A while back we saw a size comparison of random spaceships. That one pales in comparison to this extensive version by Dirk Loechel. It’s got ships from Star Wars, Star Trek, EVE, Babylon 5, Starship Troopers, Titan A.E., and oh so much more.

Be sure to see the full-sized version here. [via Kotaku]

The Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency for Great Britain, mapped 220,000 square kilometers of the mainland with 22 billion blocks in Minecraft.

Each blocks represents a ground area of 50 square metres. The raw height data is stored in metres and must be scaled down to fit within the 256 block height limit in Minecraft. A maximum height of 2 500 metres was chosen, which means Ben Nevis, appears just over 128 blocks high. Although this exaggerates the real-world height, it preserves low-lying coastal features such as Bournemouth’s cliffs, adding interest to the landscape.

Just download the free archive, load it in Minecraft, and explore. [via NextWeb]

In a step-by-step narrative, produced by Adam Becker, MacGregor Campbell and Peter Aldhous for New Scientist, is an exploration of possible Earths light years away. Possible planets are marked based on the amount of light they block from their parent star, and then those are filtered based on size and whether or not orbits are in a habitable zone, which leaves possible Earths.

The Kepler telescope did this for a relatively small spot in the sky for four years and found a handful of possible Earths. When you extrapolate, there are many more. [Thanks, Peter]

Projection mapping is the art of using physical objects as display surfaces and turning them into something else visually. This video of Box is an impressive demonstration of the technology.

“Box” explores the synthesis of real and digital space through projection-mapping on moving surfaces. The short film documents a live performance, captured entirely in camera. Bot & Dolly produced this work to serve as both an artistic statement and technical demonstration. It is the culmination of multiple technologies, including large scale robotics, projection mapping, and software engineering. We believe this methodology has tremendous potential to radically transform theatrical presentations, and define new genres of expression.

I would’ve thought this was CGI if I didn’t know any better.

It can be difficult to imagine the scale of planets and moons, because (1) they’re really big and (2) they’re far away. From where we are, the stars look pretty small, but in reality, they shiny objects might be several times larger than our own planet. In this straightforward interactive, Brian Lukis shows how planet and moon sizes compare. Simply select between the apparent view and the absolute to see how perspective seemingly changes size.

In the latest SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, Chaturapruek, et al. describe modeling criminal movements based on where potential criminals live and areas of interest.

Data available on distance between criminals’ homes and their targets shows that burglars are willing to travel longer distances for high-value targets, and tend to employ different means of transportation to make these long trips. Of course, this tendency differs among types of criminals. Professionals and older criminals may travel further than younger amateurs. A group of professional burglars planning to rob a bank, for instance, would reasonably be expected to follow a Lévy flight.

“There is actually a relationship between how far these criminals are willing to travel for a target and the ability for a hotspot to form,” explain Kolokolnikov and McCalla.

I hear the RV and Pontiac Aztec is the preferred mode of transportation among high school chemistry teachers turned meth cooks.

Full paper here, if you’re into that.

Probublica has a detailed piece on the potential overuse of acetaminophen, commonly known as Tylenol. The photo above, which compares the maximum amount of acetaminophen allowed in a single package, caught my eye. I like the use of jars to provide a second dimension of comparison, versus the formless piles or incongruous containers that we usually see in these photo comparisons.

Of course the next step is to look at dosage restrictions overall for the full comparison. [via @sisiwei]

When you look for overall trends, you often poke around the data in aggregate, but when you zoom out too far, you could miss details or within-category variation. Sometimes when you zoom in, you see a completely opposite trend of what you saw overall. This is known as Simpson’s Paradox. Lewis Lehe and Victor Powell explain in a series of small, interactive charts.

Why does this matter?

Simpson’s paradox usually fools us on tests of performance. In a famous example, researchers concluded that a newer treatment for kidney stones was more effective than traditional surgery, but it was later revealed that the newer treatment was more often being used on small kidney stones. More recently, on elementary school tests, minority students in Texas outperform their peers in Wisconsin, but Texas has so many minority students that Wisconsin beats it in state rankings. It would be a shame if Simpson’s paradox led doctors to prescribe ineffective treatments or Texas schools to waste money copying Wisconsin.

The takeaway lesson: Remember to look at the details. [Thanks, Victor]

In the continued series of meta-data-driven maps, OpenStreetMap shows the work of individuals across the online community.

OpenStreetMap is created every day by thousands of users logging in and improving the map. Here is a visualization of this amazing social fabric of individuals working together. We generated a color for each road segment from the user ID of the mapper who last edited it to show how many individual contributions large and small add up to a collaborative map of the world. Take a look at how many people have been mapping near you.

Areas that resemble a Pollock painting represent many contributors in a single area, whereas more solid colors represent uploaded databases and more major contributors.

Be sure to see the full-sized interactive version.

North Carolina State statistics graduate student Joshua Katz already mapped dialect across the United States, and now there’s a fun addition in quiz form. Answer the 25-question survey (or the more detailed 140-question version if you dare), and you get a map of language similarity. More specifically, the result maps shows the probability that someone in that area understands what you’re saying.

My results were dead on.

Update: Katz went to The New York Times where they published a refined version of his map, becoming then the most viewed page in the site’s history.

Census data can be interesting and super informative, but getting the data out of the dreaded American FactFinder is often a pain, especially if you don’t know the exact table you want. (This is typically the case.) CensusReporter, currently in beta, tries to make the process easier.

CensusReporter is a Knight News Challenge-funded project to make it easy for journalists to write stories using U.S. Census data. Expanding upon the volunteer-built Census.ire.org, Census Reporter will simplify finding and using data from the decennial census and the American Community Survey. The goal of the new site is to include much more data, to provide a friendlier interface for navigating all of that data, and, as much as possible, to use visualizations to provide a more useful first look at the data.

Although the application is still a work-in-progress, it’s usable and clearly on its way to an improvement over the painful default. The CensusReporter is faster, easier to use, and the graphics provide a visual summary that helps you decide if the current table is actually what you want.

It’s been just under a month since the Job Board went up, and there are some new postings. Looking for a place to apply your data skills?

Data Visualization Developer at Winton Capital Management in Oxford, UK.

Data Scientist at Mattermark in San Francisco, CA.

Data Analytics at Azzule Systems in Santa Maria, CA.

Front-End Engineer at Next Big Sound in New York, NY.

Vice President of Content at Pellucid Analytics in Boulder, CO.

Business Analyst at Happylatte in Beijing, China.

Data Visualization Developer for the Mintz Group, a freelance gig from anywhere.

Jr. Visual Designer at Periscopic in Portland, OR.

Josh Stevens, a PhD candidate at Penn State, mapped 92 years of sasquatch sightings, based on data from the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. Before you furiously type that the map is just population density, Stevens addresses that.

Right away you can see that sightings are not evenly distributed. At first glance, it looks a lot like a map of population distribution. After all, you would expect sightings to be the most frequent in areas where there are a lot of people. But a bivariate view of the data shows a very different story. There are distinct regions where sightings are incredibly common, despite a very sparse population. On the other hand, in some of the most densely populated areas sasquatch sightings are exceedingly rare.

The bivariate view he mentions is the county map on the left. Bright purple is high sasquatch sightings and low population density, and light green is high population density and relatively low sassquatch sightings. So it’s not all about population. More likely, it’s the vegetation level of the terrain, because as we all know, sasquatches prefer dense bushes and trees with grainy overtones.

Emily Chow and Gene Thorp for The Washington Post explored the change in D.C. skyline if buildings rose.

The D.C. Office of Planning has paired up with the National Capital Planning Commission to explore the potential of altering the federal Height of Buildings Act of 1910, which has defined the District’s skyline for nearly a century. With limited space for expansion and a growing population, the city is studying different ways to potentially change the height limit while preserving the distinct horizontality of the monumental skyline.

The height toggling feature and smooth transitions make it easy to compare views.

Tatsuo Horiuchi wanted to learn something new before retiring, so he bought a computer and booted up Microsoft Excel. Traditional graphics software from companies like Adobe were too expensive. Hariuchi’s beautiful results look like nothing you normally see come out of the spreadsheet software.

People like to knock Excel or <insert software program here> as if it’s the leading cause of their challenges with data. Then you come across something like this. Maybe it’s not the easiest way to go about making something, but if you can draw based on data, you’ve got yourself a way to visualize data. Maybe the software isn’t your problem. [via ReadWrite]

In a collaborative effort at The New York Times, a Fashion Week browser shows highlights of the event through thumbnails reminiscent of slitscans. These “fingerprints” are the zoomed out view of pixels and most dominant colors of each piece and designer. It’s a quick sense of what each label showed off this year. Then you can select fingerprints to see the actual images. It reminds me of the old Flickr Clock from years back.

By way of reddit, analog traces, or as they’re more commonly known: dirt.

With just five days left until Grand Theft Auto 5 is out, a map of the game’s landscape was leaked, whatever that means these days. It’s almost as detailed as Mario Brothers.