A report released today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that there are 200 quadrillion ants on earth. That's 20,000,000,000,000,000. A number that big, it's kind of hard to get your head around. Here's some help. There are around 7.8 billion humans on earth. That works out to more than 2.5 … Continue reading I’m Still Searching for the Ants’ Invasion

In a given location, the daily high temperature can fluctuate significantly. On the whole it's colder in winter and warmer in summer (of course), but in a single year, there's lots of variation day-to-day. For example, here are Chicago's temperatures in 2021, from January through December: Warmer in summer, colder in winter, but there are … Continue reading 102 Years of Temperatures

My friend Paul, who lives in Kalispell, Montana, introduced me to the concept of a "tall thermometer". This represents the difference between the high and low temperature on a given day. So if the overnight low is 50, and the high that day is 70, your thermometer is 20 degrees 'tall'. What happens when you … Continue reading How Tall is Your Thermometer?

Last post I looked at when the hottest day of the year occurs, across several thousand US weather stations. This time I'll look at when the coldest day happens (the lowest average low). The earliest happens on December 1st, near Savannah, Georgia. That really is an outlier, but how nice: it's not even winter yet … Continue reading When is it Coldest?

[I know there's lots in the news about record temperatures in Europe, but the timing of this post is unrelated. Global climate change is a far bigger issue than I can study. This is just me playing with some historical weather numbers.] In my previous post I started digging into the historical climate data for … Continue reading When is it Hottest?

The National Centers for Environmental Information (part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA)) has a dataset of historical climate observations from thousands of stations around the world. Over 25,000 stations are active and their data is updated regularly. Historical data, at times going back over 100 years, is available for active stations as well … Continue reading Highs and Lows

In my previous post, I discussed the use of ELO to measure the relative strength of National Football League teams over history, and how we can identify big upsets that have occurred over the years. Today I'll wrap up with a few random observations about the data. I mentioned that biggest upsets have happened in … Continue reading A Little More with ELO

Originally designed for rating chess players, ELO is a technique that is now widely used to rate sports teams, board game competitors, and eSports players. A team's ELO rating is a single number that defines its strength relative to other teams. When two teams play, the winner gains ELO points from the loser. But the … Continue reading The Biggest Upsets in NFL History

Here's another post about baby names (I know, I just can't resist). This time I'll look at big year-to-year increases (and decreases) in popularity. The metric I'll use is raw increase in the number of babies with a given name. For example, there were 5615 Sarahs born in 1970, and 5845 the next year, that's … Continue reading The Rise and Fall of Shirley and Linda