title: normalize a column to represent it as a size in a scatter plot
body: <p>I have a column with small to fairly large values in a dataframe column: sizes. I would like to use this column as a size in a scatter as shown <a href="http://matthiaseisen.com/pp/patterns/p0171/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  import numpy as np
  
  n = 50
  x = np.random.randn(n)
  y = x * np.random.randn(n)
  
  fig, ax = plt.subplots(2, figsize=(6, 6))
  
  ax[0].scatter(x, y, s=50)
  
  sizes = (np.random.randn(n) * 8) ** 2
  ax[1].scatter(x, y, s=sizes)
  
  fig.show() 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What is the best way to normalise the column: sizes. I tried to log it but the sizes turn out to look too similar. The proportions should still represent the proportions in the original column.</p>