The next several posts will look at voting patterns in the US Presidential elections. I've got data covering the past six elections (1996-2016), broken down by state and county. Let's jump right in. Well, before jumping in, I need to make some terminology clear, with an example of how I represent the 'lean' of an … Continue reading Presidential voting, part 1

This is the third and final analysis of the Microsoft building data (see here and here for the first two). I decided to crunch the numbers on all 50 states (plus the District of Columbia). The MS database reports over 125 million buildings across the nation; here are the stats broken down by state and … Continue reading Footprints across America

Yes I know that's not really a word. Here comes more analysis of Microsoft's massive database of buildings. I'm still focusing on California (10 million buildings is enough to deal with for now). Let's start with the distribution of the building sizes. Remember, these are the sizes of the footprints of the buildings (square footage … Continue reading The Averagest Building in California

In June, Microsoft released a huge database of every building in the United States. They trained a neural network to analyze satellite imagery, and used that to trace the shapes of buildings. This resulted in 125,192,184 computer generated building footprints. This is just the footprint - building heights are not part of the data. Here … Continue reading The Largest Footprints in California

Well, it happened again. For seven straight World Cups, the Mexican national soccer team was good enough to advance from group play, but not good enough to win the first game in the knock-out round (Round of 16). Thus, the curse of the "fifth game" (quinto partido) lives - once again, Mexico played four games … Continue reading Quinto Partido

We've been debating getting a second car. On the plus side there's convenience. On the minus side is cost (cost of the car, insurance, maintenance, etc). But what about the environmental cost/benefit? Is it a plus or a minus to have a second, presumably more efficient, car? Current situation: Chrysler Town & Country ramp van. … Continue reading Go Green?

Back in the 80s TV shows used 1-900 numbers as a way to poll audiences. As discussed in this article from 1987: The ballots are cast by calling numbers with a 900 prefix; the opinion calls are counted rather than answered. To vote for the Denver Broncos, viewers dial one number. To vote for the … Continue reading The Serious Undecided

Today I read about an LAX to Tokyo flight that turned around after four hours because one of the passengers was unauthorized. He had a ticket and boarding pass for a different LAX to Tokyo flight, and somehow got on the wrong plane. The airline talked about an  “out of the abundance of caution and … Continue reading You can be too careful

Back in the 80s I remember watching a TV commercial for Bayer aspirin. I only saw it once, but it stuck with me because of its deceitful use of numbers. Thanks to the miracle of the modern internet, it only took a few minutes to find it: Did you notice the trick? The four choices were … Continue reading Tricks with polls

A year ago we took a trip to London, and hopped over to Paris for 4 days in the middle. While planning the trip (Spring of 2016), the terror attacks in Paris of the previous November were pretty fresh in everyone's mind. More than one person asked me if I was worried about terrorism. Before … Continue reading Should I be worried?