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Comment by khawkins | Hacker News Reader

It's downright deceitful, in my opinion. The entire page is trying to exaggerate the significance of the shutdown.

It's not attempting to be deceitful. The problem is the DOD has 8x as many employees as the next largest agency. If spaced without a logarithmic scale, the rest of the agencies are so insignificant it doesn't have any effect at all.

To try to avoid the confusion, I'm working on another graph of percentages working for each agency, and a disclaimer about the scaling.

Mark more scale points: I suggest {1,2,4,6,8}x10^n for each n. That way the visual texture of the scale lines will immediately suggest "log scale".

Make a 2nd chart, with little inset zoomy lines to connect the 2 charts (like you see on a paper map that shows a zoom of the downtown core)

Like this: http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Is there a good js library for doing this style chart?

I personally think the author did this because otherwise the DoD would so heavily dwarf everything else that you wouldn't be able to see whats going on. But I agree, intended or not, this has the effect of heavily exaggerating the proportion of people on furlough. Its like using a log scale on a pie chart. It really makes no sense.

The author really should consider this and think hard about what point he is trying to make with that chart on the bottom.

Exaggeration seems to be a common theme for one of the authors: https://twitter.com/JustineTunney/status/385843326085132289

Exaggeration was not the intent. We've updated our graphs to be more clear.

It seems like you're loading it with the Sean Hannity inane view that its basically no big deal though, right?

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