This is a ladder leading to an elevated playhouse for kids visiting Brookside Gardens in Maryland. The ladder reveals a frequency distribution of foot placement wear. On most steps we see more wear in the middle of the ladder rung and less wear towards the left and right edges. This leaves a bell-shaped pattern of use.
But a rung near the bottom has a bi-modal pattern, showing the wear resulting from both left and right feet. This doesn't persist on higher rungs. There the wear seems more central. So why not on the lower rung as well? Perhaps central steps on higher rungs feel safer. A care that is not that needed closer to the ground.
Here is an image from imgur of the fret board on a 1956 Fender Stratocaster guitar showing the frequency distribution of playing wear (thanks Scott). But many on Reddit disagree, calling it faked. Not being a guitar player, I can't judge. What do you think?
This is a view of a basket of menus at a restaurant in
Chincoteague, Virginia. Notice the pattern of marks left as groups of menus scratch
the wall when they are returned to the basket. As customers are seated at the restaurant, they are given
menus that are removed from the right hand side of the basket. After ordering, the menus are returned to the basket and placed to the right of the remaining menus. When a single is menu returned, it nicks the wall at a location that depends on how
many menus are currently in the hands of customers. If few menus are out with
the customers, more remain in the basket and the wall marks of this returning
menu will be further to the right. If many menus are out with customers, say just before the lunch rush, this returning menu will make a
mark on the wall further to the left.
But it is not often that a single menu is returned alone. It is much more likely that a group of menus will be returned to the
basket in a bunch. The size of the bunch that is returned is random depending
on the size of the party seated. Each of the menus in the bunch makes a mark on
the wall as they are returned to the basket. What we see is a steady state
distribution of the number of seated customers, with menus in hand, waiting for
their order to be taken.
Along with reading the Sunday newspaper, CBS Sunday Morning is a favorite in our household. Click on the video above for a short report on a streaming pay TV customer satisfaction survey conducted by JD Power. The report mentions four categories: "cord cutters", those who have cancelled TV service, "cord nevers", those who have never subscribed to pay TV and only subscribe to a streaming video service, "cord shavers", those who still subscribe but now to a downgraded TV service, and "cord stackers", those who keep pay TV but also use streaming. From the report:
The inaugural study measures overall satisfaction among customers who
have used a subscription- or transaction-based streaming video service within
the past six months. The study measures customer satisfaction by examining six
key measures (listed in order of importance): performance and reliability;
content; cost of service; ease of use; communication; and customer service.
Scores for each measure are reflected in an index based on a 1,000-point scale.
The measures for "cutters", "nevers", "shavers", and "stackers" are 802, 807, 822, and 826. Here is a frame from late in the video that reports on the right most bar "stackers" as it relates to the other categories."
It's clear that that Sunday Morning is in sore need of knowledgeable graphics editors. Perhaps their artists make their charts telegenic by filling them up with what we would call "chart junk", but in ignoring the proper representation of the data, they are presenting false and misleading images. The numbers are said to be represented here, are again, 802, 807, 822, and 826. The second bar from left almost looks twice as tall as the left-most bar and not a bar that should only be about 0.6% taller. The third bar from the left looks about 3 times taller than the left-most bar and it should only be about 2.5% taller. Finally, the right-most "cord stackers" bar should be under 3% taller, not over 4 times taller! Yes, they give a grid background to judge the sizes, but they are misleading sizes to judge. The 'smiley' satisfaction faces are probably the most reliable description of the data: The satisfaction scores are amazingly the same. From smallest to largest they vary by less than 3%.
Here are the data shown on the graph and then a more accurate rendering (without the chart junk).
Not much difference in satisfaction across all type customers.
As part of the Virginia Tourism Corporation's promotion campaign, this LOVE artwork has been placed in the Robert Reed waterfront park in Chincoteague, Virginia. It displays four, 10 foot tall Adirondack chairs. The wooden chairs spell out the LOVE with the symbols L O ♥ E.
Of course, when posing for pictures, tourists prefer to sit in the ♥ chair over the others as evidenced by the greater frequency of wear on the chairs as people climb up and rub off the paint.
This view looks at the letters in reverse. The nearest chair is E, the next is ♥ with the most wear, then O and L. Note that the pattern of wear is in a bell-shape, with more wear near the middle of the seat and less towards the edges.
This is a view of the side of a small counter at a fast food restaurant in Snow Hill, Maryland. Patrons have slid this chair back and forth to sit at or leave the adjacent table. This chair movement has marred the paneling of the counter into a pattern that is skewed to the right: much more wear on the left with decreasing use and wear as the chair is set closer to the table. Of course, on the right, the chair's wear pattern is truncated since it must stop short of the table. On the left, we've got no wall to reveal the chair's position. The chair's wear is censored. What remains is a right skewed pattern of the frequency of use and wear. The pattern somewhat resembles the pattern of a sample from a right skewed exponential distribution.
Here's a utility pole at a traffic intersection in Aspen Hill, Maryland. The pole has served as display for the many yard sales, community meetings, and businesses that have had their advertising flyers posted on the pole. The flyers have long since been removed. Only their staples and nails remain. These accumulated staples show a
distribution of the heights of flyer postings.
The close-up view below shows the distribution of individual staples and nails on the cylinder of the pole. The staples are
distributed both around the pole and vertically up and down the pole. Vertically, it's too difficult to put flyers high on the pole and few staples can be found there. Flyers very low on the pole wouldn't be easily seen by those passing by, so few staples are also found there. Most staples and nails are at a comfortable shoulder and viewing height. If we imagine the height of a staple above the ground is our random variable, we find few staples with small height, few with large height, and many more with a medium height. This is a bell-shaped pattern up and down the pole that we have seen often.
From Flowing Data, an interactive dotplot showing the distribution of annual salaries in various fields. Selections can be made for the 1960s (above), the 1980s, 2000s, and 2014. As a time range is selected, the dots representing the annual salaries of 50 randomly selected people, dynamically redistributed themselves to reflect the times salary frequency distribution. Compare the dramatic change in spread from 1960s above to the 2000s below.
Yet Another Door Distribution Again, this time at the Summer Shack Restaurant in Boston. Not many patrons grab the door near the handle, not many reach it much higher. Most grab the door, and wear away its paint, at a comfortable, likely shoulder height. A bell-shaped frequency distribution results. Thanks Laura.
Oliver Stone's 1989 film Born on the Fourth of July tells the story of Ron Kovic, US Marine and anti-war activist. Kovic was portrayed by Tom Cruise, as advertised in the film's poster above. The poster's dominate color is black with, as expected, red, white, and blue, but also oranges and yellows in the face tones. Photoshop reveals the poster's colors in the swatches below.
But he has done more. He has looked at the colors in movie posters from 1914 to 2012 and produced an interactive image where you can select any year within this range and see the pie chart of movie posters from that year. Here is a still image of his interactive one.
He also produces an interactive image (still image below) with lightness and saturation ignored.
On a trip to visit family, we stopped at a gas station in Hammondville, Alabama. On the wall was a map of the US with this wear pattern of customers touching where they were on the map. The many touchers have worn though the paper map down to the underlying supporting board. It seems that many have traced their path of travel extending southwest to Birmingham, AL and northwest to Chattanooga, TN likely along the connecting route US 11, passing through Hammondville, or along the parallel interstate 59 a bit further west. What remains is a roughly ellipsoidal bivariate frequency distribution of wear with a greater frequency of wear centered on Hammondville and lesser frequencies of wear in ellipsoidal contours around it.
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.
Yet Another Door Distribution Again. This time on a bakery door just east of Cambridge, Maryland. Here we see a skewed frequency distribution of scratches, perhaps from keys, with greatest concentration around the door handle with progressively fewer scratches extending higher up the door. Many fewer scratches are below the door. Perhaps the handle is too low as customers handle their keys and hold or open the door, while also eating the delicious donuts the bakery sells.
This is an doorway threshold between two rooms of a thrift store in Easton, Maryland. People step on or over scraping their feet on both sides of the edges of the raised threshold. More frequent steps and wear in the middle and fewer steps and less wear on the left and right edges all scuff away the black painted wood revealing a bell-shaped frequency distribution of wear.
Seen on an episode of Major Crimes on TNT, a wear pattern of hand placement in holding a door open. Not many hands are placed low, many more higher, and not many are placed still higher. The frequency of hand wear shows us, yet again, the bell-shaped pattern of wear. Yet Another Door Distribution Again.
Before assisting patients, hospital professionals glove-up from this supply rack in the patient's room. From the gloves that are missing, it appears that Medium and Small gloves are used more frequently than Large or XLarge. Medium and Small workers outnumber others at this hospital.
Above is a map from Five-Thirty-Eight's survey of Thanksgiving eating traditions nationwide. It shows the most disproportionately common Thanksgiving side dish by region. I grew up in Florida, but we never got on the mac and cheese Thanksgiving bandwagon. Likewise, living now in Maryland, squash doesn't make it on our plates. Our family seems to match the midwest more, with green bean casserole and rolls (not biscuits). And for dessert we are looking forward to pumpkin, pecan, and apple pie. You can download their survey data for your own analysis here.
Everybody to the Lobby or the Basement! Got to go out or get that laundry done! Patterns of discrete wear don't keep our collective behavior discreet. (From an NYC elevator).♬ Let's All Go to the Lobby ♬
