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Comment by chancho | Hacker News Reader

We decide X is twice as big as Y when X = 2Y. This is not up for debate.

And re. net worth: That's exactly how I would plot it if I wanted to make a point about income inequality. Carlos Slim is worth US$53 billion. The per capita income in Mexico is US$13,500 and in the US it's $46,000. (Yes I know this is comparing yearly income to lifetime accumulated wealth but ignore that for a moment.) If I give the average Mexican 1 pixel and the average American 3 or 4 pixels, then Mr. Slim gets almost 4 million pixels. At 96 dpi that's roughly 3400 feet. Your monitor would have to be (much) taller than the Burj Khalifa (2717 ft) to accurately show this bar char. This is the picture I would draw if I wanted to make a point about income inequality, a person sitting next to the Burj Khalifa with a ridiculous laptop in is lap that towers over it.

If I just wanted to rank the top 10, I would just list them in order like they do in Forbes.

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> We decide X is twice as big as Y when X = 2Y. This is not up for debate.

Yes, but doubled relative to what? e.g. what's twice as big as 50F? Is it 100F or 559.67F? The first one is relative to 0F and the second is relative to absolute zero (50F is 283.15K).

Your point about how to illustrate income inequality is fine, but that's not at all what I was talking about: I was talking about a graph that depicts the distribution of net worth amongst the top 10 richest people. No, a rank order doesn't fully convey that. A table of numbers is hard to understand in a holistic way.

There's a popular, if a little contested, notion of scales that I won't source right now that divides scales into ordered, interval, ratio and absolute depending on things like whether there is such a thing as "twice as big". Fahrenheit is an interval scale, which is why we have Rankine (ratio).

Twice as hot would, in a physics sense, be 1019 °R (560 °F) because SI temperature uses the ratio scale. Fahrenheit is then just syntactic sugar for people who don't care about the physical temperature as much as they care about the range of their comfort zone. When measuring deviation from 0 °F, Fahrenheit also becomes a ratio scale, but not a very useful one (deviation from 50 °F would be better, or you could just use Celsius).

So the real question is, what do you mean "twice as big"? Twice as much warmer than "pretty cold", or twice as energetic?

As for the 10 richest people, I'm not sure they're that near each other, but assuming they are, that's going to be the important bit. If you don't want to focus on that, you have a few options. You could draw the cutmarks. You could make it a zoom lens picture. Or you could establish a baseline, such as the highest income tax bracket or the median top 10 income, offset all incomes appropriately, and draw the bar graph from that. In the latter case, you should draw some bars as negative, and label the baseline appropriately (not 0). I don't think it would make for a good graph.

However, for a distribution, absolutely no offsets allowed.

No, you would use a logarithmic graph for income.

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