Slate places cartoon characters from past and present within the frame of a color wheel.

Why are the Smurfs blue? Why is Doug’s Beebe Bluff purple? Our aim is not to answer these existential questions. When asked why the Simpsons are yellow, Yeardley Smith (voice of Lisa) explained only that Matt Groening “thought that it would be really funny if, when people watched The Simpsons, they thought that maybe the color on their TV was off.”

Totally ridiculous. And that’s what makes it fun.

[Thanks, Dean]

Most of us have gone through the paces of algebra through calculus in high school. I remember lots of problems and fact sheets. Sol Garfunkel and David Mumford imagine a math education system that teaches skills for the real world and increases quantitative literacy:

Imagine replacing the sequence of algebra, geometry and calculus with a sequence of finance, data and basic engineering. In the finance course, students would learn the exponential function, use formulas in spreadsheets and study the budgets of people, companies and governments. In the data course, students would gather their own data sets and learn how, in fields as diverse as sports and medicine, larger samples give better estimates of averages. In the basic engineering course, students would learn the workings of engines, sound waves, TV signals and computers. Science and math were originally discovered together, and they are best learned together now.

[New York Times]

Mostly because of the popularity of smartphones, location data is all the rage nowadays. You’re almost always connected no matter where you are. Rich location data can help provide you a new sense of place, and at the same time, this sort of data can paint an interesting picture of what’s going on in your country or around the world. Hence, Infochimps, the one-stop shop for data folk and developers, just announced their new Geo API.
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We read the story about the suffering of an individual, and we’re moved. We read in the paper that millions have died over the years due to hunger, and we’re not quite as moved. This is due in part to our inability to imagine big numbers, but as David Ropeik for Psychology Today explains, the way we perceive risk also is a factor:

Paul Slovic, one of the pioneers of research into the way we perceive risk, calls this greater concern for the one than the many “a fundamental deficiency in our humanity.” As the world watches but, insufficiently moved, fails to act to prevent mass starvation or stop genocides in Congo or Kosovo or Cambodia or so many more, who would not agree with such a lament. But as heartless as it seems to care more about the one than the many, it makes perfect sense in terms of human psychology. You are a person, not a number. You don’t see digits in the mirror, you see a face. And you don’t see a crowd. You see an individual. So you and I relate more powerfully to the reality of a single person than to the numbing faceless nameless lifeless abstraction of numbers. “Statistics,” as Slovic put it in a paper titled “Psychic Numbing and Genocide”, “are human beings with the tears dried off.” This tendency to relate more emotionally to the reality of a single person than to two or more people, or to the abstraction of statistics, is especially powerful when it comes to the way we perceive risk and danger, because what might happen to a single real person, might happen to you. As the familiar adage puts it, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

[Psychology Today via @alexlundry]

When you’re deciding on a place to live in a new place, it’s always good to know what’s in the area. After all, a house close to conveniences and things to do is usually more desirable than a house that is out of the way. InThirty, by Brian Lange of Datascope Analytics, provides some insight, starting with Chicago. Enter an address and see what libraries and parks (restaurants to come) are within 30 minutes of walking, biking, or public transit.

It’s stil fairly basic in what it does. You just get markers on the map for places that are within 30 minutes. The heat map on the layer underneath only changes as you change mode of transportation or between libraries and parks. Colors relative to your entered address could be more useful.

Still though, like with Mapnificent, I like the idea of searching for things by travel time over distance. If a couple of places are 10 miles versus 20 miles away, I don’t really care, if it takes the same amount of time to get there.

[inThirty | Thanks, Bryan]

I was raised to always find the best deal whenever I bought anything. Wait for the sales, and then stock up. Drive an extra mile for the cheaper supply of gas. So thank goodness floatingsheep has mapped the price of weed across the country. The more yellow, the more expensive the weed gets and the darker the green the lower the price.
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Census data can provide valuable information, but the datasets are not always the easiest to access. So you often end up spending a lot of time getting your data in order before you actually get to do anything with it. Investigative Reporters and Editors has released the next phase in their Census project to make Census 2010 more accessible via a simple interface. Easily download data in bulk as CSV or shapefiles or build it into your applications with the API.

[census.ire.org via @bryanboyer]

Earlier this week we saw two versions of mobile patent lawsuits. The original was tangled, whereas the interactive revision was less jumbled. Reader Josh commented that the original had an advantage over the clearer version in that it actually demonstrated the mess that is patent law. A simliar argument came up last year, too, with this confusing chart showing Obamacare.

With the patent chart, there’s clearly a way to make the data more readable. If you had a choice between the original and the remake, is it okay to choose the original if your point is that mobile patent lawsuits suck and are more confusing than they need to be?

The names of places can say a lot about a geographic area. Derek Watkins maps the most common term for a stream across the country. You’ve got branches and bayous in the south, brooks and streams in the northeast, and washes and arroyos in the southwest.
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Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple yesterday, and one of the reasons we actually care is because he had a hand in so many major products that we use every day. Shan Carter and Alan McLean, for The New York Times, provide a breakdown of all 313 Apple patents that include Jobs in the group of inventors.

When you walk the beer aisle at the grocery store, there are lots of different brands and types, so it can be easy to think that all of those beverages come from different companies. Maybe you felt like supporting the little guy by buying that beer that looks like it came from a smaller brewery; however, you just might be buying from one of the big guys. In a follow-up to the soda structure map, Phil Howard and Ginger Ogilvie map the structure of the top 13 beer companies.
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It’s been about a month since Visualize This came out, but it took a while for it to sink in. I mean, I don’t feel like, as my wife likes to put it, “a published author.” But people started tweeting pictures of the book in their hands, on their desk, and on actual boats (what??), and those pictures really made my day.
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The Rural West Initiative and the Bill Lane Center for the American West explore the growth of newspapers across the United States:

With American newspapers under stress from changing economics, technology and consumer behavior, it’s easy to forget how ubiquitous and important they are in society. For this data visualization, we have taken the directory of US newspaper titles compiled by the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America project — nearly 140,000 publications in all — and plotted them over time and space.

To see the distribution of papers over the years, simply click and drag the slider on the top. Context for each decade is displayed on the right. Each circle represents papers in a city, and the larger the circle the more papers.

Catch the animated version below. They start in the east and make their way west.
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In many ways, data wants to be social. It wants to get out there for people to see, interact with other datasets, and it wants people to talk about it. There aren’t that many places for that to happen though. Newly launched BuzzData wants to fill that void. It’s pitched as a “social network designed for data.”
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Peter Curran for BBC Radio 4 puts the tribe of statisticians under the anthropological microscope. At the Royal Statistical Society Awards and Summer Reception, Curran interviews a number of statisticians on what they do and what statistics is really about. I mainly post this though for the part where he whispers about what he is seeing as if he were in a jungle studying a tribe of monkeys. Cracked me up.

What’s statistics to you?

[BBC via @TimHarford]

Following the success of the Strata conference earlier this year here on the west coast, O’Reilly is hosting another event from September 19 to 23. This time it’s in New York.

If you’re planning on going, I suggest you register now and save a few hundred dollars. Tomorrow is the last day for early bird registration. Plus, FlowingData readers can use the discount code FLOW at checkout for an additional 20% off (and support FlowingData in the process).

This time around there’s the two-day conference on the 22nd and 23rd just like before, but there’s also Strata Jumpstart on the 19th, which is “a crash course for managers, strategists, and entrepreneurs on how to manage the data deluge that’s transforming traditional business practices across the board–in finance, marketing, sales, legal, privacy/security, operations, and HR.” On the 20th and 21st, there’s an invite-only summit.

So what you could do is go to Jumpstart, hang out in the amazing city of New York for a couple of days, and then round out the week with some interesting data talks and meetups.

If it’s anything like the west coast conference — and I’m sure it will be — it’ll be worth the time. When I went in February, I thought it’d be really business-y, but it turned out being an all-around fun event.

Register here, and be sure to use FLOW to get the extra 20% discount.

Mike Bostock visualizes mobile patent lawsuits, improving on a graphic from Thomson Reuters that wasn’t so good. Dashed lines are resolved suits and green ones are licenses to the company.
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Tor classifies areas in San Francisco by bicycle. I’d say that’s about right.

Also available in print.

[Bikes of San Francisco via Laughing Squid]

Statistics isn’t just for finding out how our world works and how companies can improve their business. No. It’s also for useful stuff, like, you know, gambling. Great interview with Edward Thorp [pdf], who’s best known for bringing card counting in blackjack to the masses.

I received my PhD in mathematics and then went out into the university world to teach. As it happened, I’d always had an interest in applications from all of my science play in my high school years. One idea I’d had during those days was the physical predicting of roulette. That idea had stuck with me, so as I was getting my PhD, I was working on that problem, just on the side for fun. That gave me an outlook toward gambling games that later paid off in the market. Although conventional wisdom held that you couldn’t beat these games, the outlook was that that wisdom was not necessarily true and, in fact, was probably wrong. Gambling games, which were perceived to be efficient — in the financial-world sense of the word — might not be. In fact, I was convinced that wasn’t the case in roulette. So I came to this orientation that the conventional wisdom wasn’t right. That led me not only to build a wearable computer for roulette in conjunction with Claude Shannon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but also to investigate card-counting in blackjack. I happened to see an article on blackjack strategy published in a statistical journal that was fairly close to even. After I used it just for fun, I came back and figured out a way to construct a winning strategy for the game.

[Edward Thorpe via @pkedrosky]