion and beauty stuff. Actually, finding a female equivalent of GQ or Esquire is also hard because they sort of have a niche of their own too. I have to agree with your fiancée too, because, I studied Oprah’s magazines a little in my previous study and sometimes it is really about what appeals to their audience.

Well, my study does not imply causality and it sometimes might be hard to differentiate if the result was due to gender differences or content. So, it’s interesting to find all these out, and actually men’s magazines have about 5 times more information graphics than women’s magazines which is amazing.

Wow—five times more. (At least amongst the magazines that she mentioned.)

My hope in posting this (rather than just sharing the contents of my inbox…can you tell that I’m answering mail today?) is that someone else out there knows more about the subject. Please drop me a line if you do; I’d like to know more and to post a follow-up.

In contrast to the clarity and simplicity of the New York Times info graphic mentioned yesterday, the example currently on their home page is an example of the opposite:

This is helpful because it clarifies the point I tried to make about what was nice about the other graphic. Because of space limitations, this graphic is small, and the information is stored across multiple panels. So at the top there are a pair of tabs. Then within the tabs we have a pair of buttons. Two tabs, four buttons, just to get through four possible pieces of data. That’s the sort of combinatoric magic we see in Microsoft Windows preference panels:

While the organization in the info graphic makes conceptual sense—first you must choose one of two states, then choose one of the candidates—it makes little cognitive sense. We’re choosing between one of four options. Just give them to us! For a pair of items beneath another pair of items, there’s no need to establish a sense of hierarchy. If there were a half dozen states, and a half dozen candidates, then that might make sense. Just because the data is technically hierarchic, or arranged in a tree, that doesn’t mean that it’s the best representation for it.

The solution? Just give us the four options. No sliding panels, trap doors, etc. Better yet, superimpose the Clinton and Obama data on a single map as different colors, and have a pair of buttons (not tabs!) that let the viewer quickly swap between Indiana and North Carolina.

(This only covers the interaction model, without getting into the way the data itself is presented, colors chosen, laid out, etc. The lack of population density information in the image makes the maps themselves nearly worthless.)

I like neither bacon nor these machines, so I wish they would always provide this helpful explanation (or warning).

Comparing the number of Starbucks and Wal-Marts per capita across the United States (the lower 48 at least).

Read more Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science from Andrew Gelman’s lab at Columbia.

(thx, jason)

Given the number of data points provided, it would be difficult to refute the findings depicted in this chart.

Related work can be found here and here. While later research findings (by latecomers who foolishly claim to have invented the approach) here and here.

Thanks to Raelynn Miles for the original link.

Beautiful info graphic from a September 2007 article about the restoration of the Guggenheim, depicting the cracks in the concrete walls. From the image:

Since the Guggenheim Museum opened in 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright’s massive spiral facade has been showing signs of cracking, mainly from seasonal temperature fluctuations that caus the concrete walls, built without expansion joints, to contract and expand.

The image is partly striking for the contrast between the NYT-style geometric graphic and pale colors mixed with the organic shape of the cracks. Wonderful.

Sent from one of my former students at CMU (you know who you are, drop me a line if it was you…I’ve lost the original message!)