3 ms·

You make a good point about temperature, but I stand by my critique because temperature is a quantity and these graphs are all plotting percentages, which shoul

by chancho 16y ago

You make a good point about temperature, but I stand by my critique because temperature is a quantity and these graphs are all plotting percentages, which should always been graphed from 0% to 100%. If your percentages are all within the range of 99% to 100% then you shouldn't be plotting them as percentages, and if you did then your graph would effectively convey the point that there really isn't a lot of variation among the data. I'll reiterate my opinion that the purpose of a bar chart is not to give relative orderings (if you want that just list them in order) but to illustrate the magnitude of the differences between data points with respect to the natural range of the data. Percentages have a natural range of values: 0-100. Temperature does not have a natural fixed range, unless we're talking about the weather which is incidentally why I like Fahrenheit.

jey 16y ago
> with respect to the natural range of the data. There's hardly ever such a thing as a "natural" range. Even if there is, as in the case of percentages, what's the point on wasting half of the graph on variation that has a mundane explanation? Like if you're plotting popularity of religions in the USA, do you really want to spend about 90% of the vertical space of your graph on Christianity? The point a graph is to shed light on the part of the variation that doesn't have a mundane explanation -- i.e., the interesting part. What you should be complaining about are graphs that don't have labels, as used by some drug companies in advertisements[1]. Maybe that "graphs without labels are bad" meme has maybe been misinterpreted here. 1. In the USA drug companies are permitted to advertise prescription medications.
- chancho 16y ago
  > There's hardly ever such a thing as a "natural" range. Another good point, but if bar A is twice as tall as bar B then variable A's value had better be twice that of B's. Anything else is precisely the kind of shady drug-company data manipulation that you're so concerned about. If vertical space is at an absolute premium (not the case here IMO) and you have to cut the bars then draw little cut marks on them to let the reader know that the bottoms aren't at zero. (Of course I'm talking about cases when there is a familar concept of zero, like percentages or money or population, not temperature. And if the value goes negative then the bar grows down, cf. any recent chart of US economic indicators.) If you don't base your bars at zero then your bar chart exaggerates differences between data because the reader looks at two bars and compares their relative sizes the same way he looks at the levels in two glasses of beer to compare their volumes.
  - jey 16y ago
    You're contradicting yourself again. If there's no "natural" scale, how do we decide when something is "twice" as big as another? How do you decide which scale is "natural" anyway? And it's still pointless to spend most of the vertical space on redundant mundane information when it could be used to actually show the relationships between the groups being graphed. Overall you're introducing ad hoc and nebulous special cases that are poorly justified, like the notion of a 'familiar zero'. The real solution is to learn to properly read graphs, and to ignore graphs that omit labels. > like percentages or money or population If you're plotting the net worth of the top 10 richest people on Earth, do you really want to use a miles-long graph or drown out all the actual information by just showing that the top 10 richest are within one pixel-worth-of-dollars of each other?
    - chancho 16y ago
      We decide X is twice as big as Y when X = 2Y. This is not up for debate. And re. net worth: That's exactly how I would plot it if I wanted to make a point about income inequality. Carlos Slim is worth US$53 billion. The per capita income in Mexico is US$13,500 and in the US it's $46,000. (Yes I know this is comparing yearly income to lifetime accumulated wealth but ignore that for a moment.) If I give the average Mexican 1 pixel and the average American 3 or 4 pixels, then Mr. Slim gets almost 4 million pixels. At 96 dpi that's roughly 3400 feet. Your monitor would have to be (much) taller than the Burj Khalifa (2717 ft) to accurately show this bar char. This is the picture I would draw if I wanted to make a point about income inequality, a person sitting next to the Burj Khalifa with a ridiculous laptop in is lap that towers over it. If I just wanted to rank the top 10, I would just list them in order like they do in Forbes.
      - jey 16y ago
        > We decide X is twice as big as Y when X = 2Y. This is not up for debate. Yes, but doubled relative to what? e.g. what's twice as big as 50F? Is it 100F or 559.67F? The first one is relative to 0F and the second is relative to absolute zero (50F is 283.15K). Your point about how to illustrate income inequality is fine, but that's not at all what I was talking about: I was talking about a graph that depicts the distribution of net worth amongst the top 10 richest people. No, a rank order doesn't fully convey that. A table of numbers is hard to understand in a holistic way.

by chancho 16y ago

jey 16y ago

> with respect to the natural range of the data. There's hardly ever such a thing as a "natural" range. Even if there is, as in the case of percentages, what's the point on wasting half of the graph on variation that has a mundane explanation? Like if you're plotting popularity of religions in the USA, do you really want to spend about 90% of the vertical space of your graph on Christianity? The point a graph is to shed light on the part of the variation that doesn't have a mundane explanation -- i.e., the interesting part. What you should be complaining about are graphs that don't have labels, as used by some drug companies in advertisements[1]. Maybe that "graphs without labels are bad" meme has maybe been misinterpreted here. 1. In the USA drug companies are permitted to advertise prescription medications.

chancho 16y ago
> There's hardly ever such a thing as a "natural" range. Another good point, but if bar A is twice as tall as bar B then variable A's value had better be twice that of B's. Anything else is precisely the kind of shady drug-company data manipulation that you're so concerned about. If vertical space is at an absolute premium (not the case here IMO) and you have to cut the bars then draw little cut marks on them to let the reader know that the bottoms aren't at zero. (Of course I'm talking about cases when there is a familar concept of zero, like percentages or money or population, not temperature. And if the value goes negative then the bar grows down, cf. any recent chart of US economic indicators.) If you don't base your bars at zero then your bar chart exaggerates differences between data because the reader looks at two bars and compares their relative sizes the same way he looks at the levels in two glasses of beer to compare their volumes.
- jey 16y ago
  You're contradicting yourself again. If there's no "natural" scale, how do we decide when something is "twice" as big as another? How do you decide which scale is "natural" anyway? And it's still pointless to spend most of the vertical space on redundant mundane information when it could be used to actually show the relationships between the groups being graphed. Overall you're introducing ad hoc and nebulous special cases that are poorly justified, like the notion of a 'familiar zero'. The real solution is to learn to properly read graphs, and to ignore graphs that omit labels. > like percentages or money or population If you're plotting the net worth of the top 10 richest people on Earth, do you really want to use a miles-long graph or drown out all the actual information by just showing that the top 10 richest are within one pixel-worth-of-dollars of each other?
  - chancho 16y ago
    We decide X is twice as big as Y when X = 2Y. This is not up for debate. And re. net worth: That's exactly how I would plot it if I wanted to make a point about income inequality. Carlos Slim is worth US$53 billion. The per capita income in Mexico is US$13,500 and in the US it's $46,000. (Yes I know this is comparing yearly income to lifetime accumulated wealth but ignore that for a moment.) If I give the average Mexican 1 pixel and the average American 3 or 4 pixels, then Mr. Slim gets almost 4 million pixels. At 96 dpi that's roughly 3400 feet. Your monitor would have to be (much) taller than the Burj Khalifa (2717 ft) to accurately show this bar char. This is the picture I would draw if I wanted to make a point about income inequality, a person sitting next to the Burj Khalifa with a ridiculous laptop in is lap that towers over it. If I just wanted to rank the top 10, I would just list them in order like they do in Forbes.
    - jey 16y ago
      > We decide X is twice as big as Y when X = 2Y. This is not up for debate. Yes, but doubled relative to what? e.g. what's twice as big as 50F? Is it 100F or 559.67F? The first one is relative to 0F and the second is relative to absolute zero (50F is 283.15K). Your point about how to illustrate income inequality is fine, but that's not at all what I was talking about: I was talking about a graph that depicts the distribution of net worth amongst the top 10 richest people. No, a rank order doesn't fully convey that. A table of numbers is hard to understand in a holistic way.