An entry from the Chance visualization contest

Burt Monroe writes:

I [Burt] sent an entry for the Chance visualization contest. By the time I’d ferreted out the original in our library and quizzed family friends (my father was a biologist) about bacterial taxonomy, I ended up writing a goofy little paper about the whole thing.

Here’s Burt’s article, and here’s his graph:

burt.png

This is pretty, although to my eye it looks a little busy. I’d probably favor including this information in multiple plots. That said, I didn’t actually look at the data or the problem–all I did was post the announcement–so maybe it’s the best thing to do. I like that Burt investigated the context of the problem and didn’t just treat this as a “dataset” to be graphed.