I’ve never played Portal 2 (or the first), but I suspect some of you will find these timelines by designer Piotr Bugno interesting.

As a fan of Valve’s Portal 2 video game, I designed this infographic led by my curiosity to get a better grasp on its plot, on how mechanics informed the gameplay, and on the development of its main themes — good vs evil, descent vs ascent, destruction vs construction.

Seriously, all meaning is lost for me on these. Any Portal 2 fans care to chime in?

We’ve been hearing Olympic records rattled off for the past week, but it’s hard to grasp just how great these athletes are performing. I mean, we know they’re doing amazing things, but just how amazing? Kevin Quealy and Graham Roberts for The New York Times put it into perspective with two videos, one on the long jump and the other on the 100-meter sprint.

After I watched each, all I could think was, “Oh crap, that’s good.”

The videos frame distances and times in a way that’s immediately relatable, such as a basketball court to show how far medals winners jumped or how far previous sprinters would be behind Usain Bolt. Smooth transitions move you through different perspectives and pauses give focus to the most notable athletes, and although each video covers a lot of information, you never feel disoriented. They cover the overall picture, down to the individual, and back again.

Good stuff. Give ’em a watch.

Fox News tried to show the change in the top tax rate if the Bush tax cuts expire, so they showed the rate now and what’d it be in 2013. Wow, it’ll be around five times higher. Wait. No.

The value axis starts at 34 percent instead of zero, which you don’t do with bar charts, because length is the visual cue. That is to say, when you look at this chart, you compare how high each bar is. Fox News might as well have started the vertical axis at 34.9 percent. That would’ve been more dramatic.

Here’s what the bar chart is supposed to look like:

With a difference of 4.6 percentage points, the change doesn’t look so crazy.

[via Effective Graphs]

Artist Gustavo Sousa used the Olympic rings as data indicators for statistics like obesity, homicides, and number of billionaires. Each ring represents a continent, and the larger the ring, the larger the value. Simple and an interesting metaphor shift.

Artist Brad Goodspeed imagined what the planets would look like if they were to orbit Earth, in place of the moon. His math is iffy, but the video is fun to watch.

[via kottke | Thanks, Thomas]

In partnership with social analytics service Topsy, Twitter launched a Political Index that measures sentiment towards Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

Each day, the Index evaluates and weighs the sentiment of Tweets mentioning Obama or Romney relative to the more than 400 million Tweets sent on all other topics. For example, a score of 73 for a candidate indicates that Tweets containing their name or account name are on average more positive than 73 percent of all Tweets.

The key is the comparison against all tweets for a sense of scale. As seen from the chart below, the index fluctuates closely with Gallup estimates.

Some consider Nigel Holmes, whose work tends to be more illustrative, the opposite of Edward Tufte, who preaches the data ink ratio. Column Five Media asked Holmes about how he works and what got him interested in the genre.

As a young child in England, I loved the weekly comics “The Beano” and “The Dandy.” They were not like American comic books; they were never called “books,” for a start. These English comics from the late 1940s and early ’50s had recurring one-page (usually funny) stories featuring a cast of regular characters. They had names like Biffo the Bear, Lord Snooty, and Desperate Dan. The comics were printed on poor-quality newsprint, which seemed to go yellow as you were reading it, but there was something very attractive about them.

I like the small dig on Tufte around the middle, while citing the paper that happens to find that Holmes’ graphics were more memorable than basic charts.

My own work at first was a little too illustrative, and Edward Tufte made a big fuss about what he thought was the trivialization of data. Recent academic studies have proved many of his theses wrong.

It seems the arguments haven’t changed much over the decades.