Worse than Singing about Economics: Inappropriate Visualizations

Of the many versions of the famous quote that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” is that “writing about music is as illogical as singing about economics.” Both of these activities are actually quite common. Dancing about architecture is a sport of irony, and  not only are there songs about economics, the appropriately named … Read more

New Data: XKCD Didn’t Win

An earlier post commented on an XKCD cartoon that was related to a common misinterpretation of crime maps, and I’d noted that it would be interesting to find the difference between the maps, as we had done for violent and property crime. Some of us think about interesting things, and others do them, Paul Breed … Read more

XKCD Always Wins

I shouldn’t be surprised that for any interesting technical idea, XKCD covered it first, and better. Here is another view of the issue we covered regarding crime mapping: crime is most common where (a) there are a lot of people and (b) there is alcohol, and (b) is often the reason for (a).     To go … Read more