When people share quotes from scientific articles but refuse to link to the full article, you should immediately be suspicious.
It’s a more extreme example than you’ll encounter in real life, but absolutely captures the spirit of the argument style: let me share this quote from the Gettysburg Address.
œNow we are engaged in a great civil war. It is entirely fitting and proper that we should do this. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall perish from the Earth.
Lincoln (1863)
So what should you do if you encounter this in real life? Ask to see the full article – politely but firmly, and repeatedly if necessary.
Sometimes the full article is hidden behind a paywall, but my friend can get you access through his employer. Send me the reference and he will send you the article.
I made a graph (histogram) of the ages of quarterbacks currently playing in the National (American) Football League. The graph is below. Age labels are along the bottom, increasing to the right. Along the left are labels of the number of quarterbacks at each age, increasing going up.
Look at that bar waaaaaaaaaaay oooooooover theeeeeeeeere to the right. Who do you think that is?
A graph (histogram) of NFL quarterback ages (n = 108). Click for a larger view.
Some stats
This guy, WTF?
Number of quarterbacks: 120
Average (mean) age: 27.6 years
Standard deviation (a measure of how spread out the data is): 4.5 years
Conclusion
Love him or hate him, Tom Brady is a freak of nature.
Welcome back to what is inexplicably my most popular blog topic ever: the announcement of this year’s long-awaited Best Sexy [Thing That Is Inherently Not Sexy] Halloween Costume Contest!
What is the Best Sexy [Thing That Is Inherently Not Sexy] Halloween Costume Contest, you ask? It’s an annual event on my social media, now entering its sixth year (although we skipped 2020), celebrating (?) the weirdness that is Halloween as celebrated on Earth, and especially as celebrated in the United States. Specifically, the weirdness of Halloween costumes.
What is so weird about Halloween Costumes?
Imagine that you are a woman (easy for about 50% of you) and that your favorite animal is a moose (easy for me). You want nothing more than to go out with your friends and celebrate the majestic moose.
Behold, the ONLY women’s moose costume I could find on the Internet:
And there is the problem: for just about any costume idea you can imagine, there are no costumes available in women’s sizes for that idea – instead, there are just SEXY costumes. And Sexy Moose is not even in the Top 100 weirdest.
And so in 2015, I decided to take the moose by the antlers and sponsor a contest. I invite you to suggest the best, weirdest, most WTF examples of sexy Halloween costumes. In particular, I invite you to suggest costumes that bring sexy to things that are totally, completely, Inherently Not Sexy.
Presenting the winners from previous years, and the people who suggested them:
2015: Sexy Orca
Suggested by Jeremy Berg
2016: Sexy Scrabble
Suggested by Kelly Simms
2017: Sexy Green Poo
Suggested by Aimee Shoff
2018: Sexy Marcel Duchamp Art Gallery Urinal
Suggested by Christina Rawls
2019: Sexy Mr. Rogers
Suggested by Elliot Kresmer
I’ve already gotten several great suggestions for costumes this year, which I will review on Friday. In the meantime, keep those suggestions coming!
During the wild ride that was the 2020 election, I created a new way of visualizing election maps. I started by making a new electoral vote map to replace the one that gets shoved in our faces every four years, but it quickly became clear that my new style of map would be just as useful for showing the legislative branch.
Instead of showing a traditional map that massively distorts the apparent legislative power of large-area states and large-area congressional districts, I made each seat the same size. And because many House districts have completelyridiculousshapes, I displayed each district as the same shape – a hexagon, for easiest tessellation.
The result is two maps – one for the U.S. Senate and one for the U.S. House of Representatives – that show the distribution of political power in the U.S. legislature as it really is. From there, it’s easy to add the names and political parties of each representative to give a comprehensive picture of the legislature.
There has been no change in the membership of the Senate – see the map below, where Senators are shown by name in the approximate location of the state they represent, color coded by party. Red means Republican, blue means Democratic, and light blue means Independent Senators who have joined the Democratic Caucus.
The current United States Senate (click to open a larger version in a new tab)
Meanwhile there have been several changes in the House:
The current United States House of Representatives (click to open a larger version in a new tab)
Two elections have finally been settled after multiple recounts, and the candidates have finally taken their seats
Claudia Tenney (R-NY-22) won her district by just 109 votes
On December 29, 2020 – before he could even take office – Luke Letlow (R-LA-5) died of COVID-19. A special election was held on March 20, 2021, which was won by his widow Julia Letlow (R-LA-5).
On February 7, 2021, Ron Wright (R-TX-6) died, also of COVID-19. A special election was held on July 27th, won by Jake Ellzey (R-TX-6).
On April 6, 2021, Alcee Hastings (D-FL-20) died of pancreatic cancer at age 84. A special election will be held on January 11, 2022 to name his replacement.
In happier news, some representatives have left for other jobs
On January 15, 2021, Cedric Richmond (D-LA-2) resigned to become Director of the Office of Public Liaison in President Biden’s cabinet. A special election on May 11th chose Troy Carter (D-LA-2) as his replacement.
On March 10th, Marcia Fudge (D-OH-11) resigned to become the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. A special election to replace her will be held on November 2nd.
On March 16th, Deb Haaland (D-NM-2) resigned to become Secretary of the Interior. On June 1st, a special election chose Melanie Stansbury (D-NM-2) to replace her.
On May 16th, Steve Stivers (R-OH-15) resigned to become the President and CEO of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. A special election to replace him will be held on November 2nd.
So the current party count is: 220 Democratic, 212 Republican, 3 vacant seats. Here is the map again; be sure to click on it for a larger version where you can more easily read the names of the representatives.
The current United States House of Representatives (click to open a larger version in a new tab)
As membership changes, more updates to come… American Democracy updates!
Today’s post has the same general idea as yesterday’s post – how can we begin to understand the scale of the tragedy that is the Taliban taking over Afghanistan?
It can be difficult, because Afghanistan feels so far away and so mysterious. So I make a simple map of the cities in Afghanistan and their populations, supplemented by another map labeling each city with the name of a city with roughly the same population.
Yesterday, I chose those equivalent-population city labels from cities in the United States; today, I am labeling Afghan cities with the names of cities in Europe with similar populations. See the footnote at the end of this post to learn how I did it, and how you can make a similar map of your own.
Here it is, my map of Afghanistan, with major cities and their populations (click on the image for a larger version):
Cities in Afghanistan (click for a larger version)
And here is the same map, but with Afghan cities relabled with cities in Europe with similar populations. As you can see, there are some very big cities in Afghanistan.
Cities in Afghanistan labeled with European cities of equivalent population (click for a larger version)
To see it even more clearly, look at the two maps side-by-side. Move the slider in the middle back and forth to switch between the cities in Afghanistan (and their populations), and their European equivalents.
Use the slider to wipe back-and-forth between Afghani cities (left) and their American equivalents (right)
Imagine that you live in one of these European cities – a big one like Madrid or Manchester, or a smaller one like Waterford, Ireland or Sint-Truiden, Belgium.
Now imagine that your city has been taken over by the Taliban.
Footnote: how to show cities on a map of Afghanistan
To help us (including me) learn about what Afghanistan is really like, I used the Natural Earth 1:10m geography dataset to make a Python notebook in SciServer to make a simple map of cities in Afghanistan, and their populations. If you’d like to play with the data yourself, comment with your SciServer username and I’ll add you to the research group. I’m also hoping to make a kaggle.com notebook for this work, but something is buggy with Kaggle and it’s not saving the output image files.
