I agree with you that not enough people are familiar with log-scale charts, but that’s a problem with experience, not with “intuition”. Log-scaled charts give perfectly fine “intuitive feeling” for anyone who is used to reading them. Which would include most people if log-scaled charts were more ubiquitous.<p>I am lamenting that they are not, because for many, many purposes they are easier to read and facilitate more useful intra-chart comparisons than linear-scaled charts. In particular, they make the slope of lines meaningful in many cases where linear-scaled charts do not. They also fit much more useful information about relative magnitude and allow us to read a couple significant digits of numbers across a wide range of scales. Any time there is more than 2 orders of magnitude difference among values a chart, a linear scale becomes nearly useless.<p>Reading charts at all is an acquired skill, and takes a lot more practice than you might expect. Just like doing arithmetic with fractions, decimals, or angles of a circle is an acquired skill, or driving a car is an acquired skill. If you study young children or people from non-literate cultures, you’ll see all kinds of difficulty reading linear-scaled charts.<p>Edit: here, I spent a couple minutes making a linear-scaled and a log-scaled chart of the wikipedia $&#x2F;gigaflops table from elsewhere in this thread, using Matlab. See how much useful information you can get from the linear-scaled chart:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;A80Tr6V.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;A80Tr6V.png</a> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;xG0mngX.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;xG0mngX.png</a><p>(On the log-scaled chart, if we penciled in a grid, you could get at least one significant figure out of each data point, despite the data spanning 11 orders of magnitude. On the linear-scaled chart, you get 2 significant figures for a single data point, but there’s no way to make any distinction at all between the rest of the values, which span about 8 orders of magnitude.)