Mid-week entertainment: Pity grapefruit

Courtesy of Derek.  Hope for the scatter plot?

Original link here. 

Comments

[Doug]

You left out the best part of xckd comics: the tooltip/mouseover! Go to the original and leave the cursor over the plot for a couple of seconds.

-=[doug]=-

[derek]

As I said in email, if a cartoonist thinks his audience can handle a scatter graph, what's the New York Times got against its readers' intelligence?

[Stephen]

I agree with the sentiment derek, but xkcd is aimed firmly at, for want of a better word, geeks.

To understand it all you need to be quite comfortable with unix commands (sudo make me a sandwich) as well as quite a bit about coding (stand back, I know regular expressions).

Nonetheless, it is a constant source of irritation to me that scatter plots are perceived as "too hard" for the uninitiated.

[Kaiser]

Doug: I have a problem. When I mouse over, the text is cut off on the right.

Derek: I was going to use the line "frequent contributor" but then I wasn't sure it is the same Derek. Now I know :)

[Nin Guino]

It reads:

"Coconuts are so far down to the left they couldn't be fit on the chart. Ever spent half an hour trying to open a coconut with a rock? Fuck coconuts"

[mike]

I always found the correlation a bit suspect. I wonder how he would rate fruit that was already peeled for him?

[derek]

A labelled scatter graph doesn't have to be about showing strong correlations (which would be represented by a dense band of points near a curve, and empty space far from the curve. It can be about a 2D distribution, with entities completely filling the space.

Also, I don't think you can find a humorous expression of strong opinions "suspect": de gustibus non disputandum est, in this case literally :-)

[Sean Wallace]

The artist's "blag" about this comic:

FRUIT OPINIONS!

Holy crap. This strip’s been up for 800 seconds and it’s already the most controversial thing I’ve ever written, beating out comics about cunnilingus, the Obama endorsement, and my making 4chan tiny on the map of the internet. It turns out everyone and their mother has a fruit opinion, and every one of those opinions is now in my inbox.

Just remember to keep some perspective. If you think watermelon is delicious, and I think it’s only so-so, the important thing is that we each find something we like. Who’s to say whose taste is right?

I am. You are wrong; watermelon is overrated.

Also, I have never liked cantaloupe. It brings down otherwise tasty fruit salads. There, I said it.

At http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/02/25/fruit-opinions/