Michael Jay Lissner

Thoreau Would Have Found This Amusing…or not

2009-02-13T17:06:29-08:00

I played around with a new site today called WattzOn.com that helps you to figure out how much energy your existence consumes on a daily basis. It’s a pretty useful site because it asks pretty thorough questions, and then reports on you vs. historical American, you vs. the world, you vs. lightbulbs, etc. Here’s my consumption of energy:

Pretty cool right? Who knew that my biggest environmental damage is coming from government? Here’s me vs. historical Americans:

So I’m doing pretty well relative to the average American, and I need to follow Thoreau’s advice about not paying my taxes. Got it.

Maps We Really Need to Use More

2008-10-21T11:21:27-07:00

I stumbled across some incredible maps yesterday while looking at some maps of the status of the American election.

These maps use the Gastner and Newman algorithm (don’t ask me for details) to stretch a map to make sizes of countries correspond with some datum of interest. Generally, we study geography as a separate topic from useful stats, but these pictures show which countries are really important, and which might be candidates for less emphasis.

For example, we can take the map of the world, and stretch it so that we can see where the population of the world is located:

Or we can analyze where the highest rates of HIV/AIDS can be found:

Or total spending on health care (no surprises here):

Pretty interesting stuff. This link includes more of these, and also software for making them yourself.

Radar Analysis Charts: Fun, Trendy, BAD!

2008-10-08T16:08:09-07:00

There is this trend that seems to be popping up everywhere of using radar charts such as this one:

For the record people, these are bad. They imply that there is some circular relationship about your data points. They are line graphs made into a circle. If you want to indicate the volume under a curve, make a line graph, fill the area under your curve, and then consider it done. Don’t use these unless your data points progress from A → B → C and then back to A.

Please?

EDIT: I should add - don’t use line graphs for things that don’t progress from A to B to C either. For those things, use bar graphs, or column graphs.

Music Stats

2008-10-08T14:35:46-07:00

I have this problem when I am listening to music that I almost never choose artists whose name starts with anything after the letter D. When I am browsing for music, I just never get that far in the list. For some time, I’ve wondered if this is my fault, or if I just have more music in the front of my collection.

The time came to do a little stats work and figure out why this is. Here are the results.

While there is a strong predominance of the letters A-E, there is also one in the P-T range. This leads me to believe that I should hunt for music in that area more often.

While I expected A-E to come out ahead, who would have thought that B would have more than 80 artists, almost twice the second most common letter?

So, what conclusions does this lead to? One: That I need to look at my music beyond the letter D. Two: That B is a very popular letter.

For those wondering about their own music collection, if you browse to your music folder and run the following, it will tell you how many artists starting with that letter you have. For the example below, it tells me I have 30 artists with the letter ‘A’.

ls Music | grep -i ^a | wc -l