Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Assbike Song: Rockabilly Edition



Here's two rockabilly tunes for this week. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion released an album of their 7 inches from the 90s, and Sparkle Moore (pictured above) is one of the first and few female rockabilly singers.


Blues Explosion - Ghetto Mom (4.40 MB)

Sparkle Moore - Skull and Crossbones (3.67 MB)

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Friday, November 09, 2007

Can this be real ? - Jenkem


I've admitted in the past about my guilty shame of reading Gawker daily, but it's those times when they do unearth a gem that it is worthwhile.

Jenkem

This is the most glorious news item I've read all year.

Man I just hope this is foreal, it would just make me the happiest person in the world to know there are kids somewhere (in the U.S. inevitably) who are inhaling poo to get high.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Since you asked - Can this be real ?

I can't help but read the lame-o advice column Since you asked in Salon.com.

It is just too earnest to be a parody. This week some lamer is distraught that their beighbou dumped them for a new buddy and Cary Tennis gives a hilariously long winded answer. Except he's serious

Dear Cary,

My neighbor and I were inseparable friends. We had morning coffee about three times a week. We had intimate, confidential conversations. We visited every day in our front yards.

Things were going along fine until I got a job. I would be getting ready for work, and I would see her strolling up the street for regular morning coffee with another neighbor. The hurt came when I realized that my neighbor had totally dumped me and had moved on to this other friend. When I was at home, she no longer had the time of day for me. Everything now was about her new friend. I felt dumped and betrayed. I am having a hard time with this, as she lives next door to me. I can't get it out of my mind. I have cried a lot of tears over the loss of this friendship. Our houses are close together and I see her often in the course of a week.

I want to move on, but it is so hard having the person who betrayed my friendship living right next door.

What advice can you give me?

Spurned Neighbor


Read the answer here, foreal.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Another example of a matrix: Animation



Somewhere in my reading I came across this example of a matrix; with non-gratuitous use of animation.

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Friday, November 02, 2007

More Data Display

A blog called "Urban Spoon" came up with what it calls the Steak/Sushi Index.

The finding is not that surprising: In U.S. Cities where the ratio of steakhouses to sushi joints is higher tend to vote Republican.

This is the accompanying plot :

People often make this kind of plot to show a correlation. It is natural, because this is the kind of plots that programs like Excel encourage you to make.

This makes the point, but there is the inherent problem of how the data is ordered. A scatter plot might be more "impartial", but some information would be lost (the names of the cities).

My approach is to plot the data in a matrix

It is simple to do this in MATLAB:

Enter data into an Excel spreadsheet and save it as a .csv (comma delimited) datafile, which imports easily into MATLAB.

By default the data is imported into a matrix named data and the text is imported into a matrix called textdata.

This bit of code does the plotting

for i=1:N
text(data(i,1),data(i,2),char(textdata(i)));
hold on;
end;

Then it's simply a matter of setting the axes and making it look nice.

Update:
Looking at my plot I realized that the x quantity is not linear.

A city that has 2:1 steak:sushi will have a score of 2.00, but a place with the opposite ratio will have a score of 0.5. This is not right !

The proper scaling should be steak-sushi percentage. So I re-plot here it with that scaling.

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Take that asshole !


http://torontoist.com/2007/11/road_rage_redux.php

At about 9:45 a.m. this morning, another shocking confrontation between a motorist and a cyclist took place at the intersection of College and McCaul Streets. During their heated dispute, the cyclist stabbed the motorist two to three times in the neck with a screwdriver.

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Thursday, November 01, 2007

Cool NY Times Graphic: HR Hitters

I found this cool interactive graphic on the NY Times site when it was mentioned on Edward Tufte's discussion forums.



It shows the number of homeruns the most prolific HR hitters hit at a given age. Clicking on the names on the sidebar highlights that player's graph.

Link to NYTimes Bonds Graphic

Talking about data presentation, I was also impressed to discover that on Google Finance if you enter a number of ticker symbols separated by commas it will produce a comparison plot for you :

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