The Crescive Cow

Post date: Oct 08, 2009 1:57:37 PM

Here is a very nice cutout of one of my favorite books:

How to lie with statistics by Darrell Huff in 1954

There is still another kind of danger in varying the size of objects in a chart. It seems that in 1860 there were something over eight million milk cows in the United States and by 1936 there were more than twenty-five million. Showing this increase by drawing two cows, one three times the height of the other, will exaggerate the impression in the manner we have been discussing. But the effect on the hasty scanner of the page may be even stranger: He may easily come away with the idea that cows are bigger now than they used to be.

What he of course refers to is that a linear increase in height results in a quadratic increase in area.