Starbucks vs. McDonalds

Found on the Princeton University website.

This one shows the accelerating takeover of the world by Starbucks and how quickly they are catching up to the reigning king of the hill, McDonalds. It's a few years old (2003) so let's see how they've done since then...

Starbucks: 6,200 locations in 2003. 11,225 in 2007. Almost double!!!

McDonalds: "Over 31,000" in 2003. Still 31,000 in 2007. No growth for McDonalds!

Do you want coffee with that?

Starship Comparison

Huge starship comparison image/poster that combines the starships from most of the poular scifi movies and shows into one graphic. Someone spend a lot of time figuring out the relative dimensions of these, and this really adds a new perspective to your favorite shows.

Includes Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Gallactica (the original series), Farscape, 2001:A Space Odessey, and a few others.

Hydrogen Atom

phrenopolis.com

Cool website that visualizes a hydrogen atom, showing how much empty space makes up our universe.

The page is scaled so that the smallest thing on it, the electron, is one pixel. That makes the proton, this big ball right next to us, a thousand pixels across, and the distance between them is... yep, fifty million pixels

If your monitor displays 72 pixels to the inch, then that works out to eleven miles - making this possibly the biggest page you've ever seen.

Death and Taxes 2007

One of my favorite infographics is the Death and Taxes series.

This infographic visually breaks down the US Federal Discretionary Budget for 2007 into smaller and smaller bubbles. The actual values are also included as text, but the size of the bubbles instantly gives you an understanding of how the different budget items compare.

An online version in Flash is also available at thebudgetgraph.com

Just to be clear, this only shows the Discretionary Budget which totals $938 Billion. The total budget is $2.8 Trillion. Notice the circle in the background (just barely visible at the top and bottom) showing the National Debt of $9.35 Trillion.

One older version is the 2004 Budget.