world population and growth as a bar chart
Courtesy Ariana Montanez
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Comparing wildly disparate numbers is a perpetual challenge in visualization, but Ariana Montanez added a twist to a traditional bar chart to accomplish just that. Each bar on the left is the population of a country in 2000, with the change in that figure by 2010 on the right. The illusion of three-dimensionality allows the 1.4 billion people in China to appear side-by-side with the 32,000 residents of the Liechtenstein.

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This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of Popular Science, under the title, “Dawn of the Data Age.”

world population and growth as a bar chart

World Population