Why a salad costs more than a Big MacWhy is it cheaper to by a big fatty, salty, sugary burger at Maccas than a few pieces of fresh lettuce and cucumber? Consumerist lays it out: follow the government funds.
Graph pr0n
How much energy does it take to produce a pound of food?
How much energy does it take to produce a pound of beef, milk or apples? And what kind of caloric bang do you get for your buck? Treehugger has compiled a handy graph.
VIDEO: The state of the Internet
With 234 million websites, 200 million spam emails per day and 27.3 million tweets per day, here’s a round-up by Jesse Thomas of all the nerdy facts and statistics about the interwebs told in lovely graphics.
Who are these people we call bloggers?
Bloggers are male, university educated and mainly talk about themselves, says intac in a breakdown of the blogosphere. Are 35% of bloggers really professional journalists?
Creating “smart school” heat-maps with My School data
Joel Pobar has done some impressively nerdy things with data from the My Schools website to create heat-maps of where Australia’s top schools are located.
Putting Haiti in perspective
150,000 dead in Haiti. It’s a big number — but just how big when viewed as a proportion of the country as a whole? And what about when compared with a worldwide epidemic like swine flu? It starts to look a whole lot bigger.
Bailouts vs. Stimulus vs. GDP
A great data visualisation from the Harvard Business Review showing how large a percentage of their GDP different countries are spending on bailouts and stimulus packages in the wake of the GFC.
Elite private schools vs. their Black & Gold public counterparts [PDF]
It’s like those ACA exposes where they compare expensive ice cream with the no-name stuff: The Oz uses My School data to compare elite Australian private schools with their nearby public counterparts. Do you really get more for your money?
Haiti: Who has given the most?
Which countries, companies and celebrities have given the most aid to Haiti? GOOD has graphed the givers — from Sandra Bullock to Sweden — to see who has the deepest pockets.
30 years of elections in 5 charts
The primary vote of both the Labor Party and the Coalition have been, on average, declining since 1977… but that’s only part of the story, reports Possum Comitatus.
Eating food off the floor: a flow-chart
You’ve dropped food on the floor. You know the rules: you have three seconds to decide whether to shove it in your gob or surrender it to the bin. A chart to help you make the big call.
The 10 most stolen cars in the US
1994 Honda Accords are either really trendy amongst American criminals, or really easy to break into — more than 55,000 of them were nicked in the US last year.
Australians cool on global warming
A new Morgan poll has found an increasing number of Australians think concerns over global warming and exaggerated, and an increasing partisan divide on the CPRS legislation. Possum Comitatus crunches the numbers.
From chronic disease to the fall of the US$: how the whole world is connected
An amazing interactive look from the World Economic Forum at how intertwined all the major world risks in 2010 are. From the cost and likelihood of technological errors to environmental disasters, see the real world examples of cause and effect.
The evolution of Crayola colours, 1903-2010
An amazing chart tracking Crayola’s “crayon chronology” — from a modest eight colours in 1903 to the current 120-colour lineup. Was there ever really a world without essential shades like Razzmatazz, Piggy Pink and Screamin’ Green?
What does China censor online?
A beautiful — if depressing — visualisation of words, search terms and websites censored by China on the internet. Words like “democracy”.
Abbott’s green army
Following Tony Abbott’s first big speech of his leadership last night, Possum Comitatus takes a squiz at the size of the public opinion hurdle he faces on his two chosen policy areas: water planning and the environment.
The biggest news stories of the year
A great data visualisation of 2009’s biggest news stories, giving a nice overview of what we were reading (and listening and watching) about over the last 12 months. Money, mostly.
10 years of stock market suffering
The WSJ illustrates its bold assertion that the 2000s were the stock market’s “worst decade ever” with a range of interactive graphs to hammer home the point.
What’s the real value of your job?
A new British report which looks at the social value of various professions versus their levels of pay, has found that — surprise surprise — cleaners and child-care workers are far more valuable than bankers or accountants.
Copenhagen’s climate footprint
The Copenhagen climate summit will generate some 41,000 tonnes of “carbon dioxide equivalent”. Power & Energy breaks it down into exactly what that looks like and where it’s coming from. 200,000 cups of coffee is just the beginning…
TIMELINE: Centuries of climate change debate
Roll your mouse over this interactive NY Times timeline to discover just how long we have been talking about climate change science for. What will the entries for 2010 say?
The top 5 tech companies of the decade
A look at the market capitalisation of the top five tech companies over the past 10 years: Microsoft remained dominant from start to end, but has dipped significantly and is now under heavy threat from Google and Apple.
VIDEO: An animated journey through 800,000 years of climate data
The BBC’s environment reporter Richard Black narrates an animated journey through 800,000 years of global climate history. In case you missed the news: it’s getting hotter.
Visualising the counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan
Struggling to understand the US military’s strategy in Afghanistan? This unclassified schematic of the plan obtained by MSNBC… probably won’t help, but it’s an amazing insight into the complex strategising and analysing that goes on behind the frontlines of war.
