My Neglected Blargh

So many things I’d like to be calculating and fiddling with, but haven’t had the time. Some of my recent ideas:

• Look at birth records to see if the recent presidential election results in a “baby bust”, and compare to the baby bust caused by the great recession.
• Is it possible to figure out who ghost wrote various celebrity books? Or figure out if multiple people wrote chapters?
• Scrape WebWM and see how many clicks it takes to get to “cancer” from any given page.
• Dump NFL player stats into various machine learning algos to see how they work (like, how well can ML predict a players position, or, predict next year’s performance).
• The AAS started holding meetings at Gaylord resorts a few years ago. I think it would be fun to scrape the attendee information to see if there’s been a significant drop in the number of attendees because of it.
• Follow up on this article on a spike in US mortality. It’s hard to understand how extending health coverage would lead to increasing mortality. I suspect the big part is that they lumped the age range 18-64 into a single bin. This could me a statistical mirage where mortality is constant for all age groups, but the US has an aging population, so it appears overall mortality is increasing. Looks like all the data to check is here for the scraping.
• See if 2016 really was extra lethal in terms of celebrity deaths. Put together a list of “celebrities” (I dunno, top athlete’s, musicians, and actors), based on actuarial tables, predict how many of them should have died in 2016, compare to how many actually did. I suspect celebrities tend to live a little longer than the average person, so one would predict more deaths than actually happened.

The one thing I did manage to do was make a Venn Diagram for Adam West, the most recent victim of the Curse of the Simpsons. I figured he would be the only celebrity to have voiced roles on the Simpsons, Family Guy, and Super Friends. Turns out I was wrong, Frank Welker has also been on all 3!