See­ing Chris Jor­dan’s TED talk (embed­ded below) just made me remem­ber his great work in visu­al­iz­ing large num­bers of things going wrong.

About his lat­est project, Run­ning the num­bers, he writes:

Run­ning the Num­bers looks at con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can cul­ture through the aus­tere lens of sta­tis­tics. Each image por­trays a spe­cific quan­tity of some­thing: fif­teen mil­lion sheets of office paper (five min­utes of paper use); 106,000 alu­minum cans (thirty sec­onds of can con­sump­tion) and so on. My hope is that images rep­re­sent­ing these quan­ti­ties might have a dif­fer­ent effect than the raw num­bers alone, such as we find daily in arti­cles and books. Sta­tis­tics can feel abstract and anes­thetiz­ing, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to con­nect with and make mean­ing of 3.6 mil­lion SUV sales in one year, for exam­ple, or 2.3 mil­lion Amer­i­cans in prison, or 32,000 breast aug­men­ta­tion surg­eries in the U.S. every month. This project visu­ally exam­ines these vast and bizarre mea­sures of our soci­ety, in large intri­cately detailed prints assem­bled from thou­sands of smaller pho­tographs. Employ­ing themes such as the near ver­sus the far, and the one ver­sus the many, I hope to raise some ques­tions about the role of the indi­vid­ual in a soci­ety that is increas­ingly enor­mous, incom­pre­hen­si­ble, and overwhelming.