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That’s all for now. Until next time.

- David Byrne on Cities (The Cities Anthem)

- Recycled Houses Slideshow

- Casual Near-Death Photography

- Johnny Utah Goes for Meatball Subs

Here is a really interesting photo essay of the space program’s presence in Kazakhstan. Sadly this won’t be happening any longer as Russia has decided to launch vehicles from its own territory.

Found thanks to Dangerous Minds

Mostly sunny with a chance of bliss

A straight month of rain had led to a period of intense thunderstorms followed by solid periods of summer. This photo is taken from a moment in between the two extremes.

Amazin?

These stats manage to overcome the inherent problems  in things like OBPS. (On Base percentage Plus Slugging average) Naked numbers lack a depth of meaning necessary to understanding why a player or team is capable of winning.

Craig Robinson’s work seems to do away with much of hollowness in his statistics. This strangely colored chart explains who played for the Mets during the fateful 1986 season, but what I find so interesting is how it explains each player’s journey to and away from the World Championship team. One can see the stars aligning, fate taking over and it all starts to make sense. The graphic also explains who was new to baseball and who were veterans, therefore providing a representative range of age and experience.

The only problem obviously is that we can’t appreciate the majestic and timely failings of Bill Buckner. But perhaps that ground ball could use its own info-graphic some day.

Lets move on.

The next two pieces of visual data concern ballpark design, corporate sponsorship, weather possibilities and for the orientation image, the direction in relation to due North the ballpark itself faces.

And last but not least, a simple but powerful representation of baseball’s highest and lowest ticket prices for the 2009 season. Slightly embarrassing to see my Yankees representing the Bernie Madoff factor in baseball but nevertheless, here it is:

• Goths in Hot Weather
• Gazprom’s Rock Epic
• Abandoned Theaters
• Headless Horseman
• WWIII Tweet Propaganda

In this age of modernity (or thereabouts) we take it for granted that data is represented in the most efficient and assuredly, most visual of manners. Our power point presentations documented the hypothetical (and then very real) invasion of Iraq – our excel spreadsheets improperly, though with a flair for the aesthetically enlightened, organized and presented the market’s capacity for debt trading.

These novel and assuredly clever visualizations of the world’s data do much, but they do lack the elegance of John Thomson Edinburgh’s representations of the world’s rivers and mountains. Each one perfectly scales the length of the waterways, height of the mountains, relative volume of the river, and changes in course of the water.

Though Edinburgh’s illustrations approach art, their proportions, angles, and overall composition are provided purely by the Earth’s various measurements.

The only other representation of facts I have seen that lays out its subject so elegantly is the chart pictured below. It shows Napoleon’s Grand Armee heading towards Moscow in 1812 (represented in red) and the subsequently brutal return trip a year later with only 10,000 of a 422,000 man force.

The thickness represents troop numbers, direction the relative route taken including rivers and cities of importance, the length is scaled in proportional to the campaign’s mileage, and quite interestingly, the temperature face by the invading force is marked along the bottom. One can literally see the huge mass of Napoleon’s men fought not just by the Russians, but by the shear ardor of the required march and the increasingly hostile, frigid air.

There are some who try to keep things interesting in their mapping of data and hopefully, over time, there will be more of them. Over at strange maps, they try to document the most interesting forms of mapping. For words, there is the visual thesaurus, though it is lame having to pay for its features. That can be fixed here.