#data time

[mathysphere]

Fun fact! 'Funny cross stitch' is the 16ᵗʰ most common tag given to cross-stitch listings on Etsy (right after 'pdf cross stitch' and before 'cute cross stitch'). But how many of those patterns are actually funny? What's the average humor level? And which among them is the funniest? I think it's time we found out!

Click Here* [2024 UPDATE: now here!] to cast your vote on any of 997 different 'funny' cross-stitch patterns, all randomly scraped from Etsy throughout the year, and check back later this month for the results!

Patterns pictured here: [dark sense] [keith haring] [love] [pew pew] [gnomes]

*the site is uhhhh a little hacked-together, so if it crashes lemme know and I'll fix it. website design is my passion

[hellafluff]

Data Time! That’s his name. My friends accidentally helped me make him at lunch the other day. Look, i even doodled a lil expressions sheet for practice.

His personality is what happens when you fuse Bill Nye and Adam Savage. He’s so fucking smart but all he does all day is see what limits he can push things before they explode. He’s scarily happy all the time, loves making friends, has 15 doctorates in Science™, and his favorite episode of mythbusters is the one where they explode a cement truck. 

I have no idea what vehicle mode is outside of car.

[mathysphere]

data time!! sharing the results of the survey site from a while back, and asking some deep questions: "what percentage of etsy listings tagged with 'funny cross stitch' are actually funny?" and also "what's the funniest cross-stitch pattern known to mankind?"

[mathysphere]

I missed your “is this cross stitch funny” form and I’m sad about it! Could you maybe reopen the form so folks like me can take the polls just for fun? I’d appreciate it!! It’s a great avenue for investigation.

Oh yeah, absolutely!

I just finished refurbishing the form to collect a little more specific data-- right now it's set to only show the top 25 patterns, so we can determine which of them is the absolute funniest-- but once that's been running for a little while I'll set it back to the original, full set and leave it open for people to poke around in. :)

That'll probably be in... maybe a day or so? Depending on how the data collection goes. But I'll keep y'all posted!

[mathysphere]

Actually I may have closed that form too soon-- just calculated the highest humor scores, and there's a LOT of ties for the top 10.

Lemme change a few things, and I may reopen it in a moment

[hellafluff]

i made  a wonderful chunky robot uncle earlier because my friends and i were making jokes about something i said and it turned into a transformer idea. putting the sketch here because i just really love it

[gerapitico]

Sam judges visualizations part 2

So . . . Let’s chat about effective visualization, and how this is not it.

Featuring me, your friendly neighborhood data scientist.

Jay Inslee’s team is trying really hard here (all misspelling non-withstanding). And it fits the model of public consumption, in that it isn’t hard to understand. It is however, easy to misunderstand.

This is a lesson in using the correct scale for readability.

Now, there are more detailed versions of each of these, so let’s take a look, shall we?

So, the disease activity is falling . . . not the same as low risk, but okay, blue is better than red, but we aren’t all the way over there yet. I understand what it is trying to say, regardless of how well it says it.

And here’s a really really bad one. What does it mean? Does it mean we don’t have testing capacity? Does it mean we have lots of testing capacity? Does it mean you have to be high risk to get tested? Even after reading the blurb, I’m not sure.

Same as the one right before. What does it mean? Are we close, are we still far? Who knows? Definitely not this graphic!

You are medium risk. So are all of the rest of vulnerable populations. We all understand. IDK, if it’s progress, but it is done.

I really really hope this means that our health care system is ready. Please mean that our health care system is ready.

Conclusion: Whoever did this on the data side, it is NOT there fault. This looks exactly like a data person being told: this is how we want it to look. And the poor data person spent the whole time being like fml, and this is the result.

Data literacy is important, so that things like this don’t happen. When data is presented poorly, it ruins people’s trust in data. And while you shouldn’t just blindly trust data that is presented, you should be able to find that bias quickly, not get bogged down just trying to understand what the data is trying to say.