Designer David Wicks compares rainfall against water consumption in his thesis project Drawing Water:

Drawing Water is a constructed landscape shaped by the relationship between where water falls and where it’s consumed within the United States. It builds images to expose the reality that water is channeled, pumped, and siphoned to locations far from where it falls. Although the paths are imagined, Drawing Water is based on real data and it reveals a clear truth about water resources and use.

The placement of each line represents a rainfall measurement, and the length and end placement is based on urban consumption. Lines pulled farther from its source change to black. The data comes from two sources: USGS for water consumption and NOAA/NWS for rainfall data provided.
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My many thanks to the FlowingData sponsors who help keep this growing blog running. They help you make sense of and communicate with data. Check ’em out:

InstantAtlas — Enables information analysts and researchers to create highly-interactive online reporting solutions that combine statistics and map data to improve data visualization, enhance communication, and engage people in more informed decision making.

Tableau Software — Combines data exploration and visual analytics in an easy-to-use data analysis tool you can quickly master. It makes data analysis easy and fun. Customers are working 5 to 20 times faster using Tableau.

Column Five Media — Whether you are a startup that is just beginning to get the word out about your product, or a Fortune 500 company looking to be more social, they can help you create exciting visual content – and then ensure that people actually see it.

IDV Solutions Visual Fusion — Business intelligence software for building focused apps that unite data from virtually any data source in a visual, interactive context for better insight and understanding.

Want to sponsor FlowingData? Contact me at [email protected] for more details.

FInding himself in a new town, with a new job, Tim Clark started tracking his location on August 24, 2010, and ended 200 days later on March 13, 2011. Every time he stepped out, he turned on his GPS logger, and then would tag that trip with information about what it was for or what happened. Atlas of the Habitual is the result.
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Want a free copy of R Cookbook by Paul Teetor? You’re in luck, because I have four copies to give away, generously provided by O’Reilly. In case you’re unfamiliar, here’s my review for some background. Bottom line: It’s a fine addition to the O’Reilly series of cookbooks.

How to Win

You know the drill. Simply leave a comment on this post by Sunday, March 8 at 11pm PST. This time around, let’s go with… your favorite number. Yeah, tell me what your favorite number is. Then I’ll choose four winners at random on Monday.

Obviously make sure you use a valid email address, and only one entry per person please. Good luck!

Update: Winners announced! You should have received an email if you were picked. Thanks for participating, everyone.

From the Doghouse Diaries. Smart dog. My cat on the other hand, still has some learning to do. Every time he scratches the couch, he looks at me like he’s expecting something. I yell at him, “Causation doesn’t equal correlation!” He stares back blankly.

[Doghouse Diaries | Thanks, Seth]

Ever since seeing the Facebook friendship map and later, the map of scientific collaboration, I’ve been looking for an excuse to play with great circles. So I thought, why not come back to Aaron Koblin’s classic Flight Patterns? But instead of just looking at all flights (above), I broke it down by airline to see where each one flies.
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On the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death, there was a mixed reaction across the country. Some celebrated, whereas others had mixed feelings. Jon Huang and Aron Pilhofer for The New York Times, asked readers how they felt and to mark their thoughts on the positivity vs. significance grid.
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On the one-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, designer Chris Harmon puts the amount of spilled oil into perspective in this video (below). It’s mostly simplified facts and figures, but most of us probably know enough about the spill already for the numbers to be interesting.
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In this article from Science from July 1998, award-winning journalist John Banville on the similarities and differences between art and science:

Of course, art and science are fundamentally different in their methods, and in their ends. The doing of science involves a level of rigor unattainable to art. A scientific hypothesis can be proven—or, perhaps more importantly, disproven—but a poem, a picture, or a piece of music, cannot. Yet in their origins art and science are remarkably similar. It was a scientist, Niels Bohr, who declared that a great truth is a statement whose opposite is also a great truth. Oscar Wilde would have agreed.

It often seems like there’s a chasm between the two, but there is also plenty of common ground.

Lisa Strausfeld, in collaboration with GE, compares perceived country rankings and actual ones.

Innovation is the key driver of business and economic success. In January 2011, GE developed an Innovation Barometer based on a survey of 1000 senior business executives in 12 countries. We asked about both the drivers and impact of innovation. In this visualization, we’re taking a deeper look, enabling comparisons between what execs believe drive innovation and what’s actually happening in market.

As seen in the image above, rankings are displayed via parallel coordinates, with actual country rankings on the left and perception on the right. The business execs were asked if they thought their country was “successful” in the categories, and the perceived rankings are based on the percentage who said yes. Each line represents a country. Roll over a country on either side to compare the patterns.
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As I listened to my young neighbors run around the parking lot chanting, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” I glanced at my Twitter feed, and it showed a burst of similar sentiment. On the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death, Twitter recorded the highest sustained rate of tweets ever, at an average of 3,000 per second. The above shows the progression from 9:30pm to 12:30am EST.

[Image Link via @nickbilton]

I can’t believe it’s already May. This year is whizzing by. During these past couple of months, there’s been good progress on the book, and we just passed 50k subscribers. Pretty cool. Thank you for spreading the word about FlowingData, sharing on Twitter and Facebook, etc, and passing interesting links my way. I appreciate it.

In case you’re new or missed them, here are the most popular posts from the last two months.

1. History of the world in 100 seconds, according to Wikipedia
2. Are gas prices really that high?
3. Entire movies compressed into single barcodes
4. Sorting algorithms demonstrated with Hungarian folk dance
5. Daily schedule of Benjamin Franklin
6. Vincent van Gogh paintings as pie charts
7. Gallons of stuff that cost more than gasoline
8. Women’s dress sizes demystified
9. More proportions and cocktails
10. Who spends the most years in retirement?

Thanks for yet another very enjoyable chapter. If I had known statistics would be like this, I would have actually taken classes.

This is from my editor for Visualize This. (She’s in charged of making sure my grammar doesn’t suck and my words flow like melted butter.) I can’t remember the last time—if ever—I told someone I’m in graduate school for statistics and they didn’t groan about how they hated it in high school and/or college. So you can imagine my delight when I read this. I think I’m on to something here.

I almost never post about projects that aren’t released yet, but the previews of Planetary from Bloom have got me excited. If you recall, we saw a taste of what Tom Carden and Ben Cerveny were up to last month in an interactive that displays your Twitter feed and one that maps Instagram photos.
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Women’s clothing sizes have always confused me. My wife always has to try on an array of sizes, and it seems to vary by store. For me, on the other hand, when I’m looking for pants, I just look for waist, length, and maybe cut. As we’ve seen, men’s actual sizes can change by brand, but it looks a lot more confusing for women, as shown in this graphic from The New York Times.
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R can be confusing when you’re first starting out, especially when you don’t have any experience in programming. There’s a lot of documentation online, and package developers do a decent job at providing examples on how to use their work in your code, but that stuff is not always easy to find. It’s easy if you know the name of the package or function you’re looking for. However, most of the time you just know what you want to do—like sort a data frame or test a regression model—and not the name of a package.

The R Cookbook by developer Paul Teetor might be your answer.
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Recommendation site Hunch is another one of those applications that knows a ton of random stuff about its users. In case you’ve never signed up, you start by answering a bunch of seemingly unrelated questions, and based on your answers, Hunch offers recommendations by correlating your answers with preferences for you and others. This graphic, in collaboration with Column Five Media, shows differences between Mac and PC people within the Hunch community.

Among the findings: Mac people are 95 percent more likely to prefer indie films; PC people are 26 percent more likely to prefer fitting in with others; and as for cable TV networks, Mac people prefer Bravo, HBO, and Showtime, whereas PC people prefer Syfy, History, and USA.

[Hunch | Thanks, @trendyle]

For online publications, it’s useful to know how people share links to articles and news via outlets such as Twitter. How does an article go from publication to viral? Does one person with a lot of Twitter followers share a link, or is getting lots of individuals to tweet the key? You have retweet counts, but that doesn’t tell you anything within the sharing timeline—just the final result.

Project Cascade, by Jer Thorp, Mark Hansen, and Jake Porway as parts of the New York Times R&D Lab, helps you see how news spreads.
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On January 11, 2002 the first detainees arrived at Guantánamo. On January 22, 2009, President Obama ordered Guantánamo to close in a year. The Guantánamo Docket is an interactive database compiled by The New York Times and NPR that shows the detainment and transfer of 792 men.

The Times and NPR have reviewed thousands of pages of government documents released in recent years, as well as court records and news media reports from around the world.

Visually explore changes over the past few years. Each row represents country of citizenship, with detainees on the left and transfers on the right. As you can see, according to a variety of documents, there are currently 172 detained and 600 who have been transferred.

[New York Times via @mericson]