Who has the Oil?

I caught this on Digg, it's a map from civicactions.com. There's some good debate in the comments on Digg about the accuracy of the map.

The size of the country represents the relative amount of oil reserves in each country, and teh color of the country represents how much oil is consumed by that country.

The World Freedom Atlas

The World Freedom Atlas, offers many different views of the world. Developed by Zachary Forest Johnson, his blog is here. The one above is the Raw Political Rights Score (darker is better) based on data from the Freedom House. Offering a bunch of datasets from a number of different sources, the interface is fantastically easy to use. Depending on the dataset, you can also view the data by year from 1990-2006.

Map of the Internet (blacklisted)

Found on Information Aesthetics, this is a map of all 4,294,967,296 IP addresses in the world. Blocks of addresses are shown grouped together in squares based on the owner (ISP, corporation, goverment, university, etc.), and individual addresses are shown as grey dots. The IP addresses that are listed on the Spamhaus XBL blacklist are shown as red dots, representing suspect addresses.

Potential Solar Energy

Submitted by a reader (thanks Louis), this infographic is from Good Magazine. Of course there isn't actually a way to capture ALL of the light from the sun, but it is indicative that we should be able to capture more than we do.

Check out this link at Good Magazine for a few other infographics too.

Nip and Tuck

From Many Eyes, this bubble chart shows the number of plastic surgery procedures per 100 people, by nation. Let's just say, the U.S. is one of the smaller countries measured this way.

Breathing Earth

Breathing Earth is a cool website that displays international statistics in real-time, similar in concept to Poodwaddle.com's World Counter. Breathing Earth focuses on carbon dioxide emissions by country and adds population, births and deaths.

Welcome to Breathing Earth. This presentation displays the carbon dioxide emission levels of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates - all in real-time. Though considerable effort has been taken to ensure that the presentation uses the most accurate and up-to-date data available, please remember that this is just a simulation.

Breathing Earth was created by David Bleja (aka Stillwater), whose home website is stillwater-microcosm.net

Found on SimpleComplexity.net

The Wine Advocate Vintage Guide

From eRobertParker.com, the online Wine Advocate Vintage Guide. Fascinating guide of wines from 1970-2005. Wines are grouped by region and year, and each group is scored and given a letter code to identify the current maturity status of those wines (like Ready to Drink, Too Old and Early Maturing). The color coding represents ranges of the numeric scores.

The guide is interactive, so clicking on any of the rating circles brings you to a list of the specific wines grouped together for that region. For the specific wines, you can see their individual name, score, maturity level and price range.

A PDF version of the guide is available here for download.

Shanghai Urban Planning

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!

31 Days in Iraq

This map of Iraq from the NYTimes.com visually shows the over 1,900 people killed in Iraq during the month of January 2007.

"The map, based on data from the American, British and Iraqi governments and from news reports, shows the dates, locations and circumstances of deaths."

The number has doubled since they did this for January 2006 which had around 800 deaths. Each figure represents an individual of the American forces, coalition forces, Iraqi forces, police officers or civilian death. The larger figures have numbers showing how many people they represent (which I think diminishes the visual impact). A smaller icon shows the cause of death. All the figures are connected to a location in the country.

I would have added some color coding too, but I'm guessing the NY Times had to keep it in black & white to print it in the newspaper.

Earth At Night

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.