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The London Transport Museum has put up a collection of 7,000 posters dating back to the 1930′s for users to browse, allowing them to search by artist, theme, date and color (or colour, as the case may be). The collection includes a fair share of inforgraphics from the 1920s and beyond demonstrating the advantages and widespread use of mass transit at the time. As Treeugger notes, the use (or overuse) of infographics today is clearly nothing new.

Source: Think Infographics are New? At Londons Transport Museum, They Date Back to the 1920s via TreeHugger

Flickr user Chris Spurgeon has some great pre-lunar presentation slides from NASA, including this chart on the destructive power of weapons through time. His collection also includes several artist renditions of various stages of a mission to the moon — from lift off, to landing, to return — including this stunner of the Apollo booster before lift-off:

Spurgeon’s NASA ephemera starts here.

Via Information Is Beautiful Awards:

The world’s first open contest to celebrate excellence and beauty in data visualizations, infographics and information art.

Categories include:

• Data Visualization
• Data Journalism
• Infographics
• Computational Art

The site is also running monthly visualization challenges, which launch September 9. Check it all out at The Information is Beautiful Awards.

Infographic master David McCandless, he of Information is Beautiful fame, presents “The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions,” an infogrpahic that attempts to dissect  which distractions take presedence his wandering mind. The work now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art.

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In the vein of digital distractions, Facebook has released a stand-alone app for it’s Messenger service in the latest bid to crush the living soul out of the scourge known as SMS (or text messages to the uninitiated). The messenger app essentially gives users a shortcut to Facebook’s messenger function and allows them to set up group chats. Carriers better sock away some of that SMS coin they’re making now, because the number of messaging services on the market are going to make that “service” irrelevant pretty quickly.

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Digital distraction of the moment: IEEE Spectrum: Inside Technology is like Wired without all the bullshit. Right now the site features articles on Army robots, medical tattoos and dimwitted nanotech terrorists who don’t know what nanotech is. Be sure to check out th geek Life column to find onto how to make your own Arcade game.

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Good news on the environment front: The Energy Information Administration has found that electricity generated from coal is down 6 percent! Bad news: It’s being replaced by the only slightly less dirty natural gas. Worse news: The EIA predicts electricity from coal will jump 25 percent in the next twenty years.

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Finally today, there’s some really good news for Major League Soccer. The league has signed a three-year deal with NBC Universal to bring its games to the Versus network, which will soon be renamed the NBC Sports Network. Versus will air 38 regular season MLS matches, three playoff matches and two US National Team matches, while the NBC Network mothership will air two regular season matches, two playoff matches and two national team matches. The new contract will essentially replace the matches currently found on Fox Soccer Channel. ESPN will continue to show its “MLS Game of the Week” package of MLS matches. The deal instantly doubles the exposure for MLS on cable, going from 40 million households on FSC to 80 million on the NBC Sports.

Also, the reborn Freddy Adu — Freddy 2.0 let’s call him — is being reunited with his first professional coach Piotr Nowak. Adu will sign for Philadelphia Union today. I’m psyched for Freddy. I’ve always appreciated his play and felt like the expectations put on his shoulder were too great. Seeing Freddy 2.0 emerge in the Gold Cup was one of the few bright spots for the US and I’m rooting for him in Philly — except when he plays DC United.

Writing in Scientific American’s Observations blog, Jen Christiansen has a great piece on infographics, perceived measurements and designer choice. The basic premise of the article is that designers can manipulate the way data looks to the reader by choosing different forms to represent the data. Circles, are more difficult to read than bar graphs or line charts, Christiansen contends, but may not be as visually interesting to the reader. Proportional circles can be more interesting, but can also be manipulated.

“Chart makers,” she says, “can control exact measurements. But what about perceived measurements?”

In the end she decides that creating charts that fit your audience — straight forward for doctors, visually interesting for readers — is the way to go. I tend to agree, but I  think combining symbols with visual measurement and actual data provides the most interest to the reader. An  example would be this infographic on taxes from Good magazine:

These graphics can tend to be a bit crowded, but if the designer and editor can keep the information focused, they provide the most insight. And because the figures are actually listed, these graphics are not prone to manipulation.