Did you know that the National Day of Prayer is still a thing that is celebrated in the ostensibly secular United States of America? It is! It’s the first Thursday of every May, which happens to be today. And did you know that humanists celebrate today as the National Day of Reason? They do! At least since 2003, anyway. Did you also know that today is BAD CHART THURSDAY?? Well it is, and I w... »
The other day, I Tweeted a link to this Vulture article in which the age of an actor is compared to the age of his female costar at the time of filming, showing that as men age, their female costars seem to stay the same age like a perky, perpetually stacked Dorian Gray. This, for instance, is Harrison Ford: A few of my Twitter friends wondered what the chart would look like for leading ladies who... »
Lo, once again it is bad chart Thursday, and this week the chart “creation” (too easy!) has been done for us. Behold: It’s the best bad chart of all time! Not only do all of the variables change mid-chart for no apparent reason. Not only are some variables not actually dependent (ALL THOSE NAMED ADAM NOW HAVE 950 YEARS LONGEVITY). Not only is a label missing from one axis (new ge... »
This Buzzfeed listicle is currently making the rounds, showing 20 “young people” holding up signs explaining why they are against marriage equality. It’s definitely interesting to see why young people, who we usually think of as being progressive and awesome, believe in something stupid and bigoted that will in time look as backwards as the arguments against interracial marriage ... »
Earlier this week, friend and webcomic artist Zach Weinersmith emailed me a fine example of a pre-made bad chart he found on the front page of NBC, in anticipation of Bad Chart Thursday: As wonderfully bad as that bad chart is, I was more taken by the realization that Zach would be the perfect first guest poster for BCT. I asked him if he could contribute something, and within the day I had this b... »
For today’s special Pi Day version of Bad Chart Thursday, I present to you the distribution of digits in the first 1,000 decimal places of pi, presented as a pie chart: Remarkably, when I Googled for this, I was only able to find the frequency of digits in pi represented in bar charts, which is obviously a ridiculous thing to do, considering the pun opportunities. So, fixed. As an accompanim... »
In my defense, I had a pretty shit day yesterday. The kind of day that was so shit, it could not be made happier by writing a new Bad Chart Thursday, which has quickly become one of my favorite features on Skepchick. No, it was the kind of day that could only be made better by playing hours and hours of FTL. Yes, I know I’ve already beaten it on the hardest setting (the innocent-sounding ... »
At 9:30pm* today I was still at work, just waiting for someone else to do their job so I could go home and continue to think about how much my life sucks in the comfort of my own couch. You would think that is the perfect time to open up your browser to watch cat videos on Youtube, steal some cool No.2 pencils from the supply closet, and make photocopies of your private parts, but my boss was sitt... »
