A long-time reader sent me the following map via twitter: This map tells how the major political groups divide up the European Parliament. I’ll spare you the counting. There are 27 countries, and nine political groups (including the "unaffiliated"). The key chart type is a box of dots. Each country gets its own box. Each box has its own width. What determines the width? If you ask me, it’s the relative span of the countries on the map. For example, the narrow countries like Ireland and Portugal have three dots across while the wider countries like Spain, Germany and Italy have 7, 10 and 8 do ..read more

Washington Post has a fun article about the Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island here. This graphic shows various interesting insights about the annual competition: Joey Chestnut is the recent king of hot-dog eating. Since the late 2000s, he's dominated the competition. He typically chows down over 60 hot dogs in 10 minutes. This is shown by the yellow line. Even at that high level, Chestnut has shown steady growth over time. The legend tells us that the chart shows the results of all the other competitors. It's pretty clear that few have been able to even get close to Chestnut all these ye ..read more

From Kathleen Tyson's twitter account, I came across a graphic showing the destinations of Ukraine's grain exports since 2022 under the auspices of a UN deal. This graphic, made by AFP, uses one of the chart forms that baffle me - the bag of bubbles. The first trouble with a bag of bubbles is the single bubble. The human brain is just not fit for comparing bubble sizes. The self-sufficiency test is my favorite device for demonstrating this weakness. The following is the European section of the above chart, with the data labels removed. How much bigger is Spain than the Netherlands? What's th ..read more

I've been staring at this chart from the Wall Street Journal (link) about U.S. workers working remotely: It's one of those offerings I think on which the designer spent a lot of effort, but ultimately didn't realize that the reader would spend equal if not more effort deciphering. However, the following paragraph lifted straight from the article says exactly what needs to be said: Workers overall spent an average of 5 hours and 25 minutes a day working from home in 2022. That is about two hours more than in 2019, the year before Covid-19 sent millions of workers scrambling to set up home oce ..read more

I have been watching some tennis recently, and noticed that some venues (or broadcasters) have adopted a more streamlined way of showing tiebreak results. (This is an old example I found online. Can't seem to find more recent ones. Will take a screenshot next time I see this on my TV.) For those not familiar with tennis scoring, the match is best-of-three sets (for Grand Slam men's tournaments, it's best-of-five sets); each set is first to six games, but if the scoreline reaches 5-5, a player must win two consecutive games to win the set at 7-5, or else, the scoreline reaches 6-6, and a tiebr ..read more

My friend Ray sent me to a recent blog about tile maps. Typical tile maps use squares or hexagons, although in theory many other shapes will do. Unsurprisingly, the field follows the latest development of math researchers who study the space packing problem. The space packing problem concerns how to pack a space with objects. The study of tesselations is to pack space with one or a few shapes. It was an open question until recently whether there exists an "aperiodic monotile," that is to say, a single shape that can cover space in a non-repeating manner. We all know that we can use squares to ..read more

Maxim Lisnic's recent post should delight my readers (link). Thanks Alek for the tip. Maxim argues that charts "deceive" not merely by using visual tricks but by a variety of other non-visual means. This is also the reasoning behind my Trifecta Checkup framework which looks at a data visualization project holistically. There are lots of charts that are well designed and constructed but fail for other reasons. So I am in agreement with Maxim. He analyzed "10,000 Twitter posts with data visualizations about COVID-19", and found that 84% are "misleading" while only 11% of the 84% "violate common ..read more

Maxim Lisnic's recent post should delight my readers (link). Thanks Alek for the tip. Maxim argues that charts "deceive" not merely by using visual tricks but by a variety of other non-visual means. This is also the reasoning behind my Trifecta Checkup framework which looks at a data visualization project holistically. There are lots of charts that are well designed and constructed but fail for other reasons. So I am in agreement with Maxim. He analyzed "10,000 Twitter posts with data visualizations about COVID-19", and found that 84% are "misleading" while only 11% of the 84% "violate common ..read more

The New York Times printed the following flow chart about water usage of the Colorado River (link). The Colorado River provides water to more than 10% of the U.S. population. About half is used to feed livestock, another quarter for agriculture, which leaves a quarter to residential and other uses. *** This type of flow chart in which the widths of the flows encode relative flow volumes is sometimes called a "sankey diagram."  The most famous sankey diagram of all time may be Minard's depiction of Napoleon's campaign in Russia. In Minard's map, the flows represent movement of troops. The ..read more

Today, I'm returning to those "equal-area histograms" that Andrew wrote about last month. I have two previous posts about this. The first post introduces the concept: in a traditional histogram, the columns have the same bin width while the column heights can represent a variety of metrics, such as counts, relative frequencies (i.e. proportion of the data) and densities; in the equal-area histogram, the columns have varying widths while the area of each column is constant, and determined by the number of bins (columns). Here is a comparison of the two types of histograms. In a second post, I e ..read more