Visualize

Here is a really cool video that takes crowd-sourced data about the movement of dollar bills around the country and deduces some interesting things about communities of people (apparently no embedding but click here). I thought the bit about how geographical boundaries (and even "straight-line" political boundaries) actually divide groups of people was totally fascinating.

Anyway, I saw this video in Science magazine's annual Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge 2009, which collects nifty visualizations of science concepts and subjects (link requires registration). Their winners are typically pretty neat, like this winner from last year that graphed every cross-reference in the Bible (there are a lot).

Visual and information design seems to be a field that has really flourished in recent years -- visually appealing information seems to be popping up a lot on the web. Some of my recent favorites include:

• This really useful widget that lets you focus your attention on only one level of giant hierarchical tree structures.
• Global Warming Art, which collects (naturally) images and graphics about climate change (some better than others).
• This map of the White House visitor logs, which lets you see who the POTUS (and others) is meeting with.
• These simple line graphs that show the actual size of many of the world's subway systems all at the same scale (nice job Berlin, London, NYC and Seoul!)
• A map of the (approximate) travel-time to every point on the globe.

AND this awesome mash-up of time-travel plotlines from TV and movies -- apparently Marty McFly, the Star Trek crew and the Terminator all met (will meet?) sometime in 1985. (From the always interesting visual-blog Information is Beautiful.)

Cool stuff!