Thick as a [LEGO] Brick
A few weeks ago, Samuel Arbesman wrote an article in Wired touching on the mathematical properties inherent in LEGO structures. In it, he discussed the results of a 10-year old study of natural and human-made networks that described how the number of distinct components in a network increased with the overall size of …
Wisconsin Voters Banished to NULL Island
The top headline in my local paper this morning was “Glitch puts some Wisconsin voters in Africa” … an interesting thing to ponder over a bowl of Quaker Oatmeal Squares. I suppose this problem merits at least some attention given the heated political climate surrounding the state’s voter redistricting process. But headline …
Canine Cop in Constitutional Crisis
[There have been some interesting topics flitting about the blogosphere in the past weeks but I’ve been too busy with other stuff to comment. To eliminate some of the backlog, I’ve decided to try and do a few quick takes. First up: Franky the chocolate lab.] There is a Florida legal …
Favre-a-Palooza
Now that we can safely say that Brett Favre has retired (notwithstanding rumors to the contrary), I thought it was time to pull out some data on the indecisive quarterback’s career touchdown passes. Stats on passes say a lot about the relationship between a quarterback and his receivers so I wanted …
Earnings and Unemployment by College Major
The Wall Street Journal recently published a table of income and unemployment data that presented pay and employment rates for various college majors. The original study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce contained enough additional details that I thought it might be worth trying to incorporate the information …
Have the Mainstream Media Jumped the Shark?
There was a recent article in Slate that asked why the mainstream media was having such a tough time figuring out the message of the Occupy Wall Street protestors. Now, I wouldn’t call myself a full-throated supporter of #OWS, but I do think that it’s pretty easy to understand why they’re …
Politicians Discover Data Science
During the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign, the online design community devoted a lot of pixels to comparisons of the two candidate’s web sites (a few great examples here, here, and here). The overall consensus was that Obama won the war for eyeballs by emphasizing design, web usability, multimedia, and robust social networking. According to an …
CNN published the mugshots of all of the biker gang members who were arrested after the recent shootout in a Waco, TX restaurant. There were a total of 171 pictures, all in the same standard pose and most in the same standard orange jumpsuit: Seeing all of these pictures got …
There’s nothing too complicated about this post. I’ve been interested in creating an illustration of the U.S. Interstate system for awhile but my initial concept of a “subway-style” diagram of the network had already been done. After some recent experimentation with the D3 Javascript library, I decided that it might …
My family visited Washington D.C. last year for Spring Break and, during our 12-hour drive, I remember noticing a subtle change in the names of the cities and towns we were passing through. In the beginning, the place names had a familiar mid-western flavor; one that mixed Native American origins …
I have been reading a book on the development of the English language recently and I’ve become fascinated with the idea of word etymology — the study of words and their origins. It’s no secret that English is a great borrower of foreign words but I’m not enough of an …