The whole North Korean army in one place
When it’s all laid out like that in one graphic, it’s pretty huge.
Fast food profits soar, while fast-food wages stay the same: Here’s your depressing graphic of the day, via Bloomberg.
Slate’s chart of presidents, based on the number of portrayals they’ve had in movies. Lincoln is obviously in first place, but strangely, Ulysses S. Grant is in third, likely thanks to the number of westerns that rely on Grant’s presence. Also, where is our James Buchanan biopic, anyway?
How a genius election-related graphic came together
The other night, I posted this really amazing New York Times graphic breaking down the numerous roads to Electoral College victory Obama and Romney can take. Think the graphic was cool? Now here’s how they did it. In the words of the Times’ very own Mike Bostock:
The hard part of this graphic, implementation-wise, is the animated transition as you flip states. Although this is superficially similar to collapsible interactive trees I had implemented previously, it turned out to be more challenging due to the pruning below decision nodes. To assist my thinking, I sketched out a sample tree with eight different interactions and the corresponding animations. With examples, it was possible to generalize the behavior of the transitions and start the implementation.
Which road do you think the Electoral College is going to take?
— Ernie @ ShortFormBlog
Infographic creators aspire to create something this awesome. And here it is.
Genius graphic of the day: As the New York Times shows in the amazing interactive piece “512 Paths to the White House,” Obama’s path to winning the Electoral College is much easier than that of Romney. In fact, if Obama wins Florida, Romney would have to win eight other toss-up states to topple that blow. That’s less likely than an Obama Ohio win at the moment, but … ah, why explain it?! Play with the fun, interactive, awesome graphic! (ht Jason Smedvik)
Raw weblog data gets organized into summarized, usable database tables via a couple of data processing steps. Sometimes intermediate tables are used to help calculate sums, groups, and values at the level we are interested in. For example, variables recorded at very granular time intervals might later be summed or averaged in longer groups of time. Storing what happened in the past hour or day is intuitive, whereas its hard to think of when you would need to know the exact millisecond a user clicked on something. You end up with tables that have a structure closer to what you might remember from the datasets you saw in the Intro to Stats class you aced, and these can be regularly used by developers or analysts without much hassle/manipulation.
Sideboob Exposed: Raw, Summary, and Usable Web Data aka: Why we have a whole page dedicated to this phenomenon.
This is the most fascinating article in HuffPo history …

… and it appears to all be for the purpose of an elaborate sideboob graph.
wow
caveat that the story is more complex than this: people get TV from other sources (including satellite and their telcos) and they aren’t seeing the same decline. But still, it’s nice to see e.g., Time Warner Cable getting what’s due. Or to stop getting what’s not due, or something.
(via UH OH: New Nielsen Data Says People Are Turning Away From TV - Business Insider)
I noticed a small error in your chart! Here is an amended version:
The best graphic response since the graphic was invented.
Requires Chrome or another browser with WebGL enabled. (via Hacker News)
Of Total Income Increase in 2010…
Steven Rattner, a Wall Street executive and New York Times Op-Ed contributor, writes:
In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households.
Still more astonishing was the extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich. In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent.
The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income.
Steven Rattner, The New York Times. The Rich Get Even Richer.
Yikes. The balance is off.
Ever wonder how Newsweek made some of its more elaborate graphics back in the day? Check out this look back by Karl Gude, the magazine’s former Director of Information Graphics (and a current MSU professor), who discusses what it was like to create an insanely detailed graphic like this way back in 2001. In the case of this particular piece, it included dressing people up as soldiers. Seriously. Awesome piece. You’ll dig it.
Fox’s Graphics Department is Having a Very Bad Week
And it’s only Wednesday.
The unemployment graph where 8.6 is magically greater than 8.8 or 8.9 floated through the Tumblr on Monday (the horizontal lines have been added to the original Fox graphic).
Now it’s on to geography. Let’s admire how New Hampshire replaces Vermont and Utah is now Nevada.
Images via Media Matters.
They report, you’re deceived!
Roger Ailes should hire more people.
(Source: futurejournalismproject)
If this image of a word cloud makes you angry, we have the article for you. (thanks Charles Apple)
Perspective on what we’re dealing with, guys: “Horizontal axis shows months. Vertical axis shows the ratio of that month’s nonfarm payrolls to the nonfarm payrolls at the start of recession. Note: Because employment is a lagging indicator, the dates for these employment trends are not exactly synchronized with National Bureau of Economic Research’s official business cycle dates.”