Something that is both vegetation and mythical on Google’s new doodle celebrating 180 years of Venn diagrams.
John Venn, creator of the eponymous diagram, was born 180 years ago and to celebrate, Google has created an interactive doodle of the famous data visualisation.
The concept of the Venn is simple. In each section (in most cases represented as a circle) you have one limited collection of things. In the Google example above one of those is vegetation so all trees, plants, flowers etc. and the other is mythical. The overlapping section can contain all the logical relations between those two sets.
An ash tree would belong just in the left circle because it is just vegetation and not fictional. A dragon would sit in the right circle because it is mythical but not a plant. However, because an ent, like Treebeard in the Lord of the Rings, is both mythical and a plant he belongs in the intersection between the two circles.
That’s a pretty simple example but they can get a lot more complicated. Here is an example of an incorrect Venn diagram...
Via Mitt, Venn and Now. Source: MittRomney.com
Poor Mitt Romney, not only did the Republican candidate for the US presidency in 2012 inspire mockery with such talk of car elevators and “binders full of women” he also managed to trip up with the simple Venn format.
The Romney campaign treated the Venn more like a sort of sum, with the first circle as the promise, the intersection as the subtraction and the third circle as the result. It is almost endearing how someone could have got this so wrong in such a unique way.