Junk Charts

Mid-week entertainment: Pity grapefruit

Courtesy of Derek.  Hope for the scatter plot?

Original link here. 

Lost in translation

Since English is my second language, I have always been intrigued by automatic translation.  My "Turing" test for translation engines is to feed the translated output back into the same engine in the opposite direction.

Case in point: the first sentence of this post is translated by Babelfish into Italian -

Poiché l'inglese è la mia seconda lingua, sono stato incuriosito sempre tramite la traduzione automatica.

Now, Babelfish translates the above Italian text into English, as:

Since English is my second language, has been made curious always through the automatic translation.

Not that bad, really.

The tag line of this blog is "recycling chartjunk into junk art".  What happens in the other direction?  The answer is on this page!

This entry is inspired by Michael M.

The absolutely meaningless pie chart

Simon J., from New Zealand, sent this in during the recent Rugby Cup but I didn't notice it till now.  As he stated, "they do a good job confirming our views of pie charts!"  Dropkicks is a site about rugby, and other sports popular in the south Pacific.

So here is our light entertainment for Thanksgiving week:

This chart accompanied a very serious statistical analysis to address the monumental question of whether some countries were borrowing strength from foreign players.  If this is your cup of tea, follow this link.

P.S. Today I started the Junk Charts Core Collection, which include books I recommend on graphics, statistics, data mining and related topics (top right).  Some categories are sparse right now as I build out the collection.  If you have favorites, let me know and I will include them.  (I am using the Amazon interface to organize the list; if you buy books, you are buying from them.  I am not becoming a bookstore.)

11/19: Amazon seems to be having problems serving up the images.  I have turned off the image for now.  You can follow the text link above to see the book collection.

11/20: the image is up again

Red-lining by marriage

Tom W., a reader, noticed this map featured on a BBC News page about the UK family.

One can roughly make out the shape of Great Britain so this is some kind of cartogram.
The title announces that this cartogram concerns the "distribution of population". 

In a typical map like this, the redder reds would indicate higher densities of people.  Yet, the article tells us that the population is divided evenly into 85 squares, each containing "roughly half a million people over 18 years old".

Instead, we seem to have 500K widowed people next to 500K re-married people (most of whom prefer the coasts, by the way), etc.  Apparently, the Brits practise a form of red-lining based on marital status!

The S/M/W/D/R labels are also redundant and very distracting; and the white gridlines interfere with our ability to read the grey boundaries.

Source: "The UK family", BBC News.

Clocks and pies

Keith A submitted this graphical idea from the folks at Ikea (via Boing Boing). 

Based on the comments, it seems like some people really like this presentation!

Consider these for amusement:

• Does the "9" on Sunday mean 9 am or 9 pm?  (This chart mixes A.M. and P.M. hours in a totally nonchalant way.)
• If the above is too easy, try the "9" for Saturday!
• Why was "9" displayed on Sunday anyway?  Meanwhile, why wasn't "7" displayed for Saturday?  (How were the hour labels chosen?)
• Why was "Closed" written on the chart while "High", "Mid", and "Low" were put into the legend?
• Since pie charts show proportions, is it possible to describe what proportions were plotted?

Reminds me of this pie chart.

Light entertainment

Christopher P submitted this chart, which is great for our light entertainment series.

Apparently it came from the Netherlands and showed how privileged their citizens are compared to the rest of the world.  It would appear that they need to reverse the color scheme (and font size?) to highlight the privileged.  Comments welcome.

Source: AdsoftheWorld.com

As light as Friday

Our readers are on a roll, here is another great submission.  Margaret can't say it any better:

Thought you might enjoy this infographic from The Guardian newspaper, which appears to describe how humans evolved from penguins

Source: "Prehistoric Penguin", Guardian (UK)

Could-be-light entertainment

It's the heat of the summer so here's another entertaining contribution.  Mike K, a reader, helpfully points us to this chart from The Onion (a satirical paper).

The artist must know some best practices since he/she can get so many things wrong at once.  At least he/she can do math, the percentages do add up to 100.

Histograms are the second most popular chart, that's a surprise!

Source: "America's Most Popular Charts", The Onion, Jan 7, 2007.

Mid-week entertainment: spots

Via Andrew, an amusing chart.

At least they have the good sense of not labeling the smaller bubbles.  I can imagine a scatter plot with  amount of earmarks against population or GDP of each state.

Mid-week entertainment: creme fraiche

From Forsooth! on RSS News, June 2007