I Got Charts

Recently I asked about 50 people to give me their worst movie of all time. I clarified that I didn’t mean bad in a “so bad it’s good” sort of way. Rather, we’re talking about viscerally bad. The sort of movie that makes you feel violent inside and conjures up horrid memories of having to watch even a second of it. I took all those PTSD-inducing films and found their IMDb ratings. While there was some alignment between the average IMDb viewer and worst ever, there were quite a few outliers, notably Forest Gump, Gladiator, and Magnolia (I took special exception to this pick). 

Overall, the films selected had an average IMDb rating of 6.0 and a median of 6.3. A 6-6.3 is by no means good but it’s also not Battlefield Earth level bad.

Los Angeles County attracts over 200K people a year. Yet we lose over 300K.  Where are we losing more than we are gaining and vice versa?

Been on a South America kick recently... Here we compare the Instagram hashtags for the 13 sovereign South American nations. What surprises you?

I recently put together a world map showing the various land eco-regions of the world - adapted from Nature Conservancy data. This week I’ll share some of the more diverse sections of the world, highlighting countries with the highest number of eco-regions and eco-region subtypes by country area.

It’s no secret that the United State’s Food and Drug Administration allows the presence of all sorts of fun (and to some revolting) objects in your food. They say it’s safe to eat at these levels but the knowledge it’s allowed at all will make the squeamish among us twist and turn in the wind. 

To start, we look at the allowable mold count percentages of 10 delicious treats.

 A future chart will explore the insects, rat hairs, and rot.

This Friday, Damien Chazelle’s much buzzed about Neil Armstrong/moon landing biopic, “First Man”, arrives. While I’m sure “First Man” will dazzle moviegoers  - myself included - I bemoan the tone-deaf title, especially given the events of the past few weeks and men’s unfortunate hegemony in general.  Yeah, I know the grammatically suspect Armstrong quote about “man” and his place as the “first of mankind” on the moon. I get all that. It’s history, sure, but, if we want true authenticity,  they should have at least considered “First Man of only White Straight Christian Men,” no? And beyond that, do we really need to keep drawing attention to male achievements?

With that said, let’s show it how it really is. STEM diversity now!

I Got Charts got engaged yesterday! The plan all hinged on getting her to the star on this map of important locations in our relationship: from the bars of our early dates to the places we celebrated important milestones to our consistent hangouts. From there, I took the mean coordinates (rejecting an earlier convex hull centroid approach), which happened to be on Baxter St., one of my absolute favorites in LA and one of the country’s steepest streets (though the block we were on was simply very steep, not topple-over steep like a few drops down the Baxter rollercoaster, kneeling on an incline was still quite a task).

When we got there, I said, “here we are. Don’t you recognize the place?” She didn’t and thought she had forgotten a monumental location. Alas, it was, we just hadn’t experienced it yet.

I got love for the greatest woman ever, Andrea F Garcia.

And now we move to more diverse territory with San Jose, the US City* with the highest proportion of Asian/Pacific Islander residents (note: these maps show cities with populations greater than 500K people. Smaller cities - e.g. Monterey Park is roughly 93% Asian/Pacific Islander). At 35% Asian/Pacific Islander, this leaves plenty of room for other races/ethnicities to establish enclaves. That said, you’ll notice a lack of predominately Black Census Tracts, expected in a city that is only 3% Black.