There's also an odd reversal near the middle; number of cylinders is roughly correlated w/ displacement, which is roughly correlated w/ weight, which is roughly correlated w/ horsepower, which is roughly... oops, inversely correlated w/ 0-60 acceleration time. Hence the lines looking like they got twisted in a bunch between the horsepower axis and the acceleration axis.
I think interaction is a very under-utilized aspect of visualization; if that car visualization hadn't had such abysmal performance, being able to play with it might have been very informative. I think interaction is more powerful than time (but probably harder to design effectively).
As it was, I noticed several interesting new (to me) points:
- Quantization of number of cylinders is obvious, but I didn't expect displacement turn out to be so quantized
- The highest acceleration cars didn't have the worst fuel efficiency
- The oldest cars (1970) appeared to include the ones with the worst fuel efficiency.
I've been trying to figure out a better way of laying out the weight/horsepower/acceleration axes, given that weight*acceleration=horsepower (with the addition of some noise due to different measurement techniques, etc.)
Well you're gonna have that twist anyway, unless you flip a couple columns. I sort of prefer having it in the middle. But then i didn't really mind the visualization so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask.
I think interaction is a very under-utilized aspect of visualization; if that car visualization hadn't had such abysmal performance, being able to play with it might have been very informative. I think interaction is more powerful than time (but probably harder to design effectively).
As it was, I noticed several interesting new (to me) points:
- Quantization of number of cylinders is obvious, but I didn't expect displacement turn out to be so quantized
- The highest acceleration cars didn't have the worst fuel efficiency
- The oldest cars (1970) appeared to include the ones with the worst fuel efficiency.
I've been trying to figure out a better way of laying out the weight/horsepower/acceleration axes, given that weight*acceleration=horsepower (with the addition of some noise due to different measurement techniques, etc.)