The power of visuals

After reading this hilarious "Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview" (one of the prerequisites: "The Literary Merits of Lolcats") on McSweeney's website (thanks, Doug!), I was reminded of my appreciation of actual depth in information products. One of our newest print acquisitions is a reference book called The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live, by Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman, and Anna Barford. The authors are part of the group that created Worldmapper.org, an organization that provides maps that give a greater understanding of the planet. The book presents a selection of their digitally modified maps that depict the areas and countries of the world not by their physical size, "but by their demographic importance on a vast range of subjects, ranging from basic data on population, health, wealth and occupation to how many toys we import and who's eating their vegetables." My scans don't do the book justice, but here's the depiction of underweight children around the world:


Pretty powerful, don't you think?

It's supplemented by a traditional bar graph (much smaller than the map on the actual printed page). Only Western Europe and Japan have proportionally fewer underweight children than North America does.