Billion-USD Events ~ Disaster Cost Mapping...

NOAA maps Billion-Dollar Disaster Event Types...

Engines of Liberation ~ Appliances vs Housework!

Max Roser spotlights Engines of Liberation among other data at Our World Is Changing...

Volcanic Climate Change ~ Sulfate Evidence...

OpenMind shares 1816, the Year Without a Summer when...

"It snowed and froze in parts of Europe and North America. Crops were ruined, triggering the worst famine of the nineteenth century [and] became known as “the year without a summer,” a climatic anomaly that affected the northern hemisphere"

We now know this is at least partly due to the massive Tambora volcanic eruption.

"Evidence of the long range of the emissions from Tambora has been found in the high sulphur content in samples of polar ice from the time, says paleoclimatologist Robert Mulvaney of the British Antarctic Survey [...] “Very large eruptions (such as Tambora) can lift material very high in the atmosphere, and into the stratosphere,” explains Mulvaney. “Once in the stratosphere, the sulfur dioxide can oxidise into sulphuric acid, which is taken up by tiny water droplets to form a haze in the stratosphere that can reflect incident sunlight back away from the Earth, causing less light to penetrate through the atmosphere, and the Earth to cool.” This sulphuric acid circulating in the stratosphere is then detected in ice cores. In this way, scientists can estimate the volume of emissions from an eruption."

Here's the evidence showing it's happened at huge scale at least a couple times per century, so inquiring minds want to know "when's next"?

Migrant Flows ~ Plotting Source & Volume Into US

Ria Misra at io9 spots The Last 200 Years Of U.S. Immigration in One Chart by Natalia Bronshtein of Insightful Interaction...

Evolution of Religion ~ Tree of Viral Irrationality...

Check out compelling infographic by Simon Davies -- Evolutionary Tree of Religion -- showing irrational ideas mutating like a bad virus...

Creative Routines ~ Visualizing Daily Rituals...

Thanks to HuffPo's Kevin Short for spotting the Creative Routines infographic by MIT alum RJ Andrews at Info We Trust -- building on Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey -- offering...

"...enlightening visualizations of how history's most creative and influential figures structured their days. Unfortunately, there is no common prescription for the perfect schedule, and each person had a very different set of rituals. Based on the charts, we learn that some of history's icons had more eccentric habits than others."

Generations ~ Germain's Portraits of Families!

Thanks to John Farrier at Neatorama for spotting Julian Germain's Generations series of photographs showing recursive {child + parent} family portraits!

Civil Wars ~ Economist on Ending Conflicts...

The Economist reveals about Civil Wars, How to stop the fighting, sometimes...

"Ending civil wars is hard. Hatreds within countries often run far deeper than between them. The fighting rarely sticks to battlefields, as it can do between states. Civilians are rarely spared. And there are no borders to fall back behind. [...] Yet civil wars do end. Of 150 large intrastate wars since 1945 fewer than ten are ongoing. Angola, Chad, Sri Lanka and other places long known for bloodletting are now at peace, though hardly democratic. And recently civil wars have been ending sooner. [...] So far, nothing has done more to end the world’s hot little wars than winding up its big cold one. [...] More conflicts ended in the 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall than in the preceding half-century [...] Until 1989, victory for one side was common (58%). Nowadays victories are much rarer (13%), though not unknown [...] The main reason for jaw-jaw outpacing war-war is a change in the nature of outside involvement. In the Cold War neither of the superpowers was keen to back down; both would frequently fund their faction for as long as it took. Today outside backers are less likely to have the resources for such commitment. And in many cases, outsiders are taking an active interest in stopping civil wars. [But] the motives vary."

Hurricane Tracker ~ NOAA Historic Storm Map!

Mark Prigg at the DM spots NOAA historic hurricanes map!

"The image charts 11,967 tropical cyclones that have occurred on Earth since the NOAA began keeping a record in 1842, when data was supplied by ships and lighthouses rather than today’s advanced satellite detection systems."

First zoom in on USA... Global visual of storm intensity...

Into the Storm ~ Final Days of Tallship Bounty

Mario Vittone at gCaptain shares his interactive timeline of Bounty’s last voyage before sinking at sea caught up in Superstorm Sandy...

"Bounty should have never left New London. No one disagrees. But she did. What happened next -- at least what the surviving crew say happened next -- should be studied. There are lessons in the last voyage of Bounty for all of us. [This timeline] was created using the testimony of the surviving crew along with all other publicly available information on the sinking. It covers (primarily) the time Bounty left New London on October 25th until she sank on the morning of October 29th. Seeing it this way -- hour by hour as the trip unfolded -- provides a look into human nature and decision-making that we don’t get if we stay focused only on the mistake of making the trip at all. It shows how people -- even your people – might react in a crisis. It looks head-on into the normalizing of hazards and acceptance of risk with no gain. Watching the events unfold on Saturday, you can sense the crew’s tunnel vision and denial. And trying to figure out why it took so long to call for help may even infuriate some of you. It did me. Still, this is a wreck you want to look at."

River of Myths ~ Rosling Measures Development!

Gapminder's Hans Rosling crosses River of Myths with measurement!

Platform Adoption Ramps ~ Race to Billion Users

Horace Dediu at Asymco compares adoption ramp-ups of different platforms in their decade after launch in the Race to a Billion 2012...

Timescale Matters ~ NOAA on 800Kyears CO2...

NYTimes DotEarthling Andy Revkin spots NOAA longterm CO2 data...

Time-Scale T Map ~ Boston Subway Visualized!

MapPorn spots Stonebrown Design's Boston "T" Time-Scale Map...

Time Use ~ Accounting for American Activities

The Economist's Daily Chart accounts for American time use...

Perpetual Ocean ~ Visualizing Global Currents!

Thanks to Neatorama for spotting Perpetual Ocean...

"This visualization shows ocean surface currents around the world during the period from June 2005 through December 2007. [It] produced using NASA/JPL's computational model called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II or ECCO2."

Platform Wars ~ History of Emergent Standards

The Economist spotlights earlier Asymco post and data by Horace Dediu and Jeremy Reimer about the history of personal computer adoption as Platform Wars...

"...many different systems fight it out -- until one or two standards emerge. [...] this was the case with the personal computer and is now happening in the market for smartphones and other mobile devices. It is still too early to call the winner(s)..."

Europe Evolving ~ Viz 1st thru 21st Centuries...

Map Porn spotlights European evolution from 1st thru 21st Centuries...

World GDP ~ 2,000 Year Economic Power Chart!

Chart Porn shares World GDP (1-2050) based on Angus Maddison’s GDP dataset plus IMF projections...

Temporal Distortion ~ Halverson's Dakotalapse!

Lovely Temporal Distortion by Randy Halverson...