Link Banana

An accurate predictor of the winner of the last seven presidential elections: Halloween mask sales.

In case you had doubts about the United State being one of the least equal “developed” countries, The Economist has a simple chart for you.

In case you hadn’t already assumed so, evidence suggests that the financial crisis has indeed caused some illegal immigrants to leave the United States.

In March this year an estimated 11.9m people were thought to be living in America without papers, down from 12.4m in 2007, according to the Pew Hispanic Centre. Various factors are at play, including rising unemployment and stricter policing in America, and better economic conditions in home countries, especially Mexico, origin of nearly 60% of America’s immigrants.

A very interesting daily chart from The Economist. The basic analysis:

Those [children of international parents] craving an unhealthy diet should make for America, where more than half of the expat parents said that their children had eaten more junk food since relocating. Keen gamers should consider China and Canada, whereas telly addicts should nag their parents to move to the United Arab Emirates or India.

I think this chart gives the one mentioned here a run for it’s money. There’s nothing like a well-made graph to make reveal the utter silliness of many political issues.

Though you may find it depressing, this BuzzFeed post has amassed a very impressive collection of interesting charts about suicide (mostly in the United States).

The New York Times has put together another fabulous interactive chart — or maybe it’s a map — of how many medals countries won in each summer Olympiad since 1896.

(via Passport)

This is certainly the coolest graph I’ve seen in a while. It might be the coolest ever.

(via kottke)

Of all the provocative possibilities raised by Ben Fry’s playing with intelligence (Wonderlic) scores and (American) football positions, the most obvious and interesting may be that offensive players — and especially linemen — are usually smarter than defensive players.

Charles Blow’s chart yesterday was rather interesting. It profiles along race, gender, and age — the rate at which people enter treatment for given drugs.

Nothing in this table about the cost of driving different vehicles should surprise you, but the presentation’s rather clever.

In today’s “awesome-looking but mostly purposeless charts” category, I submit Chris Harrison’s Digg Rings.

(via Information Aestetics)

Finally, Good Magazine has a chart that’s both nice looking and easy to understand. These are some interesting numbers.

Further proving that I’m a sucker for cool presentation of data that serve no practical purpose: another in a recursive series about mapping the blogosphere. The coolest visuals are at the bottom, some analysis is here.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

As is always the case with managably sized bar graphs, I’m curious as too all that was left offo this one. The list provided is surprising. Greece easily wins the cigarette consumption race, and the United States beats notoriously-smoky France.

As further proof that I’ll link to any graph Good Magazine puts out, no matter how little sense or value I can derive from it: a chart of how much money went to which military contractors.

News to me: the notoriously secretive Bob Dylan has a radio show on XM. Vanity Fair has compiled an excellent list of the show’s features and quirks. If the graphic’s too hard to read, or you just want more details, the expanded text is available here.

(via kottke, who explains the inspiration for the graphic)

In case you had begun to doubt that the United States was the most well-armed country on the face of the planet, this chart has come to allay your fears.

Only 18% of the people live in a country whose press is rated “free” by Freedom House. You may be heartened a bit by the fact that that’s actually 36% or the countries, but it still seems a terribly sad state of affairs. A map (PDF) is available as well.

Also of note, The Economist’s Asia.view column examines how censorship has changed in recent years.

Remember this? Well, people have been working on ways to revisualize the color names that Dolores Lab crowd-sourced. Color Flower is my favorite, but the others are nice too.