InfographicsFollow

Disclaimer: some of these were already compiled for a Slate feature, which I am now shamelessy appropriating for this post.

If you want to kill some time at work and you're into graphs and weird alternative visualizations of data:

Jason Salavon (some NWS content)

- Makes images composed of the average of each pixel over 100 collected wedding portraits, or 100's of playboy centerfold pictures, or even an audio/video average of 64 late night talk show openings. Kinda cool to see that the shots are so similarly composed that the image is even recognizable, or that the backdrops of the playboy shots from each decade all average out to a shade of blue.

NY Times Interactive Graphs

- Movie box office receipts, 1986-2000
- Clinton/Obama voting trends by state
- Iraq War Casualties
- Faces of The Dead in Iraq

Baby Name Wizard

- Tracks popularity of the names over time. Why did "Emma" spike faster upward ca. 1990s than "Adolph" spiked downward ca. WWII?

Computer Chess

- Shows every possibility the computer maps out before it actually moves. However, painfully slow to play an actual game with. And keep in mind it's no Deep Blue - it's supposedly tuned to be beatable by an average player.

Gapminder

- Project that uses a trend analyzer to track and create presentations about global issues. Kinda cool: look how tight the curve is that the developing nations travel in the Bangladesh video.

The Dumpster

- Some guy scanned a year's worth of blog entries from across the internet about relationship breakups, and plotted them thusly. Each bubble represents an entry, click to read an excerpt.

Wordle

- Creates those "word clouds" that depict the frequency of a word by the size of the font. For example, here's one I made out of the text of Obama's Race Speech.

Whitney Music Box (must have audio)

- An experiment in music, timing, and patterns. The whole loop takes 3 minutes; the smallest, inner dot makes 48 revolutions in that time; the largest, outer dot makes 1 revolution. At certain intervals, they align in starfish shaped patterns. The very end when the whole thing finally loops and synchs up together is quite exciting.