Here's a mesmerizing piece of data porn that is sure to keep you staring at your screen. Randall Munroe of xkcd uses a series of GIFs to compare the frequencies of events from births, deaths, and heartbeats to the eruption of Old Faithful to someone in Denver ordering a pizza.
Note: The animation up top is just there to give you an idea of what the comic looks like and is not itself a representation of the frequencies. Go to xkcd to see the comic in all its glory.
Munroe's latest comic, "Frequency," is made up of a series of looped GIFs that show the average frequency of each individual event. Consequently, this doesn't factor in time of day (for events like "Someone in Phoenix buys new shoes" and "Someone has sex in North Dakota"), but in some places, the averages are themselves quite illuminating.
There are the basics:
Some interesting comparisons:
And others that are rather specific:
On the hover text, Munroe said that he wanted to include a GIF for the pitch-drop experiment, but had trouble making a GIF set on a decades-long loop.
Frequency [xkcd]
onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Hypnotic xkcd animation compares the frequency of various events