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by Agent-Cooper 1139 days ago
The circles' areas are showing the failed assets. Observable Plot defaults to using a square root scale when encoding a quantity with the radius of a circle.

https://observablehq.com/plot/marks/dot#dot-options

3 comments

You'd think that radius meant radius, but that'd be too simple.
TIL, thanks. Guess they are crazy after all.
So weird, should it not be the area of the circle being the value? The radius should be √(Area/π) not the square root of the value or am I misunderstanding?
In this case, the x-axis is a different unit from the unit of data measured by the radius, so the fact that it's off by a constant multiple doesn't matter; it's just an arbitrary scale.

If both the x- and y-axes were encoding data in the same unit as the area encoded, then it might make sense to correct for the area, but I don't think I've ever seen a plot like that.

Circles don't have volumes?
The volume of a circle would presumably be zero, but yes I've used the wrong word. I'll change it above. I sometimes wish there was a forum that allowed editing of spelling in other peoples posts and they could just accept the changes (same with Twitter). You could spend all your days correcting obvious mistakes...
> The volume of a circle would presumably be zero, but yes I've used the wrong word.

i guess?

> I sometimes wish there was a forum that allowed editing of spelling in other peoples posts and they could just accept the changes (same with Twitter). You could spend all your days correcting obvious mistakes...

nice and interesting idea except some people are awful and would abuse that feature :(

maybe you should make a forum with that feature!