In a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Dancing Plague of 1518, Niege Borges illustrates dances from a number of shows and movies in his project of the same name. All of them available in print, including the Elaine dance from Seinfeld, Little Miss Sunshine, and Singin' in the Rain. [Niege Borges]

Like something from of a video game, this graphic from The New York Times shows the most mentioned NFL players and coaches this season. Players are scaled approximately by the number of mentions between August 1, 2011 to February 1, 2012 on ESPN's SportCenter and Sunday NFL Countdown. The giant on the left is Tim Tebow, with 1,450 mentions. Bar graphs on the bottom highlight mentions over time for players of interest.

[New York Times]

YouTube surpassed the one hour of video uploaded per second threshold recently. To put that rate into perspective, they launched a fun illustration-based site, One Hour Per Second. Big team effort headed by Punk & Butler, illustrations by Alex Eben Meyer, animation by Justin Young, and development by Use All Five.

The concept is simple. A clock runs that shows how much time has passed, and things that could've happened during the runtime of video uploaded animate on the screen.

For example, it starts with "In 1.5 seconds of uploads to YouTube, the International Space Station completes one orbit of the earth." Let it play, and babies are born, the Nyan can gets older, and millions of letters are typed by the world's fastest texter. Eventually you hit the end: "In 3.8 million years of uploads to YouTube, time as we know it begins, reaches the present day, and keeps ticking on into the future..."

Entertaining even if it is just one number.

[One Hour Per Second | Thanks, Alex]

Anyone who uses a social music service like Rdio or last.fm has probably noticed an album's sudden rise in popularity after certain events. For example, when Amy Winehouse died, her album received exponentially more plays than usual. Other times the increase in plays for a certain artist is simple, like the release of a new album. Last.fm takes a look at these patterns in 2011 through the lens of scrobbles, which is basically how last.fm users log what they're listening to.

Download the data here [zip file] and have a go yourself.

[Last.fm | Thanks, @dwtkns]

ProPublica has been tracking members of Congress who oppose and support SOPA. You can view by party and chamber, and you can even sort by campaign contributions from movie, music, and television. Above shows the quick change from January 18 to 19.

[ProPublica]

Randall Munroe of xkcd charts the things that money pays for, from the item off the dollar menu all the way up to the total estimated economic productivity of the human race. Following the same scheme to show relative scales that he used for his radiation chart, you get a big picture, a zoom for another big picture, and so on.

For example, here's the transition from millions to thousands of dollars:

See the graphic in its mondo format here, and see the list of over 200 sources here. So simple, but executed with rigor.

[xkcd]

To get a gauge of public opinion and the Occupy movement, The New York Times asked readers what they they thought, placing their comments on a two-axis grid ranging from strongly disagree/oppose to strongly agree/support.

On the horizontal: "Do you agree or disagree with the main goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement?" On the vertical: "Do you support or oppose the methods of the protestors?" So comments on the top right are those who strongly agree with the goals of the movement and strongly approve of protestors' methods. You can also color the dots and grid spots based on a range of disagree to agree for statements such as "Income inequality has contributed to the country's problems."

Then to bring it home, comments are listed on the bottom with a small grid showing where that person selected. Put it all together and it's way more useful than just open threads elsewhere.

[New York Times]

A couple of infographic résumé sites, vizualize.me and re.vu, sprouted up that use your LinkedIn data to show your career stats. Just create an account, connect it to LinkedIn, and you get some graphs that show when and where you worked. It's a visual form of your LinkedIn profile with a goal to replace the "old" and "boring" résumé that uses just text.

Is this the best way to go though, if you're applying for a job?

Other than commissioning a couple of freelancers based on their portfolios and recommendations, I haven't had any experience hiring people, but I imagine being turned off by such an infographic résumé if I were a HR person. The visual format is easy to scan, but because it it's not a traditional text layout, I'd have to figure out what I was looking at first.

Or let's say more people start submitting these sort of résumés. Then the novelty, the main advantage, wears off and they all start to look the same.

The first infographic résumé I remember was by Michael Anderson in 2008.

There were probably others before it, but this was the first that was shared a lot across the Web. It was new and creative and worked well for the type of job Anderson was looking for. Copycats followed that were less amusing than the one before.

If you were to apply for similar jobs as Anderson with an automatically generated résumé, it'd be less impressive, because the creation was a way to show a portion of his skill set, whereas you're just pointing and clicking with these sites.

Maybe you're looking for a different sort of job. Would those employers appreciate this sort of résumé? Again, it's hard for me to say. But I imagine them appreciating a thoughtful cover letter with a CV with the most important stuff at the beginning than they would about bar graphs and humps (with a meaningless vertical axis) that show a space-hogging timeline. I'm all for visualizing things (especially bits of your life), but words can also be meaningful.

NPR explains how we reached a population of 7 billion. Simply put, the world is making babies faster than people are dying, and with improved medicine and agriculture, people are living longer than before. The video above demonstrates the different birth and mortality rates, where each container represents a continent.

There has been a shift in recent years:

Much of that growth has happened in Asia — in India and China. Those two countries have been among the world's most populous for centuries. But a demographic shift is taking place as the countries have modernized and lowered their fertility rates. Now, the biggest growth is taking place in sub-Saharan Africa.

[NPR via Graphic Sociology]