Same same, but different

Great work in reducing products to its most minimalistic version.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

An updated version of the Bubble Charts which I’ve done last year, this time with a linear scale as well, as well as the Human Development Index used instead of the GDP. So, here one can see the HDI on the x-axis, the per capita CO2 emissions on the y-axis, the total emissions by size of the bubble, the total population by size of the font for the country name, and the region (colored circle) a country belongs too. Plus, the regional aggregates have been plotted too. PDFs can be downloaded here.

“So how to reconcile the appeal that attracts Gapminder with the concerns of the InfoVis mavens not to use bubbles? Simple. Follow one rule, which is to never use bubbles to display the principal dimension of your analysis. Instead, use them to add a categorization variable to an analysis that is principally concerned with one or two other variables.” More here.

Use ProxyFi

Interesting comparison of several mapping engines (GoogleMaps, Bing, YahooMaps) and what techniques Google is using to make their maps more readable.

Large hydropower reservoirs in the tropics can have a higher global warming impact per kilowatthour generated than fossil fuels, including coal. Philip Fearnside, of Brazilian government research institute INPA, estimates that in 1990 the warming impact of hydropower dams in the Amazon was equal to that of between 3 and 54 natural gas plants generating the same amount of energy. (Source)

One giant container ship pollutes the air as much as 50 million cars. Yes, that’s 50 million. Which means that just 15 ships that size emit as much as today’s entire global “car park” of roughly 750 million vehicles. Among the bad stuff: Sulfur, soot, and other particulate matter that embeds itself in human lungs to cause a variety of cardiopulmonary illnesses.
…
But ships today are where cars were in 1965: utterly uncontrolled, free to emit whatever they like. Just one of many statistics: A car driven 9,000 miles a year emits 3.5 ounces of sulfur oxides–while the engine in a large cargo ship produces 5,500 tons.
…
The world’s biggest container ships have 109,000 horsepower engines which weigh 2,300 tons.
Each ship expects to operate 24hrs a day for about 280 days a year
There are 90,000 ocean-going cargo ships
Shipping is responsible for 18-30% of all the world’s nitrogen oxide (NOx) pollution and 9% of the global sulphur oxide (SOx) pollution.
One large ship can generate about 5,000 tonnes of sulphur oxide (SOx) pollution in a year
70% of all ship emissions are within 400km of land.
85% of all ship pollution is in the northern hemisphere.
Shipping is responsible for 3.5% to 4% of all climate change emissions

More here or here (PDF).

Nice “bar/line” chart style of multiples.

Nice use of small multiples for these statistics. Some small suggestions for improvement here.

Some governmental statistics.

What the population cares about is changing each election, and differences between conservatives and democrats are clearly visible.

Which drugs are more harmful? And to others or the user? A discussion coming up from time to time, here now an interesting analysis.

Interesting application, Flash-like look and feel, but based on SVG.

Great data visualizations for number and origin of refugees.

Difficult to grab the impact of the pakistani flood for someone who doesn’t exactly know the size of Pakistan. So, here, a quick composition of Pakistan and its flood, overlaid onto Western Europe.