20110426

US home prices from 1890 to 2010: ▃▂▂ ▁▁▄▃▄▄▄█▅

I found this Ritholtz post interesting and wanted to tweet the graph visually.


Turns out that Alex Kerin has made a fabulous Excel spreadsheet for converting data into unicode blocks that can form a "sparkbar".

It ain't perfect, but it's a step forward, right?

To create the sparkbar, I took the data from Robert Shiller's page, computed the average value per decade using Excel trickery, and then lowered all the numbers so that the minimum value was zero.

Final result: ▃▂▂ ▁▁▄▃▄▄▄█▅

What do you think?  Is this useful?

20110421

Tobacco use vs lung cancer, 1900 - 2005

Tobacco seems very related to lung cancer deaths. And the American love affair with tobacco is clearly on the wane.