More on heat wave charts

How rich is the NYT heat wave map?  Lets do a quick calculation.

There are roughly 200 cities that showed up on at least one of the three maps.  For each city, they must have the maximum daily temperatures over about 20 days in order to figure out if it should appear on each map.  That would be 4,000 data points without counting other cities that did not reach 100 F during July.

Separately, drawing in state boundaries requires many data points.

Now compare with the donut chart which plotted 12 data points and you see what I mean by "data-rich".  [Correction: In fact, only 10 data points because the total population is just the sum of the individual segments.]