Late last year, Matthew Beckler was nice enough to make a sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Changes in the Amazon page format made it stop working a while ago, though, and now Amazon reports roughly equivalent data via its AuthorCentral feature, with the added bonus of BookScan sales figures. […]
Category: Playing-With-Graphs
Charting Fantasy Art
Nobody who likes both SF and the graphing of odd things as much as I do could possibly fail to link to Orbit’s charts of fantasy art. These include the frequency plot of various elements seen at right, a comparison of fashion trends for urban fantasy heroines, color trends in cover dragons, and a study […]
It’s Not Nerd Parenting Without Graphs
SteelyKid had her two-year checkup this morning, which means we got new weight and length measurements for her. It’s been a while since I did anything really dorky with her data, so here are a couple of graphs tracking her growth: (Yes, they’re in English units, not SI. Deal with it.)
When Should You Open Your Car Windows? An Experiment
Back at the start of the summer, I asked a question about automotive thermodynamics: On a hot day, is it better to open your car windows a crack when making a short stop, or leave them closed? For a long term– say, leaving your car parked outside all day– I hope everyone will agree that […]
Bad and Good Presentation Graphs
I gave a short introduction to how to give a presentation today to the students who will be presenting their research in our twice-weekly Summer Student Seminar Series. This included examples of a data slide that is bad in the ways that students’ first attempts at data slides tend to be bad, and the same […]
Quantization of Books 5: Decay of Books
It’s been a while since I’ve done a fun with graphs post about the Amazon sales rank of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, but that’s not because I’ve stopped tracking it. It’s getting to be enough data, though, that it’s worthwhile to look on a slightly coarser scale, so here’s the sales rank […]
Quantization of Books 4: How Many Books Is That Again?
I’ve toyed around in the past with ways to use the Amazon sales rank tracker to estimate the sales numbers for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It’s geeky fun, but not especially quantitative. Yesterday, though, I found a reason to re-visit the topic: calibration data!
Playing With Graphs: People in Albany Don’t Own Kindles
A few days back, Matthew Beckler added the Kindle edition to his sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Given my well-known love for playing with graphs of data, it was inevitable that I would plot both of these in a variety of ways. So, what do we learn from this? […]