Retired Geezer was reading this post over at Mayor of Mitchieville’s site, and thought that it would be interesting to plot the numbers on government regulation of religion presented in the post. “Who?” he wondered, “Who could I ask to plot these up?” For some reason I came to mind, so here you go. Tell them what they won, Johnny.

“Yes Monty, in modestly-sized blue diamonds, this graph speaks of understated elegance and refinement! But it doesn’t just look good!! this is precision plotting at its finest – every point located with patience and exacting attention to detail! Back to you.”

So here is the plot, which is pretty interesting (as RG suspected). The mayor is pointing out that religious freedom appears to be more and more restricted as Muslims come to play a larger role in the government. The graph shows that correlation in a striking way.

Special Treat!! Below the fold I’ve reserved a special version of the graph for those who prefer little dots. More importantly (nay, sadly) I’ve been forced to make an embarrassing admission.

Here’s your graph, dotphiles:

Har!! But you know what? When I was plotting this up, I noticed that the center of the triangles did not correspond to the data point. The whiz kids at Microsoft put the data point at the center of the rectangle that encloses the triangle. It doesn’t affect the unemployment charts – those triangles were handplaced – but it does mean that the definition of the data point in a triangular marker is much more ambiguous than I had stated.

At least, as implemented in commercial software.

Now, having salved my conscience, I just have to brainwipe everybody who reads this and we can get back to our derision in progress.