Ugh, I hate log scales used arbirarily, every silicon valley nerd things it makes them cool like their EE profs teaching actual science or Ray Kurzweil singularity whatever nonsense.
Ray Kurzweil is indeed full of crap (I have a specific bone to pick with his intentional mis-use of life expectancy among other things), but what makes you think in this case the use of log is arbitrary? Did you look at the data with a linear axis? I just tried it, and the vertical space is dominated by 4 or 5 outliers, and on top of that you can’t see the trend as well when it’s linear and all the data is smooshed at the bottom. Log plots are great when your values span many orders of magnitude. That’s true in this case, and the log plot both uses less vertical space, which is nice, and it more clearly shows the trend and wastes less empty space on the small minority of outliers.
