Back when I first started charting the spread of coronavirus I decided not to use a logarithmic scale. I figured that log scales were fine for communicating with other professionals, but most laymen ...

Two hundred years ago, Missouri was rocked by an earthquake so severe it made the Mississippi River flow backward and set off church bells in Boston more than 1,000 miles away. These details help ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I help people communicate data clearly with graphs. In “When Should I Use Logarithmic Scales in My Charts and Graphs”, I showed ...

Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet program includes a Chart Wizard for making a variety of graphs from tabulated data. In some situations, as with scientific experiments, the data in one or both axes of ...

The ability to map numbers onto a line is universal. But for an Amazonian tribe, this mapping is not linear but logarithmic. The finding illuminates both the nature and the limits of the human ...

Shortly after it occurred, scientists said there was a slight chance Monday’s magnitude-4.4 earthquake in Los Angeles may have been a “foreshock” of a bigger one yet to come. That’s obviously getting ...

While refurbishing an ageing audio mixer, I decided that the level meters needed special attention. Their rather horrible 100 µA edgewise movements had VU-type scales, the drive electronics being just ...