With all this talk of the sorry state of the U.S. and U.K. economies, it’s easy to forget about the good times.

Harvard Business has a great interactive chart showing economic cycles in the U.S. over the last 60 years.

If you step away from the screen, and squint a little, it looks exponential.

Click through to Harvard Business for the full interaction.

Just had to reblog this - one of the coolest visualizations I’ve seen for a while:

2008 US Movie Box Office visualization by Zach Beane

(via swissmiss via GenPink)

If the real measure of Olympic success is the number of medals won per capita, then this is the table we should be following. Australia is conspicuously absent at the moment, but that should be rectified soon if the Athens and Sydney performances are anything to go by.

Some more Olympic medal statistical goodness:

• Visualisation of population-adjusted performance from Athens (not weighted by medal-type)
• Athens medal performance weighted by GDP
• The beautiful NYT animated visualisation of medals won over time

Enjoy!