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On the first graph, that last label makes me distrust the entire article.
by theandrewbailey 6y ago
On the first graph, that last label makes me distrust the entire article.
- bichiliad 6y agoCan you clarify which graph and which label? The first graph I see is the number of new cases in Ireland over the past year, and I don't see any labels that seem suspicious.
- brundolf 6y agoThe final label on the x-axis says January 2, 2020 instead of 2021. I assume the GP was being partly facetious
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoWhat "last label" are you referring to?
- _nothing 6y agoWhat about it? The fact that it says January 2 while the caption says it's through January 7? I'm assuming that's just because the labels are generated at 11 day increments and Jan 7 isn't 11 days away from the 2nd.
- kissickas 6y agoIt says 2020 instead of 2021.
- _nothing 6y agoAh, that's definitely strange. A bug in the graphing software, maybe?
- the_local_host 6y agoI think it's more likely that there were one or more manual steps in generating the graph, and someone just kept going with 2020 instead of typing 2021. The author should explain what went wrong there if this reaches their attention.
- thotsBgone 6y agoOr it's a typo, and who cares?
- majormajor 6y agoMaybe a date formatting problem? I saw something similar in the past due to passing the wrong format string, and Jan 2 was the Saturday of the "last week" of 2020, before the "first week" of 2021?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- quesera 6y agoPossibly related: 02 Jan 2021 is a part of 2020 week 53. I've noticed a few labeling issues caused by this calendar quirk.
- cperciva 6y agoYep, that's due to someone calling strftime(buf, buflen, "%b %e, %G", &tm); when they should be calling strftime(buf, buflen, "%b %e, %Y", &tm);
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cesarb 6y agoIn Java it's worse, for SimpleDateFormat (the most often used date formatter in Java) YYYY (uppercase) is "week year" (strftime %G), the correct way to get the year (strftime %Y) is yyyy (lowercase). It's very easy to get it wrong; the correct way to get the full ISO timestamp is "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSXXX".
- meritt 6y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=ireland+covid+cases https://www.google.com/search?q=ireland+covid+cases Same graph. Happy?
- icedchai 6y agoIt kind of makes sense. People are going to think of 2020 and 2021 as one long year. Maybe 2022, too.
- Analemma_ 6y agoWe really need to get away from this meme of "I found a typo, therefore I'm going to discard the article". In theory it's good epistemic hygiene, but in practice it almost always cashes out to, "I'm going to engage in extremely selective sophistry so I can ignore information that doesn't agree with my existing worldview."
- nickspag 6y agoIt's an ISO 8601 vs Gregorian calendar peculiarity, not inaccuracy. See the date section here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601, another example of a week 53.