Category Archives: Online Tools / Apps / Data Sources

weather forecasting

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This is interesting. It is not 100% clear to me what the measure of accuracy is below, but the plot shows how much weather forecasting has improved over the last 50 years or so. A 3-5 day forecast is highly accurate now, and 3-5 are not that different. It’s interesting to me that there is such as large drop off in accuracy between a 7 and 10 day forecast – that is not necessarily intuitive, but useful even in everyday life. A 10-day forecast is basically a coin flip, while check back 3 days later and you are closer to 80/20 odds. This is based on pressure measured at a certain height I think, so it doesn’t necessarily mean forecasts of precipitation depth and intensity, rain vs. snow vs. ice, thunder and lightning, tornadoes, etc. are going to be as accurate as this implies.

Our World in Data

There is some suggesting that AI (meaning purely statistical approaches, or AI choosing any blend of statistics and physics it wants?) might make forecasting much faster, cheaper, and easier yet again.

native wildflowers from bulbs

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For something random and different (but hey, it’s meteorological spring right?), here are some wildflowers native to the U.S. that can be grown from bulbs.

  • Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium atlanticum), native to eastern North America
  • Calochortus spp. lily, native to western NA
  • Dwarf-crested iris (Iris cristata), native to eastern NA
  • Fritillaria spp., native to western NA
  • large camas (Camassia leichtlinii), native to western NA
  • Nodding onion (Allium cernuum), native throughout US
  • Northern spiderlilly (Hymenocallis occidentalis var. occidentalis), southeastern US
  • Rain lily (Zephyranthes atamasca), southeastern US
  • trout lily (Erythronium americanum), central and eastern US
  • Turk’s cap lily (Lilium superbum), central and eastern US
  • Ookow (Dichelostemma congestum), western NA
  • Wood lily (Lilium philadelphicum), throughout NA

It’s nice to grow plants from seed for genetic variety, but bulbs certainly have their place. It’s good to know there are good native choices (well, I don’t know if these are choices down at my local Lowes/Home Depot, but they should be).

those darn recipe sites

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This is some seriously dark humor. But ha ha, also so true. You have to scroll forever to get to your recipe, and at least for me the mobile version of any recipe site is infuriating because it constantly crashes. And yet…what is also true is recipe websites have made our world better. Instead of winging a recipe, or relying on one book you happen to have lying around, you can find out the ingredients, measurements, and even watch a video of how to make it well. You can even look at several versions of a dish, then wing it, and it will usually come out pretty well. And if you wing it in the future, it will come out better than if the recipe sites did not exist. So thank you, recipe sites.

most popular R books of 2023

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Here is something useful (to me, personally, and maybe too others), and thankfully not too pessimistic or morally fraught.

A Crash Course in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) using R – yes, please! We must end the tyranny of the monopolistic Environmental Systems “Research Institute”. Okay, they make some nice products, but just admit you are a rapacious for-profit corporation, please!

A ggplot2 Tutorial for Beautiful Plotting in R – Who doesn’t need to improve their data visualization and communication game?

new CDC Covid dashboard

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CDC has released a new wastewater monitoring dashboard, according to Forbes, which oddly does not link to the new dashboard or even tell us the name of it so it would be easy to find. Wastewater monitoring to me seems like a very useful tool in the toolbox to monitor public health and diseases of concern, whether common or exotic, well known or emerging.

Druid app

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This app is supposed to measure cognitive impairment from alcohol, drugs, and fatigue.

Grounded in cognitive neuroscience, Druid is a breakthrough technology. It brings you a sophisticated tool that measures impairment from any cause, including cannabis and other drugs, alcohol, fatigue, illness, injury, chronic condition, or severe stress. Druid operates like a video game while it measures hundred of neurophysiological indicators.

Google Play

Seems useful for a variety of purposes. And employers could use it for a variety of legitimate purposes, such as maybe testing pilots and surgeons? People who aren’t able to do their jobs safely because they are tired or stressed shouldn’t get fired obviously, they should get to rest. You can certainly imagine employers and law enforcement using this app abusively. As for driving safely, let’s just turn that over to the computers already.

Peter Turchin has a new book

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His new book is called End Times but it does not appear to be about the apocalypse, but about a cyclical view of political history with some evidence to back it up.

When a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to turn in an ominous direction in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability.

Peter Turchin

I haven’t read the book, but I have officially added it to my queue of too-many-books-to-read-before-I die. (I’m not terminally ill that I know of, it’s just a long and growing list.) The queue is periodically randomized, so just because it already has too many books to read before I die does not mean I will never read this particular book.

Anyway, one disturbing implication just from the brief description above is that we may not be able to educate our society out of economic inequality. That seems to go against the data which clearly show that people with more education earn more than people with less education. So it’s a case where a dynamic model leads to a different, counterintuitive conclusion compared to a linear extrapolation of data from the recent past.

more on Philadelphia crime

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The Philadelphia District Attorney has come under pressure for a drop in violent crime convictions. I generally support efforts to reduce arrests and trials for non-violent crimes, although a lot more tickets need to be written for speeding and reckless driving in the city – not doing this is killing people, both drivers and pedestrians, at alarming rates, and I don’t know how you can call this “non-violent”.

Nonetheless, the statistics on violent crime convictions do look somewhat bad, and the downward trend started before the 2020 pandemic so you can’t blame it on that alone. I like the data transparency that the District Attorney’s office provides. This, along with police data, could allow journalists to provide a lot more context on individual cases and short-term statistics than they do. I think they could do this without giving up the blood-soaked entertainment value that seems to be necessary to pay the bills in our messed up society.

Our World in Data Global Health Explorer

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Our World in Data has a new Global Health Explorer. I’m going to pick a few metrics and see where the United States stands according to a somewhat random set of peer countries. I think it would be interesting to see where we stand as a percentile among OECD and non-OECD countries, but that would require work.

Peer countries: I’m going to pick six highly developed countries and six middle income countries: Canada, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia.

I’m going to pick 10 metrics.

  • Life expectancy at birth: We’re #4! (Japan, Canada, Germany, US, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia)
  • Child mortality: We’re #4! (Japan, Germany, Canada, US, Malaysia, Brazil, Indonesia)
  • Maternal mortality: We’re #4: (Japan, Germany, Canada, US, Malaysia, Brazil, Indonesia)
  • Homicide rate: We’re #6! (Japan, Germany, Indonesia, Canada, Malaysia, US, Brazil)
  • Deaths from road injuries (rate): We’re #4! (Germany, Japan, Canada, US, Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia)
  • Suicide rate: We’re #6! (Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, US, Japan)
  • Death rate from all infectious diseases: We’re #2! (Canada, United States, Germany, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan)
  • Death rate from alcohol use: We’re #5! (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Canada, US, Brazil, Germany)
  • Death rate from drug use: We’re #7! (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Brazil, Germany, Canada, US)
  • Death rate from cardiovascular disease: We’re #6! (Brazil, Malaysia, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, United States, Germany)

There’s a lot more to glean from the graphs in terms of how much separates countries in these metrics, and of course there are many more metric and many more countries. But one thing is clear, USA USA! is not #1. And in this peer group of highly developed countries (Canada, Germany, Japan), we are not even average, we are dead last on most metrics. Asian countries tend to beat western countries on metrics related to life style, such as alcohol and drug use, and are significantly less violent. Germans are no saints when it comes to healthy life style – they drink a lot and have a lot of heart attacks. And Brazil is downright violent.