One of the problems with these circle charts is that most people aren’t very good at visually comparing areas. So to give a psychologically accurate impression you wouldn’t just want to scale the areas either (of course, most people would expect the areas to be scaled, so doing something else is also misleading).
Just a bar chart does a much better job of conveying the relative quantities (of course, it throws away the geography part). I would recommend trying to find some other way than these scaled-circles-on-a-map thingies if possible.
In any event, I think “intentionally misleading” is a leap. It seems likelier that the creator is not an expert in data visualization and wasn’t thinking carefully enough about how to make the plot.
Re:Show HN: Who Arms the World?
by annoyingnoob on Monday November 18, 2019 @12:48PM
(#21566362)
Mexico does not make the top 25 list for 2018. Yet, the circle for the US almost entirely covers Mexico, and part of Canada too.
For example, according to the rendered source code, America for 2018 has a radius of 75.05, Germany has a radius of 9.12, for a ratio of 8.22. From the data[0], America has a value of 10508, Germany has a value of 1277, for a ratio of 8.22.
However, since this is the radius, the area of America's big red dot is 17671, while the area of Germany's is 261, for a ratio of 67.7, or sqrt(8.22).
0 http://armstrade.sipri.org/armstrade/html/export_toplist.php