Data Underload  / 

It’s All Greek (or Chinese or Spanish or…) to Me

By Nathan Yau

In English, there’s an idiom that notes confusion: “It’s all Greek to me.” Other languages have similar sayings, but they don’t use Greek as their point of confusion, and of course — there’s a Wikipedia page for that. Mark Liberman graphed the relationships several years ago, but the table on Wikipedia references more languages now. So I messed around with it a bit.

“Chinese” is the leading point of confusion, then Spanish and Greek, and then you just move out from there. Languages with lighter border and towards the edges don’t have any other languages that point to them.

Obviously the Wikipedia page isn’t comprehensive, but hey, it was fun to poke at.

Become a Member
Support an independent site. Make great charts.

Join Now

Favorites

Think Like a Statistician – Without the Math

I call myself a statistician, because, well, I’m a statistics graduate student. However, the most important things I’ve learned are less formal, but have proven extremely useful when working/playing with data.

Who is Older and Younger than You

Here’s a chart to show you how long you have until you start to feel your age.

Top Brewery Road Trip, Routed Algorithmically

There are a lot of great craft breweries in the United States, but there is only so much time. This is the computed best way to get to the top rated breweries and how to maximize the beer tasting experience. Every journey begins with a single sip.

10 Best Data Visualization Projects of 2015

These are my picks for the best of 2015. As usual, they could easily appear in a different order on a different day, and there are projects not on the list that were also excellent.