flickering pictures

The top-notch Web design team at the New York Times has put together a very neat interactive graph highlighting the ways different groups of Americans spend their day. Here are some interesting facts, with the usual caveat about correlation not equaling causation and all that:

People with two children are more likely to be actively […]

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The New Scientist has put together a neat-o graphic detailing how many years we can sustain our current consumption of lead, zinc, aluminum and other metals. If they’re right, we’ll run out of chromium, copper, antimony, zinc, uranium, tin, tantalum, silver, platinum, lead, indium and gold within the next 42 years, with huge implications […]

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James Murray, an emeritus professor at both Oxford and the University of Washington, claims that his new “Murray marriage equation” can predict the success or failure of any romantic relationship 94 per cent of the time. He breaks people into three categories — respectful Validators, brooding Conflict Avoiders and less-than-pleasant Volatiles — and after […]

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FlowingData seems to have gotten itself up and running again, and contrary to my previous post, it features 27 neat-o infographics that explain the worldwide financial meltdown, not 16. Very much worth a look.

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Born on January 8, 1935, Elvis Presley would have been 74 years old today. Other notable events on this day:

1835: For the only time in U.S. history, the national debt is exactly zero dollars. Today’s debt is just over $10.6 trillion, or about $35,000 for every man, woman and child in the country.

1867: […]

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Nathan over at FlowingData has stumbled upon yet another neat-o tool that’s as unscientific as it is fun to play with:

StateStats is like Google Insights but on a state level. Type in a search term and get Google search levels with correlations to certain “metrics” like obesity or support for Obama.

Since he’s a mature sort, […]

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I’m a little pressed for time, and I didn’t have the foresight to set up a delayed post last night, so just a little one today:
Hardware giant Logitech has just announced the sale of its one billionth mouse, meaning it has made one mouse for every 6.7 people on the planet.
If a mouse cable is […]

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The last 10 search terms that led to this fine site were:

Who exactly needs to know whether insects poop at 12:34 in the morning? Why would someone seek out “weird creepy asian flash games”? And who’s pondering the pros and cons of keeping Italian lizards as pets?
Sadly, I’ll likely never know. You […]

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The good people at FlowingData (I’m really getting hooked on that site) have put together a neato animated bar chart to show the ups and downs of gasoline prices across eight U.S. regions since April 1993. Back then, the price the pump was a mere $1.07 per gallon — or a piddling 28 cents […]

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The New York Times has put together a nifty interactive timeline-map highlighting how many medals each country has won in every Summer Olympics since 1896. You can click on a year to see the medal counts from a given Olympiad by country, and view the results by geographic distribution (as above) or as a […]

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