Portrait of How I Waste Time

All right, I wasted too much time on this to throw it all away, so now you have to fucking read it.

I saw this poll on Coming Soon asking people to rate LOST, with a breakdown of how people voted:

Alas, I worked in a presentation center for over 6 years (oh!, the memories!), and I didn't think a simple vertical bar chart was the best graph to illustrate the data.

So, instead of doing something constructive and practical with my time, I opened up Excel and began playing with the numbers. Since this deals with percentages, the most obvious graph would be a pie chart:

A circle represents 100%. Easy for anyone to read and understand at a glance. A pie chart is one of the most simple and elegant graphs there are. If you're looking for a crowd-pleasing graph, you can't get much better than a pie chart. Everybody loves a fucking pie chart, man.

From this chart, you might say, "Well, clearly a majority of people liked LOST as a whole." I took some poetic license with the graph and translated the numbers into terms, where "10"="Loved it!" and "0"="Piece of shit." By this logic, even if we throw out "6"/"OK." as too low, "Pretty good!" to "Loved it!" is still a good majority of the opinion here.

But let's try another graph to see what the same data looks like.

Bubble charts are less often used and can be a bit of a pain in the ass to create, depending on what you want to do with them. The data's a bit more complicated and this one isn't exactly set up properly but you get the general idea: bubble sizes here correlate to the number of votes.

Here, the "Piece of shit" bubble looks like it could nearly burst the "Loved it" bubble.

Yes, I'm spinning and manipulating the data using different graphs and colors.

The ending of LOST sullied the entire series for me. I think I may have made this point.

Beyond that, I just felt compelled to waste some valuable time this afternoon.

Namaste.