June 4, 2013

Nonlinear time

Allan Hansen sends in this infographic from Greatist, showing the benefits of quitting smoking

Smokers-Timeline-1

He points out the non-linear time scale — equally spaced intervals range from 20 minutes to five years.  It’s also a bit strange that time progresses in the opposite direction to the burning of the cigarette — perhaps it should have been flipped left to right.

Other versions of this information are common, and they nearly all have the same nonlinear time scale

Smoking-timeline-2smoking_times-3smoking-timeline-4Smoke Timeline-5

 

One notable exception is from Blisstree, where the evenly-spaced text is linked to accurately-scaled times by lines.  This graphic also avoids the direction-of-burning problem, using comments from former smokers as the background.

smoking_timeline_2070x1530

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »