[MLUG - DISCUSSION] chart junk

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I like Tufte's criticism of modern quantitative graphics.  Check this out
from the library someday:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

Anyway, I just thought of it after seeing this graph:

http://aaja.org/logs/last-24-months/MONTHLY_line.png

Yikes!  It should be a line graph, but they've added a meaningless third
dimension.  This makes it very hard to guesstimate things like "how many
page requests for May 2003?" -- a simple line graph would be *more*
informative than this 3-d thing.  The choice of values on the ordinate is
also hard to defend.

Some of Tufte's ideas are presented here:

http://lilt.ilstu.edu/gmklass/pos138/datadisplay/badchart.htm

I don't mean to pick on any of you -- this graph was generated by a
program that was not written by anyone on this list.  I think it is good
to remember when writing programs that sometimes a simpler graph can be
more useful.

Mike
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