I was perusing the voting results for Santa Cruz County and I stumbled across something weird. It has to do with a strange feature of this year's ballot: the U.S. Senate election for California. After Diane Feinstein died in September 2023, Governor Gavin Newsome appointed Laphonza Butler to fill her seat temporarily. By law, after … Continue reading Undervoters

The NFIRS data lists several time stamps for each incident. One is when the alarm was received at the fire station. A second is when the fire company arrived on the scene. The difference between these two is the response time: how quickly the fire company responded to the alarm. To make sure we're doing … Continue reading Fire Response Time

When researching the fire data, I stumbled across a few miscellaneous items. None are worth a full column, so what follows is a grab bag of fire factoids. North Dakota: Farm Equipment Fire Capital of the US I talked about vehicle fires previously. One of the more obscure subcategories of vehicle fires is "Off-road vehicle … Continue reading Fire Odds & Ends

Not the happiest subject today - I'm looking at the casualty numbers from the NFIRS reports. In 2022, the data reports 8763 civilian casualties (6384 injuries and 2379 deaths) in all fires. Here's a chart that shows the severity of fire-related injuries to civilians in 2022 The good news is, the most common injury in … Continue reading Fire Casualties

In 2022 (the most recent year of data for the NFIRS) there were a reported 108,533 passenger vehicle fires. Yes, that's a lot - about 8.6% of all fires in the nation. First, let's see which states have the most car fires, as a percentage of all reported fires Hawaii and the deep South lead … Continue reading Vehicle Fires

There's a thing called the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS). Not surprisingly, it collects information on fire incidents from across the nation. It also collects other emergency incident data, like Rescue, Emergency Medical Service, Hazardous Conditions, and so on. Let's look at just fires for now. Before we dive in, note that NFIRS is … Continue reading What’s with the Rubbish Fires?

Take a standard deck of playing cards. Give it a good set of shuffles (six or seven should do). Congratulations! The order of your 52 cards has never been created before in human history. Of course, I can't guarantee that your deck's order is unique, but I can be pretty darn sure. The number of … Continue reading Do Something Unique Today

This one is part recollection, part historical sociology, with some number crunching at the end. When I was a kid, in my pre-teen years, I listened to KGB-AM radio in San Diego. It was a typical top-40 AM radio station (hey, I was 10 years old). Like other stations of this ilk, they had contests … Continue reading Cash Call Odds

Here's the last post regarding the year's worth of weather data at our house. Today I'll talk about sunshine. Specifically, UV index. The Tempest device reports the UV index each minute of the day. Here's the cumulative UV total for each day of the year (April 2023 - March 2024): The general shape of the … Continue reading Wrapping up Weather

Let's look at the rainfall that my personal weather station reported over the past 12 months (April 2023 - March 2024). For the year, we got 28.46 inches of rain. Here are the monthly totals: This clearly shows the rainy season in Santa Cruz: late Fall through Spring. But it doesn't always rain during those … Continue reading It’s Raining, it’s Pouring…