Here are what readers of The Big Picture bought from Amazon in December:
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Starting from the 1 o’clock position, and going clockwise:
Inside the Investor’s Brain 14%
Spy Wars 10%
Super Crunchers: 8%
Forces for Good: 7%
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable 7%
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain: 4%
Four Hour Work Week by 4%
Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics 4%
Wikinomics: 3%
Excel chart junk. Your Spy Wars slice, e.g., looks considerably smaller than Investor’s Brain. Intentional…?
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BR: No, that’s my cut & paste error — it should be 10%, but I miffed it somehow.
I’ll fix above . . .
You should add Timothy Sykes’ book ‘An American Hedge Fund’ to your list, it was a fantastic read, not so much about the hedge funds, just inspirational
Luv your thing but it feels so anal retentive. So what !! The mortgage market is bad — oooh ! So whaaat?
So what ? What am I supposed to do in response to your call to arms ? Am I supposed to trade overpriced securities ?
God carry me, and if you don’t you bastard, I will chew my way, then. ( A small Irish Catholic prayer or not. Bring it on then ladds. Amen
I was going to invoke Tufte, but since he (?) appears to have weighed in, let me second the motion. Excel makes a perfectly acceptable 2D pie chart.
The colors are nice and all… but pie charts really are the worst. Site continues to be great though!
The colors are nice and all… but pie charts really are the worst. Site continues to be great though!
If pie charts really worked, you almost wouldn’t need the list that follows this one. That list is essentially a bar chart without the bars, with the order properly shown descending. The list is easier to read at a glance than the pie chart, which is exactly the reverse of how charts should work compared with text. In fact, though, the list in this case is so simple that a chart of any sort is overkill from the start. Just because a chart can be drawn doesn’t mean it should be.
I second PN’s observation, although a horizontal bar chart (or flag chart) might be useful: you could even show raw numbers rather than percentages, since the additional information is interesting and people will visually estimate percentages from the size of the bars.