Cost of Living

Recently, someone posted a map of the cost of living for states in the US.  The issue was that the state level is way too high to look at that.  I decided to do it at the county level.

First I had to find a data source for the cost of living at the county level.  I found this site, which seems to have good county level data.  I wrote a script to scrape that data, and then had a csv with the cost of living and fips code for every county.

For plotting I followed this R tutorial.  It was easy enough to follow/adapt, but I noticed the result looked odd.  It was much more random than I would have expected, and some spot checking confirmed the plot was wrong.  It took me quite a while to figure out there were a few counties that are out of order in the maps package.  This still doesn't make sense as I used a match command so they should all be matched up.  Either way, I finally got an R script that plotted the data correctly.

The code and data are up on github.

Droughts

After hearing about this California drought nonstop, I made this quick perl script to make a gif from the pngs on this site.

I made one for the whole CONUS and uploaded it to Gfycat because the original is 14 MB.

http://gfycat.com/OnlyEasyHagfish

History of Pizza

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dr8fv/when_did_pizza_become_fairly_standardized_in/

Learn X in Y minutes

http://learnxinyminutes.com/

This site is a great reference for people that already know how to program but switch between languages frequently, and get caught up on the subtle syntax differences between them.

Tax Brackets

I saw a post where someone was advocating a sliding tax scale instead of tax brackets.  The thing is I think many people misunderstand that tax brackets don't mean that two people making $37k and $89k pay the same tax rate, despite both belonging to the 25% bracket.

I wrote a quick perl script to calculate the effective tax rate for taxable incomes $0 - $1,000,000 and plotted it.  Let me stress taxable incomes here, this is after deductions are applied.

Here's another for just up to $100k:

The result is more or less a logarithmic curve, which is realistically the curve you'd end up with using a sliding scale since you couldn't have the rate rise to infinity.  The other alternative would be a logistic curve.

If you thirst for sweet sweet data here it is:
http://pastebin.com/W8S5qLtg

On being sane in insane places

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment

Rosenhan's study was done in two parts. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or "pseudopatients" (three women and five men) who briefly feigned auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in five different States in various locations in the United States. All were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. After admission, the pseudopatients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had not experienced any more hallucinations. All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release. The average time that the patients spent in the hospital was 19 days. All but one were diagnosed with schizophrenia "in remission" before their release. The second part of his study involved an offended hospital administration challenging Rosenhan to send pseudopatients to its facility, whom its staff would then detect. Rosenhan agreed and in the following weeks out of 193 new patients the staff identified 41 as potential pseudopatients, with 19 of these receiving suspicion from at least 1 psychiatrist and 1 other staff member. In fact Rosenhan had sent no one to the hospital.

Detroit: A Hurrican Without Water

http://goobingdetroit.tumblr.com/

This is a blog that goes through Google and Bing street view images and compares recent ones to old ones.  This shows the rapid deterioration of houses in Detroit.

Keep in mind the oldest images are from 2008, and the newest are from 2013.  So, 5 years is all it takes for a couple of houses to turn into couches.

Let me stress that these pictures are of the same place.

Everything there is to know about NES Tetris

http://meatfighter.com/nintendotetrisai/

When I was a kid, I kept track of the pieces I received in Tetris on a piece of paper, because I was convinced that the in game stats were lying (they weren't).

This guy wrote 25,000 words about the inner workings of Tetris (including an interesting RNG, which is actually truly random in practice).

Even if you don't understand or care about the technical details I recommend you skim through it, as there were a lot of interesting items.

Behind the Scenes of How the Tesla Model S is Made

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_lfxPI5ObM

The Graphing Calculator Story

http://www.pacifict.com/Story/

People around the Apple campus saw us all the time and assumed we belonged. Few asked who we were or what we were doing.When someone did ask me, I never lied, but relied on the power of corporate apathy. The conversations usually went like this:
Q: Do you work here?
A: No.
Q: You mean you're a contractor?
A: Actually, no.
Q: But then who's paying you?
A: No one.
Q: How do you live?
A: I live simply.
Q: (Incredulously) What are you doing here?!