Designer Matthew Olin unmasked the characters behind the typeface characters for his MFA thesis. Others include sans serif as Batman, slab serif as the Hulk, and handwriting as the Flash.

Geographers James Cheshire and Oliver O’Brien visualized life expectancy in London as a tube map.

Whilst the average life expectancy predictions show that today’s children are expected to live longer, the range is startling. For the stations mapped, it is over 20 years with those around Star Lane (on the DLR) predicted to live, on average, for 75.3 years in contrast to 96.38 years for those around Oxford Circus. The smaller disparities are no less striking. For example, between Lancaster Gate and Mile End (20 minutes on the Central line) life expectancy decreases by 12 years and crossing the Thames between Pimlico and Vauxhall sees life expectancy drop by 6 years. The stations serving the Olympic Park fair badly and contrast with the Olympic volleyball venue at Earl’s Court whose spectators will be passing through areas with far higher life expectancies and lower child poverty

The tube map metaphor is typically a stretch, in line with the periodic table of whatever, but this actually works. [via Guardian]

Art shop Dorothy made a map with film titles for street names.

The Map, which is loosely based on the style of a vintage Los Angeles street map has its own Hollywood Boulevard and includes districts dedicated to Hitchcock and Cult British Horror movies. Like most cities it also has its own Red Light area. There’s an A-Z key at the base of the Map listing all the films featured with their release dates and names of the directors.

I was hoping for a little more than places labeled with movie names, but still fun.

I get accused of witchcraft all the time, so naturally this flowchart by Lapham’s Quarterly was of interest. Malleus Maleficarum is an actual thing, by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, that was written to be the official authority to prove the non-existence of witchcraft.

The Eyeo Festival, hosted over at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, seems to have grown quickly into the event of the year for data artists and designers. Scan the speaker list, and you’ll recognize a lot of names, like Cox, Felton, Thorp, and Fry. This year’s event has come and gone, but the talks have been trickling online. You should watch them.

Start with the keynote by Paola Antonelli, a senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, jump to the five-minute ignite talks, and then slowly take in the rest.

Derek Thompson for The Atlantic on how retail uses our numeric biases to their advantage:

Now that I’ve just told you that consumers try to avoid additional payments, I should add that there are two additional payments we love: rebates and warranties. The first buys the illusion of wealth (“I’m being paid money to spend money!”). The second buys peace of mind (“Now I can own this thing forever without worrying about it!”). Both are basically tricks. “Instead of buying something and getting a rebate,” Poundstone writes, “why not just pay a lower price in the first place?’

“[Warranties] make no rational sense,” Harvard economist David Cutler told the Washington Post. “The implied probability that [a product] will break has to be substantially greater than the risk that you can’t afford to fix it or replace it. If you’re buying a $400 item, for the overwhelming number of consumers that level of spending is not a risk you need to insure under any circumstances.”

Other tidbits: our obsession with prices ending with a nine and how we justify purchases of things that are more expensive but aren’t necessarily better than the cheaper item.

WNYC mapped all street stops that resulted in the recovery of a gun, based on data from the New York police department. On top of that, the green spots, they mapped areas where police search more frequently.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly argue the main purpose of stop-and-frisk is to get guns off the street. Out of more than 685,000 stops in 2011, about 770 guns were recovered. That means about one tenth of one percent of all stops result in the seizure of a gun.

But those guns are not showing up in the places where the police are devoting the most stop-and-frisk resources.

I’m sure a lot of people’s initial reaction to this map went something like this: “Psh. The police don’t have a clue what they’re doing,” which was one possibility the article suggested. The other was that the stops are working as a deterrent.

What’s more likely: Police officers have managed to end up in almost every area where there are fewer guns (and missed where there are more guns), or people with guns avoid the areas where there are a lot officers? I’m gonna go with the police point of view on this one.

Love is complicated. It twists, it turns, and sometimes it smacks you in the face so hard you lose track of where and when you are. Artist Louise Ma diagrams these many facets of love and relationships in her ongoing project What Love Looks Like.

[Thanks, Rich]