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And people get on me for occationally haveing a “Triple” at Wendy’s. Get a load of this guy. Jared eats a 16 patty cheeseburger Makes me want to never eat a burger again! Hmmm… or maybe I’ll pick up one of those triples from Wendy’s on the way home tonight. Yum! (via BuzzMachine) I am working on a graph and analysis I think will be interesting to quantify the oft repeated but infrequently quantified statements about taller candidates winning more often in presidential races. I have a lot of data already, but for completeness I still need the heights of a bunch of losing presidential candidates of the past. If anybody out there has this information (and a URL or reference to document it) or just has pointers on where to look, I would much appreciate it. With a little googling I was able to quickly find the heights of all the top two electoral vote getters for every election since 1788, EXCEPT these guys: 1800 – Aaron Burr (Democratic-Republican) OK, that is a lot I still haven’t found. Finding the heights of the people who won and became president was easy. Unless the height was unusual though, finding heights for the losers is harder. I may do a bit more google hunting, but I am suspecting a trip to a dusty old library to find out of print biographies or contemporary reports on some of these people may be needed. Right now with the data I do have, the “taller usually wins” thing is definately holding up, with the effect being much stronger in the 20th century than the 19th. In addition, there seems to be a correlation (albiet a very weak one and possibly not significant) that the greater the height difference, the larger the margin of victory. Effects can be seen both looking at popular vote results, and electoral college results. Very interesting. However at this point I only have complete height data for 25 out of 54 elections. That’s less than half. So the trends I am seeing in the graphs may completely go away and turn into something else entirely based on the remaining data. So I’m not ready to show any graphs or actually draw any conclusions until I have more data. Anyway, this is fun stuff. I’ve kept hearing the “taller wins” story for years, but never seen the data to back it up, and I’ve searched for it on the web multiple times before. I’m sure the research has been done before, what I am doing here is not original, but I guess it just hasn’t been put up on the web, or perhaps I just haven’t been using the right search terms to find it. Since I couldn’t find the info on the web or any actual statistical analysis, I thought I would do it myself. But getting the heights of some of these famous at the time but now completely obscure people from the 1800’s, egads! Not to mention even people still around like Walter Mondale. I would have thought his height would have just popped up right away on a search, but NO. They have to make it hard! :-) On each I would try various google searches for about 10 minutes, then if I hadn’t found a height I would move on. If I did find one, I’d document the source and get my data point. But like I said, some of these heights may take more than 10 minutes on Google to find! Anyway, if anybody has some tips or info on the people above, please let me know! I’ve been meaning to mention this for awhile, but just hadn’t gotten to it. I unfortunately will be on the Idaho Random Trip when this happens, but the venue is less than a mile from my new place. I pass it every day on the way to work, and again on the way home. Shame I’ll be missing Tito. Tito Jackson to headline 9-11 “fun”raiser
My Tivo caught a bunch of episodes last month of the TechTV show “Call for Help” because they were having a series on Photoshop Tricks which was caught by my “Photo*” season pass. Anyway, the cohost is Cat Schwartz who is lots of fun. The show is good, and Leo gives good information, but Cat is who makes the show interesting. I tried to bring up her blog at the time, but it was down and I forgot about it. But yesterday on Fark they linked to one of those voting contests with her and some other woman, and that link (forget where it was now) mentioned that she had accidentally posted topless pics of herself to her blog. Woops. They are gone now (although they can be found googling elsewhere), but her reactions to it are funny and well tempered. So here is a link to her blog. Cat is cool. :-)
Sounds good. I’ll have to check in more often. And perhaps add a wishlist for the show itself, so I get it times when they aren’t doing something on Photos as well. Now, if only Stephanie Birkitt, one of Dave Letterman’s assistants on the Late Show would get her own blog too. That would be cool. Both of these women deserve their own shows. :-) And I will try to avoid accidentally post revealing pictures of myself here as well. Not that anybody would want to see that. :-) Found this several different places today, ignored it the first few times, then finally read it through. The Public Defender was clearly having a lot of fun with this. F Word Motion (The Smoking Gun)
OK. Saw this thing pinging my site, and had to set myself up to be on it and added the needed metadata to my site and made sure the RSS version of my site was properly linked.. Pretty cool. I like it. You just watch it and people’s geographic location lights up as their sites are updated. It uses the data at geourl.com which I also made sure got updated. Which is neat because you can easily find other websites geographically close to me and via acme.co the sat picture of my location. I just have to remember to update my location once I move. I’ll save hooking the GPS to my laptop and having it update the location automatically every few minutes for some later project. :-) I’m late. I knew I was slow starting to do this. Should have done it a long time ago. But at least I beat the BIG crowd! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46143-2003Jul11.html
(via Google News) This is a really fun unintentional experiment. I’d like to see graphs and charts though. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3060579.stm
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