Monday, January 3, 2011

Venn, Where and How

For those who are livid about the TSA's scanners and intrusive searches, this Venn diagram, which made its way around the interweb recently, was pretty amusing:

3 intersecting circles of TSA agents, prositutes and doctors
But a guy named Andrew Plotkin pointed out the innaccuracies in how the diagram was conceived, and that's even funnier. If it followed the rules for Venn diagrams, it should have looked like this:

Same 3 circles with different intersection labels
Since that wasn't what the diagram's creator meant to say, what's needed is to turn the diagram's info inside-out, so that it looks like this:

Circle intersection labels are now the same as the original large circles
Plotkin has more to say here.

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via TechDirt.com and norwegianity.com

1 comment:

Barbara said...

I don't have anything interesting to comment, but I followed the link to Plotkin and read it all, and followed his link to chartjunk and read all about Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and am in the process of buying Tufte's text.

I am either a graph junkie or on vacation. Or both.