Link: At Chipotle, How Many Calories Do People Really Eat?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/17/upshot/what-do-people-actually-order-at-chipotle.html?abt=0002&abg=0&_r=0

This article makes good use of histograms to display distributions rather than just standard descriptive statistics like “average”. For those who haven’t taken much math or haven’t been exposed to these sorts of distributions, the author also picks out certain points along the cumulative frequency distribution chart to explain what they mean; for instance only 10 percent of meals have less than 625 calories.

For many data sets (especially non-normal ones that arise in social networks, arithmetic mean (sum and divide by the number of elements) is a gross approximation of the real central tendency. See Ed Chi’s great article about this subject.  (Full disclosure: I have worked with Ed at Google)

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