2010 has been a great year. You can never say you've seen it all this year, but I've seen a lot. From the slums of India to the Andes of Peru, from mono during graduation to getting my mind blown at Inception, from late hours in Wudaokou to long hours in St. Mary's, from observing someone else's logs on a plane to finding my own bottle of beer underneath 18 inches of snow, from line dancing to piranha catching, from a visit to a Chinese mannequin factory to a night as a Georgetown Cupcake, it's been a good year. It's a shame that it has to end but I think this is the nature of years - they end and the one that follows is bound to be greater. At least mathematically, 2011 > 2010. Yeah it's funny how that works.
But trying to understand the world mathematically, instead of in flowery superlatives, has been a big part of this year for me. I almost stopped blogging after starting full time graduate studies this fall because work has been so busy. This semester has felt next to nothing like college and sometimes I wake up Friday morning and wonder what I did all week, and it's hard to remember because it's been a blur of math. But for delving so deep into the subject I can now see many more layers to the world - probability distributions, random variables, functions and vectors that define our surroundings and happenings. Nearly everything can be put into a mathematical model which often makes us better understand, or differently envision, phenomena. Sometimes these models can be used to make predictions, but sometimes they are meaningless without larger context or a multi-disciplinarian approach to understanding the forces behind our data.
For example, in this year's NFL MVP race, Tom Brady and Michael Vick stand out. A lot of numbers are thrown around like Brady's 8 game interception-less streak and Vick's 9 rushing TDs. However it's hard to understand how amazing (or not) Brady's streak is unless you take a deeper look into the types of passes he throws (how many of them are risky?) and if he's abnormally lucked out by defenders dropping picks. Similarly many of Vick's rushing TDs are not equal - some are 1 yard dives, some are flashy 20 yard sprints, some are 3 yard scrambles that involved a half dozen jukes. Thus, it is often said that statistics is math + bullshit because it can be so easy to mislead with numbers. I find it good protocol to always view stunning statistics with a good dose of skepticism and try to visualize all the complications that the simple number effectively masks. Did you know? Tom Brady has more touchdown passes (34) this year than Michael Vick (21) and Brett Favre (11) combined. Did you know? Michael Vick has more career jail time (23 months) than Brady, Peyton Manning, Philip Rivers, Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers combined.
Anyways here are some ridiculous graphs I created.
The 2010 US Census told us that there are 308 million Americans. Over half of them were aware after the US national soccer team tied Slovenia 2-2 on June 18 that there was a country named Slovenia. A considerably smaller percentage of our geographically inept country was aware before that. And the population of Slovenia (just over 2 million) is in fact represented accurately on that graph.
This graph shows how "blown" my mind is on any given date, going back to late September. As you can see I'm normally not too thrown off by any surprises and keep a relatively level head that varies around a 0.75 on the Berfatz-Julenweiss Scale (named after two pioneers in Mind-Blowing). However you may notice that in early December my mind was devastatingly blown apart upon a monumental event. On this occasion I was informed that Willow Smith, she of the song "I Whip My Hair," was none other than the 10 year old daughter of Will and Jada Smith.
For more on pop artists and age, here is a graph of the Billboard year-end top 25 artists, with their positions vs. their age. When the artist was a band I just picked their most famous person. We have an interesting scatter here with people near my age already successful such as Lady Gaga (24) and Jason Derulo (21). Outliers include Lady Antebellum (Linda Davis is 48) and Susan Boyle (49) on the high side, and Justin Bieber (16) on the low side.
