Most ugly useless infographic competition winners

infosthetics.com

8 pointsvijayr4 comments

Edward Tufte (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/) isn't a bad place to start when it comes to useful (information packed) and non-ugly (in a spare, efficient way) infographics.

I don't really think this post has much value. This item stood out as particularly pointless (see article for image):

Two circulating beams bring first collisions in the LHC. "From the press release two days ago, regarding the first (CERN) collisions... I vote this image as the ugliest and most useless visualization online. It may not be the most garish or info-deprived, but when normalized by the money, time, and scientific effort that went into it, I think it's a clear winner! Based on this image, it doesn't matter what scientists learn from the LHC, because nobody will understand any of the resulting visualizations... I can only imagine the conversation: "Don't you see? The blue dots only reach the giant red bars, but the pink dots reach clear through the green bars out to the purple bars... and we have unit-less axes everywhere! Grand unification theory, here we come!"

Well, a bit cynical, but as a visualisation this graphic is indeed pointless. You don't stick something like this in a press release. You just don't. There is a small subset of people on this plant who will understand this graphic, but the recipients of the press release most likely won't. Science for them will be reduced to incomprehensible glibberish. Not something a press release celebrating the launch of the LHC should do.

I visited the RHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory (they have tours during the summer - highly recommended if you're near Long Island!) and one of the scientists told me that she had never looked at the visualization of one of her collisions. I got the sense that they were more for PR than anything else.

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