I don’t think you have to be a programmer to enjoy these visualizations of shuffling algorithms.

Talk about your data visualizations! Erik Kessels printed out all the photos uploaded to Flickr in a 24 hour period. Here’s a taste:

In celebration of Girl Scout cookies’ imminent arrival, a chart. I am thinking perhaps they forgot to include my own Samoas consumption, surely it is enough to edge out Thin Mints?

By now, everybody has seen the Policy Changes Under Two Presidents chart, but I also like James Fallows’ comments on it.

Randall Munroe’s radiation dose chart. Great work.

Good (if unsurprisingly bottom-heavy) map of which movie sequels were better than the original.

More OkTrends dating/data magic: The Mathematics Of Beauty.

This is terrific, The True Size of Africa. Here’s just a corner to give you a taste:

The hits just keep on coming from OkTrends, Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex. The data diving has been top notch all the way along, but the commentary is getting funnier. An example, in discussing a “gay curious” U.S. map:

Awesomely, the mountain West lives up to its Brokeback reputation, and Canada is orange nearly coast-to-coast. Even in the yellow and blue areas, you can see pockets of gay curiosity in interesting places: Austin, Madison, Asheville. Anywhere soy milk is served, basically.

In 1944, Harold Fisk mapped the historical paths of the Mississippi River. The result is beautiful (note the various other download options in the right margin). (via flowingdata)

More OkTrends genius, The REAL ‘Stuff White People Like’, this time it’s the commentary that shines:

As for the interests of white women, you have romance novels, some country music, and a broad selection of Good Housekeeping type stuff. It’s also amazing the extent to which their list shows a pastoral or rural self-mythology: bonfires, boating, horseback riding, thunderstorms. I remind you that OkCupid’s user base is almost all in large cities, where to one degree or another, if you find yourself doing much of any of these things, civilization has come to an end.

OkTrends, where every post is fascinating: The Big Lies People Tell In Online Dating. For example, guys add 2” inches to their height, which isn’t really surprising, but what is surprising (to me) is that this is true for guys who are already tall. It’s not until they get to 6’8” that the exaggeration stops.

My wife read an article recently that suggested, probably semi-tongue-in-cheek, that figure skating is not a sport because it is subjectively judged, and the participants wear costumes and perform to music. While I’m not a big fan of subjective judging, I think this unfairly short-changes these athletes. So, out of a great breakfast conversation with some friends, this chart was born (made with gliffy):

Notes:

• While it seems to me that there are some fat professional baseball players, none of those guys can spend all their time on the couch, and most are in great shape, so baseball is a sport.
• Perhaps golf was a game before Tiger came along and raised the bar, and now it’s a sport?
• Not sure about NASCAR or bowling. I know there are physical demands, but can you compete on the elite level without athletic training? If so, game. If not, sport. I’m not making any judgments, I just have no idea personally.

Updated, Alternate: My breakfastmates had proposed a risk clause, which I had taken out for simplicity’s sake, so if you prefer, this version puts it back in. Also, thanks to Alec for the Hemingway clause that also made it in:

Updated, Personal Version: Personally, I like the Hemingway clause but not the risk clause, so this is the version I use:

Information is Beautiful just put out a great tool, Snake Oil? The Scientific Evidence for Health Supplements. Here’s a little more about it.

The Mariana Trench To Scale. Wow, I hadn’t appreciated just how deep that was until now. (via kottke)

I don’t really think this is why people pirate DVDs, but this is still a great graphic illustrating one way that the movie studios punish their paying customers. So true.

(I think people generally pirate movies because they want them for free rather than paying for them. I think people rip movies they legitimately own for a lot of reasons, this being one of them.)

I may just link to every OkTrends post. Fascinating, as usual. This one is preaching to the choir as far as I’m concerned, but The Case For An Older Woman needs to be made.

Men are idiots!

So far my two favorite charts from FlowingData’s Data Underload category are Little Things and Bed Head.

More fascinating stuff from the OkCupid numbers crunchers: The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures. For example, does showing ripped abs help a guy get messages on the dating site? How about boobs for women? And how do those number change with age, and do they change the same way? All kinds of questions like that. Great stuff.

(For the guys, it looks like doing a one-arm handstand in front of the Eiffel Tower while reading Tolstoy with your other hand (and therefore not making eye contact with the viewer), with your washboard abs “accidentally” exposed due to gravity is the way to go. Diminishing returns on the abs as you approach 30 though.)

You Dropped Food on the Floor. Do You Eat It? A taste:

(via swissmiss)

I really like this sushi etiquette graphic Swissmiss posted, especially in combination with reader Emily’s comments:

This is old news, but new to me. The folks behind the OkCupid dating site have a weblog where they analyze all kinds of interesting dating data. We all know that looks matter, but their number crunching is still fascinating.

Update: See also Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back. Heck, just subscribe to the OkTrends weblog and read it all.

This one might be the graphic of the year for me. National Geographic has a brilliant visualization of healthcare spending, life expectancy, and doctor visits per country. Here’s a taste, but you gotta click through to the full version to find the US on there (the red line below should give you some idea):

Sigh!

Update: Here’s Andrew Gelman’s version.

Brilliant, accurate flyout view of the known universe, starting in Tibet and ending at the edge of the universe. I love that the endpoint shows the universe as a sphere floating in nothingness. I’ve never looked at it that way before:

(via kottke)

An oldie but new to me. Ben Fry created a fantastic animated visualization, The Preservation of Favoured Traces, showing how The Origin of Species changed with each edition. Watch it unfold, mouse over sections to read (which the zoomed-in view color-coded as well). (via flowingdata)

Information Is Beautiful posted a great graphic, The Global Warming Skeptics vs. The Scientific Consensus.

I will try not to link to every new thing he writes, but David Thorne is too damn funny to resist.

Fantastic rendering of the U.S. interstate system a la Beck’s tube map:

(via kottke)

Wow, here’s some beautiful, meticulous work graphing the Choose Your Own Adventure books. Just one example of the many illustrations:

I can safely say I never thought of them that way, reading them when I was a kid.

This xkcd strip charting movie narratives wants to be a poster. More specifically, it wants to be a poster on my wall. Be sure to click it for the close-up view. Here’s a taste:

Fantastic, gotta share this one with my kids (not that they’ll be as impressed as I am): Cell Size and Scale.

Does a Roomba actually vacuum the whole floor? Yup:

(via simple complexity)

I know I’m late to the party, but I just got around to watching the WolframAlpha screencast and it’s really impressive, and incredibly ambitious. I found myself slack-jawed often enough that I had to go out and find myself an appropriately sized grain of salt. Still, coooool!

Jeffrey Veen’s talk, Designing for Big Data. Lots of stuff you’ll be familiar with if if you know Edward Tufte’s work, and I would have liked a nod to Hans Rosling rather than calling his software a “Google product” (even if they do own it now), but it’s a really good aggregation and distillation of some excellent data visualization thoughts and examples.

your.flowingdata: Collect Data About Yourself via Twitter. Like Nicholas Feltron’s personal annual reports (and his related service, Daytum).

The NY Times has a couple good (but unfortunate) data visualizations up: The Geography of a Recession (related article) and Why Is Her Paycheck Smaller?

Neat sparklines plugin: jQuery Sparklines.

Excellent graph: how many As do people use when Googling Khaaan!.

RIP, Ricardo Montalban.

FlowingData’s 5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year.

Anita Lillie has a demo video up of her masters thesis, MusicBox, a very impressive project for mapping and visualizing music collections by a combination of their metadata and acoustic fingerprints (also on YouTube, in HD). Further proof that all the cool kids are using Processing these days. Slick, I love the idea of drawing a line through the music map and getting a playlist that smoothly transitions through musical styles and genres. Doesn’t sound like it will be available for download anytime soon, though. (via hackszine)

(Apologies in advance for the meta-profanity.)

The most recent appearance of the D-word on my radar, from Merlin Mann’s new post at 43 Folders, Photography, and the Tolerance for Courageous Sucking, in which his internal monologue tries to undercut his new hobby:

“Oh, Jesus. Really?“ some voice whined. “Now you’re That Guy? Can’t you just walk out there like a grownup, retrace your steps, and be back here in 5 goddamned minutes? You really need to drag your giant, douchey camera out for a four-block walk? Who’re you now, freakin’ Diane Arbus? Jeez, get a life.”

“Douchey?” When I was in high school, if you used that word as your expletive of choice that was a pretty good indicator that you were somebody I wanted nothing to do with, but now it looks like that simple litmus test is a thing of the past. Not only does Merlin Mann (who I like) use it, but Jon Stewart (who I like) uses it as a comedic crutch (if recent episode of The Daily Show are any indication).

So are they words on the rise, or has my brain decided (totally against my will) to pick them out of the air? A little research…

Google Trends has “douche” marginally on the rise as a search term:

… but I’m wondering about word frequency in text, not in people’s searches. I assume search frequency is more driven by legitimate need and preteens looking up naughty words rather than any linguistic prevalence. Although what’s up with that big spike in late 2004? Anyway, the “news reference volume” is a more what I’m looking for, so off to Google News which gives me a timeline of the actual word usage (as opposed to search usage):

Looks like a spike to me, especially if you contrast with “fuck“, which is the model of a fully saturated cuss word:

Fuck can stay, but I’m already tired of douche. I’m hoping it’s a fad.