Top 10 Best Charts OF 2013

The 345 days that have passed in 2013 (94.5 percent of the year) have, necessarily, been the 345 most-technologically advanced in human history, meaning that this year's crop of interactive infographics can be considered among the best the world has ever seen. Here, the best of the best.

1. The PRISM Slides

On June 6, The Washington Post published the first in an ongoing series of files leaked from Edward Snowden to the paper. Included among them was this, apparently created either in late 2012 or early 2013, demonstrating how the world's most popular websites were collaborating with the NSA to facilitate surveillance of targets.

2. 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.

3. 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 TheWashington Post put it, it marked the highest level of atmospheric CO₂ in 800,000 years.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. How much various people make in one minute

Speaking of professional basketball players, CNN Money's interactive video shows the relative earnings of various people and occupations over the course of 60 seconds. If you are not Kobe Bryant, this will be humbling.

7. The web's love affair with charts

This is how often an increasingly chart-obsessed internet has created postsdedicated to proving something "in one chart." We prefer long articles with multiple charts, ourselves

8. The GOP civil war, mapped

Another one we had to update multiple times. In the wake of the government shutdown, we created this map of the two sides in the increasingly hostile civil war in the Republican Party.

9. Wired's breakdown of Food Network recipes

Wired magazine decided it wanted to run an experiment in scraping content off the web. So Dylan Fried created a script that pulled in information from Food Network's 49,000-plus recipes, building a variety of beautiful graphics with the resulting data.

10.

All of the Obama conspiracy theories

We created this graphic (zoomed-in version here) to try and categorize the various theories about why or how President Obama was purportedly involved in scandals. The premise at the heart of each? That Obama hates America.