Toppin' the Charts

I must say, it is kind of a relief to be done with Workin' for the Man! While it was fun to write, and fun to see people's comments, being done with it finally gives me a chance to blog about something else. Yes, I know, I still have a blog to write about the stunning girl that I met while working at B&B, (As if you can't guess who I am going to write about) but there is something that I have been wanting to write about now ever since my cousin Jennifer introduced me to it.

How many of you out there have to go to meetings at work where they utilize different kind of charts? Or maybe you might remember studying pie charts in school. One thing that I have come to find about charts, (and numbers too) and the information contained in them, is that they can be construed any way that the chart author wants them to be.

A good example of this would be the speeding crackdown that they are doing out at my work. Since our safety record is very good, they (upper management) always have to find something that they can complain about, and turn into a big deal. So they decided to turn their attention to how fast people are driving out on the Hanford site. They have mainly been concentrating on the areas where the posted speed limit is 55. They did traffic monitoring with both radar stations, and the little rubber lines that they place over the roadway. After they compiled their data, they released a report about the speeds people drive. There are several different stretches of road out at Hanford where the speed is 55, so I will just narrow it down to the section that I drive on every day.

The groups were lumped together like this: 55 and under, 56-65, 66-75, and 75 and above. According to their numbers, only 35% of people were driving the speed limit and under. On the high side, 1% of people were going more than 75 miles an hour. It was the middle numbers though where they tried to make it look worse than it is. The 56-65 category had about 55% in it, and the 66-75 had 9 percent. I was sitting in a safety meeting, and the heads of the meeting were saying how disgraceful the numbers were, that only 35% of the workers were obeying the law, and how the others who weren't should be getting tickets, or even worse, be fired.

Now this struck a nerve with me, and I will tell you why. The average driver does about 5 over the posted speed limit. In fact, this is so commonplace that even policemen do it. Yes, I know that there are people out there like my sweet wife, who usually go UNDER the speed limit, but people like her are few and far between. If you notice the numbers above, they lumped the 5 over crowd along with the 10 over crowd. I was willing to bet that if those numbers were broken down further, you would see that the majority of people were going at the most 5 over the limit. So me being the kind of person that doesn't like to be accused of doing something that I am not completely guilty of, I stood up and said to the group how slanted the numbers were, and that if they wanted their little "study" to be taken seriously, they needed to re group the numbers.

Sure enough, they decided to re group them. When the new finding came out, you still had 35% at the limit or below. But the new group, the 55-60 group, had 50 percent of the people fall into it. So I choose to look at it this way: 85% of the people on site were driving in the accepted range of speed. And I have always heard that there is 15% of the population that gets most of the tickets issued. When I saw the new numbers, I felt really good that I (Well, other people probably mentioned it too, but not in the meeting I was in) threw a wrench in their plans to slam the workforce.

OK, that was a REALLY long way to go just to set up this post. As I was saying, my cousin Jennifer broke me off an email with a link to a fun site. The site is called GraphJam, and is loaded with easy to read charts. What kind of charts you may ask? Well, I am planning on showing you a few. Here goes.



As this chart clearly shows, the population of Alderaan shows a sharp decrease in people from Darth Vader blowing it up.



Elvis fans already know not to step on his Blue Suede Shoes, but now that engineer in your office who always wears the soup stained tie will be able to figure it out too.



Now the women will not understand this type of chart. It isn't something they could have possibly learned in school. But the guys, even guys under the age of 5, can read this chart with little or no difficulty.



To the Pain? As you wish.



Freddy Mercury nailed this one right on the head. Blue Eyed Floozys are so last year.



Hey, it pays to build up an immunity to iocane powder. You never know when it will help you out of a jam.



No, Family Guy DID NOT invent the Peanut Butter Jelly song, you who knows nothing about Internet entertainment history!!



Other things to do before you Go Go? Pull up your pants before the cops come into the public restroom.



You can't touch this. (That means you too George Michael!)



Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful.

And the best pie chart made in the history of man kind, one that is 100 percent accurate, the kind of accuracy that the scientists who preach about global warming wish they could pull out is..........



Creed 2.0 That is all I have to say.


I hope you enjoyed the charts, and if you want to find more, in case you have some office meeting that needs to be spiced up, you can find them at GraphJam.

See you next time!