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Actually this is not true: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1418001
And: "clear, fresh water". As if "non-fresh" water would make any difference.
I think the progression is interesting. It starts by visualising what 1 gallon equals using something that people recognise in everyday life ... then shows a lot of 'wow, it really is vast' slides, then moves to 'well, it's pretty small compared to the size of the gulf / how much oil we have in reserve'. It's not a good example of info-graphics - it's a slide-show with illustrations.
And what are they trying to show with the boats? These boats don't even represent known quantities (eg. size of a football stadium, milk container etc.), they only show that some catastrophes were worse, some were less bad.
The stadium misses the point, just as the oil reserve by comparison. A comparison of the affected surface area in the first case and a comparison of the production of Saudi Arabia during the same time-frame would be much more useful.
Now, the bumper-to-bumper of trucks and the SF-bay graphics are not bad.
I think the yacht one was worse. But the beer can in the stadium I'm afraid takes the cake. Completely absurd.
Made worse by the fact that the pictured oil tanker represents the 11 million gallons spilled by the Exxon Valdez. (Wait, now I come to look at it again, it's a rowboat, not a tiny oil tanker). Anyway, the 11 million gallons the Valdez spilled was a small portion of its actual capacity of 46 million gallons.
I think the yacht one was worse. But the beer can in the stadium I'm afraid takes the cake. Completely absurd.
Oh, it's not that bad. Some of them are reasonable, some of them not so much. The fact that it was enough to coat San Francisco Bay to a depth of 1/64th of an inch sorta put it into perspective for me. (This did not, I admit, need to be illustrated with a line-art drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge).
And they are wrong anyway. 184,000,000 gallons / (1/64 inch) = 677.6 mi^2, while the San Francisco Bay is 1600 mi^2
And just for fun: This could cover all the oceans of the world to a depth of .00000008045 inches. (Which is about 39 atoms thick.)
This shows you exactly what not to do with your info-viz. They show about 100 milk jugs of gray gradient and say, imagine if there were 184 million of them? Whoa Whoa Whoa. HOLD THE BOAT. You (CNBC) are telling me that the oil spill is 184 million gallons is also equivalent to 184 MILLION ONE-GALLON MILK JUGS?!?!? That is just crazy - consider my mind BLOWN! Perhaps you could show a pyramid of 184 million gallon jugs…
> However, Phelps likely wouldn't be able to swim as quickly through thick crude oil as he could through clear, fresh water. Actually this is not true: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1418001 And: "clear, fresh water". As if "non-fresh" water would make any difference.
I think the yacht one was worse. But the beer can in the stadium I'm afraid takes the cake. Completely absurd.
I agree, especially when I read this: "Cowboys stadium has an internal volume of approximately 104 cubic feet" Somebody left out a "million" somewhere.
The graphic is kind of bad, but their idea is quite sound. If you read the caption, it includes: > Set side by side, the 184 million oil-filled jugs would cover an area of approximately 1.36 square miles. This amount of 1-gallon containers would be enough for every resident of the 12 most populous US states (2/3 the population of the country) to carry one in their hand simultaneously. To me, that's powerful imagery.…
On the other hand, the San Francisco Bay one comes across as "Oh, well that's not so bad then".