35mm, a short film by Sarah Biermann, Torsten Strer, Felix Meyer, and Pascal Monaco, strips 35 movies to their simplest form and cleverly strings them together in a set of motion graphics. From Singin' in the Rain, Titanic, and Jaws to Fight Club, Star Wars, and Terminator.

Can you figure out all the movies portrayed? Test your movie wits in the video below. I only recognized two the first time around. I suck.

[via @datavis]

Charles Blow on this unnecessarily complex chart used to show the network of Obamacare:

Maybe it's the former graphics/art director in me, but I get really offended when people use charts to confuse rather than to clarify.

Take a look at this monstrosity released today by the Joint Economic Committee minority, which is led by Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) and Representative Kevin Brady (R-Texas).

To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes: they’re using this chart like a drunken man uses lampposts – for support rather than for illumination.

Really, Joint Economic Committee? Look - I'm not going to pretend I know all the intricacies of the US health care system, but this is clearly chart abuse.

Looking at this horribly designed piece of propaganda makes me want to throw up. I'm throwing up right now. Dang it. Someone owes me a new keyboard.

Our site editor approached me with a serious challenge: could I visualize six years worth of military reports? Up in their makeshift war room, our team introduced me to Julian Assange. While reporters from the New York Times and Der Speigel took photos and video, the director of Wikileaks booted his encrypted netbook and showed me a page from the war logs. I may have looked a little distressed. The gravity of this material was stark and, having never dealt with such documents before, I was uncertain if I wanted to start.

After several days feeling like I'd walked into the Bourne trilogy, David Leigh and Rob Evans put my mind at rest. We wouldn't be publishing any material that might put anyone at risk and my work could focus on charting the rise in explosive devices from 2004 – 2009.

The Data

By this point, our datablog editor was already knee deep in war logs. Simon Rogers and I sat down and figured out what would be needed to drive the visualization. The full logs contain over 90,000 records and would be far too bulky to show in their entirety. We selected a series of pertinent fields and he produced a redux containing just these columns for the IED events. Most significantly, we left out the full text field containing summary report text. With no time to check all 16,135 records for sensitive information, it was best to remove this information entirely. This had the added benefit of greatly reducing the amount of data that needed to be loaded and parsed. The resultant CSV weighs in under 2mb and is probably approaching the upper limit of what can be sensibly loaded without paging.

The Tools

This brings me on to what may have been the most critical implementation detail. What would the best client side technology be for plotting all these data points in an interactive form? We initially looked into a pure JavaScript approach but decided against it on several grounds. First, the total number of markers needing to be plotted concurrently might exceed the capabilities of the Google Maps JS API. Second, immediate mode rendering can really impair frame rates when large numbers of objects need to be added or removed from the display list at once. Third, CS4 offers a neat workflow for taking the vector designs our graphics team produce in Illustrator and incorporating them into Flash applications. Finally, we've spent the last year developing a number of AS3 libraries for features like CSV handling, playable timelines and manipulating time series data. With less than two weeks to turn things around, this wealth of existent code would prove invaluable.

At the heart of our interactive lies a single, overriding problem: how can one fetch, plot and render all of the events for particular time window quick enough for the animation to run smoothly? Video playback quality requires at least 24 frames per second and - as each frame may need up to 15ms of rendering time - this leaves us with about 30ms to construct each one. In the run up to last year's elections, the number of IEDs reported per week sometimes exceeded 250. This meant that – at worst – our software would need to figure out the times, locations, sizes and colours of several hundred markers in under 30 milliseconds. At times like this, I'm grateful for my former life as a games programmer.

Implementation

In the end, the solution to this problem came in several forms. First, Flash 10 introduced a fixed-sized, strongly-typed Vector class which makes working with large arrays of data much faster. Next, I recently came across skip lists – a deceptively simple data structure that speeds up retrieval of items from time series. Finally, a number of tweaks were required to get the best possible performance from the Google Maps API. On one hand, a marker management routine incorporated object pooling, frame-to-frame reconciliation and the disposal of unused items to ensure as little processing as possible was required to update the map. On the other, two hours of hair tearing frustration yielded the following wisdom. Unless you're careful, markers are added with a drop shadow option turned on. By default, this seems to be using a bitmap filter per sprite which causes Flash to grind to halt as soon as you need more than 50 rendered at once. This can be resolved by incorporating the drop shadow directly into your custom marker assets and then ensuring that they are cached as bitmaps.

Talking of filters and Google Maps, I should take the opportunity to thank our designer Chris Fenn, who provided me with some proof of concept work he'd done to recolour their tiles in something approaching our house style by crafty application of a colour matrix filter. Moreover, all this talk of technical trickery seems to be ignoring the biggest single reason why we got things delivered in time. Mark McCormick, Paddy Allen and Michael Robinson from our graphics team supplied a combination of fresh design ideas and longstanding wisdom that proved crucial to getting something so complex planned and built so quickly. That said, I must equally credit my manager Igor Clark for his help. Never underestimate the benefits of having someone around to sound out ideas with and consume excessive amounts of caffeine.

Nathan note — My thanks to Alastair for sharing what went on behind the scenes of their interactive. Check it out for yourself on the Guardian. It's a nice example of what comes out of a group stepping out of their comfort zone and building something more than a standard mashup.

Shawn Allen of Stamen Design provides a brief history of data visualization, starting with William Playfair's charts in the late 1700s and William Smith's map sketch of Britain, up to the more recent works from The New York Times, Martin Wattenberg, and Ben Fry.

This leads into a description of what data is, from a practical point of view, as the writeup is actually an introduction for Allen's visualisation course at the School of Visual Arts. Totally looks like a course I wish I could've taken in grad school.

This past Sunday, well-known whistle-blower site Wikileaks released over 91,000 secret US military reports, covering the war in Afghanistan. Each report contains the time, geographic location, and details of an event the US military thought was important enough to put on paper.

The Afghan War Diary is the most significant archive about the reality of war to have ever been released during the course of a war. The deaths of tens of thousands is normally only a statistic but the archive reveals the locations and the key events behind each most of these deaths. We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary to change its course.

The Guardian has mapped the data in both an interactive (above) and a graphic (below). The interactive is particularly interesting as it lets you move through time, from 2004 to 2010. Circles, sized by number of people killed and colored by who most of those people were, appear on the map as events occur.

Use the slider to move back and forth through time or press start to see six years of incidents play out. Filters in the top right let you focus on provided categories.

The Guardian group definitely upped their game for this important dataset. Download the processed data from the Guardian, or grab the entire raw set from Wikileaks.

[Thanks, Simon]

Now that the oil flow has finally stopped, for now, the attention has shifted to the effects all that oil will have on wildlife and the ecosystem. Chris Wilson for Slate reports on where all of that BP oil could end up during the next 130 days, based on modeling data from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. These models are based on how water flows in different areas of the Gulf.

Three scenarios are presented. All end up with oil leaving the Gulf.

Of course, these are all approximations, and the models can't possibly account for all the factors that play into oil drift (e.g. biological degradation of the oil), but it's an educated guess, so take it at that. Wherever all the oil ends up, one thing is for sure. There's still a lot of cleanup left to do.

It's no secret. The US military gets a lot of funding for manpower, weapons, equipment, security, so and so forth. Do you know how much money they'll have received come end of this year? I could tell you how many billions of dollars they get, or go the other way, and contextualize it by telling you what you could buy with that money - like the number of mosquito nets or pounds of food for the homeless.

Moustache, a design and direction studio, goes with the context option in their short CGI video Softwar. Thousands of tanks are piled on top of each other to show just how much the military budget can buy.

The video supposedly shows the number of M1 Abram tanks you could theoretically buy with the same budget that of the US military. That would be 88,548 and $549 billion, respectively, at $6.2 million per tank.

Although the end pile doesn't quite seem like 88k+ tanks, and Wikipedia quotes a $533.8b base budget - or a $663.8b total budget when counting "overseas contingency operations." So the numbers seem a little off. Nevertheless, it's an interesting watch and worth the two minutes.

[via infosthetics]

This will be lost on many of you, but to the programmers this will make perfect sense. Basically, when programming, there are a lot of times when you have a long list of numbers or words that you'll want sorted greatest to least or alphabetically. The way this is done will vary by what algorithm you use. Aldo Cortesi visualizes these sorting algorithms, showing just how each one works.

If you're confused but still interested, here's a simple example.

Let's say you have a list of numbers from one to five listed as such: 4, 20, 6, 12, 100. We want to organize these systematically least to greatest. The easiest way would be to setup five "spots" and then go through each number, starting at the beginning, and decide if the number is bigger or smaller than the number we already looked at. That's not the most efficient way to do it though, and when you have millions of numbers to sort, instead of just five, then efficiency matters.

[Thanks, Marlena]

From Ben Fry's newly established Fathom Information Design, is a visualization for GE on our aging world:

According to the United Nations, the elderly population of the world is growing at its fastest rate ever. By 2050, there will be more than 2 billion people aged 60 or over. The age of a country's population can reveal insights about that country's history, and can provide a glimpse towards the economic and healthcare trends that will challenge their societies in the future.

The piece is a simple but elegant interactive that lets you compare age distributions between countries, over time. Select one country on the top, and select another on the bottom. For each country, you get a pair of stacked bars (for men and women). Age moves left to right, so the left-most bars represent the youngest, and the right most represent the oldest.

Use the slider on the bottom to navigate through time, and the distributions shift further right (i.e. people live longer) in a wave-like motion, as the population of each respective country increases.

Finally, watch a composite of all eight selected countries in the bottom right.

The one thing missing for me is the percentages for each age/gender group as you roll over each bar. But I'm just being picky. Really good stuff. The interactive leaves it up to you to see what's going on in the data.

How does your country compare to others?

Sure, why not, let's make it a hairy Friday. From Tor Weeks: a series of moustaches styled by their typographic counterpart, aka typestaches. The big and bold typefaces like Federal and Wide Latin get thick and burly moustaches, while the more delicate typefaces, get thin and curvy.

If only facial hair were as easy to select as fonts. I'd get myself a 24pt Mr. Century Ultra.

Grab a print for yourself here.

[via kottke]