In the early 1990s, working partly as a freelance book editor, I had the privilege of being the main managing editor of Julian L. Simon's (edited) The State of Humanity (Blackwell, 1995). One of my responsibilities was turning raw data from the book's 60 authors into graphs so people could grasp them better. But the graphs could enhance understanding only if they handled the data objectively, and one of the things Julian drummed into me was that whenever possible a graph should have a zero … [Read more...]