This is not a story about Richard Parker. This post won’t make you believe in God. In fact, it’s not about that Pi at all.* Nor is about the other kind of pie — Apple, Pumpkin or Shepherd. It’s about showing data, and the venerable pie chart.

Naomi Robbins issued a challenge on her blog Effective Graphs. Can this chart be improved upon?

I assume what’s behind this question is a general distaste among the Data Visualization community (yes, there is one) for Pie Charts. Their inventor, William Playfair has a lot to answer for. Tufte doesn’t like them, saying, “A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart.” Stephen Few thinks you should, “save the pies for dessert.” Naomi has an angular argument against pies, “We make angle judgments when we read a pie chart, but we don’t judge angles very well…