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Comment by lusr | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting. I'd love to know how many viewers were using proxy servers to view the Olympics from outside the UK. I'd also love to know why intelligent people insist on using 3D line graphs (and why product designers choose to implement them). They are almost impossible to interpret correctly without great effort.

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Because interpretability may not be the key concern, attractiveness might be a more important criteria for the creator.

I'd also love to know why intelligent people insist on using 3D line graphs (and why product designers choose to implement them).

A lot of organizations have graphs and charts designed by visual arts designers without giving their visual artists specific work-related training in accurate, readable data presentation. That's one of the reasons that Edward Tufte has written multiple interesting books and maintains a website

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/

on visual display of quantitative information. Every intelligent person ought to read one or more of Tufte's books (they are fun and informative enough to reward your time and effort in getting the books) to understand how to avoid "chartjunk" when preparing visual data displays.

A special treat on Tufte's website is "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports,"

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

a worthy companion to Peter Norvig's more humorous treatment of PowerPoint in "The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation."

http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

Perhaps intelligent people (as opposed to those with some form of OCD) don't need masses of detail for passing items of interest. It just meant to shows a pattern in a quick and accessible fashion. If they wanted to maximise user interpretability they'd just show the raw data in a table.

that's because every executive knows that 3D graphs (especially pie charts!) contain more meaningful information!

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