I’ve seen several charts that attempt to digest the nature of this financial conundrum. So you know, watch out for charts that represent a value in terms of the diameter of a circle (i.e. the width of a circle), because our natural tendency is to interpret that circle in terms of its area, not its diameter. Here is an example of a terrible, scare-mongering graphic that makes this misleading error:

On the other hand, the Guardian has put together a really decent infographic that breaks the problem down, and they do not torture their charts to make the point. It is scary enough, as is.

RTFA: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/dan-roberts-on-…

Global recession – where did all the money go?

The New York Times has produced a wonderfully interactive infographic that includes the most commonly used words from each of the US Presidents’ inaugural address. This is a really great way to get a sense of the scope of this country’s history. I came away from this infographic with a better sense of the challenges that faced the nation at different times, and also with a sense of how young this country really is.

The New York Times infographic presents a very intuitive timeline, featuring portraits of the presidents, along with a representation of the text of their inaugural address. The words have been scaled by frequency – more frequently used words appear larger. Words shown in yellow are special, in that they are quite different from the words used by the previous president.

Scroll through this infographic, just paying attention to the yellow words. You can instantly grok the big issue that a certain president is dealing with, and I think that reflects very positively on the value of this infographic. Next, scroll through the timeline, paying attention to the biggest words, and you can get a feeling for how the presidents ideologically approached their term. Great work!

RTFA: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/17/wash…

A look at the language of presidential inaugural addresses. The most-used words in each address appear in the interactive chart below, sized by number of uses. Words highlighted in yellow were used significantly more in this inaugural address than average.

RTFA: http://infosthetics.com/archives/2009/01/if_the_wo…

A gigantic isometric eBoy-like infographic, based on the concept of summarizing world statistics as a village of 100 people [binsworld.com]. As a result, all the objects and characteristics within it become a percentage: 6 cars, 24 televisions, 9 English speaking people, 10 homosexuals, and so on. The village is divided into 5 navigable zones: Economy, Life, Food, Danger and a World map.

However, somewhere the concept became a bit lost, as I suppose the 300 million bottles of wine and 2500 million cups of coffee are not destined to be consumed by a meager 100 people?

Tragically, it seems like the site is down now (slashdotting?) …but nevertheless the idea is great, so I’ve linked to information aesthetic, which in turn links to binsworld.