This is one of those analytically poor graphs for which the NY Times is notorious - see Tufte. It looks cool but is next to useless for any sort of serious work. The human eye does a poor job of comparing areas, especially when they are scattered around randomly in relation to each other. Looking at the graph, is Ukraine greater than Italy? How does either of these compare to South Korea? What are the unlabeled countries between Germany and Italy? The interactive feature of this graph allows you to answer these questions but this just highlights the inadequacy of the static picture.
I once helped to produce graphs similar to this in APL (though we used squares instead of circles). It quickly turns into an art project rather than any kind of serious comparison. The problem is that you have a couple of arbitrary and unrelated constraints: you have to trade off geographic accuracy against the size of the figure you are supposedly analyzing. Since the circles in this graph may be any size - including zero - fitting them into proper geographic relations is often impossible. The short answer is that it would be no more difficult to do this in J than any other tool but you will end up making so many adjustments by hand you might as well do it in Photoshop. On 8/23/08, Björn Helgason <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > How difficult would it be to make a similar plot as this in J? > > http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/04/sports/olympics/20080804_MEDALCOUNT_MAP.html > -- > Björn Helgason, Verkfræðingur > Fugl&Fiskur ehf, > Fornustekkum II, 781 Hornafirði > Po Box 127,801 Selfoss , > t-póst: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > gsm: +3546985532 > Landslags og skrúðgarðagerð, gröfuþjónusta > http://groups.google.com/group/J-Programming > > > Tæknikunnátta höndlar hið flókna, sköpunargáfa er meistari einfaldleikans > > góður kennari getur stigið á tær án þess að glansinn fari af skónum > /|_ .-----------------------------------. > ,' .\ / | Með léttri lund verður | > ,--' _,' | Dagurinn í dag | > / / | Enn betri en gærdagurinn | > ( -. | `-----------------------------------' > | ) | (\_ _/) > (`-. '--.) (='.'=) > `. )----' (")_(") > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- Devon McCormick, CFA ^me^ at acm. org is my preferred e-mail
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