Rikenography

First up is from a great couple of people who design subway maps for unlikely places. Take for example this map of a hypothetical subway system on the “Bar Harbor/Acadia Metro Area.” They offer a number of cool poster size maps on their website of various unlikely locations for subways. You can find them over at Transit Authority Figures.

Next up is an interesting slideshow from the New York Times about Michael Najjar, a photographer that uses mountain peak lines to express the rise and fall of the stock market. After finding a mountain in Argentina that already looked like a stock chart, he proceeded to go home and recreate new mountains that expressed real stock data. Here is the link.

While looking through some pictures of the old Terminal Station of Atlanta, (which is now a parking lot) I found a post over at infrastructurist ranking the top ten demolished train stations. It’s too bad these epic structures are gone, especially in light of the new push for high speed rail in the US. We can only imagine what it would be like to arrive at one of these stations in a modern train. Unfortunately I imagine there will never again be the desire or incentive to build such monuments to transportation. Number 1 on the list is naturally the original Penn Station, a true marvel of New York City:

I’m really into finding new things through Wikipedia, but not usually through searching for particular facts, but by starting somewhere unusual and then following the strands until I find even more unusual and of course wonderful things. It can lead to dead ends, but who cares – you can just start somewhere else.

So in homage to this love, I give you my favorite Wiki pages:

We’re going to start off with a little classic Wikipedia list - Accidents and Disasters by Death Toll. Taken at face value, it is a grim history of mankind, but once you start to explore the list by checking out particular incidents, you can discover the nooks and crannies of life around you, both now and in the past. The Nedelin Catastrophe in Kazakhstan is a perfect window into the Soviet Space Program and its home in Central Asia. Another interesting thing is the use of powerful nouns like Disaster, Calamity, Catastrophe – they sometimes account for the size of the event, but often they just accurately portray the emotional impact. If you don’t like flying or boats I’d recommend staying away from those sections.

Next up, Fregoli Disorder, where a person wrongfully believes that a series of different people are in fact one person, only dressed in different disguises. It’s an interesting read and has some noteworthy related links.

Wikipedia is also known for great Category sections and so far one of my favorites is the Stock Character Collection. It’s just great in its size and breadth.

The rest are up to you – check one out and see where it takes you. You might find something new and wonderful.

The Brevity Code

Urnfield Culture Numerals

The Vela Incident

Sound Symbolism (Phonosemantics)

Frederick Townsend Ward [A Favorite of Mine]

Sovereign Military Order of Malta

Rail Terminology

Charles H. Bonesteel III [It's his real name, and he's a badass]

Hello folks. Here’s another edition of links. This time I’m focusing less on any subject and will just share things I’ve have interested me recently. First comes a pretty cool but obscure article by a Japanese reporter about the mysteries surrounding Tokyo’s underground tunnels. Part conspiracy theory, part investigative journalism, it is a thoroughly interesting read.

Next is a really interesting dictionary site. Wordnik takes any word you enter and provides a comprehensive set of meanings, using different resources to let you appreciate the depth of a given word’s meaning. Using history, social uses, basic definitions, flickr tag matches and cool info-graphics, it provides a resource to which I give too much time.

Next is a thoroughly good read by Bruce Haley, The Tao of War Photography, in which he lays out the wisdom and peril of working in a war zone. There are some gems that get to the heart of the matter better than many have tried to do in expansive books. Here is a snippet:

“8.  If a rebel commander asks whether you would like to be buried in his country or your own, he may very well be serious and not just testing your resolve…”

This man knows what he’s talking about. He was one of the only photographers in Afghanistan during the 1980s Soviet occupation.

The rest of his site is quite interesting with an excellent collection of photos from his work in much of Asia, Africa, and Russia.

From words and photos we are going to move on to a few info-graphic selections. If you’ve read through the site before you’ll know I’m a fan of information visualization and lately I’ve been stumbling across quite a few interesting graphics.

The first shows visually the route, length and name of every space flight undertaken from Earth. Click on the picture to make it big.

Next is a map of the current account balance of the world’s nations. The units are in billions.

Next is a quite comprehensive visual explanation of America’s political landscape and the characteristics there-in. This one definately deserves a closer look by clicking on it and zooming in. Credit for the smart people who created this is on the bottom of the image itself.

That’s all for now. See you next time.

So not long after the post regarding visual representations of complex information, I happened upon Craig Robinson’s collection of baseball related info-graphics. The images explain very simply the central idea behind each graph’s data. This may seem irrelevant as it is merely baseball. I can agree with many out who think that baseball statistics are an overindulgent and essentially meaningless art. The more one parses the numbers, the less relevant they are to the game.

Amazin?

These stats manage to overcome the inherent problems  in things like OBPS. (On Base percentage Plus Slugging average) Naked numbers lack a depth of meaning necessary to understanding why a player or team is capable of winning.

Craig Robinson’s work seems to do away with much of hollowness in his statistics. This strangely colored chart explains who played for the Mets during the fateful 1986 season, but what I find so interesting is how it explains each player’s journey to and away from the World Championship team. One can see the stars aligning, fate taking over and it all starts to make sense. The graphic also explains who was new to baseball and who were veterans, therefore providing a representative range of age and experience.

The only problem obviously is that we can’t appreciate the majestic and timely failings of Bill Buckner. But perhaps that ground ball could use its own info-graphic some day.

Lets move on.

The next two pieces of visual data concern ballpark design, corporate sponsorship, weather possibilities and for the orientation image, the direction in relation to due North the ballpark itself faces.

And last but not least, a simple but powerful representation of baseball’s highest and lowest ticket prices for the 2009 season. Slightly embarrassing to see my Yankees representing the Bernie Madoff factor in baseball but nevertheless, here it is:

In this age of modernity (or thereabouts) we take it for granted that data is represented in the most efficient and assuredly, most visual of manners. Our power point presentations documented the hypothetical (and then very real) invasion of Iraq – our excel spreadsheets improperly, though with a flair for the aesthetically enlightened, organized and presented the market’s capacity for debt trading.

These novel and assuredly clever visualizations of the world’s data do much, but they do lack the elegance of John Thomson Edinburgh’s representations of the world’s rivers and mountains. Each one perfectly scales the length of the waterways, height of the mountains, relative volume of the river, and changes in course of the water.

Though Edinburgh’s illustrations approach art, their proportions, angles, and overall composition are provided purely by the Earth’s various measurements.

The only other representation of facts I have seen that lays out its subject so elegantly is the chart pictured below. It shows Napoleon’s Grand Armee heading towards Moscow in 1812 (represented in red) and the subsequently brutal return trip a year later with only 10,000 of a 422,000 man force.

The thickness represents troop numbers, direction the relative route taken including rivers and cities of importance, the length is scaled in proportional to the campaign’s mileage, and quite interestingly, the temperature face by the invading force is marked along the bottom. One can literally see the huge mass of Napoleon’s men fought not just by the Russians, but by the shear ardor of the required march and the increasingly hostile, frigid air.

There are some who try to keep things interesting in their mapping of data and hopefully, over time, there will be more of them. Over at strange maps, they try to document the most interesting forms of mapping. For words, there is the visual thesaurus, though it is lame having to pay for its features. That can be fixed here.