Pretty In ggplot2

Notice any difference between today’s and the previous days‘ diagrams?

First of all, today was the end of 2009 daylight Saving time, and our solar system reflected that in the scatter plot diagram on the right — instead of waking up at 8am, now it wakes up at 7am. I also replaced the pair diagram with a more meaningful histogram, so now we can tell how many readings per 50w. But the more significant differences are the new look. Yup, they are prettier than the previous ones!

Thanks to Hadley Wickham’s ggplot2 package*, I was able to easily produce pretty diagrams after reading his (free!) well-written qplot chapter. Hopefully once I’m done with his book, I’ll be able to produce more meaningful, beautiful statistics diagrams.

But what was the driving force behind this “beautification“? Well, David got intrigued by my R diagrams, and this afternoon he started investigated gnuplot. An hour or so later, his shell script was able to produce a whole week of data in smooth lines! Man, I’d better hurry up, or  I won’t have my job much longer!

*: For those who are interested: The ggplot2 talk he gave at the Bay Area userR Group in Sep. was impressive! You can find his data, code and slides here, and the details in “Beautiful Code” — “Chapter 18 Bay Area Blues: The Effect of the Housing Crisis.”