In his book Cows, Pugs, Wars and Witches the anthropologist Marvin Harris tries to ground the pig taboo as a protection against the tragedy of the commons. As per Harris, pigs require excessive water, a scarce resource in the region. A flat ban on consuming pigs reduces the chance that people will divert water to pigs. The article hints at this where it calls the pig "an animal unfit for the harsh terrain and dry climate".
"They require less than half the amount of water needed by a cow or a horse, making them more drought tolerant" - it follows from the article that pigs help to conserve water
My pigs love to splash water out of their trough or tip it over so they can play in it. In hot weather, pigs will lie in mud to stay cool, and they really suffer if they get too hot.
So while pigs may drink less than cows or horses, they may use more water to stay cool in arid regions without good shade. I doubt that had anything to do with the taboo, though.
This is an insult to the doctors I know who deliberately chose to do primary care because they were more motivated by service than money or prestige. For that matter, I know a developer who chose to work in IT support for a cancer research center because he put more value on helping to cure cancer than making more money. There actually are people out there who value service to the community more than fame or fortune. They deserve praise, not scorn.
It isn't an insult to anyone. I very clearly said "most" and "usually." We also have excellent IT support, done by developers, because we specifically negotiated for it. They are excellent. But we specifically included that in the contract because it is an inarguable, objective fact that most IT help desk support is not staffed with the most skilled people in the tech industry.
Unfortunately, the kind of sacrifice and selflessness you describe is not the norm in our society. As a result, the dynamic I articulated holds for "most"—just like I said.
Your post is deliberately dishonest in its characterization of what I said, and excessively hostile. That kind of behavior is not consistent with the community norms on HN. I urge you to reconsider how you interact with people here.
The ability to search the code base is one reason I insist on correct spelling even in comments when doing code reviews, and also keep adding to my IDE's dictionary so it will catch my spelling errors.
You might also want to discuss Fitt’s law. Difference between a diagram (Tufte) and a GUI is that we only look at a diagram, but a GUI we interact with, which means we need to ensure people can actually click/tap/select the element of interest. Higher density makes that harder.
I was with you until the last sentence. Removing borders makes it harder. Not being able to see the actual area of a clickable target makes it harder. I never had trouble knowing what to click in the early 2000’s, when UI was ostensibly more dense.
I'd argue that the zero value should always be shown. Otherwise you get different impressions of the rate depending how you scale and subset the Y axis.
This is not a good practice at all. Do you think atmospheric CO2 charts should show 0? How about daily temperature reading for human body temperature? Should daily stock tickers all start at 0?
Why is 0 magical?
Adding 0 to the vast majority of plots shows that data at an unnatural scale that can obscure genuinely important information. Human body temperature readings on a scale from 0 to 107F would make all the important information hard to see.
A much better rule is that charts should have reasonable bounds based on knowledge of the system. For human temperature in F anything less that 95 and greater than 107 basically mean you're dead. For processes in nature good points are some delta - the lowest record to delta + highest recorded. For things like daily stock prices, a few standard deviations each way from historic volatility works.
The dogma that charts should all start at 0 is complete nonsense and tries to side step reasoning about you data. Yes scales can be used to misrepresent data, but forcing 0 to the axis does not solve this.
Yes. Charts are communication devices. Any "rules" for charts should be seen like similar "rules" for essays or emails: good advice that almost always gives a satisfactory result when followed. Reliable paths for infrequent authors.
But what matters most in charts is the same thing that matters most with writing: pick one major point and stick to it (if you're really good or can't avoid it, maybe a couple points). This also explains why a lot of dual-axis charts don't work: the author explains two sets of data that aren't even measured on the same scale and then leaves the reader to connect them and understand the meaning of that connection. You can't be sure the reader will end up at the point you wanted to make.
That's not to say a dual-axis chart is always the wrong choice. Just that, if you start making one, stop and ask if there isn't a better way to show the data. Same with pie charts.
Edward Tufte is a great source for learning which types of charts and visual techniques do their job best. I enjoyed his book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information."
Fahrenheit is not an absolute scale, so there is nothing special about 0F, you're right about that. As for your other two examples (atmospheric CO2 and stock tickers)... Yes, the scale should start at 0. Why shouldn't they?
So if someone showed body temperature measured in Kelvin you would argue that it should start at 0? That seems even more ridiculous.
> Why shouldn't they?
Because for the vast majority of stock it would appear to be a straight line every single day? Can you find me a example of a stock trading app for a company who's price is > $100/share that shows intraday price activity on a zero scale?
Likewise most co2 charts start around 300ppm since that has been roughly where the lower bound of atmospheric co2 levels have been for all of human history.
The last time co2 was 0 on the planet earth it was just a molten rock so what's the meaning of showing this value? It's not even theoretically possible that co2 could be that low baring alien life sucking the atmosphere off the planet.
Can you clarify why the scale should start at 0 for these things? How is that anywhere close to an honest representation?
Because starting at zero can cause scaling issues that mask meaningful trends and variation. That can also be abused to mislead, but a simple rule like “always include zero” ain’t the solution to that.
All fair points about zero. Sorry, I acknowledge now I was overly influenced my metrics dashboards I use for alerting. I've seen people panic at a seeming steep rise in error rate or increase in latency because the chart was not showing the full range (0 to 1 for rates, or 0 to 2x SLA for latency). I was only thinking of operational alerting dashboards.
In that case, we should report body temperature in Kelvin. However, now the dead-alive range (95degF - 107degF) becomes 308K to 315K.
Starting at zero, that range (17K) is now only 5% of the graph, assuming we start at zero. Or in other words, if your chart is 10cm tall, the entirety of the useful range is compressed into a space that is 5mm tall.
That’s too weird for most audiences. Removing the X axis altogether seems more appropriate (while keeping the labels). Then the plot area is still “bottomless” in a sense, but the labels are where people expect to see them.
Having the axis on top implies that the values are negative. Like an ocean depth chart.
I'm disappointed by the somewhat ad-hominem attack on Silverbook for being a porn producer: "Aaron, based on his previous work as guy at a rationalist nonprofit, videogame producer, and porn producer, decided to recreate Hillman’s work." Previous work experience is irrelevant, and besides, don't at least some of aspire to being polymaths?
Funny joke, but many people consider pornography and its creators to be fundamentally immoral, anti-social and destructive towards civil society in general. So I think it's plenty relevant. Same reason Scott promoting the work of "sex researchers" who promote the same sort of thing is reason for many to be skeptical of his integrity.
Track record on similar projects was a question on the Manifund application. Those were Silverbook's answers. Were the footnote explaining this and the link to the application added after you read the article?
The other issue is that it requires the driver to read a screen while driving. in 1988 at the MIT Media Lab I built a system called Back Seat Driver that provides spoken driving directions, allowing the driver to keep their visual attention on the road. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C0V6lDKQ0Y&t=21s. It ran on a Lisp Machine, not in the vehicle. A later version ran on a Sun computer in the trunk.
The in-car nav system was also augmented dead-reckoning, like Etak. GPS was still denied to civilians at the time.
