American Military Strategy and PowerPoint

Oh, PowerPoint, how we love to hate you. So much so that the New York Times wrote an entire article about its shortcomings. The original poster-child for horrible PowerPoint slides used to be the slide that supposedly contributed to the Columbia disaster (you can get a good breakdown of the notorious slide and the weakness of PowerPoint that is demonstrates here), but now the latest piece of evidence stacked against PowerPoint is a diagram illustrating American military strategy in Afghanistan.

If the intention of the artist was to demonstrate its complexity, then they've definitely succeeded. But if the diagram was actually intended to be a useful tool for discussion and planning then it utterly fails. Ultimately, the article isn't about this diagram at all but how PowerPoint tends to oversimplify complex and difficult concepts into rigid bullet point lists.

See the full New York Times article for more details.

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When to Use Small Multiples

Juice Analytics has put up a nice article about how and when to use small multiples, which are ways to use the same chart format to display multi-dimensional data across multiple sample sets.

Full article here (via Chart Porn)

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The Trustworthiness of Beards

If only Captain Cook's mustache were included in this chart. He'd definitely qualify as "threatening" at the very least.

via Geekologie

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Venn Diagram of Prime Time TV 2010

This infographic makes me feel better about not having time to watch TV anymore.

via Fast Company

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Photographer's Life in Graph

Hilarious, but I'll have you know that I believe shooting flowers and cats can be acceptably shot at any point in time on that graph. ;)

via Robert Benson's Blog

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Food Charts

Today is all about food, mainly because I was hungry while surfing the web today. But anyways, first up today is a nice infographic by NGF about how much salt is contained in various common foods we eat. Love the use of color and the play on salt piles and texture to add some fun depth to it all. And who knew that cutting our salt intake in half could save 150,000 lives a year?

Full article here (via Chart Porn)

Speaking of food intake, the New York times had an article in its business section about how commercialized, processed foods have begun to completely dominant the average American diet. What's interesting about the breakdown of different countries' food intake is how much baked goods Mexico each, how many veggies China eats and how incredibly little India eats in general.

Full NYTimes article here.

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Why Use an Infographic?

Infographic Showcase responds with the following: "Because they provide a moment of visual stimulation (even if we are over stimulated), allowing our more creative thoughts to open new pathways of thought and increasing our consciousness and self-awareness. Or, because we are a lazy culture and we like pretty pictures. I’m good either way."

I agree wholeheartedly.

via (Infographic Showcase)

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