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The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill)

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Re: The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill)

#41

Post by jacobolus »

hugh3 wrote: post #28
ars wrote: post #21

> However, Phelps likely wouldn't be able to swim as quickly through thick crude oil as he could through clear, fresh water. Actually this is not true: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1418001 And: "clear, fresh water". As if "non-fresh" water would make any difference.

I would expect Michael Phelps to perform differently compared to the sixteen volunteers in that experiment. Michael Phelps has spent his entire life optimising his stroke for maximum speed in water. Give him a different liquid and he'll be sub-optimal.

Why are we speculating about Michael Phelps’s ability to swim through crude oil? It’s utterly irrelevant to understanding how much oil 190 million gallons is, and including the comment in the CNBC "slideshow" was a confusing distraction.

Re: The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill)

#42

Post by sesqu »

cubicle67 wrote: post #20
judofyr wrote: post #12

And it uses Flash for static images. Can't they get anything right?

You sure? http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/CNBC/Sections/News_And_Analysis/... width="600" height="400" align="left" border="0">

You'll notice that that bit of the document is dynamically inserted, by a bit of javascript that it looks to me like being called by a flash slideshow controller. Maybe they want to discriminate against people who don't watch ads? Wouldn't be the first media company to do so.

I also noticed that the page contains all slides, as well as some logic to change them dynamically, yet fails to do so.

Re: The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill)

#44

Post by hugh3 »

jacobolus wrote: post #41
hugh3 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect Michael Phelps to perform differently compared to the sixteen volunteers in that experiment. Michael Phelps has spent his entire life optimising his stroke for maximum speed in water. Give him a different liquid and he'll be sub-optimal.

Why are we speculating about Michael Phelps’s ability to swim through crude oil? It’s utterly irrelevant to understanding how much oil 190 million gallons is, and including the comment in the CNBC "slideshow" was a confusing distraction.

Because we're needlessly pedantic, that's why.

The internet exists to allow us to have pointless arguments over things that don't matter, for no other reason than that we think another person is saying something which is not entirely true.

There's not much point in discussing how much oil 190 million gallons is, either. Personally I'd say it's enough to fill the world's largest supertanker about 1.3 times over, but that doesn't sound very spectacular.

Re: The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill)

#45

Post by hugh3 »

Confusion wrote: post #9

Even '279 olympic-size swimming pools' does not really appeal to the imagination. You'd probably be best of comparing it to the volume of a reasonably sized lake in the vicinity of the reader.

It would be tiny compared to any lake that anyone would have heard of.

Re: The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill)

#46

Post by bad_alloc »

On slide 12 you can read that the spill is supposed to be equivalent to "1,9301.5 mW wind turbines"; i.e. for the money spent on everything you could buy as many wind turbines as required to achieve the specified energy output. Sadly mW means milliwatts and not Megawatts, which they probably intended to say.

Re: The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill)

#47

Post by hugh3 »

andrewingram wrote: post #19

Unless my maths is very much off, if you made the oil into one long cuboid 1 atom across, the length would be 88 light years. I was kind of disappointed by this, I was hoping it would be longer than the known universe.

What are you using for "one atom"?

Using one square angstrom as the cross section of an atom (which is about right), and plugging

"187 million gallons / 1e-20 m^2 in light years"

into google, I get:

7.48237279 × 10^9 light years

which is at least an appreciable fraction of the universe, and ten thousand times the width of the galaxy.

Re: The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill)

#49

Post by andrewingram »

hugh3 wrote: post #47
andrewingram wrote: post #19

Unless my maths is very much off, if you made the oil into one long cuboid 1 atom across, the length would be 88 light years. I was kind of disappointed by this, I was hoping it would be longer than the known universe.

What are you using for "one atom"? Using one square angstrom as the cross section of an atom (which is about right), and plugging "187 million gallons / 1e-20 m^2 in light years" into google, I get: 7.48237279 × 10^9 light years which is at least an appreciable fraction of the universe, and ten thousand times the width of the galaxy.

It looks like my calculations were in fact way off. Though when I plug that into google I get a different answer because it assumes imperial gallons for me.

However, this answer is much more interesting and restores my faith in ridiculous numbers.

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