Understanding logarithmic plots
More often than not, reading daily newspapers and similar articles, one can find charts that are used by media organizations to misrepresent the facts. One common example is using linear scales to create so called panic charts, where a constantly growing value is followed for a long period of time (years) and starting values are smaller than the latest one by several magnitudes. These values when visualized correctly would (and usually should) produce linear or almost linear charts, taking some panic out of the articles they illustrate.
Getting ready
With the logarithmic scale, the ratio of consecutive values is constant. This is important when we are trying to read log plots. With linear (arithmetic) scales, the constant is the distance between consecutive values. In other words, logarithmic plots have a constant distance in orders of magnitude. We will see this illustrated in the following plots. The code used to produce this figure is explained next.
As a...
