Scale of flying animals

A straightforward lineup of animals that fly provide a sense of scale, from tiny to very big. I feel like some everyday objects like a car or a helicopter would’ve really driven the point, but it’s neat to see.

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Scale of the Chinese balloon

I wasn’t paying much attention to the Chinese balloon that the U.S. shot down — until this graphic by JoElla Carman for NBC News floated by. The balloon was 200 feet tall, which makes the Thanksgiving parade Snoopy balloon look tiny and about equivalent to the wingspan of a Boeing 747.

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Objects in space headed towards Earth

NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies tracks large objects, such as asteroids, that have passed Earth or are headed towards it. Reuters visualized the nearest objects in the database.

The graphic starts at Earth’s surface, and you get farther away as you scroll down. Speed is plotted on the horizontal, symbols are scaled by the object’s minimum diameter, and yellow indicates objects on the way.

Illustrations after the initial graphic do a good job of providing scale for if any of these objects hit us.

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Football field to show population change in the UK

The Office for National Statistics for the UK published an interactive to show how population has changed:

The population of England and Wales has increased by more than 3.5 million in the 10 years leading up to Census 2021. Using the first results from this census, we look at which places have seen the biggest increases and decreases, which areas had the largest growth in different age groups, and how your chosen local authority area compares with others.

You choose a region and go from there. The best part though is the football (a.k.a. soccer) field used to visualize population density, which communicates the numbers on a relatable scale.

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✚ Using Absolute vs. Relative Scales

Welcome to issue #192 of The Process, the newsletter for FlowingData members that looks closer at how the charts get made. I’m Nathan Yau, and this week I’m thinking about comparing absolute counts versus relative rates.

Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.

Behind the million

Sergio Peçanha and Yan Wu, for The Washington Post, used a combination unit chart with individual icons to represent the scale and weight of the near million Covid deaths in the United States.

Compare this with NYT’s particle-based charts and Axios’ scaled squares. It’s kind of in between the two in level of abstraction, but all three carry similar messages, with a focus on the one-million mark.

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Scale of one million deaths

The United States is about to reach one million confirmed Covid deaths, or already passed the mark if you consider excess deaths. There’s no way to truly feel that number, but Axios visualized the scale, with comparisons against city populations and historical events.

A diamond shape represents counts, and as you scroll, shapes fill the screen until you only see the tips. The shapes overflow beyond what we can or want to understand. The time series line on the bottom shows cumulative deaths over time, leading towards the one-million mark.

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Scale of atoms

I’ll probably never tire of these sort of videos. It starts at human scale and then zooms in closer and closer until it gets to quarks.

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Comparing rich people incomes and the taxes they pay

Based on leaked IRS data for the 400 wealthiest Americans, ProPublica provides a comparison of their incomes and the lower taxes they paid between 2013 and 2018. This might be best piece so far from ProPublica’s IRS series in terms of understanding the big picture from their dataset. Also, that “smaller than a pixel” note for the average American is doing some heavy lifting.

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Jeff Bezos wealth to scale

Jeff Bezos’ wealth is difficult to understand conceptually, because the scale is just so much more than what any of us are used to. So for NYT Magazine, Mona Chalabi took a more abstract approach, focusing less on monetary values and more on how many multiples more Bezos has compared to the median household.

See also The Washington Post’s comparison from a couple of years ago, scaling things down to spending equivalencies. I think Chalabi’s comparison works better. It’s abstract compared with abstract.

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