From Information Design Watch comes a link to a graph showing that the number of zombie movies in the US parallels war and social upheavals.

Makes as much sense as anything. Now a media talking head can look at it and conclude that since spikes in zombie movies precede peace or betterment of social upheaval, the zombie movies must be the curative force. “After this, therefore because of this” (post hoc ergo propter hoc) is the only logic the mass media seem to use.

This is much reduced; take a look at the original where you will also find a long list of the movies they used for the chart, going back to a 1910 version of Frankenstein.

The site of the zombie movie graph, 1o9 Strung out on science fiction, labels it with the category “Chart Porn”. I took this term to be some sort of a spin-off from Edward Tufte’s “chartjunk” (= irrelevant, distorting, or distracting material added to charts) but a search on the term told me that it may mean something different. Another blog that deals with charts, themessthatgreenspanmade, tells us

In case you were wondering, the reason this post is titled “chart porn” (a term shamelessly stolen from Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture) is that if you open the charts with a Windows Internet Explorer browser using Windows Vista, you get multiple windows opening on a somewhat random basis (at least, that’s what happened to me).

It reminded me of six or eight years ago when a co-worker would come by and say, “Type in http://www.whitehouse.com” and up would come some porn site that proceeded to open more and more windows faster than you could close them … and then the boss would walk by.

I took a look at chart porn on The Big Picture, where indeed the term is used frequently, but couldn’t decide exactly what it meant. Most of the chart porn posted there, from major media, is what one could call “tarted up”, that is for sure. Looks like a good site for skeptical commentary on current economic authorities and their continually readjusted b.s.

Recent Zombie Appearance in Real Life

These members of an event called “SF Zombie Mob 2007” got a little confused and evidently tried sucking brains out of iMacs––no gratitude, don’t they remember how Apple freed them in the 1984 Mac commercial? Meanwhile the Apple Store employees jostled for position to take the best photos; other stores had no sense of humor and shut the zombies out, according to the source.