I See What You Mean

I've written before about song lyrics shown in graphic form . And it's Friday afternoon, so what the hey -- I'm going there again. Sometimes this visual gimmick really works. See " Pinball Wizard ," where the lyrics actually provide you with all the necessary data (namely, Tommy's various actions and their frequency). Other times, the song's structure or content just doesn't lend itself to any sort of proper graph. Consequently the message conveyed feels painfully thin, and the joke stupid and weak. One example: "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina," rendered here . I say, if you're going to attempt the visual joke, why not do it right? To do so, we must face up to certain painful facts, namely: Many songs just don't feature quantitative concepts. In such cases, look to flow charts . After all, singing a song is a process. Flow charts proceed forward in time (just like music), often incorporating repetitions (verses or chorus) or variati...

Based on a common and surprisingly versatile visual metaphor, this subway map of the cinematic universe was recommended by some film critic friends.

Brought to our attention by Synoptical simpatica MCL , this gorgeously rendered space map is even deeper than it looks at first glance. The number of rings around each planet depicts how many spacecraft have orbited that planet (most visited: moon), while each imperfect circle represents a capsule's precise path around the planet. National Geographic has a Flash version here . (I kinda hate Flash. Who's with me?) If you want to see or have a static version, you can do both of those here .

Here's another look at public health stats from various countries around the world. As with the first installment of this series , the countries included here rank in the Top 5 in at least one of four categories: Life Expectancy (longest), Under-5 Mortality (least), Health Care Expenditure per Capita (highest), and Prevalence of Physicians (greatest). (Source: Nationmaster.com .) NOTE: Unlike the previous chart, this one omits Macau and Hong Kong, which had made the cut because of their populations' longevity. I omitted these two Chinese territories because the only available figures on the geographical distribution of physicians reflect China as a whole. Result: not only does this camouflage the serious disparity between urban centers and rural districts, it obscures any geographical specifics. Comments and questions are invited.

In selecting my international sample, I decided to examine the top 5 countries in each of four categories:  Longest life expectancy (longest) Lowest infant mortality (least) Highest health care expenditure per capita Greatest prevalence of physicians My source for these stats was the invaluable Nationmaster.com . (Note:  As a proxy for Hong Kong and Macau, I've used China's expenditure figure, since they've both been under Chinese rule for the last decade.) Given where the two dimensions of this graph ultimately lead, I've nicknamed it "Death and Taxes (Sorta)."

Jess Bachman of Wallstats.com , creator of the well-known Death and Taxes poster, has turned his eye to the U.S. government's unemployment statistics. Back in January he published a flowchart clarifying how the government determines who is officially Unemployed and who is merely overlooked. ( Here's how that determination is described verbally by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) What's more, the official numbers have gone up since January. As of the end of June, the official figure is 9.5 percent. Has the Obama administration come up with a new tally to include all the undercounted (I hope)? Or are things just going to hell in a handbasket (I fear)? Click here to see the whole thing. Nice work, Jess.

Created by a couple of UK computer science students, this newly upgraded aggregator/search engine delivers results that are both broad and deep. Tags are used extensively and to good effect, but the infoviz applications are where the action is. The Network widget is probably my favorite. To use, hover over a small graphic image to highlight its connections with other items in the network. Hover over bits of text for pop-ups providing additional information. Double-click a node if you want to drill down. If you're looking for news from a certain region, click the Hot Spots map widget and drill down from there. You can further refine the search by filtering the topic of the news stories. Unfortunately, the Trends app is buggy, poorly explained and therefore far less useful. And Silobreaker's collection of pre-set topics (global issues, tech, science, business, energy and world) is certainly incomplete. Even so, the site's dashboard-style interface provides lots of entry p...