The internet is filled with things. Here are some of them.
#statistics
2025
What Americans think about the Middle Ages2025 Mar 28
YouGov has released their poll results from when they asked Americans questions about the Middle Ages. Unsurprisingly, there is some bonkers stuff in here, like some people "viewing the black plague favorably" (wtf???) and some people thinking the assassination of Julius Caesar and the French Revolution both took place during the Middle Ages but that the Crusades did not (wtf???)
The real surprising thing here, though, is the revelation that Americans think more often about the Middle Ages than they do Ancient Rome, and with less gender separation between the results, too.
The Most Mario Colors2025 Jan 24
This person has collected every single Mario game where Mario's name appears in the title in multicolor polygonal letters (at least 40 games meet this criteria) and analyzed which color is used for each letter. This is the sort of advanced nonsense on which we thrive.
The Music Stats Project2023 Dec 11
Sometime in 2007 I finally acted on a thought that'd been bouncing through my brain: "iTunes logs playcounts for tracks, but wouldn't it be great if it did the same for albums and artists, too?" I wrote a script which read an iTunes export file and generated those album and artist playcounts. Since then, I've been periodically exporting my iTunes library to update those counts whilst incrementally improving that script. The biggest step up was in 2018, when I added to the script the ability to compare a recent export against an older one. This created a view into 'recent playcount', thus answering questions such as "What's popular now?" and "What's fallen from favor?" And yet... is it even more insightful if the script, rather than just compare two points in time, compiled all of the static export files into a continuous moving picture of my iTunes library? Or would that be a bunch of work for what is essentially highly-personal trivia? Baby, it's both!
Introducing, sixteen years in the making, the (almost complete) new version of my interactive iTunes library!
YouGov has released their poll results from when they asked Americans questions about the Middle Ages. Unsurprisingly, there is some bonkers stuff in here, like some people "viewing the black plague favorably" (wtf???) and some people thinking the assassination of Julius Caesar and the French Revolution both took place during the Middle Ages but that the Crusades did not (wtf???)
The real surprising thing here, though, is the revelation that Americans think more often about the Middle Ages than they do Ancient Rome, and with less gender separation between the results, too.