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 …
This post is related to NPR’s Planet Money’s podcast “Episode 472: The One-Page Plan To Fix Global Warming“. In the podcast, Alex Blumberg and David Kestenbaum describe their approach to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the chief cause of global warming. Their one step approach is to tax emissions. It’s an interesting podcast, well worth the …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Here’s an interesting relationship. The graph shows the percentage Republicans in the states Lower Legislatures versus the Upper Legislatures. It would appear that if you’re a Republican, you have the best chances of winning an election in the lower house in states where the upper house is split. You will have a hard time in …
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 …
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 …
