From Pop Chart Labs

But Big Ben isn’t alone; architects have been correcting the Leaning Tower of Pisa since the 1170s when it was still being built. Germany’s Leaning Tower of Suurhusen, which at an angle of 5.19 degrees holds the Guinness World Record for the most tilted tower in the world, dates back to the 1450s.

In modern times, many buildings have been designed at a deliberate slant. The 165-metre Montréal Tower, finished in 1987, is the world’s tallest man-made leaning tower and inclines at a 45-degree angle. In 1996, the Puerta de Europa in Spain was completed with two towers sloping towards each other at a 15-degree angle.

Late this year the Capital Gate is set to be finished in Abu Dhabi at a slant of 18 degrees.

From The Economist

It’s All Connected: A Spectator’s Guide to the Euro Crisis

From The New York Times

The iPhone may have kicked off the smartphone revolution, but so far the iPad is selling much faster.

This chart shows unit sales of each products in the first six quarters after launch. The iPhone launched in June 2007, but didn’t really take off until the iPhone 3G launched in July 2008, five quarters later.

The iPad launched in January 2010, and has sold more units every quarter.
That’s partly because the iPad benefits from all the work Apple did for the iPhone, including a huge base of developers and customers who already understand how the product works. The iPhone is also constrained by carrier contracts — it’s hard to convince customers to buy a new phone before their current contract is up — and had stronger competition at launch (like the BlackBerry).

From Business Insider.

A taxonomic breakdown of all manner of frightful creatures from the silver screen, from the very large (like Godzilla) to the rather small (like Chucky) to the very weird (like the Crawling Eye). Hundreds in all, this is the definitive guide to a universe of scarifying baddies.

From Pop Chart Lab

Vampire Identification Chart by Ben Douglass

TeleGeography’s free interactive submarine cable map is based on our authoritative Global Bandwidth research, and depicts active and planned submarine cable systems and their landing stations. Selecting a cable route on the map provides access to data about the cable, including the cable’s name, ready-for-service (RFS) date, length, owners, website, and landing points. Selecting a landing point provides a list of all submarine cables landing at that station.

CLICK HERE FOR THE INTERACTIVE VERSION

Cables shown include international and US domestic submarine cables with a maximum upgradeable capacity of at least 5 Gbps. Cable routes are stylized to improve readability, and do not reflect the physical cable location. Similarly, cable landing stations do not show the precise coordinates of the building, and are meant to serve as a general guide to where a cable system lands.

We update our map regularly to ensure that our data are as accurate and as up-to-date as possible. If you have updated information for a cable system please email us at cablemap@telegeography.com.

TeleGeography has made the source code behind the interactive Submarine Cable Map available for download.

From TeleGeography, Source: Global Bandwidth Research Service

Rather than focusing on network dynamics, they decided to analyze the tributes by language. Jobs wasn’t just an American visionary, but truly global.

Above is a breakdown of two million tweets containing the name “Steve Jobs” and posted between 9 pm on Oct. 5 and 9 am the next morning. Each dot represents 1,000 tweets, and they’re colored according to language. A high-resolution version containing the most-retweeted messages can be downloaded here.

Though the methodology’s a little rough — tweets didn’t mention Steve Jobs by name aren’t included, nor are languages with non-Western alphabets — but it’s enough.

“I have been looking at the tributes,” said NECSI president Yaneer Bar-Yam, “and their extent is itself a tribute.”

From Wired.com

Images: Amaç Herdagdelen, Alexander Sayer Gard-Murray, Yaneer Bar-Yam/New England Complex Systems Institute

From the Black Death to the measles, rapidly spreading diseases have taken a toll on humanity for centuries. Here’s a look at the biggest and deadliest pandemics ever.

A collaboration between GOOD and Column Five Media.

From militaryfactory.com

The long drought is almost over. It’s Girl Scout cookie time again! These little morsels of delight are sold only October through March (regional councils determine the dates for each locale), so you’d better stock up. But which varieties will guests at your next fancy dinner party prefer? Perhaps this sales data can help.

“On average, more than a billion new pages are added to it every day. To give you an idea of how big world wide web is, our infographic 60 Seconds will cover some really interesting facts about websites that we use on day-to-day basis.”

Apple doesn’t make the iPhone itself. It neither manufactures the components nor assembles them into a finished product. The components come from a variety of suppliers and the assembly is done by Foxconn, a Taiwanese firm, at its plant in Shenzhen, China. The “teardown” graphic below, based on data from iSuppli, a market-research firm, shows who makes what inside the iPhone, and how much the various bits cost. Samsung turns out to be a particularly important supplier. It provides some of the phone’s most important components: the flash memory that holds the phone’s apps, music and operating software; the working memory, or DRAM; and the applications processor that makes the whole thing work. Together these account for 26% of the component cost of an iPhone.

“After seeing this article and graphic on the rising cost of food in The New York Times week in review, I was curious about how prices for other stuff has changed in the past year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides this data monthly via Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Why they have to provide it in an equal-spaced text file over a plain CSV or a spreadsheet still confuses me, but at least they publish the data regularly, which is more than I can say for other government departments. I originally wanted to see how obesity rates have changed over the past year, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) hasn’t updated obesity trend data since 2009.

In any case, price changes alone are still interesting. Relative to overall inflation (2.7 percent), transportation prices increased the most by far, at plus 9.8 percent. The cost of gasoline alone went up 27.5 percent.
Education also took a hit, going up 4.0 percent. Meanwhile, the cost of apparel and technology went down this past year by 0.6 and 1.4 percent, respectively. Having a baby? Now might be good time to buy some onesies.”