The Skepchicks enjoyed this so much that we want to make this a regular feature. Every Thursday, we'll bring you a new bad chart, either created by us just for you, created by you just for us (leave your efforts in the comments), or found elsewhere on the Interwebs.
Just so it's captured for all of eternity, I grabbed fresh stats from w3schools.com and disastercenter.com and tossed both onto a scatter plot. I added a trendline using linear regression and, for my data, came up with an R squared value of .965. Perhaps the decline of pirates, rise in global climate temperatures, or Manatee populations off the coast of Florida would explain the remaining .035?
I believe in it. lol Certainly more than the gun moron argument, "The violent crime rate either went down, or didn't go up, as more and more guns got bought." They never seem to note that this is actually "fewer guns in the average person's hands, but dozens more, instead, in the hands of paranoid freaks, with the net result being more guns in general." Or, at least, this seems to be the more common result, in many cases.
Either I'm completely misreading what you're saying, or you're making the point that 'more guns purchased' is equal to 'people owning more guns', which…well.
I believe the point is the number of gun owners has gone down, while the overall number of guns in "circulation" has gone up.
Ah, that makes more sense. Although it appears not to be based on any solid data.
It maybe a bad chart, but it's still a lot of fun.
This feature is a great idea, It reminds me a bit of a game I used to play at work, where I would think up the worst possible solution to a work problem and tell everybody at morning teatime. Not so funny when the hierarchy implemented it! These days I keep my trap shut.
I think this is a very promising feature.
I'd love to see something involving cats with this.
Clearly, what this data shows is that someone is systematically murdering Internet Explorer users.
Seems like a valid hypothesis, however, I'd wager that no matter where you get the browser market share data, 18,000 does not correspond to 90% market share..though it would be awesome, if only 18,000 people were using Internet Explorer..
Also love this new Thursday feature, and just because I immediately thought of it when I saw the chart, the original "Average global temperature vs. number of pirates" chart by Bobby Henderson should at the very least get an honorable mention, lifetime achievement award or something along those lines.