Beautiful
Best Science Visualization Videos of 2009
I remember when I was a kid in middle school there was a school wide poster contest on Countries of the World. I spent an entire week on mine, did a whole lot of research and spent a lot of time organizing the information on my poster. All the data was easy to read and flowed fairly well (at least I thought so at the time…one wonders how much of that memory is just wishful thinking). Meanwhile my brother, on the day of the contest made a quick cutout of his country and its name in bright colors, slapped it onto his poster and said “Done.” There was no content whatsoever, but it was bright and colorful. Big surprise that day, he won top prize and my display was simply ignored.
One result of this experience for me was an awareness of the difference between a pretty presentation and it’s underlying data, especially in popular media. In this case, from what I can see these videos do appear to have some real content, in addition to the bright colors. There might be others out there with more real and useful data, or more beautiful presentation (kind of hard to believe that, though), but it’s the combination here that really set these apart I think.