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Heatmapping My New York City Marathon Training

Motivation This post was inspired by my wife who used the GPS data from her Strava app to plot her running routes during 2020. Since I don’t run nearly as much as I used to, I need to go back to when I was training for the NYC marathon to find enough running to make such a map worthwhile.

Exploring Wednesday Night Cable Ratings with OCR

One of my guilty pleasure TV shows is MTV’s The Challenge. Debuting in the late 90s, the show pitted alumni from The Real World and Road Rules against each other in a series of physical events.

When Did the US Senate Best Reflect the US Population?

TL;DR While this is the oldest Senate we’ve ever had, its not the most non-representative Senate when compared to the age distribution of the US Population The most representative Senate was in the 1970s as the average Senator age declined while the average age in the US increased.

Predicting the Winner of Super Bowl LV

TL;DR Using Pythagorean expectation we should expect the Baltimore Ravens to be Super Bowl Champions Using a Bradley-Terry model we should expect the Kansas City Chiefs to be Super Bowl champions Seems like it will be a good year for the AFC It’s Playoff Time in the NFL!

7 Tricks I Learned During Advent of Code 2020

I got into the Advent of Code through some co-workers for the first time this year. For those not familiar, its a series of programming puzzles created by Eric Wastl released once a day for the first 25 days of December.

Exploring NHL Stanley Cup Champion's Points Percentage In Four GGPlots

Motivation While browsing Reddit’s r/DataIsBeautiful sub-reddit I came across a post from Fabio Votta showing a beeswarm plot of US County vote share in the 2020 Election. Having never seen a beeswarm plot before I wanted to come up with an excuse to try it out.

What's the most successful Dancing With the Stars "Profession"? Visualizing with {gt}

Motivation During this pandemic I’ve found a source of comfort in Dancing with the Stars (DWTS). I’ve never watched any other season before and I think a large part of starting now are:

An Attempt at Tweaking the Electoral College

Motivation With the 2020 Election wrapping up and a renewed discussion about the merits of the Electoral College I’ve been thinking more about the system and why it might be the way it is.

Sequence Mining My Browsing History with arulesSequences

Typically when thinking of pattern mining people tend to think of Market Basket Analysis with the conventional example showing people typically buy both Beer and Diapers in the same trip.

Looking for Media Bias in Coverage of Trump's COVID Diagnosis

Within the United States, especially these last few years, there has been an increased focus on “fake news” or “bias in the media”. Fox News typically is the poster-child for right-wing bias and everything else seems to be the poster child for left-wing bias.