Thursday, May 14, 2009

The nuke-o-meter


I used to think data was for ugly, charmless people with more PhDs than friends. Now I realise, data is for dangerous, edgy, sexy people.
I’m jolly impressed with The Guardian’s datablog. It’s got loads of brilliant statistics and visualisations. You can watch the British economy collapse in a beautiful sequence of graphs, see Walmart spread like typhoid and find out what percentage of UK hit singles were written by Swedes.
The Guardian kindly makes lots of data available and invites people to do interesting stuff with it. Like this guy, who took their stats on nuclear weapons and created the nuke-o-meter. Just type in where you live and it tells you the number of nuclear warheads you’re in range of, the type of weapon and the country it’s coming from.
If you’re in London, 7,728 warheads have the potential to destroy us. It’s literal overkill. Brilliant.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Followers