2011 May

• Tweets per second during Bin Laden announcement

  May 2, 2011 to Statistical Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  As I listened to my young neighbors run around the parking lot chanting, "U-S-A! U-S-A!" I glanced at my Twitter feed, and it showed a burst of similar sentiment. On the announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death, Twitter recorded the highest sustained rate of tweets ever, at an average of 3,000 per second. The above shows the progression from 9:30pm to 12:30am EST.

  [Image Link via @nickbilton]

• Best of FlowingData – April 2011

  May 2, 2011 to Best of FlowingData  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  I can't believe it's already May. This year is whizzing by. During these past couple of months, there's been good progress on the book, and we just passed 50k subscribers. Pretty cool. Thank you for spreading the word about FlowingData, sharing on Twitter and Facebook, etc, and passing interesting links my way. I appreciate it.

  In case you're new or missed them, here are the most popular posts from the last two months.

  1. History of the world in 100 seconds, according to Wikipedia
  2. Are gas prices really that high?
  3. Entire movies compressed into single barcodes
  4. Sorting algorithms demonstrated with Hungarian folk dance
  5. Daily schedule of Benjamin Franklin
  6. Vincent van Gogh paintings as pie charts
  7. Gallons of stuff that cost more than gasoline
  8. Women's dress sizes demystified
  9. More proportions and cocktails
  10. Who spends the most years in retirement?