A warped pie chart lets you cram in more than 100%

On August 10, 2018 Randall Munroe posted an xkcd cartoon titled Pie Charts. As shown above, he illustrated how to warp (or pleat) the chart out of the usual plane so you could somewhat legitimately cram in 130%.    

I detest pie charts and donut charts. On March 17, 2016 I blogged that 3-D Pie Charts are the Spawn of Satan. Since then I saw that on February 16, 2017 Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic had posted on her Storytelling with Data blog An Updated Post on Pies. She referred to a May 30, 2016 article by Robert Kosara at EagerEyes titled A pair of pie chart papers that discusses how they actually can work. One is titled Arcs, angles, or areas: individual data encodings in pie and donut charts; the other is Judgement error in pie chart variations. More recently there also was another article by X. Cai et al. titled A study of the effect of doughnut chart parameters on proportion estimation accuracy.

Sometimes people cram way more than 130% into a pie chart. On December 22, 2013 I had blogged about ‘tis the season for pies and artistic charts about them – and gave an example with an outrageous 271%. On December 1, 2009 at his Peltier Tech Blog Jon Peltier blogged about how I Keep Saying, Use Bar Charts, Not Pies. He showed a Fox News pie chart with 193% that really should have added another segment for a total of 251%.

There is a real object called a wave washer that can be used as a spring. You could cover with a warped donut chart. (The image came from Wikimedia Commons).