The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill) | Hacker News Reader

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

cnbc.com

133 pointsviggity47 comments

This shows you exactly what not to do with your info-viz. They show about 100 milk jugs of gray gradient and say, imagine if there were 184 million of them?

Whoa Whoa Whoa. HOLD THE BOAT. You (CNBC) are telling me that the oil spill is 184 million gallons is also equivalent to 184 MILLION ONE-GALLON MILK JUGS?!?!? That is just crazy - consider my mind BLOWN! Perhaps you could show a pyramid of 184 million gallon jugs and put a small outline of a 6' tall man next to it?

Then there is this one: http://www.cnbc.com/id/38294088/?slide=7 At least there is some useful information on this slide "674K Homes for one year". But why the hell show a picture of the entire electrical grid? It doesn't make any sense.

The rest of them are pretty bad as well, they either don't show scale, or they show a very misleading scale.

Here, let me help you out since a "gallon milk jug" is apparently a little too big of a concept for your mind to hold. Picture this: a Quart container of milk, and now just imagine 736 million of them. Doesn't that make it easier to relate to on an intuitive level? I thought so. Courtesy of the CNBC Visualization Graphics Help Desk.

Most of the pictures sucked, but the text is not that bad. It's reasonable to compare the spill to Gallons per person in the US, but the graphic shows nothing of the sort.

EX: http://www.cnbc.com/id/38294088/?slide=9 there is no indication on the picture as to what it represents, but read the text and it's ok.

I think the progression is interesting.

It starts by visualising what 1 gallon equals using something that people recognise in everyday life ... then shows a lot of 'wow, it really is vast' slides, then moves to 'well, it's pretty small compared to the size of the gulf / how much oil we have in reserve'.

It's not a good example of info-graphics - it's a slide-show with illustrations.

There is a place for the "compare to everyday measurements" info-graphics. But as others have pointed out, it doesn't take a genius to understand that one gallon of oil has the same volume as one gallon of milk and 184 millions of anything is still pretty hard to comprehend.

And what are they trying to show with the boats? These boats don't even represent known quantities (eg. size of a football stadium, milk container etc.), they only show that some catastrophes were worse, some were less bad.

The stadium misses the point, just as the oil reserve by comparison. A comparison of the affected surface area in the first case and a comparison of the production of Saudi Arabia during the same time-frame would be much more useful.

Now, the bumper-to-bumper of trucks and the SF-bay graphics are not bad.

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

You sure?

http://img.skitch.com/20100719-ckjke8bssjpmxxtgnfngnbbsr.png

Weird. But still: it needs to load a Flash file in order to display some HTML? WTF? That's actually even worse in my opinion.

Don't you want some cookies besides the milk?

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.

On The Bugle (a genuinely funny podcast) they were amused by these ridiculous types of comparisons, so they calculated how far cricket bats made of frozen oil would stretch, placed end-to-end.

As absurd as these visualizations are, it does raise the bigger point that it is very difficult for our brains to understand large numbers.

It is difficult for most people to really grasp how much 184 million gallons is, or to tell the difference between $1 Trillion in bailout vs $2 trillion in bailout money. After some point, we just give up and call it "a lot". I think this has very real public policy consequences.

But I'd bet, we'd very much understand if your boss said he was cutting your $100k salary to $50k.

I've heard an interview on the planet money podcast some time ago where they had a teacher on. The teacher said, that she uses one dollar bills which she hands over to a student one bill at a time to give them a sense of larger numbers. She explains to them that it would take about 11 days to give them 1 million, but about 31 years to give them 1 billion. I thought this was a nifty way to 'visualize' these abstract numbers.

Somewhere Edward Tufte is crying.

Here's another visualization for you:

The flow rate of Niagara Falls is about 1833 m^3 per second. So if Niagara Falls suddenly started gushing oil instead of water, it would be about six minutes' worth.

The graphic is kind of bad, but their idea is quite sound. If you read the caption, it includes:

> Set side by side, the 184 million oil-filled jugs would cover an area of approximately 1.36 square miles. This amount of 1-gallon containers would be enough for every resident of the 12 most populous US states (2/3 the population of the country) to carry one in their hand simultaneously.

To me, that's powerful imagery. Too bad their infographic doesn't reflect that idea.

Is it powerful imagery? To me it just comes across as "incomprehensibly large".

On the other hand, the San Francisco Bay one comes across as "Oh, well that's not so bad then".

No that's not powerful imagery.

"Some portion of the people living in the US can hold one". Yeah I know, 184 million out of ~300 million people.

You either reduce it to a value where you say, "one half quart per person" or you get out. Don't sub divide saying "the most populous states ...". You want to try and hook the 184 million gallons (a big number we have no concept of) to another big thing we MIGHT have a better concept of. Not a partial bit of it.

This is sorta halfway there, maybe a better analogy would be "the amount of milk america drinks in two weeks"? Although it doesn't sound particularly severe.

avg american drinks 25 gallons of milk a year, an avg household of 2.59 people, 184 million gallons oil, and ~population of 307 million. (307,006,550 people) / (184 million gallons / ((25 gallons / (52 weeks)) * 2.59 people)) = ~2 weeks

> 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.

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.

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.

That visualization is unhelpful, but at least it isn't grossly misleading, like the graphic corrected in this post:

http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/three-decades-of-maj...

Wait one milk jug is == to one gallon of oil? Wow, that makes it that much easier to see.

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.

Are they dumb?? Is it a joke? I am not getting it -can someone explain plz?

What Does 184 Million Gallons of Oil Look Like? - Like 184 Milk Jugs..

We're going to need a bigger cow...

Oh, it's not that bad. Some of them are reasonable, some of them not so much. The fact that it was enough to coat San Francisco Bay to a depth of 1/64th of an inch sorta put it into perspective for me. (This did not, I admit, need to be illustrated with a line-art drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge).

How so? If I get to pick the thickness that I coat it with I can compare it to anything, from a small pool to the entire worlds oceans. So telling you San Francisco Bay tells you nothing at all.

And they are wrong anyway. 184,000,000 gallons / (1/64 inch) = 677.6 mi^2, while the San Francisco Bay is 1600 mi^2

And just for fun: This could cover all the oceans of the world to a depth of .00000008045 inches. (Which is about 39 atoms thick.)

Maybe it's just that I can see San Francisco Bay out my window.

But I can't visualise the whole of the world's oceans, nor can I visualise a swimming pool coated with half a mile of oil. But a thin layer of oil all across the Bay, that I can easily imagine.

Perhaps showing something like one of the old World Trade center towers as a container with a thermometer-style guage on the side would work better. Show more than one building if it is more than that.

Looks like the buildings were 87x135 feet, if I got the math right, a pair could be filled to just over 1000 feet

Best clicktrap ever: keep moving through the visualizations ... it gets better and better.

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.

That whole set is surprisingly bad... it goes from "OMG that's a LOT" to "oh, that's not so bad then, is it?" to "1/64th of an inch...? How thick is that?"

Aimless, perspectiveless, and confusing.

This one is worse, the 76% isn't volume, area, height, or length weighted.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/38294088/?slide=5

However, a pool that is 1.36 square miles, 1 milk-jug deep does actually does put it into perspective quite well, especially compared to the volume of the ocean.

Additionally, it is one of those web page that hitting 'back' once doesn't take you back and tries to get you stuck. At least in Chrome on the Mac.

I think the yacht one was worse.

But the beer can in the stadium I'm afraid takes the cake. Completely absurd.

I agree, especially when I read this: "Cowboys stadium has an internal volume of approximately 104 cubic feet"

Somebody left out a "million" somewhere.

So close to the action!

The yacht was confusing. Am I looking at the height of the boat? The height of its deck? Its area as plotted? And where do I get one of these giant yachts that dwarfs an oil tanker?

Made worse by the fact that the pictured oil tanker represents the 11 million gallons spilled by the Exxon Valdez. (Wait, now I come to look at it again, it's a rowboat, not a tiny oil tanker). Anyway, the 11 million gallons the Valdez spilled was a small portion of its actual capacity of 46 million gallons.

Now we know that even CNBC uses odesk for their illustrations

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