notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

U.S. Electoral College – Graphic of the Day | The Knowledge Effect at Thompson Reuters.

Most images of the electoral college that decides the US presidential election are geographical, like the ones on Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight blog. The above graphic scales the states by the number of electors, rather than area, and the vast red states of the south and plains look rather smaller in it than they do in a standard map - and give a better idea of the fact that the race is closer than you’d think from looking at most visualisations.

(Note that the original post was in April, so the colours of “toss up states” are more than a little out of date.)

An animated GIF composed from the New York MTA hurricane recovery maps from the first to the fourth of November, most obviously showing the restoration of service in Lower Manhattan and across the East River to Brooklyn. Full size version (1.3MB).

The map format changed on the third to not include the parks or some other details, but I neither have the software nor skill to remove them from the first two PDFs. If you do and want to do better, please go ahead.

Source PDFs: Nov 1, Nov 2, Nov 3, Nov 4 (midday); Nov 4 (evening).

toffeemilkshake:

PIN number analysis

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.

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.

CityDashboard: London (via), by the CASA research lab at University College London.

There’s a fuller list of contributors and sources on the about page, along with this disclaimer:

CityDashboard is an early prototype and should be considered to be “alpha quality” - expect data feeds to break regularly. Please do not rely on information display in CityDashboard, as it may be erroneous. For example, if the CASA Geiger counter is showing a high reading, please do not panic! Somebody in the office might just have placed some Brazil nuts or another calibration source in front of the detector.

mathiascrawford:

Charting American vs. Russian Space Projects in 1961

This must be from very early in 1961, since it predates Gagarin’s orbit and Shepard’s suborbital hop. It’s interesting to compare to how the timelines actually shook out, too (someone with better graphic design skills can make that one happen, though).

I assume it’s from either Time or Life; probably Life, but I’m not quite expert enough in their house styles to tell.

Four of the many, many different map overlays at the London Profiler site. Sadly the data is a little out of date (it looks like it hasn’t been updated since around 2008; I first saw it in 2009), but it’s still fun to play with for a while.

(The images are captioned, but if you’re really curious about what’s displayed, I’d urge you to check out the maps in full.)

Screenshots of Oliver O’Brien’s Geodemographics of Housing in Great Britain, a map of the 2010 Index of Multiple Depravation in the style of Charles Booth’s famous Poverty Map of the late 1800s. Read more here.

The last three photos show one of the more interesting (to me, anyway) parts of this map: the divide between Waltham Forest (largely red and orange) and Redbridge (largely green) in east London. The areas always felt somewhat similar in terms of housing stock to me, but they show up very differently here. Perhaps part of that is transport related: the railway you can see running through the latter is the Central line, which goes directly to the middle of the city.

A Dymaxion air-ocean map, from the The Utopian Impulse exhibitio, as seen in the New York Times story, R. Buckminster Fuller’s Comeback at a San Francisco Museum.

See also: the map on display at SFMOMA.

Dymaxion map showing world energy usage, via iamdanw.