Archive for November, 2006

Go Tar Heels

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

UNC - Ohio State game
I was lucky enough to use a friend’s extra ticket to last night’s UNC – Ohio State game. It was a lot of fun — I can see how people get addicted to such things. It was a close game throughout, and the fans made a painful amount of noise at times.
I’ve been to the Dean Dome before shortly after it opened for an NCAA tourney game, but it’s been seriously overhauled since then with giant replay monitors and other high tech items. The scorer’s table sign, for instance, was completely electronic — not a scrolling poster as I’ve seen at other venues.

Only problem: it took us 30 minutes to get out of the parking lot.

Posted in Sport | No Comments »

Cuban Primes Correction

Monday, November 20th, 2006

If you look up any math term in Google, you likely get front page links to articles at Wikipedia and MathWorld. Both are usually very good, with the latter being more formal but having a Mathematica slant. (MathWorld is hosted by Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica).

MathWorld has guest contributors but is otherwise closed content, unlike Wikipedia which is completely open. But as I found out last week, MathWorld does accommodate content suggestions. I completed the comment form twice for the Cuban Primes page, once for a typographical error and once for a factual error. I got a response noting the corrections a few days later. Not quite the turn-around of Wikipedia corrections, but still functional.

I can confirm the errors were fixed, though now I see the last modification time stamp wasn’t updated …

Posted in Math | No Comments »

Automobile Maker Market Share Chart

Monday, November 13th, 2006

A week or so ago, Junk Charts featured a discussion (Rip Tide) of a New York Times chart of how auto-maker market share distribution in the US is becoming more like it is in Europe. The original chart showed lots of information in a pleasant way, but as usual folks want to do better — either to look better or to make the point better.

I scraped the data (csv) from the chart (thanks GraphClick), and provided a rough alternative to the graph.

auto market share distributions

My graph aims to show only enough information to support the text of the original chart. I chart ordered market share histograms for three different years so one can get a sense of how the US and European market share distributions are changing. I’m not sure how well the data supports the thesis though — it looks like both distributions are becoming more like the other rather that just US becoming more like Europe.

I just found out today that Junk Charts actually made use of the data I posted and provided yet another alternate view (Calming the Rip Tide). Interesting, but I don’t think the boxplots work since they don’t show a trend.

Posted in Graphs | No Comments »