2013-04-24
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One chart can speak volumes about politics, history, technology, and the human race.
This chart explains why the golden age for the British is widely seen as being pre-WW2 and why Americans hark back the post-war period so much. (For all the talk of American decline, note their share of GDP is still massively out of scale with their percentage of the population (which is nearer five than twenty).
2012-12-13
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Stats Alert! Frequency of Yellow and Red Alerts in Star Trek: The Next Generation at Overthinking It includes this chart, showing a breakdown of alerts per season (via)
2012-12-07
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Price per Lego brick, from Does It Feel Like Lego Bricks Just Keep Getting More Expensive? by GeekMom at Wired.com.
2012-12-05
2012-11-29
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Pacific Ocean. G9230-1908. Sandy Island. (by Auckland Museum)
Sandy Is, Velocity, 1876. The source of the island that isn’t there? (See also.)
2012-09-28
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The first two digits are the X axis; the second two, the Y axis. The colour scaling is logarithmic.
The diagonal is repeated digits. The strong vertical line is numbers starting 19; in other words, years. The author has a somewhat more readable summary at The Guardian, with some interesting points:
In America, a driver’s licence, which everyone carries in their wallet with their ATM card, contains birthday information providing a thief with both the lock and key in the same location. If you have difficulty remembering a pin and elect to use a birth date, at least use that of your spouse.
2012-05-07
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A Week in the Life of London’s Public Transit System, by Jon Reades (via):
This visualisation shows average entries at each and every Underground, Overground, and DLR station over the course of a week using a 10-minute interval. So in theory there are some 300 * 7 * 24 * 6 data points in this image.
2012-04-28
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EIA Linearity Chart, 1961. An explanation from the no-frills technical links page:
In the 1970s, if your color cameras had registration problems, the ball chart would show them to you. You see, the cameras had separate tubes for red, green and blue (RGB). After the RGB signals go through the NTSC encoder, and sync is added, it is then called composite video. If you point your Norelco PC-70 at this chart and the black circles have rainbows around the edges, you need to twist some knobs to get the red, green and blue pictures to coincide.
2012-02-24
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The History of Skirt Lengths from Ptak Science Books:
This graph illustrating the history of skirt lengths in the United States is oddly interesting and appealing, a job well done. I like that the graph lines fairly well reveal the amount of leg shown by the rising and lowering hemlines, measuring the height above the ankle from bottom to top.
