Cartographer Martin Elmer made a truncated history map of the world:

This map was produced by running all the various countries’ “History of _____” Wikipedia article through a word cloud, then writing out the most common word to fit into the country’s boundary. The result is thousands of years of human history oversimplified into 100-some words.

More on the map here.

On news of the Houston Texans getting ready to build the largest video screens in professional sports, Reddit user dbeat compared the sizes of current NFL screens to the future giant. It’s just slightly bigger than the one in my living room. [via Deadspin]

Available in print. See also: a video version. Still no confirmation for whether or not if Batman in fact does smell or if Robin laid an egg.

The Earth as Art is a compilation of NASA satellite imagery that shows the planet from a new perspective. The sensors on the satellite measure light outside the visible range, which makes for beautiful and unexpected pictures.

In 1960, the United States put its first Earth-observing environmental satellite into orbit around the planet. Over the decades, these satellites have provided invaluable information, and the vantage point of space has provided new perspectives on Earth. This book celebrates Earth’s aesthetic beauty in the patterns, shapes, colors, and textures of the land, oceans, ice, and atmosphere.

Available as PDF or as an iPad app. I’m glad the world didn’t end.

Jeff Leek, an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is teaching a course on data analysis on Coursera, appropriately named Data Analysis.

This course is an applied statistics course focusing on data analysis. The course will begin with an overview of how to organize, perform, and write-up data analyses. Then we will cover some of the most popular and widely used statistical methods like linear regression, principal components analysis, cross-validation, and p-values. Instead of focusing on mathematical details, the lectures will be designed to help you apply these techniques to real data using the R statistical programming language, interpret the results, and diagnose potential problems in your analysis.

The course starts on January 22, 2013.

You might also be interested in Computing for Data Analysis taught by Roger Peng, who is also a biostatistics professor at John Hopkins. Leek’s course is focused on statistical methods, whereas Peng’s course is focused on programming. Better take both. [via Revolutions]

What is your effective tax rate now versus years past? Ritchie King made an interactive to show you.

Having not been alive in the ’50s or ’60s, let alone filing taxes, I was struck by the high top income tax rate—exactly double the highest tax rate today. It made me wonder: what would my income tax be if I had earned the equivalent of what I earn now several decades ago—or even in 1913, when the current federal income tax program was first introduced? What would the history of income taxes look like through the collective eyes of people in my exact financial situation over the past 100 years?

Just enter your taxable income and filing status, and you get a time series of what your tax rate would’ve been years ago. It’s kind of fun to mouse right to left to see your inflation-adjusted income.

See also the New York Times piece from last month, which makes for an interesting contrast. Similar data was used, but the views are quite different.

Bonnie Berkowitz, Emily Chow and Todd Lindeman for the Washington Post plotted life expectancy against percentage of healthy years. Although life expectancy is increasing, the percentage of years living without disease isn’t quite keeping up.

People are living longer lives, but the time they are gaining isn’t entirely time with good health. For every year of life expectancy added since 1990, about 9 1/2 months is time in good health. The rest is time in a diminished state — in pain, immobility, mental incapacity or medical support such as dialysis. For people who survive to age 50, the added time is “discounted” even further. For every added year they get, only seven months are healthy.

On the other hand, total number of expected years in good health is still on the plus-side, and I think most people would choose years in poor health over fewer years. So it’s not all bad news.

The New York Times mapped ratings for members of Congress, as given by the NRA.

The National Rifle Association gives members of Congress a grade ranging from A to F that reflects their voting record on gun rights. But in response to the school shooting, some pro-gun Democrats have signaled an openness to new restrictions on guns, and the N.R.A. released a statement that said it was “prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again.”

A company grows, it shrinks, people come and go. Justin Matejka, a research scientist at Autodesk, visualized the changes for where he works.

The OrgOrgChart (Organic Organization Chart) project looks at the evolution of a company’s structure over time. A snapshot of the Autodesk organizational hierarchy was taken each day between May 2007 and June 2011, a span of 1498 days.

Each day the entire hierarchy of the company is constructed as a tree with each employee represented by a circle, and a line connecting each employee with his or her manager. Larger circles represent managers with more employees working under them. The tree is then laid out using a force-directed layout algorithm.

Each second in the animation is about one week of activity, and acquisitions are most obvious when big clumps of people join the company. The long-term changes are a little harder to see, because the branches in the network fade into the background. Recomputing the layout each week might be good for the next round.

[Thanks, Justin]

As a teaser for a larger project on diagrams, Jane Nisselson describes how they exist in the real world.

Diagrams are everywhere — from the established conventions of highway signs to the newly emerging visualizations appearing on social networking websites. Most people have a personal experience of diagrams whether drawing directions or figuring out how to operate a new computer. Yet very few people are familiar with how we read or construct diagrams.

This short film introduces the language of diagrams and their role in visual thinking and communication. As only a film can do, it reveals the vocabulary “in the wild” and in the context of making and using diagrams.

I’m looking forward to the rest if this is any indication of what’s to come.