President Obama announced his 2011 budget proposal. How does it compare to last year’s budget? Shan Carter and Amanda Cox of The New York Times compare the two plans. Red indicates a decrease in the percentage of the budget dedicated to the respective area, and green is for growth. Zoom in for a better view of the smaller areas.
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I started the FlowingData Flickr group a little while ago, but didn’t come back to it until now. Here are just a few of the graphics you all have added. Click on the images below for the full-size versions.
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Designers Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth looked at ink usage of some commonly-used typefaces, by hand-drawing them with ballpoint pens.
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I’m sure a lot of you love The Beatles. I’m not a huge fan myself, but for those who are, you will love these graphics from designer Michael Deal.

The graphic up top shows the level of collaboration between group members. The level of shared authorship was a lot higher early on and then pretty much died off before the breakup.
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Today is Data Privacy Day 2010, apparently. Was there a Data Privacy Day 2009? I dunno. To be honest, I didn’t even care all that much about data privacy a couple years ago.

But it’s grown in importance as everything goes digital (and Google acquires every business under the sun).

Take a moment and think about what Google knows about you. Correspondence and contacts via email, schedule via calendar, interest via feed reader, purchases via Checkout, and most importantly your day-to-day via search. How do you feel about a single company knowing that much about you? Don’t you want to know how they use all that data and more importantly, how they protect it?
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David Spiegelhalter is a Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University. He studies the choices we make, and how those choices can have an effect later on.
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Nicholas Felton’s personal annual report on his life is now up. For those not in the know, Felton makes this report every year based on data he has collected about himself. People see the report, and think to themselves, “I want that for my life.”
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Since you’ll be trying every single drink recipe in the engineer’s guide this weekend, you’re most likely going to drop some food on the ground. Consult this flowchart to decide whether to eat it. Results may vary by individual.

Food on the ground, food on the ground. Looking like a fool with your food on the ground.

Seeing as the weekend is just about here, I’m sure many of you can find a use for this guide. It’s drink recipes hand-drawn like schematics to some circuitry system. I like how color wasn’t an option, so instead they used 42 stripe and dot patterns to differentiate ingredients.

See the full version here [pdf].

My sister sent this one along, but I couldn’t find the original source. Anyone know?

Update: I had scheduled this post for next week, but apparently, Data.gov.uk launched today. The site isn’t loading for me right now though. I guess they weren’t prepared for traffic.

Data.gov, a catalog of US data, launched last year. Now it’s the UK’s turn. Well, not yet. But soon. Data.gov.uk is still under lock and key, but it has granted access to some developers. Ito Labs, the group behind mapping a year of OpenStreetMap edits posted screenshots of their maps that show vehicle counts (above).

Here are some comparison maps between 2001 and 2008, by vehicle type.
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I’m admittedly not very good with historical precedent, but I think we can all agree it’s important to know about the work those have done before us. It makes your own work better and lets you appreciate what others do more (or less).
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Thank you, sponsors. I wouldn’t be able to do what I do on this blog without you. It seems like FlowingData is growing faster every month, and you guys make that possible.

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Email me at nathan [at] flowingdata [dot] com if you’d like to sponsor FlowingData, and I’ll send you the details.

In 1903, Crayola had eight colors in its standard package. Today, there are 120, along with special packs like Gem Tones and Silver Swhirls. What happened? Above, from Weather Sealed, shows the growing color selection (and a few color retirements) in the standard package from 1903 to now.

In 2101, Crayola will hit a color peak and revert to a simpler time. The standard pack will have just two colors: black and Tickle Me Pink (#FC89AC).

[via Waxy Links]

It’s funny how data is finding it’s way into everyday objects. There was jewelry a few months ago and coins last month. Now we’ve got this experiment with Christmas ornaments from Really Interesting Group (RIG). The snowman’s head is sized by the number of followers on Twitter; the (rain) bars represent miles traveled per month on Dopplr; the red shows listening habits on last.fm; and finally, the blue one shows apertures you’ve used over the year for photos uploaded to Flickr. Read More

How do you compare music visually? You can break it down into data by quantifying the notes, volume, etc and then visualize it with timescapes (above). The horizontal axis represents musical time, from the beginning to end of a piece. Large blocks show similarities to other pieces and smaller noisy chunks show more “fleeting” similarities.
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