After a certain point in math education, like some time during high school, the relevance of the concepts to the everyday and the real world seem to fade. However, in many ways, math lets you describe real life better than you can with just words. Designer Bret Victor hopes to make the abstract and conceptual to real and concrete with Kill Math.
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In 1937, mathematician Lothar Collatz proposed that given the following algorithm, you will always end at the number 1:

1. Take any natural number, n.
2. If n is even, divide it by 2.
3. Otherwise, n is odd. Multiply it by 3 and add 1.
4. Repeat indefinitely.

Developer Jason Davies puts it into reverse and shows all the numbers that fall within an orbit length of 18 or less. Press play, and watch the graph grow. Mostly a fun animation for nerds like me.

[Collatz Graph]

TeleGeography maps underwater cables that connect countries and continents:

TeleGeography’s free interactive submarine cable map is based on our authoritative Global Bandwidth research, and depicts 188 active and planned submarine cable systems and their landing stations. Selecting a cable route on the map provides access to data about the cable, including the cable’s name, ready-for-service (RFS) date, length, owners, website, and landing points. Selecting a landing point provides a list of all submarine cables landing at that station.

Just imagining cables that stretch that far seems pretty amazing.

[Thanks, Harvey]

SF Signal constructs a big arse flowchart to help you sift through NPR’s listener-picked top 100 science fiction and fantasy books. It’s big and scrolltastic. Check out full and printable version here. I end up at The Time Machine by Wells. You?

Yep, still amusing. [via]

There are a lot of words to describe visualization and visualization-related things. It can be confusing. You just came across this thing with data and stuff, but what do you call it? Here I define what all those words mean. Keep in mind, I’m not so, uh, good with words and, uh, stuff, so yeah.

Disclaimer: This is how I perceive the words. They are not official dictionary or academic definitions. Don’t use these in your next report or paper, unless you want to be laughed at.
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The THINK exhibit from IBM just opened up at Lincoln Center in New York, complete with data wall and immersive film. The former visualizes surrounding data in real-time, such as traffic, solar energy, and air quality. The formers puts you in a place with 40 seven-foot screens.
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Since 1955, Fortune Magazine has published a list of America’s 500 largest companies. What companies have risen to the top? Which ones have fallen? Ben Fry, of Fathom Information Design, visualizes the companies of past and present and how their rankings, revenue, and profit have changed.
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In a time long ago, there existed a place on the Internet called Geocities. People created pages and pages of blinking icons, brightly colored background, and everyone loved it. There was even MIDI music to set the mood. In 2009, Geocities was deleted, but the memories lived on thanks to the Archive Team. Information designer Richard Vijgen visualized these pages in an interactive piece called The Deleted City.
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The Pew Internet and American Life Project published the results of their texting study, showing that young adults text more than anyone else. The report refers to a lot of averages across demographics, but it seems that there were a lot of heavy texters driving up those averages. The medians are a lot lower. The chart above shows the latter.

Even the median for young adults is still high though relative to other groups.

At 29, I’m right at the edge of that young adult group, and I text maybe once or twice a month on average. Forty per day seems outrageously high. Kids these days.

Eric Fischer, who continues his string of mapping fun and doesn’t even do it for his day job, maps the world in binary subdivisions. Each bounding box contains an equal number of geotagged tweets. Read More

Jon-Kyle Mohr visualizes the musical spectrum of a song in this mesmerizing video. As the song plays, frequencies bubble up in the 6-o-clock position, and the trace remains as the circle rotates.

[Video Link via feltron]

GE shows how their body imaging technology can take detailed pictures of insides without cutting, using fruit, a baseball, engine motor, and violin to demonstrate.

Many body imaging devices follow a principle called tomography (the ‘T’ in CT, PET and SPECT systems), which take images of body “slices” using everything from projection data to powerful magnets. But have you ever wondered how such routine procedures can help clinicians see things that used to require a sharp knife? Watch how GE’s body imaging technology can paint a bigger picture of what’s happening beneath our skin.

Update: I wasn’t paying close enough attention, and it turns out that these are actual, physical sliced objects. Like, with a saw. Now I’m left wondering what the point is.

Seeing how things change over time can be important for a business so that you can figure out what works best. Square, the company that turns your iPhone into a credit card reader, just released Cube, an open-source system to help you visualize time series data. It’s built on MongoDB, Node, and D3.
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One of my favorite data graphics is an interactive piece by The New York Times that shows how Americans spend their day, based on the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). I’ve also been wanting to play with Mike Bostock’s Data-Driven Documents, or D3 for short, for a while now. So put the two together, and this is what I got.

Main takeaway: we spend most of our time sleeping, eating, working, and watching television.
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When we make charts and graphs, we usually think of the data abstractions in terms of bars, dots, and other geometric shapes. ImagePlot, from UCSD-based Software Studies, instead makes it easier to use images to understand large collections.
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“Do or do not. There is no try.” — Yoda [via]

National Geographic has a look at where and how we live:

The map shows population density; the brightest points are the highest densities. Each country is colored according to its average annual gross national income per capita, using categories established by the World Bank (see key below). Some nations — like economic powerhouses China and India — have an especially wide range of incomes. But as the two most populous countries, both are lower middle class when income is averaged per capita.

It’s interesting, but the map is a little wonky, because the income levels and population densities differ in granularity. It kind of works. Kinda doesn’t. There seems to be a lot of missing data — or does population density in northern Africa really drop off that quickly (it is desert land, albeit)? A little more explanation in the description or the legend would have been useful.
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