One of my favorite ways to play Jeopardy is to try and guess what some of the answers will be based only on the catagory. For example, if the catagory is “Bond Films”, I might guess Goldeneye, Live and Let Die, and Sean Connery as answers I expect to show up at some point. I want an app that lets me guess answers ahead of time and gives huge bonus points if I manage to hit one. Even bigger bonus if it’s a daily double. And if you guess the final jeopardy answer from the topic alone you win the game.
I like this paper though, turns out booster seats, car seats, and seat belts are all about the same effectiveness. Juts strap kids down some way, it doesn’t really matter. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180105124030.htm
Random ideas that I don’t have time to follow up on
I should write a twitter bot that finds and retweets jokes that are variations of “teach a man to fish…”. It would be a good ML natural language kind of project
I should write a twitter bot that finds and retweets trolly problem memes. It would be a fun ML vision project
I should scrape twitter for folks posting wordle scores and see what fraction of folks are playing “wrong”, ie, playing as if they are in hard-mode, but not actually in hard-mode. It’s been eye-opening to see how many folks will lock in their correct letters even if it would clearly be better to eliminate many potential letters in a turn.
More things I’d like to play with, but haven’t had time:
Another cool dataset with birth records, implying that there is a “human mating season”. It would be fun to slice by age and see if this is for everyone, or just some subset of people. I’m guessing it could be just when people are inside more, like cold/flu season.
My kids have forced me to play a millon hands of UNO. It would be good to check if there are actually any winning strategies for the game. Is it better to play reverses and draw 2/4 cards early or late, etc? It’s not always obvious, but a Monte Carlo could show some interesting results (or the null result that there’s no good strategy to be had).
I want to make a vizulization of Disney/Pixar protagonist family mortality. It’s long been known that Disney moms are at a huge risk of dying, but now we’re seeing grandmothers and even great grandmothers dying (thanks Coco)
I’m convinced the reason the original Star Wars movies and The Force Awakens were so good is that the main characters spent a large amount of time on screen together. I’d like to compare to the amount of time the main characters are together in The Last Jedi.
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!
