Some Blog Site

Regular readers of this blog will recall that every May I enhance the Social Security’s list of popular baby names during the previous year.

That should happen next week, pending release of the Social Security data.

What I have this week might be more interesting to most people that just a list of names. It is an animation of the growth (and decay) in popularity of the names.

I’m not putting the animations here on SomeBlogSite; rather, they are at SomeFunSite, with the rest of the baby name information. Go view the animations.

Here are some still images though:

This is how I made them:

First, I collected the top 25 names for each year from 1900-2012. Then I combined them into a list – the superset of top 25 names. For boys, this list was 103 names long. For girls, this list was 175 names long. Apparently girl names go in and out of fashion more quickly than boy names.

Next, I went through each year and got the number of babies born with those names, and put all that information into bubble charts.

Finally, I combined all 113 bubble charts into one animation file.

And then repeat the steps for the other gender.

How long did that take?
Not as long as it sounds. The longest part was figuring out the colors to use and the size of the text for the names and the pattern/placement of the circles.

Once that was in place, it’s easy. Thanks to PHP and SVG, it takes about 1 minute for that second step (generating 113 images). PHP also got the first step done in about 3 seconds (after I took about 15 minutes to write the script).

The last step is a little time consuming. I used GIMP to create the animated GIF. I had to drag and drop 113 files (one at a time) into the program. Maybe there’s a batch import function, maybe there’s a way to script it, but it wasn’t too bad by itself so I didn’t bother trying.

The funny things is that this project succumbed to the problem that the baby names site fixes for the Social Security list of names. That is, duplicate spellings of names are not combined. So the charts have both Aidan and Aiden, or Michaela and Makayla. I noticed this late enough in the process that I didn’t feel like redoing things.

Government has been telling us that we need to improve fuel economy by our actions – inflate our tires, buy electric vehicles, etc.

You’ll notice that anytime the government discusses fuel economy, it is always in the context of what other people or groups need to do; the government is never responsible.

I was thinking about that the other day as I sat in my car, idling at a red light and watching the green light’s empty lanes. Why did I have to sit there and waste gas? Because the government wants other people, not the government, to have to act to improve fuel economy.

More prevalent than solid-red left arrows though are the 4-way stops. What contributes not only to poor fuel economy but also to higher maintenance costs for a vehicle? Stop-and-go driving.

I bet the government could improve my fuel economy if it upgraded a bunch of intersections from 4-way stops to roundabouts. Then I wouldn’t have to stop. Coasting through a right turn, rather than coming to a complete stop and then having to accelerate again, would reduce my dependency on foreign oil.

And then are some T intersections where the right turn traffic has to come to a complete stop because the light is red, even though their action would not interfere with the green-light traffic.

Why not put up a right-turn green arrow (that would be on when the cross street has a green light) so that we don’t need to burn more gas than we need to?

Come on, government, do your part too.

In the last week, we had the announcement of the 2014 NFL schedule. Now that we know who will play whom and when, we can start predicting wins and losses.

I keep my predictions over at Some Fun Site. View results of previous football seasons.

2013 Summary

Last year, I predicted that

• Arizona Cardinals = 3-13
• Dallas Cowboys = 7-9
• Oakland Raiders = 4-12
• San Francisco 49ers = 14-2

How they actually did was

• Arizona Cardinals = 10-6
• Dallas Cowboys = 8-8
• Oakland Raiders = 4-12
• San Francisco 49ers = 12-4

Pretty good, except for the Cardinals.

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One of the basic things you learn during driver’s ed is how to make a 3-point turn.

I have a problem with the 3-point turn.

Not doing the turn – the problem is with the name.

First off, here is a little video is made showing how a 3-point turn works. I did an cursory internet search for an animated diagram of 3-point turn, but didn’t find any. So I made one myself. It is not a very polished animation, because I drew the frames individually and pieced them together. I bet the better-looking videos out there use animation-rendering software, which I don’t have because I’m not planning on doing much animation.

Now, having watched the video, you can see my problem with the name. Specifically, the number given to the maneuver.
Point #1 is obvious – it’s where the car stops and reverses direction.
Point #2 is also obvious – it’s where the car stops and reverses direction again.
Point #3 – I just made it up. I had to put a third point in there somewhere to make it a 3-point turn, but there is no place it fits.

Where is the third point in a 3-point turn?
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If there’s a fire on the first floor, too bad. Stay on the second floor.

And don’t use the elevator if there’s a fire.

I don’t follow basketball much, but I hear a little bit about it as I listen to the news, traffic, weather, and sports during my commute. Every year, some people have complaints about the NBA lottery pick system. Why their draft can’t be like everyone else’s, I’m not sure.

But people were proposing changes to the lottery draft format. Most proposals are intended to curb the motivation for teams to lose on purpose in order to get a better draft. One proposal that I remember was to give more ping-pong balls to the non-playoff teams with the better records. That would decrease the incentive to lose, but that would be counter to the purpose of the draft – to help bad teams.

That whole sports-talk radio bit got me thinking as to other ways the NBA could run its draft. Here are my proposals, if they are intent on ignoring the simplest process of just basing it on record:

• Plinko
  It would make as much sense as the current system, but be more entertaining. Make it a giant Plinko board, with the names of all the available draft picks at the bottom. They would have to have all the number combinations as separate ping-pong balls, instead of just 14 balls like they have currently. But then the commissioner just dumps all the balls at once and then it’s a race to the bottom!
• Silent Auction
  Not as entertaining as Plinko, but perhaps some more drama possible. Instead of a certain number of ping-pong ball combinations, each team would get a certain number of Draft Bucks they could spend. Worse teams would get more Draft Bucks. I think this would work better if it applied to the whole draft, not just the first part. Then teams could overspend for one player if they wanted, at the expense of their second round. On second thought, this might be too much like a salary cap, and fans might want something different.
• White Elephant-Style
  That’s right – stealing. The draft would occur with the best team going first and the worst team last. A team could draft anyone off the board, or steal a player who was drafted by an earlier team. The NBA would set limits on how many steals are allowed and such. Possibly confusing, but definitely more exciting.

Any other ideas for how to improve (or at least change) the NBA draft?

If you ever need a random-number generator for values between 0-100, don’t bother with any of the standard libraries or websites to provide them.

Just look at the weather forecast for Michigan.