Surely, you’ve seen a myriad of optical illusions on the internet. Some are funny, inexplicable, confusing, and there are some you may not have fallen for. I present one of my favorite ones here. Take a look at this image: Most likely, you’ll see different colors of sphere in the above image. Ranging from yellowish, […]
Category: STEM
How Many Dogs In the Park—in the Past and Future?
Here’s the Scenario: Based on our observations over a month, we find that there are 40 dogs on average in a off-leash park during an hour’s time-frame during the day in its open hours. We want to find out the chance of having a specific number of dogs at any given time in the park […]
Getting to know our presidents
Let’s gather and organize some facts about all the U.S. presidents to-date and slice and dice the data to see what insights we can garner. First, I looked at various, reliable sources and shaped the data in a way I could work with. For example, normalizing the data, converting to appropriate scales and units, bucketing, […]
Need a baby name? Or just love data?
In either case, read on. I collected a dataset of poplular baby names from OpenData government site of City of New York ranging from 2011 through 2016…exactly 19,418 records. Original dataset view: What I want to do is find out: a) Most popular names b) Less popular names (or rare names used) c) Slice it […]
How well are your incentives working?
Here’s the situation. You’re asking customers to sign up for your gym membership by offering some discounts. But how well are they working? Let’s find out (working with limited data). Information on hand is that you made 20 attempts or trials and find that 22% signed up. Your task is to calculate the various chances […]
So, what’s special about 144?
Every now and then there will be some mathematician or a student of math who will present a specific number and either ask or advocate the special characteristics of a number. We all encountered the Pi, Fibonacci sequence, Golden ratio, etc. etc. Today, let’s talk about a less popular, seemingly benign number: 144 Immediately, most […]
Solving Real-world crimes with Bayes Theorem
Today, I present a real-life problem that actually goes back many years in terms of the type of problem and method to tackle such. Here’s the scenario: There was a robbery and the software has identified the perpetrator to be black. The case goes to jury and they must decide with the help of the […]
Anatomy of a goal (part 2)
This is a continuation of the original soccer goal tracking chart and animation posted @: https://flyingsalmon.net/blog/?p=869 It’s recommended that you read that blog first for context. In this blog, I added actual players involved in that goal (denoted by their jersey and individual numbers). The players data are added as an addition series (much like […]
Behind every goal, there’s science. Anatomy of a goal (part1)
With the World Cup, Copa America underway, obviously I try to catch some games and follow the scores on matches I missed. The other day I noticed a chart on BBC site that showed charts with points plotted on a field where the ball had traveled on a particular game. This got me thinking, how […]
Wading through Billions of $$$!
Welcome to this post. Today, I want to share my process of retrieving some Mega Million Lottery winning data, curating them, and analyzing them to tell a story. The results may or may not make us super-rich 🙂 but I certainly had fun throughout the process. Disclaimer: I used Excel, but this is not a […]