
Randall Munroe at xkcd put together a chart about money, so massive that you’ll have to enlarge a few times just to read it. The statistics cover what things cost, what people earn, business profits, taxes, government spending, utilities, war, and more. The amounts of money for each are laid out in blocks for comparison. That’s a lot of blocks. What is shown here, as compressed as it is, is just a portion. Link -via Boing Boing

The world population is expected to reach seven billion within the next few days. Wonder what number you are? A calculator from the BBC helps you find out approximately where you fit in. I have a relatively low number, as there weren’t even three billion people when I was born. Link -via Breakfast Links

All I know about the 2004 time travel film Primer is that it’s very confusing. That was made clear in an xkcd plot graph that we linked (Primer is at the bottom right). Although the movie covers only five days, there are nine timelines, according to this graph at Unreality magazine (which you can enlarge at the link). Does this clear things up? Link

Here’s an online thesaurus that gives you a graphic look at how words relate. Neat! Or otherwise tasteful, refined, clean, tidy, smashing, great groovy, nifty, or keen! Link -via Breakfast Links

What is your biggest regret about? A study by Kellogg professor of marketing Neal Roese plotted the results from a telephone survey of 370 American adults and graphed them for our edification. The link has further information on the study besides what’s in this graph. Link -via The Daily What
Doctor Bradley Voytek knows a thing or two about being a Doctor (in neuroscience) so he decided to chart the probability of crap versus the number of times people on TV and movie characters referring to themselves as "doctor." Link
The Journal of Irreproducible Results held a contest to find the funniest graph ever. The winner is All Theories Proven with One Graph by Don Grace of Florence, Alabama. See a larger version at the magazine site. Link -via Everlasting Blort
Photographer Nikki Graziano takes pictures and then creates graphs of mathematical functions which map nicely to elements of the image. It’s a very neat and beautiful way of combining math, nature, and art together into a single image.
Most of us can’t tell our secant from our cotangent. But the forms are everywhere, and Nikki Graziano wants to help us see them. Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. “I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone,” she says.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by thalin.
The New York Times has an interactive graph that plots the jobless rate for different groups of Americans compared to the average for all those who are unemployed. Mouseover to find lines for different races, ages, and levels of education. In this screenshot, the label refers to the very faint red line above the dotted line which represents the average jobless rate. Link -via Metafilter
Randall Munroe of xkcd has posted intricate movie graphs that help explain the sequence of characters for those who have trouble figuring out what went on over a long narrative. The most helpful is the largest graph, which deals with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Grouping of lines shows which characters are together over time. There are also graphs for the original Star Wars trilogy, Jurassic Park, 12 Angry Men, and Primer. Only a small portion of the LOTR graph is shown here. Link -via reddit
One of my favorite science comic artists, Jorge Cham of PhD Comics, nailed yet another one with this panel. Incidentally, it is 2AM on the West Coast when I post this one up.
Link | If you’re new to PhD Comics, go here for the good stuff
