Jesse Onland

8 1/2 is the most overrated work of art in any medium ever made.

Can you guess which basic #dataviz errors this graphic features?

Why in the world wouldn't the colour mapping be the same across the four donuts?

And why not a 100% stacked bar chart instead of donuts?

Just like movies about making movies, data graphics about making data graphics are never good.

Screen-shot of wirecutter page with a big titel that says "The Best Bar Carts"

I'm not proud to tell you that I clicked this Wirecutter article fully believing it was about the 📊 Best Bar Charts.

If you're looking for more on this sort of thing, what we did here was "enumerate non-decreasing sequences".

A lot of these elementary enumeration problems hinge on recursion: a non-decreasing sequence of length n+m is comprised of one of length m glued to the end of one of length n.

When we add the (n + 1)-th variable, we need to know how many times the nth variable took on each of its possible values, which can be found in the nth diagonal of Pascal's triangle. (Prove by induction somehow.)

I think that solves the problem.

For the case with just two variables 2 ≤ a ≤ b ≤ 6, there are (7 - a) choices for b once a is fixed, and the sum over a from 2 to 6 of (7 - a) is 15.

Can you do a similar trick for 2 ≤ a ≤ b ≤ c ≤ 6? Can you get a recurrence relation by writing the answer for this case in terms of the previous one?

Are you sure there are only 15?

Figure 2 from the linked article.

Abstract of the linked article

New paper for anyone working with data:
Better data viz - for free, in few clicks.

Below, all N = 111, M = 0.04, SD = 0.27.
One-sided t-tests vs. 0 yield: t(110) = 1.67, p = .049.

Use raincloud plots. Or risk wrong conclusions!
Plot w/ @jaspstats.bsky.social today!

🧪 📊 #PsychSciSky #StatsSky

🧵👇

Will Posit's recent transition to hyping slop generation endanger its B Corporation status? Surely you can't be serious about climate targets while shilling this stuff, right?

Does this company only have "AI" in its name for marketing reasons, or is it actually engaged in slop generation?

The plot on the right is exactly what I had in mind!

Can you superimpose the exact and smoothed plots with differences in lighter grey?

Maybe just plotting a smoothed line on top would be more straightforward, I suppose.

Also formalized the frequentist interpretation of probability.

One of many line graphs in the NASA Mariner-Venus Report from 1962. Due to the rather black and bold and many grid lines, the straight lines that show the results (which are also black) are almost invisible.

Find the data 🧐🤓
#dataviz #datatoinkratio

Would the "The Lady Tasting Tea" be too breezy?

Not certain. I don't want a facsimile edition but other than that I'm not too picky.

Embarrassing. Why not just train a slop generator on all the conference submissions and then skip actually running it?

Maybe I'm too ggplot2-brained, but I wouldn't have guessed that "make one line in this chart dashed and the rest solid" is advanced!

Every time I can't figure out how to get what I want, the solution always seems to be some zany kludge.

My struggles with Tableau 📊 seem to boil down to two issues:

1. Too little control over the aesthetic mapping. (E.g. cannot map to position.)

2. Dimensions and measures are treated radically differently (e.g by filtering) in ways that are unintuitive and/or just never what one would want.

I've been on the hunt for a copy of this, but it seems scarcer than his other book, "Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts".

Watch the seismic waves from today's magnitude 7.3 Alaska earthquake ripple across seismic stations in North America.

More ➡️ loom.ly/kaJp5I0

(After live-generating 80 lines of SQL with five paragraphs of pre-written prompts)

"This would have taken hours!"

Maybe for *you*.

I'm sorry, but if the image slop generator you used for your slides can't produce a world map with South America in it, I'm not buying your data engineering pipeline slop generator.

Pretend tools for pretend work.

Plot by distance to an ocean port and you get a different set of outliers.

Data Strips Experiment I built a “Data Strips” app to experiment with new ways of graphically summarizing the distribution of a single variable.. You can try it out or access the code on GitHub. This post wil…

I've written an explainer blog post for my "data strips" #dataviz workbench web app, trying alternative 1-D distribution summary plots. rawdatastudies.com/2025/07/05/d...

I wouldn't want to be associated with that creep either, but I think if you open-source your #dataviz 📊 theme, you have to accept the possibility of creeps using it.

In any case, I'd never assume that two chart authors were associated just because they use the same style, and you shouldn't either.

Vertical axis trickery in Bigalke et al. (2021), via dynomight.net/blue-light/. 📊

A #dataviz adjacent post from Andrew Gelman about which Venn diagrams can be drawn with rotational symmetry. The same Venn after whom the diagrams are named originated the frequency interpretation of probabilities, incidentally.

(At least for that aspect ratio.)