Taller still

More evidence that, on average, men are taller than women, (late vacation find).

Vacation Outlier Sighting

We're just back from a family vacation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. In route, I snapped this one, lone cornstalk outlier in a field of soybeans. I doubt that Big-Agra would approve.

World's Deadliest Animals

From Bill Gates via datavizblog. I guess it's time for the Discovery Channel to have an annual Mosquito Week in place of this week's Shark Week.

Note the caption that says, "All calculations have wide error margins".

Visual Averaging

Designer Moritz Resl constructed a visually averaged alphabetical font by superimposing 900 different font characters with low opacity. See his video here. The full, lower-case average font can be seen here via Design-Milk.

The Game Changes

Here is a fun interactive display by Noah Velltman of the height and weight of National Football League players from 1920 to 2014, via Statistical Modeling... Clicking on this link allows you to vary the year and observe the joint distribution of height and weight over the years. You can even see how the game as changed from the early 1990s as roles and players have become more specialized resulting in distinct clusters of body types.

Adding Economic Noise

Two months ago the New York Times had a very informative visualization of monthly economic data with added variability due to sampling error. In the above screen shot we can see how repeated sampling variability can change a steady job growth graph to many different shapes of what it might have looked like with repeated sampling.

Here is another, an accelerating job growth graph and one possible result of the same graph with sampling variability showing very stable job growth, via Statistical Modeling ... One commenter there notes how easy it is for us to reading meaning into random noise.

States by Letter

Alphabetical distribution of the first letter of US states, via Flowing Data.