Graph Addiction

Always Lookin' for a McRib

An experiment:

Which begs the question: just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience? And how would you figure that out?

As I hurtled down the highway, a pair of golden arches crept over the horizon, and the proverbial lightbulb smacked me in the forehead. To gauge the creep of cookie-cutter commercialism, there’s no better barometer than McDonald’s – ubiquitous fast food chain and inaugural megacorporate colonizer of small towns nationwide.

So, I set out to determine the farthest point from a Micky Dee’s – in the lower 48 states, at least. This endeavor required information, and the nice folks at AggData were kind enough to provide it to me: a complete list of all 13,000-or-so U.S. restaurants, in CSV format, geolocated for maximum convenience. From there, a bit of software engineering gymnastics, and...

That map above of the contiguous US.

Via GeekDad where they also have this important bit:

Von Worley warned me when I emailed him that the map isn't perfect, however.

"In the interest of full disclosure, please note that the McFarthest Spot is measured as the crow flies, at 107 miles. Also ~145 miles by car, but it's entirely possible that there's another location that's closer as the crow flies, but farther travelling on the roads. Indeed, regarding the latter, there's places in the lower 48 that you can’t even drive to/from with a car - that is, by auto, infinitely distant from MickyDee's."

Essential Information for Office Workers

Over at Information is Beautiful, David McCandless has plotted common food and drink items along two critical axes, calories and caffeine content:



I have a few quibbles with the presentation, namely the axes don't cross at 0, and the figures to the right are under-explained. Nonetheless, this visualization is pretty useful and stylish.

(X-posted at Johnny Logic)

Google SketchUp 3009?

The World of 100

The World of 100:

This is a self-initiated project based on the scenario – If the world were a village of 100 people. There are a few different versions of this text in circulation about the world’s statistics. I found the data very striking and neatly summarises the world that we live in. So I used information graphics to re-tell the story in another creative way.

Comparative Energy Consumption by Transport Mode

GOOD looks at what form of transportation gets the most bang per gallon on a 350 mile trip.(Click to enlarge)

Wow, are bicyclists efficient!

20 Useful Visualization Libraries

Like the title says... oh shiny!

SIMILE

A collection of tools and projects to help us use data from various sources.

Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments

SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets.

Check out this completed project: Timeline

Or Exhibit

Create interactive data-rich web pages like these ones below without ever touching a database or a web server, or doing any programming.

Here's an example.

More visualization tools for John.

Even though it's not YOUR birthday.

http://www.maani.us/xml_charts/

Register Your Opinion in 2D!

The makers of the SAT bring you this fun chart thingy.

Questions don't have a common theme, but a geared towards college students and occasionally have to do with shows on NBC.

Worth looking at.

Obama's Inaugural Speech

I created a wordle of Obama's speech:

Click the thumbnail to see it at full size.

Update: Check out the new whitehouse.gov.

Searching for "God"

StateStats:

...shows you how popular a Google search query is in each U.S. state, giving a ranking like the one you see in the left column. It then compares this ranking with other ways of ranking states, like average income or population density, using Spearman's rank correlation.

For instance, here are the states by popularity of searching for "God".


And here are the correlations:

Metric	Correlation with God
Obesity	0.84 (Positive, strong)
InfantMortality	0.65 (Positive, moderate)
EnergyConsumption	0.51 (Positive, moderate)
VotedForBush	0.47 (Positive, moderate)
Illiteracy	0.41 (Positive, moderate)
Rainfall	0.39 (Positive, weak)
ViolentCrime	0.33 (Positive, weak)
Unemployment	0.33 (Positive, weak)
Suicide	0.08 (Positive, very weak)
Area	0.07 (Positive, very weak)
PercentElderly	0.06 (Positive, very weak)
Density	0.04 (Positive, very weak)
Longitude	-0.02 (Negative, very weak)
Age	-0.21 (Negative, weak)
LifeExpectancy	-0.33 (Negative, weak)
SameSexCouples	-0.38 (Negative, weak)
Latitude	-0.45 (Negative, moderate)
Frost	-0.48 (Negative, moderate)
VotedForObama	-0.51 (Negative, moderate)
Income	-0.55 (Negative, moderate)
HighSchoolGrad	-0.67 (Negative, moderate)

Hmmm.

D&D Chart

Here's a chart showing some history of role-playing games up to the release of AD&D 2E.

Found at Adventures in Gaming via W Wheaton.

Wordle of Our Site

This is what we are writing about (omitting common English words and preformatted blogger junk).

Flexy FactBook

Here is a neat flex dashboard showcasing data from the C.I.A.'s World FactBook.

Note to Self: Need More Flare

Many-Eyes is fun, but if I really want geek cred I need to learn how to create unique visualizations in Flare, the platform on which Many Eyes is built:

Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel.

Here is a Corporations by Political Contributions visualization made in Flare.

Govt. Land Ownership Map

Click for embiggening.

Line Graph for Otis

By request, I have created a visualization where you can see countries overcoming one another in projected GDP:
Control-click to select and unselect countries for bar graph display.

A Visualization by Johnny Logic

Whipped this up with some data from Wikipedia, which in turn came from the IMF.

Sprint's Now Machine

Sprint has an interesting advert consisting of a "futuristic" dashboard. It is flashy, amusing and a perfect example of what we too often lack in our information sources, elegance, context and relevance. (via Flowing Data)