A few days ago I posted a link to a US Flickr and Tweet map. There is now a large set of regions and cities with this information.
Red dots are locations of Flickr pictures. Blue dots are locations of Twitter tweets. White dots are locations that have been posted to both.
North American detail map of Flickr and Twitter locations
Red dots are locations of Flickr pictures. Blue dots are locations of Twitter tweets. White dots are locations that have been posted to both
Bend LEGO Bricks, Learn Some Non-Euclidean Geometry
The slight bendability of the small 1×2 and 1×3 bricks, combined with mathematical principles has allowed Sanders to keep building up and out with his designs. Right now, the largest, a “sunflower,” [picture at link] is made of more than 1,800 bricks.
N-body problem simulation from Stanford protovis
Slate‘s Hollywood Career-O-Matic
A visitor to the Rotten Tomatoes site can check out the data for individual Hollywood careers—that’s how Tabarrok came up with the Shyamalan graph—but there’s no easy way for users to measure industrywide trends or to compare different actors and directors side-by-side. To that end, Rotten Tomatoes kindly let Slate analyze the scores in its enormous database and create an interactive tool so our readers might do the same.
It only works from 1985 on, on the hypothesis that people tend not to review old clunkers as often as the classics, which results in sampling bias and this is what skews the older results.
As a general trend, actors seem to be all over the place, score-wise, but directors tend to get better over time.
Multiplication smackdown: Sal Khan vs Vi Hart—who’s got the ‘insight’?
As usual, Vi delivers a gigantic heaping of insight into what multiplication is, why these algorithms work, along with a handful of sarcasm and one of the most important critiques of math education and obsession with notation I’ve seen in the past month or so.
(New Vi Hart video in the link)
One has to acknowledge that there are different goals in mind for the two videos, but a shortcoming of “turn the crank” cookbook instruction is that you won’t know what to do if you ever encounter a new situation, which is why conveying the deeper understanding is a winner in the long run. Add some enthusiasm for the beauty of math, and that will help foster an interest.
Survey: 36% Of U.S. Adults “Not Concerned” With Electronics Power Consumption
Adults in the U.S. could use a little more education on economics and physics, it seems. We’re not drawing the connection between power consumed by our electronics and the cost of our electric bills.
A new survey from the Consumer Electronics Association found thirty-six percent of adults in the U.S. are “not concerned” with the amount of power consumed by their gadgets, gear and appliances. Sixty percent of U.S. adults, by contrast, are concerned about the cost of their electric bill.
I’m not sure where the conundrum is supposed to be. 60% vs 36%. Since that adds up to 96%, the numbers are not such that you could conclusively say that there are people who are concerned about their electric bill and yet not concerned with the amount of power their gadgets draw. I would not be surprised if such people existed, mind you, but this survey does not present any evidence of irrationality in that regard.
In honor of Dirk: ‘Points Per Miss’ and his spot among the NBA’s all-time greats
As Bill Simmons tweeted: “48 points, 3 missed shots total (FG + FT). We need a stat like ‘points per miss’ to see if that’s a record for a 40+ point game.”
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And as I went to bed last night, Simmons’ tweet had me thinking. Just how useful of a stat would PPM be? So I decided to get up this morning and investigate it a little further.
I like it, because it’s a measure of offensive efficiency. Raw statistics, such as points scored don’t differentiate between good shooting and poor shooting, incorporates points scored or squandered on the free-throw line, and normalizes, to some extent, the increased risk and reward of three-point shots for which shooting percentage fails to account. Efficient shooting leaves more opportunities for teammates, which the author recognizes:
Points per game is an oft-cited stat, but it provides little in the way of efficiency. A player could score 40 points per game and lead the league, but if he just does it because he chucks up half of his team’s shots, his team probably is not very good or balanced on offense. Another player who scores only 25 points per game but who is highly efficient at turning shooting opportunities into points is maximizing his own scoring chances while, theoretically, not wasting his team’s scoring opportunities shooting lower percentage shots (by comparison) than what his teammates could get