
Title-text: "The worst are graphs with qualitative, vaguely-titled axes and very little actual data"
I propose there should be a brief up-spike in "goodness" around 1985 as millions of techies switched to MacDraw to present figures and charts.
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Reka wrote:I don't get where MSPaint enters into this: surely anyone who's using Powerpoint would have Excel available to them, and would use Excel to generate the charts?
Reka wrote:I don't get where MSPaint enters into this: surely anyone who's using Powerpoint would have Excel available to them, and would use Excel to generate the charts?
Reka wrote:I don't get where MSPaint enters into this: surely anyone who's using Powerpoint would have Excel available to them, and would use Excel to generate the charts?
balthasar_s wrote:"Scientific Paper Graph Quality"?
I'm more interested in the scientific graph paper quality.
xtifr wrote:... and orthogon merely sounds undecided.
orthogon wrote:balthasar_s wrote:"Scientific Paper Graph Quality"?
I'm more interested in the scientific graph paper quality.
OMY! Graph paper! That totally used to be a thing!
yakkoTDI wrote: <snipped quotes>
I love the idea of graph paper. Sadly my handwriting looks like crap unless it is tiny and those graph boxes are just too big.
orthogon wrote:balthasar_s wrote:"Scientific Paper Graph Quality"?
I'm more interested in the scientific graph paper quality.
OMY! Graph paper! That totally used to be a thing!
pierreb wrote:I can't help but notice the decrease in quality started BEFORE the powerpoint/ms-paint era.
It seems clear to me the quality decline wasn't MSFT made.
I'm a "graph quality change" denier.
Yu_p wrote:pierreb wrote:I can't help but notice the decrease in quality started BEFORE the powerpoint/ms-paint era.
There is a very real chance, that the decline was started simply by using software instead of drawing graphs by hand, as lowering the entry barrier to something typically results in more people doing it, with on average less knowledge about it.
GlassHouses wrote:In other words, my explanation for the phenomenon (which I'm not convinced exists, but whatever) isn't that graphing became too easy, but too hard. I still can't use gnuplot without a bottle of Valium.
orthogon wrote:balthasar_s wrote:"Scientific Paper Graph Quality"?
I'm more interested in the scientific graph paper quality.
OMY! Graph paper! That totally used to be a thing!
Yu_p wrote:GlassHouses wrote:In other words, my explanation for the phenomenon (which I'm not convinced exists, but whatever) isn't that graphing became too easy, but too hard. I still can't use gnuplot without a bottle of Valium.
Likely a matter of educationlikely. I haven't really learned doing proper graphs by hand to begin with, so I would be lost when trying to do stuff like drawing a smooth curve based on actual data. I understand that there are some tools used to pull it off, but I don't think I've ever even seen them.
Sketches of course, are much easier by hand. But production quality graphs? No idea how to do them that way. Funny enough, I still find gnuplot the most intuitive solutionI even wrote a simple (unpublished) wrapper for python, because I had grown too annoyed by alternatives.
Last time I tried Excel it crashed from too-many-datapoints though
bottles wrote:The trick to hand-drawn graphs is that you linearize the data. Rather than plotting pH vs [HA] and trying to figure out where the middle of the S curve is (to get the pKa), you plot pH vs log([HA]/[A-]) and use a straightedge to get the line. Then finding the pKa is just a matter of seeing where the line intersects an axis. There's a lot of situations where we don't bother doing the linearization part anymore because modern graphing software (Excel if you're a wizard, but more like graphpad or kaleidagraph) has no problem fitting that sort of curve.
xtifr wrote:... and orthogon merely sounds undecided.
orthogon wrote:Linearisation is essentially the opposite of what you want for (3), since the whole point there is to see whether the curve flattens off, asymptotes, peaks, where it's steepest, etc. Showing that some function of the variables results in a straight line literally removes all the interesting features from the relationship; it tells you no more than the hypothesised mathematical equation.
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