Coffee Spoons – Page 16 – Examining How We Measure Our Lives

The Terrible No Good Chart About Gas Prices

Saw this graphic on the Twitter the other day from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), or the D Triple C or D Trip C. The context was that earlier in the day Matt Yglesias posted a clearly tongue-in-cheek chart about how after signing the infrastructure bill, President Biden had single-handedly fixed inflation and gas prices were heading down.

Of course, anyone with a brain knows this isn’t true. The President of the United States cannot control the price of petrol. Because, you know, market economy. The underlying problem of high demand and low supply was, of course, not solved by the infrastructure bill. But lots of people complain on the telly or the internets about Biden not doing more about inflation, but, you know, not really within the wheelhouse.

Anyway, this chart in particular does not bother me. Because Yglesias knows—and most of his audience knows—it is not meant to be taken seriously. It is really just a joke.

But emphasis most of his audience.

Because the DCCC later posted this graphic with the accompanying text “Thanks, Joe Biden”.

Oh boy.

Clearly they didn’t get the memo about the original being a joke.

The entire scale of the chart is 4¢. I cannot even recall the last time I had to use the glyph ¢ we’re talking so small a scale. The change in the the three week period amounts to a decline of 2¢.

And now you get the joke of the post. Ask me my 2¢ about the chart…

Now look closely at that y-axis. You’ll also note that we are carrying it all the way out to the third decimal point. Now, it’s true that some petrol stations will have a wee little nine trailing just after the two digits to the right of the decimal. Sometimes you might see a 9/10. As was explained to me in school that’s because people will buy something if it looks even a fraction of a cent cheaper. Thing 99¢—getting the use out of this glyph today—versus $1. Makes all the difference. So back when petrol was cheap (inflation stories come round and round), 0.899 looked better than 0.90. But now that it’s routinely well over a few dollars, that 9/10 is a laughable percentage of the total price.

So, yes, we do present petrol prices to three decimals in the environmental design space. But think to yourself, when have you ever aloud repeated a price to the third decimal point? You probably haven’t. And so this chart probably shouldn’t be using that granular a level of specificity.

The other underlying problem, jokes aside, is that the chart spends all that horizontal space looking at three data points. Three. If the data were showing the daily price, not the weekly average, we’d have 21 days worth of data, and that—scale notwithstanding—would be worthy of charting. My basic rule is that if it’s five or six data points, you can use a table unless there is a contextual or design reason for doing so. Say, for example, you’re doing a series of small multiples for a time series of objects in a category. For all but a few categories you have dozens of data points, but just a few have really spotty observations. In those cases, plot the three or four numbers. But in this case, just don’t.

Instead this kind of graphic is best presented as a factette, a big old number, preferably in a narrow or condensed width. Because a 2¢ decline over a three-week period is also not terribly newsworthy. (Unless your story is how prices haven’t changed much over the last three weeks.)

This also points to how the original chart misses the context of time. Granted, a lot can happen in three weeks, but a 2¢ shift is not massive. Give those three weeks their proper place in time, however, and you can see just how little movement that truly is. Cue my own quickly whipped up charts.

In the first chart you can begin to see how the change, during the course of the last nearly two years, is not significant. And in the second you can see that things really are not that bad compared to where they were back during the lead up to the Great Recession and then in the recovery that followed. (Aww, look at back in the early oughts when prices averaged just over a $1/gallon. I can still remember filling up my minivan for prices like 99¢.)

If the designer wants to make a point that perhaps we’re reaching the peak prices during this time period, sure. Because a two-week decline in prices could well be the beginning of that. But, to show that you also need to show the context of the time before that.

But once again, the President of the United States cannot much affect the price of petrol short of releasing the strategic reserve, which as its name implies, is meant for strategic purposes in case of national emergency. And high consumer prices are not a strategic national emergency on the scale of, say, a crippling storm impacting the refineries in the Gulf or an earthquake destroying pipelines in Alaska or an invasion or stifling blockade of overseas imports.

At the end of the day, this was just a terrible, terrible chart. And I think it speaks to a degree of chart illiteracy that I see creeping up in society at large. Not that it wasn’t there in the past—get off my lawn, kids—but seems more ever present these days. I don’t know if that’s because of the amplification effect of things like the Twitter or just a decline in education and critical thinking. But those are topics for another day.

This chart fails on so many levels. The concept is bad, i.e. neither Biden nor Trump nor their predecessors nor their successors—unless we adopt a planned economy, am I right, comrades?—can directly affect petrol prices. Prices are governed by larger market forces that boil down to supply and demand.

But also, the sheer design is bad. Don’t use a chart of three data points. Don’t stretch out the x-axis. Don’t use decimal points to a point where they’re unrecognisable.

In the meantime, charts like this? Don’t do them, kids.

Credit for the first original goes to FRED, whose chart Matt Yglesias used.

Credit for the second goes to the DCCC graphics department.

Oh, and because I used Federal Reserve data for the charts, and because I work there, I should add the views and opinions are my own and don’t represent those of my employer.

Be Kind to Retail and Service Industry Folks

For many years I worked in retail and food service, and for a subset of those years I worked the Christmas shopping season. Black Fridays were indeed awful. And so this graphic that I alluded to last week from Indexed felt appropriate to share. I have no idea how busy in-person retail work will be this year as we begin to near the light at the end of this Covid tunnel, but just keep those in retail and other service industries in mind.

I’ll just add Black Friday in November sucks.

Credit for the piece goes to Jessica Hagy.

Those Are Some Heavy Balls

Unfortunately, I don’t subscribe to Business Insider, but I saw this graphic on the Twitter and felt the need to share it. Primarily because baseball will almost certainly stop at midnight when the owners of the teams will impose a lockout (as opposed to players going on strike). And with that baseball will be on hold until the two parties resolve their current labour issues.

And at present that seems like it could take quite some time.

So on the eve of the lockout Bradford William Davis tweeted a link to an article he wrote, alas no subscription as aforementioned, but he did share one of the graphics therein.

We have a basic dot plot charting the weight of the centre of baseballs, sorted by the month of game from which they were pulled.

The designer made a few interesting choices here. First, typographically, we have a few decisions around the type. I would have loved to have seen a bit of editing or design to eliminate the widow at the end of the graphic’s subtitle, that bit that just says “(blue)”. Do the descriptors in parentheses even need to be there when the designer included a legend immediately below? I find that one word incredibly distracting.

On the other hand, the designer chose to use a thin white outline around the text on the plot. Normally I’d really like this choice, because it can reduce some of the issues around legibility when lines intersect text, especially when they are the same colour. Here, however, the backgrounds are not white. I would have tried, for the top, using that light blue instead of white as the stroke for the outside of the letters. And on the bottom I would have tried the light pink. That would probably achieve the presumed desired effect of reducing the visual interference unintentionally created by the white. I also would have moved the top label up so it didn’t sit overlay the top dot.

As far as the dot plot itself goes, that works fine. I wonder if some transparency in the dots would have emphasised how many dots sit atop each other. Or maybe they could have clustered, but when overlapping moved horizontally off the vertical axis.

Overall this was a really nice graphic with which to end this half of the baseball off season. Hopefully the lockout doesn’t last too long.

Credit for the piece goes to Taylor Tyson.

There’s Water in the Basement

If you didn’t know, climate change is real and it threatens much of our current way of life. I don’t go so far as to say it threatens the extinction of mankind, because there are nearly seven billion of us and to wipe out every living soul would be a tall order. But, it could wipe out parts of our history.

If you didn’t know, the city of Washington in the District of Columbia was built on a swamp. Except, actually, it wasn’t. Most of the city was built on higher ground along the riverbank of the Potomac. True, there are low-lying areas affected by the tides and high water, such as the National Mall, but places like the Capitol were purposefully placed on high ground.

And that gets us to this article in the Washington Post. It takes a look at the impact of rising waters and flash flooding on the National Mall, home to some of the preeminent American museums. The article uses a map to show just how the museums are threatened by extreme weather events that will only increase in frequency as climate change ramps up.

Note the Capitol and the White House will both be fine.

The designer used colour to denote museums by their risk of flooding, and sadly there are several. But as the article describes, there are few short-term fixes that we can undertake to mitigate the risk of damage to the collections.

Credit for the piece goes to Taylor Johnston.

Out of Office

One of the pieces I flagged a month or so ago around the time of my trip to the Berkshires was this one by Indexed. There was a time in my life when I would receive notifications for e-mail, particularly work e-mail, on my mobile. As a manager, I tend to think that’s…not great. There becomes no separation between work and personal life and for many, if not most, people that separation is critical to maintaining a healthy balance of both.

Consequently on my trip I barely even checked my personal e-mail, because I wanted to disconnect nearly entirely from that part of my life. And so this graphic made a lot of sense. Even if I was far from being “off the grid” I was very much “off the clock”.

I don’t think I could ever be off the grid, though…

And for my American friends, it’s time to go off the clock as the Thanksgiving holiday begins for many of us this afternoon or evening. But just remember that many will still be working and serving. More on that next week.

Credit for the piece goes to Jessica Hagy.

Hey Boo Boo

When I was in the Berkshires, one thing I noticed was signs about bears. Bear crossing. Don’t feed the bears. Be beary careful. Okay, not so much the latter. But it was nonetheless odd to a city dweller like myself where I just need to be wary of giant rats.

Less than a month later, I read an article in the Boston Globe about how the black bear population in Massachusetts is expanding from the western and central portions of the state to those in the east.

The graphic in the article actually comes from the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, so credit goes to them, but it shows the existing range and the black bears’ new range.

I understand the inclusion of the highways in red, green, and black, but I wish they had some even simple labelling. In the article they mention a few highways, but my familiarity with the highway system in Massachusetts is not great. Also, because the designer used thin black lines to demarcate the towns, one could think that the black lines, especially out west, represent counties or other larger political geography units.

Credit for the piece goes to the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.

How Far You Won’t Go

Housekeeping first, as you may have noticed, I haven’t been publishing as much lately. That’s because I’ve been on holiday. After a tremendously busy year, I need to use up all the time I didn’t spend on holiday. Consequently, I’m only going to be posting a handful or so more times before the end of the year. The plan is to return in early January to my regular posting schedule. For this week that means the next few days before I’m off for American Thanksgiving.

But on with the show.

One of the things I haven’t been doing too much of is travelling. There are many reasons for this, but one is that air travel in the United States has, of late, been, shall we say unreliable. Hundreds if not thousands of flight cancellations, sometimes with no obvious cause. And in one notorious case, Southwest claimed inclement weather cancelled flights in Florida, but it was the only airline to cancel significant numbers of flights. In other words, it wasn’t the weather.

The Wall Street Journal recently posted an article that explored the issue, doing so via a great example. It followed the literal path of one Southwest aircraft over one long holiday weekend. The screenshot below captures two of the graphics with a wee bit of text between.

What’s nice about the graphics’ design is how they use small multiples and consistent colours. The intended route is always on the left and what actually happened is on the right. Red and blue colours depict those throughout.

The only thing I quibble with is the embedded HTML text. Sometimes the page loads fine for me, other times it looks like it did this morning for this screenshot. Note how for some city labels the final letters get dropped to a second line, e.g. the “o” in Chicago or the “e” in Baltimore.

This is far from a deal breaker on this being a good graphic, but I find it mildly annoying, especially when in situations like the bottom left Orlando, there’s no obvious reason as to why, because the little airplane departure icon sits atop the final letter.

I understand the idea behind using native HTML text in graphics, but when things like this happen, I wonder if it wouldn’t simply be better to include the text as part of the graphic and avoid these potential mishaps altogether.

Credit for the piece goes to Emma Brown.

Data Analysis and Baseball

First, a brief housekeeping thing for my regular readers. It is that time of year, as I alluded to last week, where I’ll be taking quite a bit of holiday. This week that includes yesterday and Friday, so no posts. After that, unless I have the entire week off—and I do on a few occasions—it’s looking like three days’ worth of posts, Monday through Wednesday. Then I’m enjoying a number of four day weekends.

But to start this week, we have Game 6 of the World Series tonight between the Atlanta Braves and the Houston Astros. That should the Braves vs. the Red Sox, but whatever. If you want your bats to fall asleep, you deserve to lose. Anyways, rest in peace, RemDawg.

Yesterday the BBC posted an article about baseball, which is first weird because baseball is far more an American sport that’s played in relatively few countries. Here’s looking at you Japanese gold medal for the sport earlier this year. Nevertheless I fully enjoyed having a baseball article on the BBC homepage. But beyond that, it also combined baseball with history and with data and its visualisation.

You might say they hit the sweet spot of the bat.

There really isn’t much in the way of graphics, because we’re talking about work from the 1910s. So I recommend reading the piece, it’s fascinating. Overall it describes how Hugh Fullerton, a sportswriter, determined that the 1919 White Sox had thrown the World Series.

Fullerton, long story short, loved baseball and he loved data. He went to games well before the era of Statcast and recorded everything from pitches to hits and locations of batted balls. He used this to create mathematical models that helped him forecast winners and losers. And he was often right.

For the purposes of our blog post, he explained in 1910 how his system of notations worked and what it allowed him to see in terms of how games were won and lost. Below we have this screen capture of the only relevant graphic for our purposes.

In it we see the areas where the batter is like safe or out depending upon where the ball is hit. Along the first and third base foul lines we thin strips of what all baseball fans fear: doubles or triples down the line. If you look closely you can see the dark lines become small blobs near home plate. We’ve all seen those little tappers off the end of the bat that die, effectively a bunt.

Then in the outfield we have the two power alleys in right- and left-centre. When your favourite power hitter hits a blast deep to the outfield for a home run, it’s usually in one of those two areas.

We also have some light grey lines, which are more where batted balls are going to get through the infielders. We are talking ground balls up the middle and between the middle infielders and the corners. Of course this was baseball in the early 20th century. And while, yes, shifting was a thing, it was nowhere near as prevalent. Consequently defenders were usually lined up in regular positions. These correspond to those defensive alignments.

Finally the vast majority of the infield is coloured another dark grey, representing how infielders can usually soak up any groundball and make the play.

The whole article is well worth the read, but I loved this graphic from 1910 that explains (unshifted) baseball in the 21st century.

Credit for the piece goes to Hugh Fullerton.

Greater Delaware

We are at that point in the year where I begin to use up my holiday time for work. I just returned from two weeks away, but I am out again tomorrow, so no post. Ergo, this Thursday is my Friday. And so I’ll leave you with a post from xkcd that talks vexillology, or the study of flags.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Ventfort Hall

On the last day of my trip I took some time to visit two Gilded Age mansions, called “cottages”, though they are anything but the image the word cottage conjures in my mind. Ventfort Hall, the subject of today’s post, was the cottage of Sarah Morgan, sister of J.P. Morgan. Yeah, that J.P. Morgan. So already “not a stereotypical cottage” should be flashing in your mind.

From an information design standpoint, one of the really neat things was seeing the floor plans and grounds of the home, which had significantly deteriorated since it 19th century construction and necessitated significant restorative work.

First we have a map of the grounds, originally over 26 acres, since reduced to just under 12.

These kind of maps help you appreciate just how much has been lost in the century-plus since its construction. In particular greenhouses and other mansions’ farms made the estates partially self-sustaining. The butlers weren’t doing Whole Foods runs, except they did have to go to town to get the specialties and the meats.

In addition to the landscape architecture we also have the floor plans for two of the four floors of the mansion. This is the ground floor, or first floor. Most of this is open to the public as part of the restored summer home, though some parts are closed for staff and volunteers. Some parts remain original, though significant damage has meant that other parts are wholly new, but to the best reconstruction of what was.

The first floor, or the second floor in American parlance, held most of the bedrooms, including the two masters, his and hers.

This floor has two rooms, Caroline’s Suite and the Honeysuckle Room, that are presently off limits to visitors. But you can peer in through the open doorway to see what the original conditions were like before the restoration, spoiler, not good.

Also not accessible to visitors are the floor above, which contained mostly servants quarters and a few additional guest bedrooms, in particular two directly over the master bedrooms.

Finally the basement is also not accessible, but is where the kitchen, boilers, &c. were all housed. You can peak in through the outside windows and catch a glimpse of the kitchen. But hopefully it’s restored and opened someday, because apparently beneath the veranda was an entire bowling alley. Because don’t all great homes have bowling alleys?

It’s funny because I’ve always enjoyed architecture, so much so that I thought I wanted to be an architect growing up. Then I realised I’d have to do maths and I said nah. Now I work with data. Go figure. Also, whenever I’ve looked at apartments or places to live, whilst photos are super helpful, I’ve always valued floor plans more. They help me appreciate the true dimensions and thus visualise myself and my stuff in the spaces. And that’s why these sort of displays are super neat when visiting famous homes.

It’s also funny because my present one-bedroom flat could almost fit entirely within the billiards room. Oh, the Gilded Age.

Credit for the piece, as in the design, goes to Arthur Rotch.