(To go straight to a gallery of informational graphic images, go the the Informational graphics page. More informational graphics as they appeared on the page can be found on the Books-nonfiction/science page. There's also this poster.)

Data visualization

When I transform a gray expanse of numbers from an Excel spreadsheet into a picture of what those numbers mean, I get a little thrill at the elegance of the bar chart, line graph, pie chart, bubble chart, scatter graph, and all the hardworking cousins in the family of data visualization. They really earn their keep.

For example:

If you had a suspicion there's been something amiss in the U.S. healthcare system, there's a picture of it. Talk about being worth a thousand words!

I am not of the school that thinks this chart could be improved by adding a Caduceus in the background, or making the bars into stethoscopes of different lengths. Every element in a bar chart means something regarding the information it depicts. Extra stuff is not just a distraction, it's an inaccuracy. Don't get me wrong, I love illustration. But not here.

Here's more on the same subject:

At least we're doing better than Chile and Mexico. Spending eight times as much per person ought to get us something.

Not to harp, but here are some more numbers on that subject, depicted differently:

Below are some more graphics on the subject as they appeared on the page in 2014. Click to see an enlargement of the pages. Pages and graphics in this section from the Burrill Annual Report on the Life Sciences Industry.