Showing posts with label how do i math. Show all posts
Showing posts with label how do i math. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Google Drive's autofill feature is both useful and bizarre

 Autofill is a common feature on spreadsheets where you can enter a few items (typically, numbers) like so:


Then, if you click that little blue square and drag down, it'll know that you want to just keep counting up:


Useful!  However, as this story over at TechCrunch today notes, Google Drive has an enhanced version of this, where you can ctrl-click instead of just clicking before you drag and Google will attempt to guess what you want to autofill with pretty much any data you want.  As TechCrunch writer Drew Olanoff notes, you can do this with beer types to produce a comprehensive list of beer varieties (albeit with some noise thrown in):


Obviously, I wanted to try for myself, so I put in a few beer types, autofilled the column, and ta-da!


So that list was populated using three entries ahead of time--as a certified lazy person, I wanted to see if I could use just two for the same result, which did in fact produce basically the same list:


Using just one, however, yielded more unusual results.  If I started with "ale", I think Google assumes I'm looking for country abbreviations:


Using "ipa" yields what appear to be names of college majors in Indonesian:


Starting with "lager" gives us some words I had to translate, but they appear to be basic German (and some Dutch) words that have to do with either A) business transactions or B) automobile repair.  The word "lager" just means "stock", so I guess that's the common thread.  I am not sure where the Dutch words came from.


If we use "porter", we at first just get a list of other jobs, including some oddly specific ones.  The Japanese characters below translate to "Yoshida bag", which seems random at first--however, apparently Yoshida makes a line of porter bags, so that explains that.  Zozotown also seems wholly ridiculous, but it's apparently a Japanese retail site that sells items such as porter bags, so there you go.


I thought typing out the full name of a beer style might help, so I tried "india pale ale", but that just gave a series of "________ pale ale" results, which is boring.  "Imperial pale ale" was more interesting--we got off to a good start, but then it just started naming German months (from 2011, for some reason) as well as the German word for "pages".  No clue.


"Pilsner" was the only single beer type that really worked--it yields a similar list to using several beer types:


Having confirmed that this feature works (mostly), I decided to try a couple other things.  Obviously, I was curious what using my name might yield:


Not much of use there, though I noticed that Google appears to be subtly hinting that others, as opposed to myself, arouse.  Daily dose of damage to self esteem:

Lastly, I wondered if Google's smart autofill could count.  Obviously, the basic version can, since it can only use basic mathematical progressions, but can the more advanced version figure out how to count?  


 Ah.  Well, it did get to eleven, I guess.  It's probably kinda unfair to use the spelled-out versions of numbers--what happens with just the digits?


 No idea what happened there.  Anyway, if you're interested in seeing the results on a spreadsheet, all the images come from here--feel free to add your own if you find some interesting results. 

Friday, December 28, 2012

Michael Barone discovers percentages, treats them like a child treats Play-Doh

Michael Barone has some thoughts about the 2012 election, now that it's been a whole seven weeks.  Specifically, he thinks that it's interesting how the 2004 and 2012 elections were similar, and thinks that if he shows us some math, we might be interested in that too.  Unfortunately, he seems to think that mathematical operations are just things you can arbitrarily perform on numbers to make them more interesting so that you can have something to write about in your online column.

In combing through the results of the 2012 election — apparently finally complete, nearly two months after the fact — I continue to find many similarities between 2012 and 2004, and one enormous difference. 

Does "combing through" mean "reading some article someone else wrote and using those ideas for your own"?  Because this sounds familiar.
Wowie zowie!  Two elections in the same country separated by eight years were kinda the same but also kinda different in some ways also! 

Both of the elections involved incumbent presidents with approval ratings hovering around or just under 50 percent facing challengers who were rich men from Massachusetts (though one made his money and the other married it).

Logically, these elections were basically the same then!
Whoa!  In a country where people divide themselves roughly evenly into liberal and conservative factions, a president from either side is liked by about half the people!  This math shit is off the hook, you guys.  Also, really loving the random dig at Kerry there.  Excellent stuff.

In both cases, the challenger and his campaign seemed confident he was going to win — and had reasonable grounds to believe so.

Debatable.

In both elections, the incumbent started running a barrage of negative ads defining the challenger in the spring. And in both elections, the incumbent had at least one spotty debate performance.

I don't think there are any elections involving incumbents where these aren't true statements. 

In both elections, each candidate concentrated on a more or less fixed list of target states, and in both elections the challenger depended heavily on outside groups’ spending that failed to achieve optimal results.

"In both elections, candidates focused their efforts in areas where they might matter.  The loser and his friends also spent lots of money, which indicates that they did not expect to lose and thought the money might make a difference.  I am a real writer and these are real insights, I swear."

The popular-vote margins were similar — 51 to 48 percent for George W. Bush in 2004, 51 to 47 percent for Barack Obama in 2012.

These numbers are scintillat--zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Wow!  I care so much that I fell asleep there for a second.  Is this column actually just a list of numbers that you thought were weird?  You guys, in the past several elections, the winning party received an odd number of votes.*  Maximum weirdness!

The one enormous difference was turnout. Turnout between the 2000 and 2004 elections rose from 105 million to 122 million — plus 16 percent. Turnout between the 2008 and 2012 elections fell from 131 million to 128 million — minus 2 percent.

You make kitty bored as fuck.
For what it's worth, the only reason these numbers look interesting is that turnout in 2000 was low because it was 2000 and people were all rocking out about the fact that Y2K never happened.**  When I say "interesting", I of course mean "any word other than interesting, preferably one which means the opposite of interesting".

Turnout is a measure of organization but also of spontaneous enthusiasm. In 2004, John Kerry got 16 percent more popular votes than Al Gore had four years before. But he lost, because George W. Bush got 23 percent more popular votes than he had four years before.

I'm spontaneously enthusiastic!  Not about this article, of course.
This paragraph is a basic explanation of how the way to win is to get more more votes than the other person if they get more votes than the person who tried before and oh my god i am bored someone pls send help.

Kerry voters were motivated more by negative feelings about Bush than by positive feelings for their candidate. They disagreed with Bush’s major policies and disliked him personally. The Texas twang, the swagger, the garbled sentence structure — it was like hearing someone scratch his fingers on a blackboard.

Turn my swag on
Bush voters were more positively motivated. Political reporters had a hard time picking this up. His job-approval rating was weak, but Bush voters tended to have a lot of warmth for him. He had carried us through 9/11, he had confronted our enemies directly, he had pushed through with bipartisan support popular domestic measures such as his education bill and the Medicare prescription-drug benefit.

Meh.

His criticism of his opponents was measured and never personal, and he blamed none of his difficulties on his predecessor (who had blamed none of his on his).

Maybe that's because Bush's predecessor left him a balanced budget and relatively few long-term problems, whereas Obama entered office with several foreign conflicts and a...how do you say...not-balanced budget?  Weighted budget?  Whatever.  Also, I feel compelled to note that it was very easy for Bush to avoid personal attacks because Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and a legion of Swift boaters took care of those for him. 

The 2012 election was different. Barack Obama got 6 percent fewer popular votes than he had gotten in 2008. And Mitt Romney got only 1 percent more popular votes than John McCain had four years before.

"See, what I did there was I took the numbers and I...mathed them.  After the mathing, there was some really interesting stuff, with the numbers and the maths and all that.  Percent!
In retrospect, it looks like both campaigns fell short of their turnout goals. Yet examination of election returns and exit polls indicates that the Obama campaign turned out voters where it really needed them. That enabled him to carry Florida by one point, Ohio by three points, Virginia by four points, and Colorado and Pennsylvania by five points. Without those states, he would have gotten only 243 electoral votes and would now be planning his presidential library.

I never thought of that!  If several million people had voted differently someone different might have won.  Inception!
For what it's worth (I wouldn't know how much it's worth, since I'm not as good at math as Mr. Barone here), 5 points in Pennsylvania was about 310,000 votes.  This whole paragraph is a giant exercise in "just imagine if everything was totally different!"

But the conservative bloggers who argued that the Obama campaign’s early-voting numbers were below target may have been right. If Mitt Romney had gotten 16 percent more popular votes than his predecessor, as John Kerry did, he would have led Obama by 4 million votes and won the popular vote 51 to 48 percent. Romney, like Kerry, depended on voters’ distaste for the incumbent; he could not hope to inspire the devotion Bush enjoyed in 2004 and that Obama had from a diminished number in 2012.

But to continue this counterfactual scenario, if Obama had won 23 percent more popular votes this year than in 2008, he would have beaten Romney by 85 million to 69 million votes and by 54 to 44 percent. In reality, Obama’s vote and percentage went down. Considering what happened in Bush’s second term, that suggests a course of caution and wariness for the reelected president and his party.

The key word here would be "counterfactual". This has been your day's exercise in pretending numbers are different and painting a word picture of what that might mean, which as I understand it is the heart of modern mathematic theory.


*facts may be fabricated if I see fit
**probably not the real reason

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Rush Limbaugh wants to bounce off a theory, whatever that means

Rush Limbaugh has titled a portion of a recent radio show "ChiCom envy at the New York Times".  This appears to be an insinuation that the New York Times has expressed some sort of jealousy at the powers of Chinese Communists, which makes sense if by "sense" you mean "absolutely zero sense of any kind at all ever".  Rush, explain yourself!

RUSH: You know, the theory -- and I'm not espousing it, I just want to bounce off of it.  The theory that Adam Lanza somehow had been convinced the world was gonna end Friday and he was discombobulated by it. His mother was a prepper and a survivalist and showed him guns and he went in there and did what he did to either deal with the pressure of it or maybe save people from the end, who knows what.

It's pretty offensive to just look at a bad thing that happened and start making shit up about what you think might have caused it, which is pretty much what Rush seems to be doing here.  He cleverly avoids actually saying that he thinks this is true with the "I just want to bounce off of it" and then goes on to strongly imply that it is true.  Interestingly enough, many of Rush's advertisers seem to encourage the same kind of survivalist tendencies that he seems to be decrying here--lots of them would love if concerned survivalists wanted to stock up on home security, firearms, and gold, and Rush has been known to promote survivalist viewpoints himself.

It happened in China, is the point.  Some doomsayer in China -- we had the story earlier in the week, and I didn't get to it, I neglected to mention it. But some doomsayer went crazy last week and attacked his mother, and then went into a school and stabbed 26 or so kids.  He didn't have a gun.  But he had a knife, and he stabbed 26 or so kids.  It was an AP story. 

Alright, Rush.  So it's disrespectful to politicize the tragedy in Newtown if you're pushing gun control, but if you just want to compare it to an almost certainly unrelated event in China, that's okay?  Your entire basis for this theory that a survivalist tendency might have to do with Newtown is that another thing happened in an entirely different place and it was similarly tragic.  Also, where are you going with this point?

And today the ChiComs "have arrested more than 500 doomsayers for spreading rumors about the end of the world on Friday."  Don't you think Obama's salivating -- uh, sorry.  Sorry.  That's the old Rush.

Yeah, the old Rush would claim that Obama would love to have authoritarian powers and be able to arrest dissidents.  The new Rush apparently does the same thing, except then he walks it back and pretends like he didn't really say it because he called backsies and that totally makes it not count that he said it, you guys.

That's the threatening, making-people-nervous Rush. 

Totally different than the new Rush!

The new Rush is all about welcoming, friendship, and easing anxiety.
But I do know Thomas L. Friedman's salivating over it, New York Times.  Oh, that kind of power, wouldn't that be great?  If government could just shut up wackos like that.  Wouldn't it?  You know Thomas L. Friedman, the communist of the New York Times, has ChiCom envy.  A number of these guys wish that Obama would simply seize power like the ChiComs have.  Good, decent, smarter than everybody else people.  So when you have a problem like this, 500 doomsayers running around spreading rumors about the end of the world you just go grab 'em and lock 'em up.  You arrest them.

Yes.  Thomas Friedman, a newspaper writer, and the New York Times, a newspaper, who rely on the freedom of speech guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution about as much as any other individual or organization in the country, would just love it if Obama gave himself power to arrest anyone he pleases, the way it is in communist China.  That seems completely logical.  On another note, Rush Limbaugh himself has in the past expressed frustration that we can't lock people up for speaking freely.  Maybe he should write for the New York Times, that well-known communist rag.

By the way, just to be clear, there's only one person that I know of who is saying that Adam Lanza's mother was a prepper, and that's the ex-sister-in-law.  She's the only source for that.  Have you heard any more?  I don't know of anybody other than the ex-sister-in-law who says that she was a survivalist or a prepper. And again, folks, I have to remind you that everything that was reported on this for three hours on Friday was wrong, and a lot probably still is.  It's getting to the point I don't really believe anything that I see or hear, and the things that I'm told are true and the things I'm told to believe, it's becoming a bit much.

So, you personally acknowledge that you have no faith in the entire premise of your argument here.  Was it that urgent to find a way to compare this to something that happened in China that you couldn't wait, say, 24 hours to clear up the facts?  I suppose if the premise turned out to be demonstrably false, you couldn't spin hypothetical scenarios relying on what appear to be fake facts.  One of the reasons that we can't believe all these things we see and hear from the media is people doing the same fucking thing you're doing right now--everyone wants to be the first with a story or theory and can't be bothered to check if it's actually based on something resembling the real world.  It's becoming a bit much.

It seems truth is a huge casualty in our country.  Right and wrong don't exist anymore.  It's far worse than I think any of us thought it was gonna be.  We've been making jokes about it over the course of the 25 years, how we've been in outcome based education, awarding people who think two plus two is five for trying and refusing to tell 'em that they're wrong 'cause it would hurt their feelings and humiliate them.

Everything you said that preceded this paragraph was a classic example of having a two and another two and trying to tell everyone how they might equal five if something you heard of one time is true and also somehow relevant to the equation, as opposed to being irrelevant and wrong.  I award you nothing for trying, and I am absolutely willing to tell you that you are wrong regardless of subsequent hurt feelings. 

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Yahoo news: The entire population of the United States went shopping on Black Friday

Per Yahoo! News, 247 million people shopped in person or online on Black Friday.  Given that this number is slightly higher than the number of adults in the US (approximately 238 million, estimated from 2010 census), there was reason for doubt; therefore, they consulted a second study, which found that the number was in fact over 307 million, this time not including online shopping.  That leaves just over 4 million of us who stayed home.  Either illegal immigration is far more widespread than anyone realized, or math is just really hard for some people.

The quote from the CEO of the NRF about BFS is horrific.  OMG WTF BBQ QED.