This picture of shadows gave me vertigo for a minute when I first saw it. It's a lot like the National Geographic photo of the camels.

Annie Leibovitz does another round of celebrities as Disney characters. Even though I'm not a particular fan of any of the celebrities photographed, it's still exciting to see the characters portrayed by real people. Disney's been going downhill for a long time now, but my childhood memories, and the fact that the company still manages to produce a few flashes of greatness now and then, will probably keep me a fan for life. It's really a heartbreaking relationship, though, especially since Disney misses so many opportunities, despite having many people within the company who could really turn things around. I have my fingers crossed that someday the folks behind Re-Imagineering will be running the show. EPCOT Central can be brought on to consult.

Books correlated to SAT scores. I think the creator has his head on straight about the conclusions that can be drawn from these charts (not many). But still, he sure is inviting a lot of flames with the title of the website.

Averaging several photos of a single person makes face-recognition software perform better. That's a really good idea. Why didn't someone think of it sooner? There's not much else to say about that.

Overcoming Bias has been temporarily replaced with an automated quote-posting machine. It's put up a ton of thought-provoking and/or amusing quotes from a huge range of sources. They're up to 9, but it's not too late to catch up with pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. Incidentally, here's a New Yorker article about one of the most quotable Americans ever, Ben Franklin (even if he was often misinterpreted).

Gapminder is an amazing tool for comparing the populations and GDP's of countries over time (via Think or Thwim). Worldmapper, which resizes countries based on a variety of metrics like carbon emissions, is also food for thought.

It's striking how much of an impact these visualizations make considering how often we're beaten over the head with the statistics on which they're based. It just goes to show how bad humans are at wrapping their brains around large numbers. In high school, I participated in a competition that was all about estimating huge quantities. For instance, approximately how many ping pong balls would it take to fill up the sun? How many Chevy Impalas would fit end-to-end between the Earth and the Moon? You only had to guess the unit and power of ten, but I don't think I came close on a single question. What does it mean to have a hundred billion pennies? I'd have no idea unless I actually saw it. Clive Thompson hits it right on the head when he points to our inability to understand large numbers as a major source of our humanitarian problems. "We'll donate thousands of dollars to bring a single African war orphan to the US for lifesaving surgery, but we don't offer much money or political pressure to stop widespread genocides in Rwanda or Darfur." We're outraged when a serial killer murders five people, but our eyes glaze over when we hear about the millions starving to death all over the world. The examples are endless. At least humanitarian groups are starting to catch on to this phenomenon and developing materials like The Miniature Earth that make large-scale, global problems much easier to grasp.

I suppose many of the same things can be said of government spending, with billion-dollar budgets and TRILLION-dollar deficits. As far as most people are concerned, any unit above a million is just another term for "really big."

An economist's take on altruism.

Understanding the economies of scale can also result in huge profits. UPS saved three million gallons of gas by using routing software to reduce the number of left turns taken by their trucks.