Worldometers put up one of these little men to represent each and every living human being in the world on a single page.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Detail of 1880 “Conspectus of the History of (US) Political Parties,” an attempt to represent graphically just over a century of American politics.

Susan Schulten introduces this interesting antique item at Mapping the Nation.

I had never heard of a “conspectus,” which is a nineteenth-century term meaning “a comprehensive mental survey.” And that is exactly the idea. I have only reproduced the image here, and left out the extensive narrative that was designed to be laid out under the chart, which lists political events, Supreme Court decisions, and acts of Congress.

In fact, there’s so much detail that I wonder about the purpose of the chart. Perhaps the point was to collapse the chaos of change into a single view, one where a party’s power could be traced over time. The appeal seems to be to capture an overall state of change, of flux. Notice how much the chart resembles a a river. The metaphor is useful — the wider the river at any spot, the more “powerful” the party at that time. I’m particularly impressed by the representation of the turbulent 1850s, when the Whig Party disintegrated and the Republican Party was founded.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Hat tip to Theo.

As we enjoy a nice spring day, punctuated by the voices of happy songbirds, as well as by the clamor of unhappy liberals moaning and wailing over the budget cuts (which they describe as “Draconian,” “damaging,” proof that “our democracy has been irretrievably lost,” the kind of result only possible through “hostage-taking“), you can get a good picture of fiscal reality from the graphic below.

Our friend Bird Dog, added a slight addendum to this illustration from Gateway Pundit, making clear just how dramatic the Obama Administration’s contribution to the $1.65 trillion deficit is, indicating how comparatively insignificant the budget deal’s reduction of $38.5 billion is by comparison.

detail

At Red State, Jeff Emmanuel has a large graphic illustrating a number of informative comparisons between President Bush’s unilateral, war-of-choice in Iraq and President Obama’s kinectic action in Libya which illustrates a number of difficulties in the conventional wisdom of the establishment commentariat. Be sure to look at the larger original.

Click on the image

A graphic from Places & Spaces via Shannon Connors and Leah Libresco.

Hans Rosling