Thanks, visualized
I'm mixing it up a bit this week, presenting charts and data visualizations and maps and so on but with a contrived theme: Things for which I am thankful. See, on Thursday it was Thanksgiving, a holiday when people give thanks for things? So what I'm doing is taking that idea and applying it to this newsletter, a bit of outside-the-box thinking that I can't imagine anyone else has ever conceived of doing.
Hopefully that complicated idea makes sense. Because here we go.
Appreciation 1
My kids — and getting to watch them learn
There are a lot of novel experiences that accompany becoming a parent, many of them involving bodily secretions. But one thing I hadn't really anticipated was the way in which you can observe kids slowly learning about the world and their place in it.
The process of learning to walk is an obvious one. But I was also struck by the way in which kids slowly learn language, forming sounds and then refining them and then figuring out how to write letters, etc.
I, being me, have also enjoyed seeing my kids discover math and science, figuring out the subtle threads within them and that connect them.
For example, earlier this month, my first grader's school held a Math Night, when kids could come and play math games. Some involved dice and, at one point, a teacher pointed out to my son that the opposite sides of a standard die add up to seven.
So the next day, I started talking with him and his brother, who is in the third grade, about probability and the most common result when you roll two dice. And, being me, I wrote a script that generated 10,000 random dice rolls to see what occurred.
You'll notice that the pairings are fairly random, distributed among the outcomes unevenly but unpredictably. (The shading is a bit deceptive, since the lightest color represents 241 instances and the darkest 308, but you get the point.)
Yet, when we add up the sum, we get an imperfect bell curve with the most likely outcome, seven, appearing more often.
Then I had another thought. While we were in Pittsburgh visiting family earlier this year, the kids spotted a gaming store. Each came out the owner of a brand-new 20-sided die. So what would happen if we rolled those 10,000 times?
The answer, of course, is "basically the same thing." A random, uneven distribution across all 400 possible outcomes.
Again, though, summing the dice yielded a bell curve, with 21 at the apex.
As you know (but they didn't), this is not because there's anything more special about seven (or 21) than, say, two. On the chart below, each subtly different shade of green is a different color — and each diagonal from lower left to upper right is the same color and the same sum. There are simply more boxes that have seven (or 21) as a result.