I Have Your Infographic Right Here

September 30, 2011 2:28 PM

How far above (or below) the average was the temperature and income in your state for the year you were conceived? A genealogy of US Airlines and a visual history of the TSA. See how the increasing severity and frequency of disasters is starting to strain the resources of FEMA (and where will the next big earthquake strike?). Alcohol vs. Marijuana. Facebook vs. Twitter. International travel and hotel prices for Americans and Canadians. How much does the US subsidize energy? And what would it look like if that energy was renewable?

Much more at GE Data Visualisation and The GE Show, Good Magazines Infographics and Transparency, and History Shots.

posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul (22 comments total)

Man, the average income the year I was born was $1906/yr. That won't even pay the monthly bills now.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 2:35 PM on September 30, 2011

Interesting thing for me is that Gas was 23 cents per gallon, which was basically the same (or higher) than I was paying when I started driving 16 years later..... now that's pretty much a daily fluctuation in the price.
posted by HuronBob at 2:45 PM on September 30, 2011

What am I missing? The map says that in 1974, average income per capita in Wisconsin was $80K - $90K. That's not anywhere near reality.
posted by desjardins at 2:54 PM on September 30, 2011

Also, in 1947, per capita income was over $100K in North Dakota. What?
posted by desjardins at 2:56 PM on September 30, 2011

Normalized for 2011 dollars? I think if you do took old incomes and convert them to today's dollars, they'd be higher than what people earn now.
posted by mrgrimm at 3:02 PM on September 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

Also, Oregon wins.
posted by mrgrimm at 3:03 PM on September 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

Tufte wept.
posted by Llama-Lime at 3:09 PM on September 30, 2011 [5 favorites]

The "youth marijuana use" part of the Marijuana vs. Alcohol chart really needs a "youth alcohol use" chart to go with it.
posted by vorfeed at 3:13 PM on September 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

What is up with these spammy domains (hotel-price-index.com, onlineuniversities.net ) hosting classy-looking infographics? Are we helping build up the pagerank of link farms?
posted by the jam at 3:16 PM on September 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

Due to inflation, $100K in 2010 dollars corresponds to about $10K in 1947 dollars. (via)

But what really bothers me is that this seems to suggest that my parents got in the mood to conceive me by thinking about the president.
posted by twoleftfeet at 3:23 PM on September 30, 2011

Most Popular Infographics you can find around the web. With such familiar hits as "The cloud with random words in the shape of something" and "A crapload of irrelevant data put together in a big vertical image".
posted by Nelson at 3:31 PM on September 30, 2011

I think if you do took old incomes and convert them to today's dollars, they'd be higher than what people earn now.

One has to be careful when thinking about this. In fact, between 1947 and 2008 average incomes in the U.S. grew by more than $30,000 (in 2008 dollars). The missing piece is the distribution of those incomes. After adjusting for inflation, the bottom 90% earn about the same as in 1947, but the average is skewed by an incredible rise in incomes at the top 1%. So basically, "average income" is misleading.
posted by twoleftfeet at 3:40 PM on September 30, 2011 [3 favorites]

>What is up with these spammy domains (hotel-price-index.com, onlineuniversities.net ) hosting classy-looking infographics? Are we helping build up the pagerank of link farms?
posted by the jam at 6:16 PM

ding ding ding, a winrar is you.
posted by frijole at 4:26 PM on September 30, 2011

What is up with these spammy domains (hotel-price-index.com, onlineuniversities.net ) hosting classy-looking infographics? Are we helping build up the pagerank of link farms?

I asked that question a while ago and yeah, linkbait.
posted by ghharr at 4:31 PM on September 30, 2011

I was born on Martin Luther King's birthday (1/15/1970) and according to this, I was conceived on the day Martin Luther King was assassinated (4/10/1969).
posted by Maisie at 4:54 PM on September 30, 2011

I thought I knew bad infographics, but Facebook vs. Twitter is a whole new FUCKING DIMENSION of terrible. The radial arrangement is totally meaningless: each slice represents an independent piece of data. Facebook and Twitter are disjoint, and presented in a way that makes it impossible to visually compare the two without reading the attached numbers. It's like someone made the worst infographic possible on purpose.
posted by scose at 7:41 PM on September 30, 2011 [4 favorites]

Holy Christ, yes, that Facebook vs Twitter is truly awful. It's not the only one. The graphic of Canadian hotel room prices has a map showing the ten most expensive cities. Except you can't tell what those cities are. There are no labels on the map. Brilliant! And for some weird reason the size of the dot is supposed to tell you the ranking of each city. But you can't tell the difference between the size of the 10th largest dot and the 9th largest dot.

It's like they deliberately took the information and krazy-glued it under a graphical rock.

These aren't information graphics, these are ignorance graphics.
posted by storybored at 8:31 PM on September 30, 2011

Do we at least get a cut of whatever the returns on all this link-farming action is? (Still, kind of interesting to learn that nutmeg is deadlier per effective dose than alcohol.)
posted by saulgoodman at 8:46 PM on September 30, 2011

What does "effective dose" of nutmeg even mean? Is someone out there snorting nutmeg? How would you OD on nutmeg? Eating too many of your grandma's delicious holiday cookies?
posted by sonic meat machine at 9:19 AM on October 1, 2011

How would you OD on nutmeg? Eating too many of your grandma's delicious holiday cookies?

You and your stupid little teenage buddies hear that nutmeg can get you high but you have to eat spoonfuls of it and it's so fucking gross and you end up with the worst stomach pain ever and you can't stop throwing up.
posted by The Whelk at 10:38 AM on October 1, 2011

2010 had 3.5 natural disasters.

What's half a natural disaster???
posted by miyabo at 10:06 PM on October 1, 2011

in high doses, nutmeg's actually a very potent hallucinogen (but apparently, there's a high risk you'll die before you get high, given the ratio of its relatively low fatal dose to its high effective dose).
posted by saulgoodman at 12:09 PM on October 3, 2011