We’ve seen life expectancy at the country and state levels, but the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research center at the University of Washington, recently released life expectancy data at the county level. The press release focuses on the lower life expectancy of girls born in 2009 compared to those born ten years before. However, the main takeaway from the IHME map, while interactive, is that life expectancy has improved. I wanted to see where life expectancy dropped during the decade.

Update: Brett and Jørgen in the comments make good points on caveats of small-county life expectancy. Is this just statistical noise?

Welcome to Anthropocene:

Scientific concepts like the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and planetary stewardship have heralded a profound shift in perception of our place in the world: a growing evidence base of scientific observations show we have become the prime driver of global environmental change. These new concepts are powerful communication tools as we move towards global sustainability.

There’s also a non-narrated version, but I like the narration. It helps you better appreciate what you’re seeing. Oh yeah, and ooohh, purdy.

[via infosthetics]

I’ve never played Minecraft, but maybe this map showing live server connections means something to those who do. “A dot is a server or a client. Lines are traced from clients connecting to servers. Lone dots are local servers.” They also have raw hardware data available for download. [Thanks, Erik]

With the Titanic anniversary this year, Chiqui Esteban dug up graphics back from the time of the event. This one showing the time to cross the Atlantic is the best. “If only we could fly the Atlantic!”

With The Avengers coming out today in the US, artist Jer Thorp had a look at character appearances, of which there have been 127 since 1963.

We can see a big cluster of major Avengers appearing in the first few episodes, with some other big names coming in the next few years (Vision, the Avenger with the 3rd most appearances in issues, doesn’t come along until #57). While there are a couple of major additions along the way (She-Hulk & Photon in 1982), we can see that the cast of characters for the team is defined pretty early.

See Thorp’s post for additional categorizations such as gender balance and robot characters. Best enjoyed in high resolution.

I’ve been reading papers on how people learn statistics (and thoughts on teaching the subject) and came across the frequently-cited work of mathematical psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. In 1972, they studied statistical misconceptions. It doesn’t seem much has changed. Joan Garfield (1995) summarizes in How to Learn Statistics [pdf].
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A while back, Robert Kosara and Caroline Ziemkiewicz shared their work on Parallel Sets, a way to visually explore categorical data. Software developer, Jason Davies, just ported the technique to Data-Driven Documents (D3). The interactions for sorting and rearranging are similar to the Kosara and Ziemkiewicz version, but the D3 version of course runs in the browser and has some nifty transitions. Try toggling the show curves box and the icicle plot one.

Glaciers are big, slow-moving objects, and it might seem that not much is happening if you stare at one for a while. The Extreme Ice Survey, founded by James Balog in 2007, aims to provide the ice with a “visual voice” using time-lapse photography.

One aspect of EIS is an extensive portfolio of single-frame photos celebrating the beauty–the art and architecture–of ice. The other aspect of EIS is time-lapse photography; currently, 27 cameras are deployed at 18 glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, the Nepalese Himalaya, Alaska and the Rocky Mountains of the U.S. These cameras record changes in the glaciers every half hour, year-round during daylight, yielding approximately 8,000 frames per camera per year. We edit the time-lapse images into stunning videos that reveal how fast climate change is transforming large regions of the planet.

Some of the videos span four years, from 2007 to 2011, and it’s amazing to see the sped-up dynamic of the ice. I like this one, which Balog refers to as the cat’s paw. It looks like a big paw of ice reaching into the ocean.

[via Boing Boing]