Remember how Pat Benatar sang that love is a battlefield? Truer words were never spoken, and along those lines, infographics whiz Lee Byron has used a technique better known for showing war casualties to visualize how sexual relationships begin, flower, and die.
Yesterday, WikiLeaks detonated the usual veil of secrecy that shrouds diplomatic negotiations, by releasing 250,000 cables that detail everything from Saudi Arabia urging the U.S. to attack Iran, to U.S. diplomats being ordered to spy on Hamas. Here, we have the three best online infographics for digging into the details.
As if Long Island doesn't catch enough flak, someone's gone and made a short film that lasers in on exactly how much the place sucks.
In the past few years, the quirky genius of Metafilter, which lets you pose a question to the community and allows anyone to answer, has blossomed into a full-on industry. These days, there's Hunch, Yahoo Answers, Aardvark, Quora, and Facebook Questions, just to name a few. But each one has a different community culture. So if you're looking for answers, which do you use?
Here's a graph that lays it all out:
[Click for larger version]
We've featured a slew of Twitter visualizations, but you'll probably agree that this is the most beautiful and hypnotizing.
Designed by Frog's office in Milan, A World of Tweets simply visualizes real-time Twitter activity around the world. Tweets are shown as raindrops falling across the globe. But what's more, the longer you let the visualization run, the better it gets -- the rain drops add up, building you a real time heatmap of worldwide Twitter activity.
Think having 5000 Facebook friends is impressive? What if you had to maintain those relationships with status updates that took weeks or months to arrive? That wasn't a problem for literati in the 1700s, who managed to maintain impressive social networks with handwritten letters.
A team from Stanford has mapped this "social graph" in an interactive graphic that visualizes 55,000 letters exchanged between 6400 correspondents. Here's the dashboard for 1700 to 1801:
Remember a few years back, when big companies such as Nike kept getting immersed in sweatshop scandals? You hardly hear about that sort of stuff anymore. But the fact is, child labor and forced labor remain startlingly common throughout the developing world.
This superb interactive chart shows you everything you need to know, from the countries where child and forced labor are most prevalent, to what exactly is being made -- the point being to better inform people, so that they can avoid such goods.
If you're a San Francisco Giants fan, you're probably still savoring the sweet, sweet season that led to the team's improbable World Series win. Thanks to the power of infographics, you can relive every game of it.
![Infographics of the Day: Ed Tufte Sells Over $2 Million in Info-viz Treasures [Slideshow]](/multisite_files/codesign/imagecache/642x368/tuftelibrarylede.jpg "Infographics of the Day: Ed Tufte Sells Over $2 Million in Info-viz Treasures [Slideshow]")
Infographic nerds: Put away your iPad and prepare to slobber all over your desk. Edward Tufte is auctioning off rare books from his private library.
If you call Connecticut home, your standard of living and economic opportunities are almost two times better than that of someone in West Virginia. That basic inequality shouldn't be news to any American who's spent a day outside. But rarely has it been put in such a stark visual form.
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