Raghu Parthasarathy writes:
I know you’re sick of seeing / being pointed to awful figures, but this one is an abomination of a sort I’ve never seen before:
It’s a pie chart *and* a word cloud. In an actual research paper! Messy, illegible, and generally pointless.
It’s Figure 1 of this paper (in Cell — super high-impact. Sigh…)
I agree. This is one bad graph.
Plus, it’s wrong. I hate lima beans.
Are you kidding? No way. Lima bean and onion soup is awesome. I love Lima beans. But the entire human population couldn’t eat enough soup to fix that graph.
Also, in the graphical abstract, the outlook for the Bangladeshi child seems a little grim.
The outlook for any Bangladeshi child is a little grim in just about any graphic. That said – the baby does look sorta happy bouncing up and down before we go peering into their gut…. although those lurking rats underneath the baby are a little ominous.
I now foresee that someone will soon attempt to explain the “Asian Enigma” via Turmeric. I mean, I think so far only 150% of the difference in growth patterns between South Asian and African children has been explained by open defecation and gender-discrimination in child investments.
Gender and Birth Order: http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~sjv340/height.pdf
Open Defecation: https://d3gxp3iknbs7bs.cloudfront.net/attachments/902b86b5-eb72-4f97-9a72-ea4f758be1aa.pdf
Who wouldn’t want to be filtered through a fine screen and turned into mice, which are then fed to Malawian mice?
Well, note the careful placement of the arrow — not from the child, but just from the child’s posterior. (Please, no prior/posterior jokes — unless they’re good ones.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=345uegSj-zQ
It’s the graphical equivalent of Shimmer Floor Wax.
Although this isn’t ggplot2 obviously, I definitely am seeing a lot of grammar-of-graphics-itis where people think if they map enough features to enough aesthetic mappings, they have a sophisticated visualization.