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User: sharknado

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  1. Re:No thanks. on Team of Dentists Create "The Six-Second Toothbrush" · · Score: 1

    I used baking soda toothpaste once in my life...it was salty and unpleasant. Maybe some people can deal with that, but in my mind, the minty = fresh association is the one that controls my toothpaste purchasing :)

  2. Consumable Pricing on Team of Dentists Create "The Six-Second Toothbrush" · · Score: 1

    Looking at the pictures, I don't get how the device cleans the outside of your teeth. I honestly can't see this achieving mass market success for a few reasons. First, the price needs to come down - as a consumable item, people aren't going to want to blow a lot of money on it. Then there are issues with cleaning / hygiene - lots of crap can get stuck in those bristles. Then there's the risk involved - people aren't willing to risk their dental hygiene on an untested / unproven technology. For most people, this means a recommendation from their dentist / hygienist.

  3. Re:The latest episode on Teaching Fractions: The Tootsie Roll Is the New Pie · · Score: 1

    Well, box plots and bar charts have very different purposes...box plots are used to show distribution statistics, whereas bars are for comparing individual values. 100% agree on the pie charts though - in fact, the percent completion property of pie charts is perhaps the only thing that makes them useful. Imagine a scorecard with many rows of data, that uses a partly completed pie to represent a percentage value (e.g. half a pie = 50%, three quarters of a pie = 75%). Now, sort the data by the pie column, so the pie grows/shrinks as your eyes move up and down the scorecard. It's a very quick and useful visual representation because it provides a vertical reference for finding values near a certain percentage value. The cognitive delay that you normally experience with pie charts (of converting a slice to a percentage value) is irrelevant because the sorting makes it so that you only have to do this conversion once for many rows of data. I call this a pie trend. You heard it here first. The problem is that most common uses for pie charts give them a bad rep in the dataviz best practices community. Have to agree with Few on that one.

  4. The latest episode on Teaching Fractions: The Tootsie Roll Is the New Pie · · Score: 2

    This is just the latest episode in Stephen Few's war on pie charts. For anyone interested: http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1492 http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf

  5. Re:Fucking idiots on U.S. Government: Sorry, We're Closed · · Score: 1

    The problem is they have a blind eye when it comes to a really overbloated defense bill

    Heh. "Defense" bill.