35mm, a short film by Sarah Biermann, Torsten Strer, Felix Meyer, and Pascal Monaco, strips 35 movies to their simplest form and cleverly strings them together in a set of motion graphics. From Singin' in the Rain, Titanic, and Jaws to Fight Club, Star Wars, and Terminator.

Can you figure out all the movies portrayed? Test your movie wits in the video below. I only recognized two the first time around. I suck.
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Charles Blow on this unnecessarily complex chart used to show the network of Obamacare:

Maybe it's the former graphics/art director in me, but I get really offended when people use charts to confuse rather than to clarify.

Take a look at this monstrosity released today by the Joint Economic Committee minority, which is led by Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) and Representative Kevin Brady (R-Texas).

To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes: they’re using this chart like a drunken man uses lampposts – for support rather than for illumination.

Really, Joint Economic Committee? Look - I'm not going to pretend I know all the intricacies of the US health care system, but this is clearly chart abuse.

Looking at this horribly designed piece of propaganda makes me want to throw up. I'm throwing up right now. Dang it. Someone owes me a new keyboard.

This is a guest post by Alastair Dant, interactive lead at the Guardian. He describes the efforts that went into designing the recently published war logs map of incidents revealed by Wikileaks.

Our site editor approached me with a serious challenge: could I visualize six years worth of military reports? Up in their makeshift war room, our team introduced me to Julian Assange. While reporters from the New York Times and Der Speigel took photos and video, the director of Wikileaks booted his encrypted netbook and showed me a page from the war logs. I may have looked a little distressed. The gravity of this material was stark and, having never dealt with such documents before, I was uncertain if I wanted to start.

After several days feeling like I'd walked into the Bourne trilogy, David Leigh and Rob Evans put my mind at rest. We wouldn't be publishing any material that might put anyone at risk and my work could focus on charting the rise in explosive devices from 2004 – 2009.
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Shawn Allen of Stamen Design provides a brief history of data visualization, starting with William Playfair's charts in the late 1700s and William Smith's map sketch of Britain, up to the more recent works from The New York Times, Martin Wattenberg, and Ben Fry.

This leads into a description of what data is, from a practical point of view, as the writeup is actually an introduction for Allen's visualisation course at the School of Visual Arts. Totally looks like a course I wish I could've taken in grad school.

This past Sunday, well-known whistle-blower site Wikileaks released over 91,000 secret US military reports, covering the war in Afghanistan. Each report contains the time, geographic location, and details of an event the US military thought was important enough to put on paper.
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Now that the oil flow has finally stopped, for now, the attention has shifted to the effects all that oil will have on wildlife and the ecosystem. Chris Wilson for Slate reports on where all of that BP oil could end up during the next 130 days, based on modeling data from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. These models are based on how water flows in different areas of the Gulf.

Three scenarios are presented. All end up with oil leaving the Gulf.

Of course, these are all approximations, and the models can't possibly account for all the factors that play into oil drift (e.g. biological degradation of the oil), but it's an educated guess, so take it at that. Wherever all the oil ends up, one thing is for sure. There's still a lot of cleanup left to do.