Using the Federal Reserve’s Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989 data, Ryan Thorpe imagines a pizza party with 100 guests and 100 slices of pizza as a stand-in for the United States:

We’re having a pizza party with 100 guests! Let’s divvy up the slices the way wealth is divided among American households:

• 1 person gets 30 slices
• 9 people get 3.7 slices each
• 40…

This World History Timeline (2016) shows how nations, empires, and ruling groups shifted and evolved across the globe from 3000 BCE to the present. It takes a second to understand what you’re looking at — I thought it was a sort of stretched geographical map at first. Get your own here.

The chart is based on Joseph Priestley’s A New Chart of History (1769):

Priestley is best known for his…

Using the NY Times Archive API, journalist Ted Alcorn built Below the Fold, a dashboard through which you can explore the last 25 years of Times coverage: 2.2 million articles containing 1.5 billion words. You can slice and dice this data in a bunch of different ways — it’s a fantastic resource.

One of the site’s sections is about obituaries. From that data, Alcorn produced this infographic of…

I love this planet & stars chart from XKCD because it’s technically correct but also completely useless.

Tags: astronomy · infoviz · science · xkcd

Do you know your Gaia from your Cronus from your Zeus? In fewer than 15 minutes, this video provides a comprehensive overview of all the important Greek & Roman gods, goddesses, nymphs, heroes, monsters, demigods, and other assorted spiritual beings, who begat who, and what all of their domains were. (via open culture)

Tags: infoviz · mythology · religion · video