ChartJunk

The New York Times and the Washington Post are arguably two of the best newspapers in the world — so when both of them come a graphical cropper on the same day perhaps it's noteworthy:

• On the front page of the Sunday 15 July 2007 Post, within an otherwise-thoughtful article ("Climate Change Proposals Seen As Insufficient") appears a faux-perspective line of gray obelisks marching across a globe decorated with a wiggly red line from Florida to Washington State, plus the caption: "Many experts think cutting the world's greenhouse gas emissions by about 26 gigatons a year by 2030 could prevent catastrophic climate change. That much gas would weight more than 300,000 Washington Monuments — which side by side would stretch more than 3,300 miles, or the driving distance between Seattle and Miami." It's hard to imagine a less-informative metaphor.
• On the back page of the same day's "Ideas & Trends" section of the Times, within an otherwise-thoughtful article ("A Battle Between the Bottle and the Faucet") appear dozens of various-sized cartoon water bottles meant to depict the ~21 gallons of bottled water that an average American consumed last year. Above a globe with arrows arcing parochially to New York City from horizons labeled "Europe" and "Fiji" is the paragraph: "According to an analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the 43 million gallons of bottled water imported from the European Union into New York area ports last year traveled 3,500 miles and created 3,800 tons of carbon dioxide — equivalent to 660 cars running for a year. About one million gallons came from Fiji, a distance of 8,000 miles, creating an additional 190 tons of CO2 (another 30 cars running)." It's hard to imagine a less-significant contribution to global warming.

In both cases a combination of innumeracy and eye-candy seems to have left rational thought far behind ...

(cf. TufteThoughts (18 Dec 2000), EyeCandy (23 Dec 2002), ...)

TopicScience - TopicHumor - 2007-07-20

(correlates: InFoamation, LimitingFactors, WhatPhysicsIs, ...)