geekosystem

Armed with 56 years of information on tornadoes and a computer, John Nelson has created this remarkable map of the United States. On it, he's charted all of the known tornadoes and color-coded them by intensity. The result is a beautiful, if terrifying, map of destruction. See it, after the break.

Space is a big place, a very big place, an unfathomably big place. Even our little corner of it is pretty gigantic, but it's at least slightly more fathomable. If you think you'd like to attempt to fathom it, this infographic by the BBC is likely to help, illustrating the distance between you and the farthest reaches of the solar system with conveniently fathomable benchmarks. Spoilers: It's still pretty hard to wrap your head around.

Get your mouse wheel finger warmed up and check out the full graphic after the jump.

Infographics are a dime a dozen nowadays, as the world figured out that if you want modern society to read things, they have to be splashy and colorful, or be about adolescent wizards. This infographic falls into the former camp, and visualizes what the most pirated movies of all time are, so you can have that information handy when you're trying to convince your friends that the movie industry is on the way out because of torrents. Or something. Full infographic after the jump.

Within this amusing infographic that simply compares Twitter statistics to real-life bad statistics lies a bunch of morbidly hilarious comparisons. Did you know that for every 1,700 tweets, someone in the world dies? Or that one tweet is equal to smoking 60 cigarettes? How about how for every single tweet, we spend about 75 cents on a weight loss programs? If you want to see how Twitter stacks up to everything that is wrong with the world, click on past the break, and make sure you have your Twitter client's global tweet button handy.

We currently live in an age where one can start reading a long article on one's computer, shoot the article over to one's phone and continue reading it on said phone while in transit. People have their web browser of choice, which allows them to view various different types of content in various different types of formats on the web, but have it look roughly the same as everyone else sees it. There are now so many ways to connect to the Internet, whether it be via standard computer, tablet, phone, video game console, and even portable gaming device, and it has become so seamless and consistent due to web standards. You probably know something out there has to regulate this kind of thing, but have probably not paid too much attention to it before. With the help of The Barbarian Group, Vitamin T, An Event Apart, and head on past the break, you can now begin thinking about web standards, infographically speaking.

Any decent boss or manager attempts to lessen the blow of work by providing some sort of perk for coming into the office. Free beverages or snacks, a break room with a pretty television, company outings, or even picking up lunch for the office once in a while. While those tend to be the perks for we common folk, giant tech companies usually do their employees one better. From Google's legendary cafeteria, to Facebook's leather repair service, tech giants seem like a pretty nice place to work. If you're curious, or want to be made jealous for a bit and start daydreaming about what it'd be like to get out of that cubicle in the office that doesn't even allow you to put up a life-size cardboard David Tennant, head on past the break and infographically learn the wonders tech giant perks.

The Internet has been abuzz about the death of Steve Jobs for days, and while some may already be overly saturated with the recent deluge coverage, Infographic World made a handy infographic to explain why the coverage has been a deluge rather than a drizzle for which one doesn't even bother to open an umbrella. So, head on past the jump and check out the easily consumable informational graphic conveying the life of Steve Jobs.

User-submitted content aggregators are a fairly popular method of creating a cohesive community out of scratch. From the olden days of newsgroups, to Slashdot, to Digg before the fall, allowing users to find or create their own content and submit it at their leisure can end up creating a surprisingly informed community with lightning-fast updates. Of course, that can also lead to a bunch of superfluous garbage, but a few communities out there are able to surpass that hurdle. More often than not, reddit tends to be one of the few examples of a user-submitted content aggregating community. If you aren't hip to reddit yet, or are the hippest of cool cats but want to brush up on your history, Sortable created an informative infographic full of information and graphics just for you, seen below the break.

Ever wonder how Takeru Kobayashi is able to fit all of those hot dogs inside his body when the guy is actually kind of thin? Are you kept awake at night pondering exactly how many calories Joey Chestnut takes in when he eats 68 hot dogs in 10 minutes, or exactly how long that amount of calories would power his body? Would you like to add how many jars of mayonnaise it would take to power a Prius for 45 miles? Then head on past the jump and check out this infographic Food Service Warehouse put together about competitive eating, and you can start learning how to turn your stomach into an enormous flaccid sac in order to store those 64 hard boiled eggs.

As you sit in front of your computer late at night, watching calorie-free videos of funny cats or where women look when talking to a buff bro, do you suddenly get the feeling that you're the only one wasting away, spending precious life hours watching a man covered in peanut butter? If you're in America, you can check out this infographic about the video-sharing trends in your country, and then you can stop feeling so alone. Alternatively, if you're not in America, you can ingest the information in the infographic and make fun of us Americans for watching so much video content instead of reading books or, I don't know, watching soccer. Full infographic after the jump.

Market research firm Ask Your Target Market decided to delve deep into the Angry Birds phenomenon and perform a some market research to put together this informative infographic as to why the suicide-bird game is so popular and addictive. Among various other interesting tidbits, they found that people play Angry Birds 200 million minutes per day, which is equal to game play every hour of every day for 16 years. The team also found what mood the game puts people in, as well as how addicted people feel they are to the admittedly somewhat OCD-style knock-down-all-the-things game play. They also found that there is no known cure for addiction to the game, but I will personally proscribe some better games, and you should be right as rain come morning. Head on past the jump to see the full infographic, and learn why you can't stop throwing birds at pigs.

If you haven't yet participated in the daily deals craze, you've at least read a bit of news about Groupon's ridiculous growth or get daily deals spam in your inbox that you really want to stop getting, but can't quite bring yourself to halt just in case one of those future daily deals emails contains something you actually want to use. Market research firm Lab42 wanted to get to the bottom of the daily deals craze and surveyed 500 social media users who have an account with at least one daily deals site, taking note of tidbits like which sites said social media users are members of, how often they check for new deals, and how much they end up spending on said deals. Head on past the break to see the results in everyone's favorite informative, prettier-than-text format.

Software piracy has had a very interesting, successful history. From bulletin boards, to FTP sites, to IRC fileservers, to the currently popular torrent, the methods of software piracy moves with the times, and modernizes as fast and as frequently as any other technology. Whether or not one supports or abhors software piracy, its long and innovative history is always interesting, and the speed at which software becomes cracked and distributed after release is always impressive, regardless of how illegal it is. The folks over at Starmedia have put together a neat infographic about the history of software piracy, which includes some interesting numbers, such as the average amount of illegal downloads at any given time, based on company. Check out the full infographic after the break.

Since we're all so used to the Facebook way of social networking, finding your way around Google+ and getting a good feel for what you're actually doing can be a little tough. If you feel like you need a little extra assistance or at least a way to check your answers, we've got some Google+ cheat sheets for you. Simon Laustsen, a dude from Denmark, took the time to write up these charts as a service to humanity and I, on behalf of humanity, thank him. These cheat sheets will definitely help you find your way around Google+ land, but they also seem to indicate at best, how complex Google+ is, and at worst, how un-user-friendly it is right now. Either way, if you hadn't spent the last 5 years with a Facebook IV drip, that interface would probably be a little baffling too. Check out another Laustsen cheat sheet and a handy flowchart from a fellow with the amazing name of Lee Swagerty, after the jump.

Japan isn't buying the Nintendo 3DS for all the seasons one might expect: Poor current library of games, a hefty price tag, or because they're satisfied by other handheld systems. Though we have Japan's reasons, what exactly led to them? Couldn't Nintendo have done something about it? After all, they're in control of their own handheld. After the break, check out the full chart explaining how Nintendo killed interest in the Nintendo 3DS. It only took Nintendo one year to do so -- hey, they're still good at something!