I wish they would draw those graphs in a more honest way. Now it looks like there's a very high time resolution when in fact there's one data point per year and

I wish they would draw those graphs in a more honest way. Now it looks like there's a very high time resolution when in fact there's one data point per year and they've done some spline fitting to them... It looks like it's the 2001 data point that has a higher value. I'm not sure what happened in 2001, and without knowing if academic or industry jobs are responsible it's hard to guess, but it would be interesting to see if there was a corresponding uptick in funding for physics research grants at that time.