Dumb Pie Chart

Although I love messing around with Flash and actionscript, I'm well aware that the vast majority of Flash content on the Internet is crap. Some of this crap is even in the form of (gasp!) pie charts.

This pie chart is driven by a table, containing the titles, and the data. You can see the content of the different wedges by mousing around it.

Where does this data come from, you might ask? Naturally, like most pie charts, it is made up. Even when statistics are not made up, they tend to tell you far more about the person formulating the statistics than the thing they portend to reveal.

Edward Tufte, in his classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information has this to say about pie charts:

A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart; the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them, for then the viewer is asked to compare quantities located in spatial disarray both within and between pies... Given their low data-density and failure to order numbers along a visual dimension, pie charts should never be used.

Nonetheless, should you be compelled by a paying client to use one, feel free to use this code.