Health Outcomes Maps

The County Health Rankings website (www.countyhealthrankings.org) ranks the health of people in each county by state.  While this doesn't tell the overall health of people, it shows which counties are healthier, overall, than others in the state.  These interesting maps were created by Forum One, a Web design and communications firm that specializes in socially conscious causes.

In addition to the map, visitors can view the underlying data by county.  This includes data ranging from smoking and binge drinking rates to liquor store density, air pollution days and single parent households.

Visualizing the News

Newsmap.jp pulls data and maps the size of the headline based on how many articles are written about the topic.  The site is customizable by country, type of news, and by period of time.  While not the way I want to get most of my news, it is an interesting way to visualize the news. 

Interestingly this type of visualization would have been nearly impossible 15 years ago.  I remember some students spending hours and hours scouring Lexis-Nexus data to come up with news trends in the mid 1990s... now, it is considered an interesting way to view the news, but few would question that the data is readily at our fingertips.

Wolfram Tones

Create your own unique music with WolframTones.  One of the great sites from the Mathematica and Wolfram series of sites - the clear leader in Mathematics and Science modelling on the Web.

Wolfram Tones allows users to create music using unique inputs such as types of instruments, roles, rhythm, pitch, and tempo.  All music can be saved, downloaded or emailed.

So why have show a music site on Chart Planet?  Because it also shows an interesting visualization for each unique set of criteria selected (see image on left as an example.

Friction Force on a Car in a Turn - Wolfram Demonstrations Projects

If you haven't seen the Wolfram suite of mathematics and science sites, then you are missing out on the premiere resource math and science on the web.  The Wolfram Demonstrations Project site, for example, has over 6,000 visualizations to make many complex math and science concepts very accessible.

One example is the friction force on a car in a turn (pictured at left).  Others include human walking animation, an analysis of the frequency of character pairs (important for cryptologists among others), to geometric visualizations such as triacontahedron stellations.

Take a look - you will not be disappointed.

The Web is Dead

Wired magazine asserts that The Web is Dead in their September 2010 issue.  Instead of browsing the Web, Internet traffic is now focused on videos, games and specific apps.  This chart shows the rise and fall of Web Traffic (and email, FTP and other activities) as a percent of overall traffic on the Internet.

View the full chart in Wired Magazine

Pick Hindu to be Rich

This chart shows the wealth of followers of various religions in the United States by looking at the income brackets for adherents.  Hindus have the largest portion, by far, of those earning $75,000+ per year.

I like the way this chart is a modified bar chart to create the rainbow pattern instead of the normal rectangle.  The houses of worship at the bottom is another nice touch.  Having the overall US average in the middle is useful as well.  

Original chart may be found at the GOOD.is Web Site.

Baseball Games Getting Longer Over Time

Did you know that baseball games have gotten longer over time?  Since the 1970s baseball games have become over 20 minutes longer, on average.  This chart shows the length of all games from 1970 until 2009.  Interestingly, the red lines show the time when steroids are thought to have been most prevalent in baseball... which certainly correlates to the increased games times (I'll not speculate as to causation). Leave a comment about why you think baseball games are going longer.

Thanks to Revolutionanalytics.com for the chart.