Playing-With-Graphs
drorzel | December 31, 2010Late last year, Matthew Beckler was nice enough to make a sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Changes in the Amazon page format made it stop working a while ago, though, and now Amazon reports roughly equivalent data via its AuthorCentral feature, with the added bonus of BookScan sales figures. So I've got a new source for my book sales related cat-vacuuming.
Still, there's this great big data file sitting there with thousands of hourly sales rank numbers, and I thought to myself "I ought to be able to do something else amusing with this..." And then Corky at the Virtuosi…
drorzel | August 21, 2010Nobody who likes both SF and the graphing of odd things as much as I do could possibly fail to link to Orbit's charts of fantasy art. These include the frequency plot of various elements seen at right, a comparison of fashion trends for urban fantasy heroines, color trends in cover dragons, and a study of word and font frequencies in titles. If you're planning a fantasy series, Bloody Death Dragon of the Magic Shadow God would apparently be a good title choice.
drorzel | August 10, 2010SteelyKid had her two-year checkup this morning, which means we got new weight and length measurements for her. It's been a while since I did anything really dorky with her data, so here are a couple of graphs tracking her growth:
(Yes, they're in English units, not SI. Deal with it.)
Using the rule of thumb somebody mentioned a while back that a person's final height is double their height at age 2, this projects her to be a bit over 5'9", so that's a prediction we'll be able to test in another fifteen years or so. There's some fairly large uncertainty in these, though, especially today's…
drorzel | July 28, 2010Back at the start of the summer, I asked a question about automotive thermodynamics: On a hot day, is it better to open your car windows a crack when making a short stop, or leave them closed? For a long term-- say, leaving your car parked outside all day-- I hope everyone will agree that leaving the windows slightly open is the better call, but the answer isn't as clear for a short stop. There might well be some time during which the open-window car heats up faster as warm air from outside gets in, while the closed-window car holds in the air-conditioned goodness longer.
It occurred to me…
drorzel | June 29, 2010I gave a short introduction to how to give a presentation today to the students who will be presenting their research in our twice-weekly Summer Student Seminar Series. This included examples of a data slide that is bad in the ways that students' first attempts at data slides tend to be bad, and the same graph re-done in a more appropriate manner. As long as I'm doing format conversions of this anyway, I figure it might be amusing to post them here. So, here's the bad graph, with the bullet points highlighting the mistakes:
And here's the good version:
(The seminar series features three…
drorzel | February 3, 2010It's been a while since I've done a fun with graphs post about the Amazon sales rank of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, but that's not because I've stopped tracking it. It's getting to be enough data, though, that it's worthwhile to look on a slightly coarser scale, so here's the sales rank data binned by day:
This shows some clear structure, specifically two points with dramatic drops (that is, dramatic improvements in the Amazon rank-- smaller numbers are better), followed by slow climbs. The two big improvements correspond to the immediate post-publication blog boost, and the…
drorzel | January 28, 2010I've toyed around in the past with ways to use the Amazon sales rank tracker to estimate the sales numbers for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It's geeky fun, but not especially quantitative.
Yesterday, though, I found a reason to re-visit the topic: calibration data!
OK, "calibration data" is probably too strong a description. "Calibration anecdote" is more accurate.
Yesterday when I went into work a little after 10, a comment somebody made sent me to the actual Amazon page for the book, where I saw a little note next to the price information saying "Only 5 left (more are coming)-- order…
drorzel | January 26, 2010A few days back, Matthew Beckler added the Kindle edition to his sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Given my well-known love for playing with graphs of data, it was inevitable that I would plot both of these in a variety of ways.
So, what do we learn from this? Well, we learn that people in the Albany. NY area don't own Kindles:
OK, maybe that's not obvious to everybody...
When you look at that graph, the blue line is the Amazon sales rank of the physical book edition, while the red line is the Amazon sales rank of the Kindle edition. The two track each other pretty…