I guess I should preface this by saying that I'm not being particularly trained in this; I've skimmed Tufte, but that's it. To me, the interesting thing about

I guess I should preface this by saying that I'm not being particularly trained in this; I've skimmed Tufte, but that's it. To me, the interesting thing about it is that it captures both the utilization of two dimensions of the paper/screen and the representation of a one-dimensional quantity. Humans are notoriously bad at intuitively translating among quantities of different dimensions, e.g. translating the area of a circle to a population.