Difference between revisions of "2031: Pie Charts"

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==Explanation==
 
==Explanation==
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Pie Charts graph quantities at "slices" of a circle, like a pie that you cut into slices.  The circle, or Pie, represents the whole sum of the slices, or 100% of the data.  As such, if the data represented by the slices is expressed as percentages, the total of all the slices, by definition, must total 100%.  This comic introduces a new technique for getting around that rule by "warping" the circle to allow more than 100% of the data to exist in the graph.
 
Pie Charts graph quantities at "slices" of a circle, like a pie that you cut into slices.  The circle, or Pie, represents the whole sum of the slices, or 100% of the data.  As such, if the data represented by the slices is expressed as percentages, the total of all the slices, by definition, must total 100%.  This comic introduces a new technique for getting around that rule by "warping" the circle to allow more than 100% of the data to exist in the graph.

Revision as of 15:33, 10 August 2018

Pie Charts
If you can't get your graphing tool to do the shading, just add some clip art of cosmologists discussing the unusual curvature of space in the area.
Title text: If you can't get your graphing tool to do the shading, just add some clip art of cosmologists discussing the unusual curvature of space in the area.

Explanation

Ambox notice.png This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by Fox News - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.
If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Pie Charts graph quantities at "slices" of a circle, like a pie that you cut into slices. The circle, or Pie, represents the whole sum of the slices, or 100% of the data. As such, if the data represented by the slices is expressed as percentages, the total of all the slices, by definition, must total 100%. This comic introduces a new technique for getting around that rule by "warping" the circle to allow more than 100% of the data to exist in the graph.

Transcript

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Discussion

I wonder if it is a coincidence that this came out the same week as Android Pie Zachweix (talk) 15:34, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

Zachweix seems to want to share this link: Fox News --NeatNit (talk) 16:56, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

What's wrong with the link? The link in that page is exactly the type of pie chart to which he is referring Zachweix (talk) 16:57, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
But that's the wrong place to put it. I'm not even sure that it fits anywhere in the article, but it definitely doesn't fit in the "who created this page" part of the "this page is incomplete" tag. --NeatNit (talk) 17:18, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
Wrong just in the sense that it's a temporary place, but I think it adds to the humor of referring to Fox News in the "who created this page" piece. It might be appropriate to add it to a section of real world examples of published pie charts that fail the "mostly 100%" test (aside from trivial rounding errors). -boB (talk) 20:40, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

That's not a hyperbolic plane. It's more like a cone, but with more than 360 degrees instead of less. I don't know the proper term for it. It has curvature zero everywhere except the center, which is a singularity. DanielLC (talk) 19:00, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

Agreed. This has nothing to do with the hyperbolic plane. That image does have some saddle points, and maybe that's where the idea came from. A hyperbolic plane is sort of like a space where every point is a saddle point, not just some points. You can't draw it. EebstertheGreat (talk) 01:26, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Any explanation of the title text? An example of the clipart would be great. 172.68.47.54 00:26, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

I wouldn't take it too literally. Clipart is just easy to use, cheap-looking iconography. I highly doubt there's clipart of cosmologists. You could just put in little stick figures saying like "the curvature of the space here is unusual" and you'd get the same effect. 162.158.62.147 17:08, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

I don't think there is a method to the madness guys, it looks like he just took an editor's warp tool and held it in place. 172.68.59.24 14:35, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

  1. Edward Tufte on Pie Charts

Maybe we should also mention what the dodfather of visualization has to say on pie charts: Edward Tufte gives the pie chart a more succinct and decisive treatment in "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information": A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart; the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them, for then the viewer is asked to compare quantities located in spatial disarray both within and between charts [...] Given their low density and failure to order numbers along a visual dimension, pie charts should never be used. (Tufte: "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information", quoted by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2991062 )

(previous editor did not sign) My favourite missapplied chart is a doughnut chart (which is a piechart without of the center comes from one of Germanys big automobile clubs. They made a campaign about how dangerous it is to use a phone in the car, and part of it was a statistic wher ethey would find out, at various places (red light, motorway, city trafic or country roads) what percentage of people would use their cell phone. They summarized it in a doughnut chart which does not make any sense: https://www.mobil.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/%C3%9Cbersicht-Verkehrsz%C3%A4hlung-2016-Mobil-in-Deutschland-e.V-1-724x1024.jpg Lupo (talk) 16:29, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

It took me a while to figure this one out. I kept thinking it was representing data on two axes, like some sort of combined pie chart/polar area diagram. Like a spie chart, but working in some different, unfathomable way. But no, the radial dimension means nothing, it's just used to help clarify the borders. They took a bunch of percentages of different groups, then put them together in a bar chart, decided they didn't like how the bars looked, and told Excel to turn it into a pie chart. So it added the percentages to get a total, then divided each data point by that, and used the results to make a completely meaningless pie. It's like discovering that skim milk is 0.5% fat, whole milk is 3.5%, and cream is 36% fat: adding them up gives 40, so you make a pie chart where skim milk is 1/80 of a circle, whole milk is 7/80, and cream is 72/80. And then you gave each sector a random radius and shade of green. So, so, so dumb. EebstertheGreat (talk) 02:15, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Come on guys, the blue slice is CLEARLY the intersection of the red and yellow slices. It all makes perfect sense once you realize that. His pie chart isn't wrong, it's just a Venn-Pie-o-gram 172.69.50.4 00:51, 16 August 2018 (UTC)