[ralferoo]

This article is weird. It centres on the central premise that pie charts are useless because you can't tell exactly the relative sizes of slices that are very similarly sized. That's not the point of a pie chart, which is to show clearly which areas are big and which are insignificant.

The article then poses the question "Let’s See if it actually rains more on the weekend." Looking at the pie chart, it's immediately obvious at a glance, that YES, it does rain more at the weekend, as the two segments for Saturday and Sunday together account for nearly half the pie. Clearly the pie chart is perfect for answering this question. But then, the article launches into a whole spiel about how pie charts are useless because you can't tell which was rainier between Saturday or Sunday.

However, if you used an alternative presentation e.g. the lollipop charts as they suggest, then it's NOT obvious for answering the question of whether the 2 weekend days rained more or less than the 5 other days. Rather it's benefit is in determining which days were the rainiest.

The obvious take-home is to use the appropriate graph to illustrate the conclusion you're trying to make from the data, but also include the raw data so that others can analyse it if they think there might be other details that are important.

[wartijn_]

I think the "Let’s See if it actually rains more on the weekend." is not really want the author actually wants to test. The text in the image above says "What do you call the day after two days of rain? Monday". This suggests that Saturday and Sunday are the rainiest and second rainiest days of the week.

So what the author wants to see is if both Saturday and Sunday are rainier than any other week. So the problem isn't that you can't differentiate between those two days, but that you can't between either of those days individually and Monday.