We all know the peculiarities of our presidential electoral college system. Nowhere is it more apparent then in the 'tipping point' states that determine elections. Because of the winner-take-all appropriation of electoral votes, small changes in those states can have huge ramifications. Take Pennsylvania for example, since that was the state on everyone's mind this … Continue reading Pennsylvania, of course

We all know that the Covid-19 case count has been increasing pretty dramatically the past month in the United States: But the good news is that the deaths from Covid continue to drop. The chart below shows the daily deaths, through last weekend. The solid line is a 7-day rolling average, which smooths out the … Continue reading I’ve got a bad feeling about this…

It's July 1st, which means that the New York Mets have to make a yearly payment to a baseball player who hasn't played for them in 20 years. In 1999, the Mets signed Bobby Bonilla to an ill-advised contract. Bonilla, 36 years old at the time, was on the downside of his career, and it … Continue reading Happy Bobby Bonilla Day!

Pop Quiz. Let's say you take a Covid-19 antibody test. The test has an accuracy of 90%. To be more specific, both its sensitivity (the proportion of actual positives that are correctly identified as such) and specificity (the proportion of actual negatives that are correctly identified as such) are 90%. The test comes back positive. … Continue reading Base Rate Fallacy

Whenever you do a math calculation, it's a good idea to do a sanity check. The goal is to do a quick test to determine whether the answer could possibly be true. Not that it is true, but that it could be true. Or, to put it another way, to verify that it isn't obviously … Continue reading Sanity Check

I haven't written about Covid-19, because lots of very smart people are already doing great analysis of it. (Of course, there's also been a lot of crappy analysis too, usually by someone with a political ax to grind). But... One thing that struck me recently, is that we're about to embark on a large multiple … Continue reading A Grand Experiment

Today we'll look at debuts of baby names - names that show up on the list for the first time. The original name list dates from 1880, and all of the common names of that era appear on this list. In fact, most of the currently-popular names were in use back then too: of the … Continue reading Baby Name Debuts

Yes, that's from Life of Brian. One interesting trend of baby names is the diversification. Parents are frequently choosing names that are non-traditional/non-standard. Even the most popular names are chosen less frequently than before. To see this change, let's compare 1959, which is very close to the peak of the baby boom, with 2018. The … Continue reading “You’re all different”

The Social Security department puts out a list of names chosen for babies. Every year, this generates a series of news stories about the most popular baby names. The data, which goes back decades, also feeds Wolfram Alpha's database (here is an example). The data is broken down by states, so let's have some fun … Continue reading Baby Names

One last post on the Presidential election data. This one will look at something I call Adjusted Trend. The "trend" part looks at how each county voted, compared to the previous election. The "adjusted" means that I'll adjust for the overall swing for the country as a whole. Here's an example: in the 1996 re-election … Continue reading Adjusted Trend heat maps