[haberman]

> The book, How to Lie With Statistics, is wrong on this point.

Ugh, the more I read of Tufte the less I like him. He loves to make blanket statements (like calling a point "wrong") in an authoritative way, and he's amassed enough adoring followers that people repeat his words like gospel instead of calling him on it.

It's valid to say that a non-zero-based scale shows the data better. But it's also completely valid to note that non-zero-based scales can be used in alarmist ways to make data extremely misleading.

I thought "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" was terrible, and I went in really wanting to like it: http://www.amazon.com/review/R11NYC3OE3LBE