“Follow the Money” is a video summarizing the results from the
project by Northwestern University grad students Daniel Grady
and Christian Thiemann. Using data from the website Where’s
George?, they have been able to track the movement of U.S. paper
currency. What can you learn from this? That there are natural
borders within the U.S. that don’t necessarily follow state
borders, and it can also be used to predict the spread of
disease because it maps movement of people within the U.S. From
Maria Popova on BrainPickings.org: This may sound like dry
statistical uninterestingness, but the video visualization of
the results is rather eye-opening, revealing how money — not
state borders, not political maps, not ethnic clusters — is the
real cartographer drawing our cultural geography. The project
was a winner at the 2009 Visualization Challenge sponsored by
the National Science Foundation and AAA. From Manuel Lima on
VisualComplexity.com: Some places, such as Los Angeles,
California, have many bills passing throug