Beautiful visualisations of everyday statistics | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful visualisations of everyday statistics

chrisjordan.com

35 pointsjgamman11 comments

compelling in a way that's hard to describe

Superb work presenting such big numbers in a 'graspable' way. I wonder what techniques the artist used to generate some of the more complicated images.

The point of the work is to make the number not graspable as anything but BIG. As in, "This number is so big, you should be morally outraged".

Effective as a political statement, maybe, as long as you're already receptive to the political statement. (The artist would, presumably, be less than happy to see a map of Africa drawn out of several million copies of Silent Spring, one for every African child killed by Western environmentalists causing DDT to be de-facto banned there. Bonus points: the presentation covers the fact that the factual premise of the statement I just made is controversial.)

Maybe you know more about this than me, but last I had heard, it was the use of agricultural DDT that was most condemned, whereas DDT for epidemic control was supported by, for example, WHO. The idea was that, after some years, agricultural DDT caused DDT resistance in mosquito populations. This rendered DDT for epidemic control ineffective.

Of course, the whole argument is complicated by the fact that pesticides are needed, in current practice for high-yield rice at the green-revolution scale, without which millions would starve.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&...

Now imagine those visualizations coupled with something like Seadragon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ra5tp7K--I

There's a note on the page about that.

Several new images coming soon; and my apologies for the slow-loading website. In a few weeks these JPEGs will have a cool zooming function, using Microsoft's new SeaDragon technology. Please stay tuned! ~cj, December 2008

Are these statistics publicly available? I'd like to verify them because they seem too big. For example, 106,000 aluminum cans used every 30 seconds seems off by an order of magnitude.

It's one per American per day, by my reckoning. Seems reasonable.

I'm in it for the stats.

2 million bottles every 5 minutes, in the US alone? That's over 200,000,000,000 a year.

Absolutely stunning. The statistics are almost as interesting as the visualizations.

same idea with Star Wars http://gizmodo.com/366573/skywalker-last-supper-painting-mad...

2000000 bottles / 5 minutes = 400,000 bottles / minute

400000 * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day = 576,000,000 bottles a day.

576 Million bottles / 300 million americans = 1.92 bottles per American per day?

I have a hard time buying that.

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