the.com/chart
where chaos puts on a suit and pretends to make sense
means A diagram, table, or graph that organizes information visually so patterns and relationships can be seen at a glance.
from From Latin 'charta' (a leaf of papyrus, a sheet of paper), which traveled through French 'charte' into English. The same root branched off into 'card' and 'charter' — all of them, at heart, just things written on a sheet. The sense of a navigational map came first; the graph-and-table meaning followed once people realized you could plot more than coastlines on a flat surface.
- navy roots
- sailors charted seas long before anyone charted profits
- lie machine
- truncated y-axes have launched a thousand panics
- top spot
- pop charts ranked songs before they ranked algorithms
- pie problem
- humans badly misjudge angles, making pie charts mathematically rude
- flatlining
- a flat line on a heart chart means trouble
for instance
dow jones industrial average — stock market index tracking 30 large us companies, established 1896
billboard hot 100 — weekly music chart ranking top songs in the us since 1958