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Maybe it’s just because the Meetup graphs have been decontextualized, but they don’t make sense. The percentages in the first one are decreasing, although the graph is going up. (Furthermore, 35.9% of what?) The second one is goofy, too.

Graphs are powerful animals. If they’re not using them right, maybe they shouldn’t be using them at all.

It’s too bad that the cleverness of the farm subsidies graphic requires it to use a misleading 2-d pyramid representation… while the height of the “Meat Dairy” section is 73.8% of the total height, the total orange area is far higher (around 90%). I think I measured it right. Forgive me for channeling Tufte, but their data is good enough that they didn’t need to exaggerate it.

@rb: It’s worse than that, because the graph gives the impression of being three-dimensional, so the apparent volume of the meat & dairy section is around 98% of the total.

Re: Meetup. Also, there’s no scale on the y-axis, but it’s apparent that the bottom is not at 0%. It’s only 5% change of whatever is changing (I guess).

The artists of both of these graphs are hearby sentenced to be pelted with hardback copies of Tufte and Huff.

A different take on Salad vs. Big Mac by Chris Rice, my favorite contemporary Christian song writer.

I dig ActionHead Studios.

@rb: And it’s not just the height.. since it’s being shown as a pyramid, it’s in three dimensions, and the volume of each of those sections is majorly out of whack with the numbers. In terms of volume, meat / dairy is probably 95% or more in that graphic.

Can’t believe someone else wrote almost the same thing in the same format in the 20 seconds between me loading the page and writing that comment. The world is a small place.. :)

Clarity of graphs aside, I enjoy how the Meetup charts resemble the “Hello, my name is . . .” stickers.

I actually measured the pyramid to 239 pixels height and the Meat portion to 177 pixels, which equals roughly 74%, so except for the mass-thing, the graph is okay :-)

Did anyone look at that Big Mac graph and expect a side view of a hamburger, with the ingredient heights inflated and shrunk to express the volume of subsidies? Informative and delicious.