Happy Deathday Will?

In honor of William Shakepeare's 400th deathday, An infographic from Raconteur showing a timeline of the World's Greatest Storytellers (compete with local magnification) as surveyed by authors, journalists, writers, and students. The size of the bubble corresponds to the number of votes. Shakespeare looms large overall as the greatest story teller of the all. Happy Death-day Will.

(Earlier I posted Happy Birthday wishes, misled as others were on the web, but I was wrong. It is Will's Deathday and I corrected my posting, although I thought only Saints were to be remembered on their Death-day. Shakespeare was a genius, but I don't think many would call him a Saint).

Flag Graphics

Design agency ferdio has put together graphics illustrating the design, colors, and symbols of national flags. Patterns, layouts, ages etc. are collected together in what they have call Flag Stories. Above is one such story of flags stacked into a bar chart showing the frequencies of the number of colors in the flags. As they mention, over a third of countries favor flags with three or four colors. You can find many more at Flag Stories. We've seen flag colors before.

March Madness: It Didn't Happen Yet Again

It didn't happen yet again. In last month's NCAA "March Madness" men's college basketball championship, a number of 16 seeds have again failed to best the number 1 seeds. The histogram above shows the score differences in such matchings since 1985. It closely matches a normal distribution, allowing for us to estimate the probability that such an upset could happen as the area under the approximating bell-curve that falls beyond zero. Our estimated probability that a number 16 seed would beat a number 1 seed is 0.0208. It has risen a bit since our last view.

Feel the Curve

Here is a relief model of a normal curve that was developed to aid teaching statistics to the visually impaired. Students would trace their fingers along the raised impression of the curve and its divisions into standard deviation intervals to gain experience and understanding of the normal curve and how it describes the normal distribution of measurements along its horizontal axis, distinctions that we have seen repeatedly on this blog. In this figure, the lines representing one standard deviation above and below the mean seem to fall a bit short of the curve's two points of inflection, where they should naturally fall. But this is an excellent concept for aiding those with visual impairments.