It's hard for us, cognitively speaking, to imagine things that are really really big or really really small, so we need things to put things in perspective.

For example: how big is a skin cell? I could tell you it's 30 micrometers, but that doesn't do you any good. In this interactive from the Genetic Science Learning Center of the University of Utah, we get perspective. The above is the start view with a coffee bean. Zoom in, and you get a much better idea of what 30 micrometers looks like.

We've seen this before with money, the Web, planets, hard drive memory, etc but the zoom for this case works really well. The scale legend in the top left is also a good touch.

[Thanks, Joe]

I tend to post a wide array of subjects from the data spectrum, so I know all of you come from different view points and areas of study. Some are in academics, and others are casual readers. Some work with data for a living while others are more about design.

So why do you read FlowingData? Punch in your answer in the poll below.

Andy Woodruff from Cartogrammar uses average color in Flickr photos to map the colors that people take the most pictures of. The above for example, shows the common colors of Harvard Square. Why all the red? It's because there's so many brick buildings.

So in the end is a map that provides a different geographic view of what we're used to seeing. We're used to seeing the aerials or the designer-defined color coding of roads and land. This however, while portrayed as a view from above, is what people are seeing on the ground.

You know the Roomba from iRobot? It's the robot vacuum cleaner that is supposed to do the work on its own so that you don't have to. I've seen video of the thing picking up dirt and junk but I've always been skeptical that it would cover all areas.

Well the above, from Signal Theorist, is the Roomba coverage over a half an hour. A camera was setup, the lights were turned off, and the above is a long exposure shot of the Roomba's path. Not bad huh?

[via Simple Complexity]

The above graphic shows missions to mars starting in 1960 to present (top to bottom). Paths are colored by country, and as you can see it's been a lot of missions from Europe and the United States lately. Obviously the farthest we've gone is with the rover with more to come.

(I couldn't figure out where the graphic originally came from. Anyone know?)

[via Fast Company | Thanks, Travis]

You gotta love Jessica Hagy. If you've got the skills you should be able to widen the valley in that curve significantly.

Have a nice weekend all.

[via Cool Infographics]

A BIG thank you to our sponsors. You keep FlowingData running smoothly, make it possible for projects like your.flowingdata and FlowingPrints to come alive, and most importantly, allow FlowingData to grow. We saw some 350k views this month and are quickly coming up on 25k RSS and email subscribers. Yikes.

Xcelsius Present — Transform spreadsheets into professional, interactive presentations.

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Email me at nathan [at] flowingdata [dot] com if you'd like to sponsor FlowingData, and I'll get back to you with the details.

FlowingData readers who have been around for a while will remember I made a map early this year that showed the growth of Target stores across America. It starts with the first one in 1962 and then goes from there. It was a follow-up to the Walmart map, which I shared the code and data for.

Anyways, I often still get emails about the Target data. I finally got around to asking if I could release it, and lucky for your the answer was yes. So here you are. Go wild.

By the way, if anyone has similar data for Starbucks, let me know. There's gotta be at least one Starbucks analyst who reads this blog. Maybe?

[Thanks, Cole]

I think ever since visualization got started, people have been asking this question.

What is visualization?

Some... okay, many describe it as purely an analytical tool. Others (i.e. me) are a little more liberal with their use of the term while the rest are somewhere in between. Some insist that the stuff we see on information aesthetics belong in an entirely different category and that that stuff isn't visualization at all.

As art, science, design, statistics, computer science, etc. start to melt together, the line between what is and isn't visualization grows more blurry.

What do you think? Is visualization only analytical? Can visualization be art? Are the infographics that frequent the front page of Digg visualization or are they just pretty pictures? Can visualization be just a pretty picture? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

GOOD magazine's most recent transparency contest asked designers to focus their powers on showing CEO compensation in the United States.

The above graphic, by Dee Adams, won top honors. Adams' graphic shows the eight CEOs with the highest compensations and the number of minimum wage earners that each respective CEO's compensation could have supported. Bruce Wasserstein of Lazard ltd. was the top earner at $133 million, or the annual salary of 8,866 minimum wage earners.

Below are the two runners up by Amanda Buck and Thomas Edwards, respectively.

Whether these salaries are justified, well, I'll leave that up to you to decide.

Check out all the other entries here.