This video has been making its way around the tubes.
It’s the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen. Dick Cheney in 1994, explaining why invading Iraq would be a bad idea.

Did he really just use the word “quagmire”?

Worldmapper.org is a project that takes the map of our planet and distorts it based on various statistical data.
Here are a few that I found interesting.

Arms Exports 2003:

War Deaths 2002:

While the timeline on these doesn’t line up exactly, this trend has been happening for a long time. Looking at these two maps side by side, it’s easy to see that the United States and Europe are making a lot of weapons, and the rest of the world is buying them and using them to kill each other.

Toys Exports:

Toys Imports:

I knew we got a lot of cheap plastic crap from China and Korea, but these two images really put things into perspective.

Valuables Imports:

Bling bling suckas!

This project is about design at its core. Mixing art and science to find new ways of looking at or interacting with the world around us.

Presidential Speeches Tag Clouds is a great variation on a data display technique known as tag clouds, a type of weighted list that is becoming very popular online. It is usually used on blogs and online communities for organizing what words are used most often in reference to a given article. Here it is used to organize the frequency of buzzword use in presidential speeches. Excellent illustration of how political focus has shifted from issue to issue throughout US history.