But who is this “Jim Walker”? Do you or any of your readers know? I cannot locate anything about him online – no home page or anything. This is complicated by the fact that there’s a high profile Rev. James (Jim) Walker, a different person, who writes on Islam and Christianity from a fundamentalist Christian perspective.

I actually didn’t make it up. I stole it from someone else. I also supplied a link to the source so people can go and find out the source of this idea, and learn more about it, and how the graph is made.

Any admission of Christianity hear, is
a source of contention and liability.

And one of them is to intentionally destroy all of the old knowledge. As a Christian who is also a scientist by training, I must remind everyone that it was the Church that ran around and gathered up old manuscripts and scrolls and such and stored them away when the Western Roman Empire fell circa 476 AD. Much of the ancient knowledge we have today would have been destroyed by the elements other religions and yes some less far-sighted Christians too but much of what we know today based on the ancient and classical knowledge was specifically purposely saved by the church’s monastic orders.

Yes, indeed!

“which is clearly cartoonish and an attempt to make a specific point”

Well, we agree on something at least!

“What is YMMV? You really ought to spell out the abbreviations the first time you use them. Laughing Out Loud! (LOL)”

YGTBK, YKWIM? 😉

(back in the BBS day we used to use actual English almost always if memory serves, I don’t know what happened…)

Have a good week.

Think of it this way: You know what cartoon xkcd? I predict you don’t like that either, based on what you’re saying here, but I could be wrong. Anyway, many of xkcd’s cartoons are pithy commentaries on life, history, society, whatever. They work. Thy are stick figure line drawings.

It may be helpful to think of this graph, which is clearly cartoonish and an attempt to make a specific point, a cartoon that looks like a graph. That, indeed, is what it is.

While we’re on the subject of graphs that don’t pass as good graphs for use in research papers but still make valuable points (though usualy just for fun), have you seen the index card graphs? Check out this example:

http://thisisindexed.com/

If you like, but it is a bit harder, you can find examples of graphs done in this manner but that are quite serious conceptualizations that have zero data but that show relationships.

One could argue that each and every graph used in Economics with “U” as the vertical axis is unlabeled.

What is YMMV? You really ought to spell out the abbreviations the first time you use them. Laughing Out Loud! (LOL)