1.21 Jigga-watts

Nothing much today.. not exactly a math art, but funny nontheless. This is courtesy of Nathan Yau, of FlowingData - in a post called Save the Space Time Continuum. Funny post. Go to his site, comment a suitable comment and you’ll be in the running to win one of Edward Tufte’s books! (If you don’t know who Edward Tufte is, I mentioned him in the Ebb and Flow of Movies - a post which Nathan made way more lucid points than me)

In a way, this picture itself is ironic (just like all good art), and not only pokes fun at Dr. Emmet Brown, but also at the way how people visualize data. If you notice, the 1.21 jiggowatt gigawatt dwarves everything else. That is exactly the problem with many graphs and data visualization methods nowadays. A better option would be to use a log-scale to visualize this data (but I doubt there’d be much difference)