It's inelegant and confusing in its presentation — what's the y-axis? — but its significance in the year can't be underestimated.

How Americans use language differently

Business Insider's blockbuster post of 22 maps showing how Americans use language differently was, quite rightfully, a big hit. It's fascinating to see not only how different areas use different words, but how those differences aren't always reflected in the other distinctions presented.

The minute the first bomb exploded in Boston

In the aftermath of the April 15 bomb attack at the Boston Marathon, The New York Times created an interactive showing a photo of people crossing or at the finish line when the explosion occurred, then matching them to interviews conducted later. It was an effective way of presenting a very confusing moment.

The map of the Internet

The Internet map uses data on website size and activity to present a unique way of looking at the internet — as a series of larger and smaller planets around which other bodies and constellations swarm. The depth of its scale is one of its most remarkable features; it allows you to take even the smallest site and see how it compares to the rest of everything online.

Political polarization since 1857

The Brookings Institution's graph of polarization makes an increasingly obvious point even clearer. By tracking how closely members of Congress hewed to the rest of their party over time, you can watch as the body increasingly becomes two clusters of similarly-minded voters.

The world sets a new carbon dioxide record

Earlier this year, the observatory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, for the first time recorded a reading of 400 part-per-million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As The Washington Post put it, it marked the highest level of atmospheric CO 2 in 800,000 years.

So who cares? Well, not enough people, apparently. The increasing presence of the most abundant greenhouse gas suggests that global warming is not going to reverse any time soon. It's 50 ppm higher than what scientists suggest could prevent the worst climate change effects — and it's still going up.

The age of every building in New York City

A programmer in San Francisco merged two sets of data to create one of the most impressive visualizations in recent memory: Every building in the city of New York, colored by the era in which it was built.

America's favorite porn [NSFW]

The adult site Pornhub (which does what it says on the tin) figured out what porn Americans in every state liked the most. That is a more interesting map than the chart above, which shows the states that spent the most time on the site (do you need a hobby, Mississippi?) — but it also contains language that might make some people a bit uncomfortable. Because it is about porn.

The other Earth-like planets we know about

Another great Times interactive, this one shows each of the 150 Earth-like planets that have been discovered by NASA's Kepler mission — their size, their orbits, their temperatures. It's pure data, just representations, but it's still enormously suggestive of what could be.