
The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill) - viggity
http://www.cnbc.com/id/38294088/?slide=2
======
viggity
This shows you exactly what not to do with your info-viz. They show about 100
milk jugs of gray gradient and say, imagine if there were 184 million of them?

Whoa Whoa Whoa. HOLD THE BOAT. You (CNBC) are telling me that the oil spill is
184 million gallons is also equivalent to 184 MILLION ONE-GALLON MILK
JUGS?!?!? That is just crazy - consider my mind BLOWN! Perhaps you could show
a pyramid of 184 million gallon jugs and put a small outline of a 6' tall man
next to it?

Then there is this one: <http://www.cnbc.com/id/38294088/?slide=7> At least
there is some useful information on this slide "674K Homes for one year". But
why the hell show a picture of the entire electrical grid? It doesn't make any
sense.

The rest of them are pretty bad as well, they either don't show scale, or they
show a very misleading scale.

~~~
mbyrne
Here, let me help you out since a "gallon milk jug" is apparently a little too
big of a concept for your mind to hold. Picture this: a Quart container of
milk, and now just imagine 736 million of them. Doesn't that make it easier to
relate to on an intuitive level? I thought so. Courtesy of the CNBC
Visualization Graphics Help Desk.

~~~
Retric
Most of the pictures sucked, but the text is not that bad. It's reasonable to
compare the spill to Gallons per person in the US, but the graphic shows
nothing of the sort.

EX: <http://www.cnbc.com/id/38294088/?slide=9> there is no indication on the
picture as to what it represents, but read the text and it's ok.

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lwhi
I think the progression is interesting.

It starts by visualising what 1 gallon equals using something that people
recognise in everyday life ... then shows a lot of 'wow, it really is vast'
slides, then moves to 'well, it's pretty small compared to the size of the
gulf / how much oil we have in reserve'.

It's not a good example of info-graphics - it's a slide-show with
illustrations.

~~~
sdfx
There is a place for the "compare to everyday measurements" info-graphics. But
as others have pointed out, it doesn't take a genius to understand that one
gallon of oil has the same volume as one gallon of milk and 184 millions of
anything is still pretty hard to comprehend.

And what are they trying to show with the boats? These boats don't even
represent known quantities (eg. size of a football stadium, milk container
etc.), they only show that some catastrophes were worse, some were less bad.

The stadium misses the point, just as the oil reserve by comparison. A
comparison of the affected surface area in the first case and a comparison of
the production of Saudi Arabia during the same time-frame would be much more
useful.

Now, the bumper-to-bumper of trucks and the SF-bay graphics are not bad.

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judofyr
And it uses Flash for static images. Can't they get _anything_ right?

~~~
cubicle67
You sure?

<img id="ssImage"
src="[http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/CNBC/Sections/News_And_Analysis/...](http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/CNBC/Sections/News_And_Analysis/_News/_TEMPLATES/_SLIDESHOWS/VisualizingTheOilSpill/SS_Oil_Spill_visualized_milk.jpg)
width="600" height="400" align="left" border="0">

~~~
judofyr
<http://img.skitch.com/20100719-ckjke8bssjpmxxtgnfngnbbsr.png>

Weird. But still: it needs to load a Flash file in order to display some HTML?
WTF? That's actually even _worse_ in my opinion.

~~~
senki
Don't you want some cookies besides the milk?

------
jcromartie
On The Bugle (a genuinely funny podcast) they were amused by these ridiculous
types of comparisons, so they calculated how far cricket bats made of frozen
oil would stretch, placed end-to-end.

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Elite
As absurd as these visualizations are, it does raise the bigger point that it
is very difficult for our brains to understand large numbers.

It is difficult for most people to really grasp how much 184 million gallons
is, or to tell the difference between $1 Trillion in bailout vs $2 trillion in
bailout money. After some point, we just give up and call it "a lot". I think
this has very real public policy consequences.

But I'd bet, we'd very much understand if your boss said he was cutting your
$100k salary to $50k.

~~~
sdfx
I've heard an interview on the planet money podcast some time ago where they
had a teacher on. The teacher said, that she uses one dollar bills which she
hands over to a student one bill at a time to give them a sense of larger
numbers. She explains to them that it would take about 11 days to give them 1
million, but about 31 years to give them 1 billion. I thought this was a nifty
way to 'visualize' these abstract numbers.

------
sspencer
Somewhere Edward Tufte is crying.

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hugh3
Here's another visualization for you:

The flow rate of Niagara Falls is about 1833 m^3 per second. So if Niagara
Falls suddenly started gushing oil instead of water, it would be about six
minutes' worth.

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apinstein
The graphic is kind of bad, but their idea is quite sound. If you read the
caption, it includes:

> Set side by side, the 184 million oil-filled jugs would cover an area of
> approximately 1.36 square miles. This amount of 1-gallon containers would be
> enough for every resident of the 12 most populous US states (2/3 the
> population of the country) to carry one in their hand simultaneously.

To me, that's powerful imagery. Too bad their infographic doesn't reflect that
idea.

~~~
hugh3
Is it powerful imagery? To me it just comes across as "incomprehensibly
large".

On the other hand, the San Francisco Bay one comes across as "Oh, well that's
not so bad then".

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nsfmc
This is sorta halfway there, maybe a better analogy would be " _the amount of
milk america drinks in two weeks_ "? Although it doesn't sound particularly
severe.

avg american drinks 25 gallons of milk a year, an avg household of 2.59
people, 184 million gallons oil, and ~population of 307 million. (307,006,550
people) / (184 million gallons / ((25 gallons / (52 weeks)) * 2.59 people)) =
~2 weeks

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ars
> However, Phelps likely wouldn't be able to swim as quickly through thick
> crude oil as he could through clear, fresh water.

Actually this is not true: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1418001>

And: "clear, fresh water". As if "non-fresh" water would make any difference.

~~~
hugh3
I would expect Michael Phelps to perform differently compared to the sixteen
volunteers in that experiment. Michael Phelps has spent his entire life
optimising his stroke for maximum speed in water. Give him a different liquid
and he'll be sub-optimal.

~~~
jacobolus
Why are we speculating about Michael Phelps’s ability to swim through crude
oil? It’s utterly irrelevant to understanding how much oil 190 million gallons
is, and including the comment in the CNBC "slideshow" was a confusing
distraction.

~~~
hugh3
Because we're needlessly pedantic, that's why.

The internet exists to allow us to have pointless arguments over things that
don't matter, for no other reason than that we think another person is saying
something which is not entirely true.

There's not much point in discussing how much oil 190 million gallons is,
either. Personally I'd say it's enough to fill the world's largest supertanker
about 1.3 times over, but that doesn't sound very spectacular.

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bad_alloc
On slide 12 you can read that the spill is supposed to be equivalent to
"1,9301.5 mW wind turbines"; i.e. for the money spent on everything you could
buy as many wind turbines as required to achieve the specified energy output.
Sadly mW means milliwatts and not Megawatts, which they probably intended to
say.

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jcl
That visualization is unhelpful, but at least it isn't grossly misleading,
like the graphic corrected in this post:

[http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/three-decades-of-
maj...](http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/three-decades-of-major-oil-
spills.html)

------
nkassis
Wait one milk jug is == to one gallon of oil? Wow, that makes it that much
easier to see.

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andrewingram
Unless my maths is very much off, if you made the oil into one long cuboid 1
atom across, the length would be 88 light years. I was kind of disappointed by
this, I was hoping it would be longer than the known universe.

~~~
hugh3
What are you using for "one atom"?

Using one square angstrom as the cross section of an atom (which is about
right), and plugging

"187 million gallons / 1e-20 m^2 in light years"

into google, I get:

7.48237279 × 10^9 light years

which is at least an appreciable fraction of the universe, and ten thousand
times the width of the galaxy.

~~~
andrewingram
It looks like my calculations were in fact way off. Though when I plug that
into google I get a different answer because it assumes imperial gallons for
me.

However, this answer is much more interesting and restores my faith in
ridiculous numbers.

------
vgurgov
Are they dumb?? Is it a joke? I am not getting it -can someone explain plz?

What Does 184 Million Gallons of Oil Look Like? - Like 184 Milk Jugs..

~~~
agperson
We're going to need a bigger cow...

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hugh3
Oh, it's not that bad. Some of them are reasonable, some of them not so much.
The fact that it was enough to coat San Francisco Bay to a depth of 1/64th of
an inch sorta put it into perspective for me. (This did not, I admit, need to
be illustrated with a line-art drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge).

~~~
ars
How so? If I get to pick the thickness that I coat it with I can compare it to
anything, from a small pool to the entire worlds oceans. So telling you San
Francisco Bay tells you nothing at all.

And they are wrong anyway. 184,000,000 gallons / (1/64 inch) = 677.6 mi^2,
while the San Francisco Bay is 1600 mi^2

And just for fun: This could cover all the oceans of the world to a depth of
.00000008045 inches. (Which is about 39 atoms thick.)

~~~
hugh3
Maybe it's just that I can see San Francisco Bay out my window.

But I can't visualise the whole of the world's oceans, nor can I visualise a
swimming pool coated with half a mile of oil. But a thin layer of oil all
across the Bay, that I can easily imagine.

------
biggulp
Perhaps showing something like one of the old World Trade center towers as a
container with a thermometer-style guage on the side would work better. Show
more than one building if it is more than that.

Looks like the buildings were 87x135 feet, if I got the math right, a pair
could be filled to just over 1000 feet

------
c1sc0
Best clicktrap ever: keep moving through the visualizations ... it gets better
and better.

------
Confusion
Even '279 olympic-size swimming pools' does not really appeal to the
imagination. You'd probably be best of comparing it to the volume of a
reasonably sized lake in the vicinity of the reader.

~~~
hugh3
It would be tiny compared to any lake that anyone would have heard of.

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Groxx
That whole set is surprisingly bad... it goes from "OMG that's a LOT" to "oh,
that's not so bad then, is it?" to "1/64th of an inch...? How thick is that?"

Aimless, perspectiveless, and confusing.

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jedbrown
This one is worse, the 76% isn't volume, area, height, or length weighted.

<http://www.cnbc.com/id/38294088/?slide=5>

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aheilbut
However, a pool that is 1.36 square miles, 1 milk-jug deep does actually does
put it into perspective quite well, especially compared to the volume of the
ocean.

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tibbon
Additionally, it is one of those web page that hitting 'back' once doesn't
take you back and tries to get you stuck. At least in Chrome on the Mac.

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Marticus
I think the yacht one was worse.

But the beer can in the stadium I'm afraid takes the cake. Completely absurd.

~~~
norova
I agree, especially when I read this: "Cowboys stadium has an internal volume
of approximately 104 cubic feet"

Somebody left out a "million" somewhere.

~~~
mbyrne
So close to the action!

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davidedicillo
Now we know that even CNBC uses odesk for their illustrations

