I do not agree. I've seen quite a bunch that – although obviously not a definitive source of information – give a good sense of perspective. Here's one [0] that came back to mind.
I agree that the XKCD "radiation" chart is an instance where an XKCD-style comic does a better job of explaining something than an equivalent well-written paragraph. But I don't agree that it's a particularly great visualization.
The "radiation doses combined" transition seemed fairly clear to me. In every case the collective doses are measured in the new SI-prefixed unit delineated by the scale on the left. If I were to criticize anything I would be a little more wary of the color choices and the box labeling. The = sign and parenthetic dose notation seems a little confused (the blue box dose size uses a different convention from the others).
While the chart could layout some things a little more clearly, I think that Minard's chart shows that one shouldn't reduce information content solely for the sake of simplicity.
Scale of the Universe, Radiation, IPv4 space, lakes & oceans, gravity wells, and Money all come to mind.
(You can curse me later).
[0] http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
By contrast, the infographic you like uses illustrations incorrectly; for instance, isn't it confusing the area and radius of circles? Notice how it uses multiple pictures each drawing a single comparison on a single axis. Think about how many words the same comparison takes in prose (not hard, because all those words are included in the infographic in gigantic type above the illustration, often in radioactive neon green).
--- Also: note that this [unfavorable] comparison is against a relatively weak example of explanatory illustration --- the best examples in _VDQA_ are way, way better than these NYT examples, which are a bit chartjunky themselves. If there's a good critique to be leveled at E.T., I think it may be that he tends to be overly favorable to friends, students, and, most importantly, people who share the same aesthetic sense that he does: simple line drawing style, low-saturation colors, arts & letters themes. Look at that "Game of Life" illustration, for instance; ouch.
Look at the "airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow" by, I believe, one of his students --- a truly excellent, effective example of an information graphic done in E.T.'s favored style [literally, with E.T.'s favorite palette]:
Graphics like this seem more like posters promoting an idea than tools for understanding complex data.
Of course this one being ordered by Mozy should trigger some warnings about it being a covert ad, but it does not detract from the potential veracity of the data.
This one is admittedly quite simple, but should we discard all infographics on the merit they're not of Tufte level?
Can you really? I work with video every day. Terabytes are nothing when we're talking HD content and lots of it. It's still pretty hard for me to visualize, even sitting at a system with the details up in front of me, what exactly a petabyte is. Let alone hundreds of thousands of them.
It's like asking an average person to visualize a trillion dollars. There exists a point once a quantity becomes sufficiently large that you tend to stop consciously processing it.
-edit, realize this sounds really snarky, it's not. I am legitimately curious how you quantify that much stuff.
In text it states that Hitatchi came out with the first terabyte drive which holds 1000 GB. Later, in graphic form, it shows 1024 GB = 1 TB.
In the Internet Users by millions chart the author uses a bar graph (time is continuous, why use a bar graph) with no x-axis labels and then to express hard drive price over time we get a line chart (still no x-axis label). The missing labels are okay because there are callouts specifying the dates, but the change in graph type is weird.
As for Hitatchi creating a 1TB drive that holds 1000GB, but later stating that 1TB is 1024 GB, isn't 1 terabyte technically 1000GB which the hard drive companies use, but also frequently used—incorrectly—to reference 1024 GiB or 1024^4 bytes? This other number, 1024GiB is actually a tebibyte, not a terrabyte. They are technically incorrect, but from the standpoint of the majority of the population, the difference between a terabyte and a teribyte is just small print on the back of box. The infographic could be clearer, but honestly, do you think this detail is worthwhile for trying to show the scale of what a petabyte is? That is what, a 5% difference in size? I think that is, when looking a petabyte. If I did my math correctly, there is 50GB of loss (or is that GiB?)
In the end, they are trying to show that a petabyte is a fuck-ton of data. More data than many people can wrap there mind around. They are trying to show scale. How you define the numbers are complicated because we have SI units for both binary and decimal which don't match up and IEC units for the binary side as well. The average consumer isn't going to know or care. They could care that a petabtye is HUGE. The infographic portrays this without trying to bog the consumer down in differences in technical jargon that most of use technical people know but don't bother using correctly ourselves most of the time.
