World Processor

18 years ago

World Processor: globe-based data visualizations.
Some of these are hokey, but some are pretty cool.
There are many.

Television Ownership

Landlocked Nations

Tags: art, space, sprawl

Current Music: The Dresden Dolls -- Truce ♬

11 Responses:

1. dnl2ba says:

   18 years ago at 12:25 pm

   When I visited, many were unavailable (broken image links).

2. otterley says:

   18 years ago at 12:27 pm

   Interestingly, on the "Mountains of Debt" visualization, the U.S. is flat. On the contrary, the U.S. is in a great deal of debt. I wonder what they mean by debt.

   • jwz says:

     18 years ago at 12:34 pm

     I noticed that too, but I assumed that meant he made that one during the Clinton administration?

     • otterley says:

       18 years ago at 2:02 pm

       The U.S. was still in a great deal of debt during the Clinton administration, too -- our debts really piled up during the Reagan administration, when Congress leveraged the country's assets to escape the recession caused in the 1970s partly by skyrocketing energy prices.

       In the Clinton administration, our income exceeded expenses for a time during the Internet boom years. This allowed us the possibility to repay some of our debt, but we never began a full scale effort to do so. See here, which shows that despite our best efforts, our debt increased from 1992-2000 (the Clinton years).

3. lroberson says:

   18 years ago at 1:39 pm

   Ripped straight out of the latest dead tree issue of Wired.

4. gwillen says:

   18 years ago at 2:58 pm

   I think Tufte would call that first one "chartjunk". It doesn't really convey much information -- the interesting region is all solid black ink! It does get the point across, but it's not that useful for really understanding the numbers. I'm sure they don't much care.

5. kungfupolarbear says:

   18 years ago at 4:18 pm

   I started noticing that it was slanted toward Germany, especially the "Germany vs. Japan" map, and then realized that the whole page is a source from Germany. Hrm.

6. mackys says:

   18 years ago at 4:38 pm

   http://essw.bren.ucsb.edu/~frew/courses/263/lectures/Future_of_GIS/Snow_Crash.html

7. davidmccabe says:

   18 years ago at 4:53 am

   Damned socialists.

8. roninspoon says:

   18 years ago at 9:42 am

   I'm a little disapointed that they went to the trouble to make some that were blank or with seemingly unrelated global data, but neglected to make one of the death star.

9. badc0ffee says:

   18 years ago at 2:47 am

   There's some bad data in there. Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976.