Dan Goldstein asks what I think of this:
My reply:
It’s hard for me to imagine a compelling reason for anyone to go to London, Ontario–but, hey, I guess there’s all kinds of people in this world! More seriously, I see the appeal of the graph but it’s a bit busy for my taste. Over the years I’ve moved toward small multiples rather than single busy graphs. That’s one reason why I prefer Tufte’s second book to his first book. The Napoleon-in-Russia graph is a bad model, in that inspires people to try to cram lots of variables on a single graph.
Dan wrote back:
I [Dan] like it as a travel planning graph, it gives you what you want to know (how how will the days be, how cold will the nights be, will it rain) but is a bit easier on the brain than a table of highs and lows. Also makes it easy to see the trend.
I agree the 2nd axis doesn’t help.
When I lived there the used bookstore was the best reason to stick around. I am not sure if it still exists, but it was epic at the time.
I suspect a lot of traditional Tufteisque heuristics will need tweaking as we move from the printed page to more interactive media. It isn’t so bad to cram a lot of info. on a graph when there’s a option of hiding series’, zooming in etc.
e.g. For a data-crowded scatter plot labeling points used to be a nightmare; mouse tooltip popups have made this more manageable. Incidently, a question for the experts: Of all the plotting routines (Gnuplot, Matlab, Excel) I’ve used I’ve never found a scatter plot procedure that can avoid label overlap intelligently. Are there any programs that are good at this?
I cringe to think of the global time wasted in manually moving datapoint labels around on scatter plots.
Tufte’s admonition about using less ink certainly applies, but indeed, interactive graphics change the rules.
Nick Stokes has some interesting graphs at Moyhu. See especially this one, which uses a mouseover of labels to highlight each of the lines in the “spaghetti graph.”
This really helps.
Or perhaps Toronto, Ontario?
To hear Xiao-Li Meng talk on wine (and statistics).
http://www.utoronto.ca/reg/list_full.pl?20120019-1530.30799
p.s. and if you are only 19 you can legally taste the wine there
This seems like the not-as-good version of weatherspark.com.
Re: Visiting London, Ontario. If you enjoy highway wreckage, it might be worth a stop.
From wikipedia ” Due to fatigue caused by the lack of driver engagement along the flat and straight lengths of highway,[19] the section of Highway 401 from Windsor to London (especially west of Tilbury) has become known for deadly car accidents and pile-ups, earning it the nickname Carnage Alley.[20] As the highway approaches London, Highway 402 merges in,[14] resulting in a six lane cross-section.[21][22] Within London, it intersects the city’s two municipal expressways, Highbury Avenue and the Veterans Memorial Parkway.[23]“
The US weather service version – http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=40.84890&lon=-73.87620&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=graphical
You beat me to it. I was going to use New London, CT because haha.
It’s a small multiples version that keeps units constant for each individual graph. Once you switch to different units on the same graph, comprehension quickly goes way down.
The real problem with this system is that it doesn’t have much coverage. Pretty plot are nice, but data to plot is the pre-requisite.
I just tried the towns along I-5 in CA. They had LA. Not Grapevine, not Buttonwillow, not Kettleman City, not Gilroy. That makes it pretty hard to use for any kind of trip planning.
One problem is the day/night lines. I’m not sure they are needed, but, if they are, they should be accurate. In January, day and night are not equal lengths of time. For example, Jan 9 will have 9 hrs 8 min of daytime and 14 hrs 52 min of night.
Why is the shading for “day” darker than the shading for “night”?
@Peter Flom,
It looks like the days and nights are reversed, in fact. I would suspect a production error and someone mistakenly picked June or July for the day-night coding function rather January.
It is a bit to busy a graph for my taste but I probably beats tables.
As to Andrew’s comment about why would anyone want to go there: The weather, of course, Hot and humid in the summer; cold and damp in the winter, interspersed with exciting winter blizzards.
@Peter Flom,
x-axis indicates time of year is April, which would be close to equal days and nights.