The longer I look at it, the more issues I find with it.

1) What are the units for the Y-axis? How does one quantify strength of evidence? And what’s the basis for the “worth it” line?

2) What is the meaning of the colors? Other than the “one to watch”, the color seems to be redundant, simply displaying the same information as the Y-axis position represents.

3) Why not make use the X-axis? As far as I can tell, position along the X-axis is arbitrary. If you had plotted popularity on the X-axis and strength-of-evidence on the Y-axis, then you might expose some trends in the data – how are popularity and evidence correlated?

4) While its a nifty visual trick, having the circles expand as you mouse over them distorts the data.

5) Why not show the # of google hits? You indicate this with the size of the circle, but the key does not show the actual numbers. Is the number of hits proportional to the area or the radius of the circle? Since you don’t show this in the key, we are left to guess.
And, this use of circles is questionable. “Area and volume representations fool people with the square/cube law: an increase in linear size leads to a square of the increase for areas and a cube of the increase for volumes.” – (Edward Tufte)

Those are just a few of my issues with the graphical presentation – beyond this there are clearly some issues with careless gathering of the data, cherry-picking of studies (the St. John’s Wort study was from Germany, and according to Wikipedia, “results from German-language countries are considerably more favourable for hypericum than trials from other countries.”), and apparent misunderstanding of medical terms (for example, mousing over “Licorice Root” says “coughs”, while the study linked is for “A plant extract and its modified preparation in functional dyspepsia”)

It just goes to show, you can put a pretty Flash interface in front of something and people will be impressed with the gee-whiz aspect of the presentation, despite the fact that the underlying data is being badly mangled. The purpose of a plot is to present information clearly and cleanly, not to be a game. Information is beautiful when it is presented clearly.

However, 2 big flaws that will keep me form playing it!

You can’t see ships when they shoot at you because the zoom is way to tight and the info blogs flip too quickly to read.

Back to the first complant

How can you shoot something that in off the sceen and !!!!! how can something off the screen shoot you???????? even games that have bad grrapics, no sound, and no fun follow basic rules. So, because I can’t target invisible ships, I will not be able to play your game even though I really want to.

Also, If you were the creators of 1066 you need to do some work on that game as well.