Four Values Can Still Be Worth A Chart
eagereyes 2013-03-15
Summary:
A while ago, Kaiser Fung criticized a chart for its uselessness because it only showed four numbers. The chart appeared on the smart web comic Abstruse Goose (which, as of this writing, is down for a site reorganization).
First, I think Mr. Fung was trolled by his reader, and fell for it hook, line, and sinker. The point of this chart is not to communicate a lot of data or to inform, but merely to entertain and perhaps to make people pause and think for a moment.
But the chart is actually kind of interesting because of some clever choices. The two axes are logarithmic, and they are both cropped. That is understandable, given the large differences in the frequencies involved in sight and hearing.
However, the axes are scaled the same: one order of magnitude takes up the same amount of space on each of them. That provides an interesting comparison, that I don’t think a lot of people have seen before. Sound frequencies cover three orders of magnitude (if we go with the usual 20Hz to 20,000Hz range), while light covers less than one (roughly 400THz to 800THz). Those frequencies are vastly different of course, and the difference in light frequencies contains the sound frequencies many billions of times.
But our perception largely works in a logarithmic way, so this kind of comparison is still interesting (as a data point, our perception of brightness covers about six orders of magnitude). It’s not useful, and rather [...]