So Many a Second

Visualizations of raining trees, cars, births, deaths showing how many happen in the world per second. Even more from infosthetics.

Two Colorful Examples of Smoothed Bivariate Density Functions

Seen this week, smoothed scatterplots showing the density of locations of basketball shots taken by Phoenix Suns players. More information is here. Via the Statistical Modeling blog of the Stat Department at Columbia University.

Also this week:

Smoothed scatterplots showing where subjects first looked in recognizing faces. The nose knows. More here.

Bivariate Histogram from Maya Lin

From Maya Lin, the designer of the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial, a sculpture in wood called 2X4 Landscape. It looks like a bivariate histogram. It is showing now at the de Young museum in San Francisco until mid January 2009. After that it is coming to the Corcoran in Washington, DC according to this site.

Joint and marginal distributions in Legos

Here are Lego approximations to a joint probability density function and its two marginal probability density functions. The marginals are built just by stacking the Legos in their appropriate row or column. Notice the Legos modeling the quadratic marginals. In one case concave up, and the other concave down.