

Beautiful visualisations of everyday statistics - jgamman
http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7
compelling in a way that's hard to describe
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leonroy
Superb work presenting such big numbers in a 'graspable' way. I wonder what
techniques the artist used to generate some of the more complicated images.

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patio11
The point of the work is to make the number not graspable as anything but BIG.
As in, "This number is so big, you should be morally outraged".

Effective as a political statement, maybe, as long as you're already receptive
to the political statement. (The artist would, presumably, be less than happy
to see a map of Africa drawn out of several million copies of Silent Spring,
one for every African child killed by Western environmentalists causing DDT to
be de-facto banned there. Bonus points: the presentation covers the fact that
the factual premise of the statement I just made is controversial.)

~~~
DaniFong
Maybe you know more about this than me, but last I had heard, it was the use
of agricultural DDT that was most condemned, whereas DDT for epidemic control
was supported by, for example, WHO. The idea was that, after some years,
agricultural DDT caused DDT resistance in mosquito populations. This rendered
DDT for epidemic control ineffective.

Of course, the whole argument is complicated by the fact that pesticides are
needed, in current practice for high-yield rice at the green-revolution scale,
without which millions would starve.

[http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=4&url=http%3A%2F%2Fportalserver.unepchemicals.ch%2FPublications%2FCase%2520study_Agriculture%2520prod%2520and%2520malaria%2520resurgence%2520in%2520C%2520America%2520and%2520India.pdf&ei=IzZySYKjEYHwsAPo_q2fBA&usg=AFQjCNF9ZBb7B1Bz2fBUpe0ghMmj-
MSqJw&sig2=_3Q6uADmNIkM8XwP_Kyntw)

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martythemaniak
Now imagine those visualizations coupled with something like Seadragon.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ra5tp7K--I>

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delano
There's a note on the page about that.

 _Several new images coming soon; and my apologies for the slow-loading
website. In a few weeks these JPEGs will have a cool zooming function, using
Microsoft's new SeaDragon technology. Please stay tuned! ~cj, December 2008_

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delano
Are these statistics publicly available? I'd like to verify them because they
seem too big. For example, 106,000 aluminum cans used every 30 seconds seems
off by an order of magnitude.

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tome
It's one per American per day, by my reckoning. Seems reasonable.

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sam_in_nyc
I'm in it for the stats.

2 million bottles every 5 minutes, in the US alone? That's over
200,000,000,000 a year.

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gsmaverick
Absolutely stunning. The statistics are almost as interesting as the
visualizations.

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dw0rm
same idea with Star Wars [http://gizmodo.com/366573/skywalker-last-supper-
painting-mad...](http://gizmodo.com/366573/skywalker-last-supper-painting-
made-with-69550-star-wars-frames)

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viggity
2000000 bottles / 5 minutes = 400,000 bottles / minute

400000 * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day = 576,000,000 bottles a day.

576 Million bottles / 300 million americans = 1.92 bottles per American per
day?

I have a hard time buying that.

