Information is Bullshitable. Visualising data is all the rage these days, everyone is at it, invading the web and print with colourful ways to make numbers mean something.
But some people are clearly faking it. Engadget have these nice colourful graphs down the side of the page, but take a closer look and the size/shape/overlapping elements bare no relation to the data - it’s just BULL. A list with boxes whos size is determined by the amount of copy. There is no accurate appliance of scale, so its pointless and misleading.
26 != 4,
(179 -122) != (112-108)
They have since introduced a timeline based graph that does this in an actual real data way that sometimes (when the fairy’s decide it appropriate) appears in the main body, but its not that much more informative - other than what the most commented on. But still it shows some scale and meaning.
