2010 March

• How Genetics Works

  March 5, 2010 to Misc. Visualization  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (21)

  

  Simple yet effective. Any questions? [via 9gag | Thanks, Barry]
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  Think like a statistician – without the math

  I call myself a statistician, because, well, I'm a statistics graduate student. However, the most important things I've learned are less formal, but have proven extremely useful when working/playing with data.

• Visualize your Last.fm listening patterns with LastHistory

  March 3, 2010 to Self-surveillance, Software  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (11)

  

  Frederik Seiffert provides this nifty tool, LastHistory, to visualize your Last.fm listening history. Mouse over songs and find repeated track sequences. The visualization itself isn't all that useful, but it gets interesting when you hook your calendar and photos in with music. LastHistory lets you replay songs synched with your photos, and your slideshow suddenly gains a new dimension.
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• Where Bars Trump Grocery Stores

  March 2, 2010 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (344)

  

  FloatingSheep, a fun geography blog, looks at the beer belly of America. One maps shows total number of bars, but the interesting map is the one above. Red dots represent locations where there are more bars than grocery stores, based on results from the Google Maps API. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.

  Of course there are plenty of possible explanations for the distribution. Maybe people get all their food from superstores like Walmart in the red dot areas, so there are fewer gigantic stores than there are small local bars.

  Then again, the FloatingSheep guys did their homework and found, according to Census, that the number of drinking places in those red dots are really skewed compare to the average. So it's also possible that area of the country just likes to drink a lot.

  Anyone who lives in the area care to confirm? I expect your comment to be filled with typos and make very little sense. And maybe smell like garbage.

  [Thanks, Michael]

• The State of the Internet

  March 1, 2010 to Infographics  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (18)

  From JESS3 is this video on the state of the internet. It's essentially a barrage of numbers, but it's fun nevertheless and it's got some interesting morsels in there.

• Data Underload #11 – American Hockey

  March 1, 2010 to Data Underload  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (12)