visual data

Scale is a simple concept. From a very early age, children know about big and small, heavy and light, more and less. Extreme scales, however, are another story.

Try to imagine, for example, the size of the universe… or $1 trillion made up entirely of dollar bills. Exactly. Grasping the actual quantities involved in extreme scales can be difficult, which makes managing scale in visualizations an interesting problem.

Here are 12 visualizations that try to show things at extreme scales.

Since the advent of big data, it's been a struggle for some to get a real sense of just how big big data really is. You hear strange terms like "peta," exa" and "yotta"… but what does all that really mean?

When managing massive amounts of data, the scales were talking about can quickly reach astronomical proportions. Recent efforts to quantify big data have produced interesting results. A recent infographic from clearCi is one such effort, outlining the scale of data produced on the Internet each day: 2.5 quintillion bytes of data...

Read further to gain a better understanding of the scale of big data and the potential for future growth...