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Looks like the buildings were 87x135 feet, if I got the math right, a pair could be filled to just over 1000 feet
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…
Here, let me help you out since a "gallon milk jug" is apparently a little too big of a concept for your mind to hold. Picture this: a Quart container of milk, and now just imagine 736 million of them. Doesn't that make it easier to relate to on an intuitive level? I thought so. Courtesy of the CNBC Visualization Graphics Help Desk.
EX: http://www.cnbc.com/id/38294088/?slide=9 there is no indication on the picture as to what it represents, but read the text and it's ok.
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).
How so? If I get to pick the thickness that I coat it with I can compare it to anything, from a small pool to the entire worlds oceans. So telling you San Francisco Bay tells you nothing at all. 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 a…
But I can't visualise the whole of the world's oceans, nor can I visualise a swimming pool coated with half a mile of oil. But a thin layer of oil all across the Bay, that I can easily imagine.
And it uses Flash for static images. Can't they get anything right?
You sure? http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/CNBC/Sections/News_And_Analysis/... width="600" height="400" align="left" border="0">
Weird. But still: it needs to load a Flash file in order to display some HTML? WTF? That's actually even worse in my opinion.
As absurd as these visualizations are, it does raise the bigger point that it is very difficult for our brains to understand large numbers. It is difficult for most people to really grasp how much 184 million gallons is, or to tell the difference between $1 Trillion in bailout vs $2 trillion in bailout money. After some point, we just give up and call it "a lot". I think this has very real public policy consequences.…
http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/three-decades-of-maj...
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.…
"Some portion of the people living in the US can hold one". Yeah I know, 184 million out of ~300 million people.
You either reduce it to a value where you say, "one half quart per person" or you get out. Don't sub divide saying "the most populous states ...". You want to try and hook the 184 million gallons (a big number we have no concept of) to another big thing we MIGHT have a better concept of. Not a partial bit of it.
avg american drinks 25 gallons of milk a year, an avg household of 2.59 people, 184 million gallons oil, and ~population of 307 million. (307,006,550 people) / (184 million gallons / ((25 gallons / (52 weeks)) * 2.59 people)) = ~2 weeks
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You sure? http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/CNBC/Sections/News_And_Analysis/... width="600" height="400" align="left" border="0">
http://img.skitch.com/20100719-ckjke8bssjpmxxtgnfngnbbsr.png Weird. But still: it needs to load a Flash file in order to display some HTML? WTF? That's actually even worse in my opinion.
