What the Internet map looks like

What does “the Internet” look like geographically? Recently, I wondered where the world’s IP addresses were physically located. I thought that getting the answer to this question would be a 5 minute project, but it turns out that for a network novice such as myself there was a little learning curve. By the end of …

More

Stimulus vs. the Price of all Homes Bought During Bubble

For a moment, suspend fairness to honest, prudent homeowners. Forget about providing “correct” market incentives. And disregard any other emotional or political problems that accompany this particular idea. It is widely agreed that the “Great Recession of 2006” was caused by the failing of mortgage-backed securities. So it seems like a simple approach to restoring normalcy …

More

Seasonal spikes in women’s rights

Playing with Google Trends led me to a mystery. If you look up search trends for “women’s rights”, “feminist” or “feminism”, the trend is downward. Down a whopping 70% since 2005 (I’m not really sure what is causing this trend, perhaps it will be the subject of a future post). But oddly enough, there are …

More

Earthquakes vs. Time of Day

Time and tide wait for no one. Add to that: earthquakes. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a.k.a. “earthquake country”, in a house built in the 1950s before earthquake building codes had been created. Within the next 30 years, the USGS tells us we can expect a “big one” in the East Bay …

More

Economic Recovery in Red vs Blue States

I was chatting with my Dad recently and he brought up a debate he’d heard on the radio between a Republican and Democratic candidate. The Republican candidate said that in our present-day recession economy, Republican states were better off than Democratic states. My Dad seemed to particularly relish how the Democratic candidate scrambled to defend his …

More

International Women’s Day

Thanks to Google’s ngrams project page I have wasted my scarce spare hours looking at micro trends in literature. A couple of months ago, the Google ngrams project presented a database of all the words from Google’s extensive book collection. Making the books freely available presents copyright issues, but a database of word frequency in …

More

Visualize word freqency

I came across a visualization website that can transform a blog’s text (or the text of any url) into a visual display. Wordle.net takes a text and churns out a graphic wherein each word is sized according to frequency. Then it arranges all the words together in a  vaguely oval shape which describes how big …

More