Randy Krum
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From Many Eyes, this bubble chart shows the number of plastic surgery procedures per 100 people, by nation. Let's just say, the U.S. is one of the smaller countries measured this way.
Breathing Earth is a cool website that displays international statistics in real-time, similar in concept to Poodwaddle.com's World Counter. Breathing Earth focuses on carbon dioxide emissions by country and adds population, births and deaths.
Welcome to Breathing Earth. This presentation displays the carbon dioxide emission levels of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates - all in real-time. Though considerable effort has been taken to ensure that the presentation uses the most accurate and up-to-date data available, please remember that this is just a simulation.Breathing Earth was created by David Bleja (aka Stillwater), whose home website is stillwater-microcosm.net
Found on SimpleComplexity.net
From eRobertParker.com, the online Wine Advocate Vintage Guide. Fascinating guide of wines from 1970-2005. Wines are grouped by region and year, and each group is scored and given a letter code to identify the current maturity status of those wines (like Ready to Drink, Too Old and Early Maturing). The color coding represents ranges of the numeric scores.
The guide is interactive, so clicking on any of the rating circles brings you to a list of the specific wines grouped together for that region. For the specific wines, you can see their individual name, score, maturity level and price range.
A PDF version of the guide is available here for download.
Last year I was in Shanghai, China on business. A friend suggested we visit the Shanghai Urban Planning building, and the first thing I thought was "ohhh, I bet that's exciting...not". But, he convinced us to give it a try, and here are a few photos I took.
On the top floor of this building is the largest model of urban planning in the world. For an American, seeing Shanghai is a shock at how large the city is, and how many skyscrapers there are. For reference, Shanghai's population is about 22 million people, compared to about 8 million in New York. Most U.S. cities have a "downtown" type area where the most skyscrapers are clustered, but Shanghai is a city of skyscrapers everywhere.
The World Population Map is one way to understand the scale difference between the U.S. and China, but this model city is astounding. Even better than riding around town (you definitely don't want to be the one driving), the model city really drives home the scale of Shanghai, and what has been accomplished in urban development. The model is built at 1:2000 scale.
Those are the building support columns in the middle of the model, NOT some new super skyscraper!
This map of Iraq from the NYTimes.com visually shows the over 1,900 people killed in Iraq during the month of January 2007.
"The map, based on data from the American, British and Iraqi governments and from news reports, shows the dates, locations and circumstances of deaths."The number has doubled since they did this for January 2006 which had around 800 deaths. Each figure represents an individual of the American forces, coalition forces, Iraqi forces, police officers or civilian death. The larger figures have numbers showing how many people they represent (which I think diminishes the visual impact). A smaller icon shows the cause of death. All the figures are connected to a location in the country.
I would have added some color coding too, but I'm guessing the NY Times had to keep it in black & white to print it in the newspaper.
This satellite photo from NASA spans a 24-hour period showing the entire surface of the Earth in darkness. The lights obviously show the highest areas of concentration of civilization. Note the Nile River delta, the Siberian Express railway route, the Australian coastal cities, and Africa, literally "the dark continent".
From Princeton's International Networks Archive, the old project of Jonathan Harris.
Jonathan Harris, earth, history, map, photo, planets, population, space, world 
Found on VisualComplexity.com, this disturbing poster examines global human trafficking.
"It depicts each country's level of involvement (from Very High to Very Low) as either a country of destination or origin. The project concentrates on the smuggling of people from one country to another - mainly illegally. In many cases these people are forced to do work that is illegal, such as prostitution or child labor."The poster was created by Taulant Bushi, and the original image is here.
Following my earlier post on Imagining the Tenth Dimension, I found that NOVA has put the entire 3-hour show The Elegant Universe on their website.
The show is full of different visual methods to visual strings, gravity, the scale of particles and multiple dimensions. Brian Greene really did a fantastic job with this show based on his book on the same name.
This last December was the 10th anniversary of Carl Sagan's death. One of his most popular episodes of Cosmos was titled The Dragons of Eden where he first described his Cosmic Calendar. This website from discovery.com has a simple image showing the Cosmic Calendar as Carl described it. A few websites are selling posters of the Cosmic Calendar, like AllPosters.com.
The premise is that if you compress the entire history of the universe into a calendar year, homo sapiens only exist in the last 6 minutes, and the last second represents the last 400+ years of human history.
You can see Cosmos, and hear Carl describe it on YouTube here:
This is a prime example of how seeing the data visually is better than reading numbers. Here is a population density map from Wikipedia.
We have heard that China and India have most of the human population in the world, but here you can really see and understand how much. Reading that China's population is four times that of the U.S. is much harder than really seeing it on a map.
The Wikipedia page on World Population has some other great information too.
