Charts
How Colors Are Used in Cultures Around the World
Color has the power to evoke a kaleidoscope of different emotions and concepts. The message or symbolism conveyed by a color often varies across cultures, although some are almost universally believed to encompass a certain idea or feeling. For example, red is often associated with passion and black is the epitome of evil or grief. However, there can be vastly different interpretations of color around the world, which is just so intriguing to me! The founder of Information is Beautiful, David McCandless, has created this beautiful circular design called “Colours in Culture”, which showcases how colors are linked to different concepts and sentiments across cultures.
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What an absolutely compelling yet simple way to visualize this information! What cultural color “conundrums” stand out to you? There are a few concepts that have a wide range of colors, such as love. According to this, love is represented by red in Western, Japanese, and Asian culture, green in Hindu culture, yellow in Native American culture, and blue in African culture. What color do you associate love with the most? Death is another intriguing one. It is associated with black in Western, Japanese, and Native American culture, and white in Hindu and Chinese cultures. In Arab culture, death is silver, but here is the real curiosity – South Americans associate death with green! I looked into it further and found that while that is true for many Latin countries, green is the national color of Mexico and considered patriotic, so it is important to do further investigation before flexing your cultural color wheel knowledge!
All in all, I am in love with this idea for a visualization and the execution is stunning! One tiny critique would be to have the lines continue all around because I did struggle a bit with lining up the color blocks to the cultures.
This map from NapLab highlights the locations with the highest instances of drowsy driving. This is such an important topic to study and gather data on. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that in 2022, 693 people died in drowsy-driving-related crashes. Many people push their limits behind the wheel when they’re tired. After all, if you’re exhausted while traveling, nothing sounds more appealing than hurrying home to your warm, familiar bed. But maps like this one illustrate just how risky this decision can be.
The team at NapLab studied fatalities in drowsy driving accidents, adjusted rates by population density and then mapped out the locations that had the most accidents. Here are their findings.
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For counties with 150,000-500,000 residents:
- Bastrop County, TX: 20.72 fatalities per 100,000
- Coconino County, AZ: 13.19 fatalities per 100,000
- Midland County, TX: 20 11.63 fatalities per 100,000
- Hunt County, TX: 10.16 fatalities per 100,000
- Liberty County, TX: 9.80 fatalities per 100,000
For counties with 25,000-150,000 people:
- Gillespie, TX: 40.03 per 100,000
- Milam, TX: 1039.02 per 100,000
- Walker, AL: 2132.64 per 100,000
- Cass, TX: 931.54 per 100,000
- Sweetwater, WY: 31.44 per 100,000
For counties with populations of 5,000 to 25,000:
- Pecos, TX: 190.02 per 100,000
- Reeves, TX: 178.23 per 100,000
- Madison, TX: 157.23 per 100,000
- Refugio, TX: 150.78 per 100,000
- Winkler, TX: 150.56 per 100,000
Texas counties topped most of the of the lists, which might be due to dark, quiet rural highways lulling drivers to sleep.
Boat lovers have a new way to pick their dream destination with this chart ranking states by how desirable they are for boaters. The SI Yachts team used a detailed scoring system to rank these states. The system considers some of the major factors important to boaters like average temperatures, number of sunny and cloudy days, amount of coastline, lakes, and rivers, hurricane risk, number of boats owned in the state, and the average cost of boater’s insurance. All these factors, averaged together, created the team’s ultimate list of boating states.
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Despite the hurricane risks, Louisiana still comes out on top as the best state for boating. Miles and miles of coastline and waterways, low swampy areas, and a fishing legacy make boating a way of life in the Bayou State. As for the bottom of the list, New York was not the Empire State for boating. Expensive boater’s insurance and few days of ideal weather meant that despite this state’s abundance of lakes, rivers, and coastline, it just wasn’t an ideal place to own a boat.
Every boater has different priorities to guide where they want to set sail, but this chart is a great way to consider where you’ll find a boater’s paradise. There’s a great diversity of regions in the top states on this list so East or West, North or South, you’ll find the perfect boating destination.
Attention spans are nosediving in our modern society and it’s no surprise that technology and social media are most often given the blame for this. But are attention spans getting shorter for everyone? Maybe not. A new study by Brainscape, which analyzed their users study habits, has revealed that students’ attention spans are actually getting longer while studying. Yes, you read that right. In a world of shrinking attention spans, Brainscape users study sessions are getting longer, which means their attention spans are actually growing.
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Brainscape used the length of study sessions as a relative measure of attention span. They compare their users’ sessions with the average number of minutes studies indicate the general public can focus and, as you can see, with each year attention spans grow. By 2024, students were actively studying for 5 minutes more per session than they were in 2015. While this number is impressive in its own right, users are usually completing several sessions a day, this means that they are studying a LOT more than they were 10 years ago.
For the general public, however, attention spans are assuredly still shrinking. To keep people’s attention, movie scenes are now shorter than they’ve ever been (even though the movies themselves are longer), and websites like TikTok, which is famous for their super-short attention span-friendly videos, is exploding in popularity. While TikTok is believed to be popular because of shorter attention spans, some believe that TikTok itself is helping to make those short attention spans even shorter.
It’s unclear if attention spans will ever get back to the level they were once at (it seems unlikely at this point), so it will be interesting to see how this problem will develop into the future.
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