Inspired by Logorama – the incredible Oscar-winning animated short – we decided to go big, plunged into AggData’s geolocated business database, identified 330 retail chain corporations, extracted the latitudes and longitudes of each of their U.S. stores, and mapped them, one per dot:
America In Chains
That’s 500,000 individual retail establishments in all: thirty to each public library, fifteen per post office, and one for every 6.2 square miles and 600 souls in the Lower 48!
As penance for my recently-inadequate college basketball fandom, I must submit an offering! That’s what last night’s flaming apparition said, at least, and who am I to reject such a terrifyingly-unambiguous request from the Gods of Hoops?
So, this morning, I hastily dug through the season’s NCAA Division I men’s basketball statistics, determined the nine tourney teams that have played against two or more of this year’s Final Four, and rolled them into a graph:
Final Four Versus Teams In Common
Towards the middle, we see the Final Four – Duke, Michigan State, Butler, and West Virginia – and to the outside, the other tournament teams that they’ve shared during the 2009-10 season. Arrows represent the games between the two groups, each pointing towards the winner and numbered with the margin of victory.
An obvious favorite: the powerhouse team that’s notched an uninterrupted run of key wins? You won’t find it here. Rather, we see the epitome of parity: a loopy graph full of see-saw rivalries and contradictory evidence. In fact, start at any Final Four team and follow the arrows, and you can trace a path through all but one of the other schools and then back again to where you began. Try it!
Our championship prediction? Well, lacking other guidance, we’d have to pick Duke, for the way that it consistently manhandles its opponents in victory. However, as they say in Vegas, the crap will shoot, and any of the Four could win.
The best advice? Unless you’ve got money to burn, block your bookie’s number and don’t call him again until next season!
Them young’uns have different names than they used to! Stateside, a century ago, you couldn’t spit without hitting a John, William, or Mary. My grade school literally brimmed with Jasons and Jennifers. But nowadays, at the playground, more than anything else, you’ll hear Ethan, Jacob, Emma, and Isabella.
Which is fine by me – I like the new names. However, I wonder: did each bygone moniker selflessly pass the baton to the next generation? Lose a back-alley scrap with a gang of unsavory whippersnappers? Or simply succumb to the inexorable march of time?
Our answer comes from the Social Security Administration, which mined their archives to produce an extensive online list of popular baby names for each year from 1880 onwards. It’s tempting to be cynical about the government, but in this case, your tax dollars have worked quite wonderfully!
From the SSA data, we extracted the historically most-often-bestowed first names, one-hundred-and-fifteen per gender, and then charted their relative ratios by year, arranged with the older towards top and bottom and newer in the middle.
Let’s take a gander at the boys graph first, and be sure to click to see it big:
Popular U.S. Boys Names, Ratio By Year Given, 1880-2008
For nine in ten of us, the most fundamental mystery of life is that of the Opposite Sex.
We’d like to understand, but it just doesn’t make sense! Women wonder: what’s the story with the Ultimate Fighting and Star Trek, and why can’t he put the toilet seat down? The men puzzle likewise. Um, aromatherapy? Greeting cards? Why does she care what I do with the toilet seat? And so on…
Yup, we don’t entirely get it – but keep trying we must! Each hard-earned insight, no matter how tiny, could be the difference between, in feminine terms, a spiritual connection and crossed arms, or, in male-speak, nookie and the dog house.
So, with Valentine’s Day fast approaching, we rolled our combine into the ripe fields of the Internet Dot Com and harvested 14,000,000 words from over 2,000 randomly-selected weblogs – per their profiles, all stateside, half written by women and the rest by men. Then, we fed them into the Corpusculator, our custom in-house suite of text analysis software. For hours, it jittered and hummed, as if tenderizing meat and smashing atoms, then out popped two lists: one of words that ladies use more than gentlemen, and the other vice versa.
That night, we left a kettle of chamomile on the stove, set out a plate of snickerdoodles, put the words under our pillow, and slipped into slumber. The next morning, lo and behold, the kettle was empty, the plate barren, and Glory Be! The Data Fairy had come during the night and replaced the words with an infographic, entitled He Said, She Said: Words That Men Bloggers Use More Than Women, and Vice Versa:
He Said, She Said. Click it to see the full-sized version!
The Data Fairy left a note, explaining that she’d scaled each word by the degree of preference and omitted very common words (and, it, my, etc.) and contractions (I’ll, we’re, etc.). She also noticed a seasonal bias: since we sampled the blogs on February 5th, the data reflects the psychology and events of the month or two beforehand, more or less.
From the lead off of love, the women’s words rollick past Christmas and then bounce about the warm, fuzzy territory of family, food, and fun. They’re utterly heart-warming, like that classic second-season episode of Friends where Phoebe told Monica that she overheard Chandler say to Rachel that Ross had kissed Joey in the meat locker and hahaha hahah hah haha! Clearly, if throwing a party, you’ll want to invite as many women as possible.
Quite honestly, I expected the men’s words to be just as entertaining: maybe a corny mix of sports phrases and beer terminology, or something of that genre. Could I have been less right? Witness a dry mélange of American politics, government, business, power, influence, and money, spritzled with the cardinal directions, counting numbers, place names, Biblical material, references to other men, and to top it all off, a smatterin’ of the fightin’ and the killin’ words.
As a whole, even to my masculine self, it’s so unyieldingly, analytically, megalomaniacally weird that I’ve gotta say: Whoa. Hold on a sec, guys. Let’s take a few deep breaths, lighten up, and mellow out, lest we involuntarily commandeer a banana republic or something awful like that.
Yes, yes, I over-dramatize, but the men’s words really do read like the uptight offspring of a G8 meeting and the Dubuque City Council!
So, at this point, Dude Association Bylaws require me to inform Better Halves about how they might best achieve the aforementioned “Relaxation” of their Significant Others. However, I cannot, for the DA recently revoked my advisor privileges because of an unfortunate misunderstanding: on February 7th, GenderAnalyzer.com reported that this blog is written by a woman!
The GenderAnalyzer's verdict.
As I’ve assured the Association, my behavior falls within the Safe Harbor carved out in Subsection 4.3.6(a):
Dudes may be female only on Halloween and/or within the privacy of their primary domicile.
I hope to prevail soon, and counsel advises me to refrain from any further comment. Now, my lovely wife, do you know what happened to that size-24 black spandex mini?
If you’re one of the fortunate few who’s successfully completed a typing class, dance those ballerina fingers across the keyboard, you lucky devil!
As for Yours Truly, teenage peer pressure kept me from riding the touch typing train. Per the sexist suppositions of way-back-when, before computers went mainstream, keyboards were for secretaries, and secretaries were female! Dudes just didn’t do that kind of thing.
Sans guidance, out of the pecks of a ten-year-old computer programmer, my keyboard technique evolved organically. Today, at maximum caffeination, via a curious set of finger contortions, I can knock out 55 words per minute – not blazingly fast, but adequate for whatever the typing need…
That is, until I got a Blog!
Now, every morning, I spend three hours making a biggest pile of words that I can muster. Then, my Blog runs in, gulps it down whole, belches, grins, and enthusiastically inquires:
Thank you, sir, may I have another? Please please please?!
A responsible Blog owner keeps his animal well-fed, but would a semester of Touch Typing 101 do the trick, or did I simply have to work harder? I fired off a probing tweet in the direction of my technical staff, for certainly, they could help me with the answer.
Weather Sealed finds inspiration at the fringes of art, science, photography, and life. Our guiding principles? Quality over quantity, original content, and the occasional chuckle. Read more...
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