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IMO neither chart gives an intuitive feel for the data. That nice straight line does nothing to emphasize just how rapidly the price dropped over the last 10 ye
by Houshalter 11y ago
IMO neither chart gives an intuitive feel for the data. That nice straight line does nothing to emphasize just how rapidly the price dropped over the last 10 years. That's why I listed a table of the raw numbers instead of a graph. People understand the scale of numbers, and the scale isn't lost by trying to cram it into a chart.
The video used a zooming chart, which solves both problems.
- jacobolus 11y ago> That nice straight line does nothing to emphasize just how rapidly the price dropped over the last 10 years Sure it does. The number goes from 10^12 down to 10^-1, 13 orders of magnitude. You can easily read these off the side or count the number of grid lines crossed. (Whoops, I wrote 11 in my comment before.) If you’re used to reading a log-scaled chart, counting the powers of ten along the vertical axis is perfectly “intuitive”, or at any rate just as “intuitive” as any other way you could write these. In distance scale terms, this is the same as going from nanometers to tens of kilometers. Or in time scale terms from milliseconds to hundreds of years. Numbers with such a big difference in scale are to some extent inherently incomparable: We don’t interact with such a range of scale with most of our naked senses, but need tools to understand and compare such divergent numbers. (Though if you’re hunting for an analogy, comparing volume or mass might be slightly easier, as they scale with length cubed. 13 orders of magnitude gets you from the mass of a human egg cell up to the mass of a tank.)
- aninhumer 11y agoA list of numbers also functions as a slightly messy ascii log graph.