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Featured in the Tech & Science category
A good one from BusinessWeek.com. This chart shows the participation in the various Web 2.0 activities by age group.
As part of Gen X, these graphs look like a tidal wave rising up behind me.
charts, internet, population, web 
Last year I was in Shanghai, China on business. A friend suggested we visit the Shanghai Urban Planning building, and the first thing I thought was "ohhh, I bet that's exciting...not". But, he convinced us to give it a try, and here are a few photos I took.
On the top floor of this building is the largest model of urban planning in the world. For an American, seeing Shanghai is a shock at how large the city is, and how many skyscrapers there are. For reference, Shanghai's population is about 22 million people, compared to about 8 million in New York. Most U.S. cities have a "downtown" type area where the most skyscrapers are clustered, but Shanghai is a city of skyscrapers everywhere.
The World Population Map is one way to understand the scale difference between the U.S. and China, but this model city is astounding. Even better than riding around town (you definitely don't want to be the one driving), the model city really drives home the scale of Shanghai, and what has been accomplished in urban development. The model is built at 1:2000 scale.
Those are the building support columns in the middle of the model, NOT some new super skyscraper!
This satellite photo from NASA spans a 24-hour period showing the entire surface of the Earth in darkness. The lights obviously show the highest areas of concentration of civilization. Note the Nile River delta, the Siberian Express railway route, the Australian coastal cities, and Africa, literally "the dark continent".
From Princeton's International Networks Archive, the old project of Jonathan Harris.
Jonathan Harris, earth, history, map, photo, planets, population, space, world 
This is a prime example of how seeing the data visually is better than reading numbers. Here is a population density map from Wikipedia.
We have heard that China and India have most of the human population in the world, but here you can really see and understand how much. Reading that China's population is four times that of the U.S. is much harder than really seeing it on a map.
The Wikipedia page on World Population has some other great information too.
Here's part two, when Hans Rosling followed-up his 2006 presentation with updated software in 2007. It looks like he's been able to get more data from the UN also.
He gets really excited while describes what's happening as the software animates the data about world health.
Hans Rosling is a professor from Sweden who is an expert in world health, but has pioneered some amazing ways to look at massive amounts of data. I mean truly AMAZING. I can think of at least a dozen uses for this software to help visualize changes over time. Don't let the topic scare you, this is incredible to watch.
The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop.This video is one of the TED Talks videos from the 2006 TED Conference.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/92
