A picture of misery.
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I was reading the local paper on Thursday and came across the list of properties that will be auctioned by the Richland County treasurer for back taxes. I got curious, and found the list of properties on the county web site, but a big list of names and amounts just wasn’t very easy for me to picture. So I wrote a little script, geocoded the addresses, converted the results to KML, and uploaded to it to Google Maps. Hard to believe that behind every little dot there’s a story of someone’s home lost.
TMI
So I was trying to do my civic duty and investigating our presidential candidates, and I found out about this web site that Obama sponsored. It’s pretty interesting, but it’s hard to get your head around numbers that are in billions. McDonald’s hamburgers or contracting dollars, the numbers just seem so large as to be meaningless.
One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.
–Joseph Stalin
It’s finished…
So, a few years ago I entered an idea contest here in South Carolina and get runner-up with my idea for a construction equipment theme park. Finally, someone else did it so I can take it off my list. Whew!
Cool data visualization site.
I was browsing around this morning (which is unusual for me) and I came across the IBM Many Eyes web site. It lets you upload data and visualize it using a lot of interesting chart types (bubble charts, clouds, etc.) Just to play around with it, I plugged in poker starting hands’ expected value data from TightPoker.com and after a little tweaking I came up with this visualization:
Click on the image to bring up the ManyEyes site. I originally embedded the Java applet in this posting but it was causing IE 6.0 to lock up for some reason. Once you have the visualization up, click on the starting position in the left column and you’ll see how the various starting hands stack up. The difference between values in the big blind and the dealer position is, as expected, huge. It’s clear how huge when you can look at the data this way.
Time for my monthly blog posting!!!
Wow, I’m a terrible blogger. I think that the problem is that I’m always busy doing stuff so I never have time to write about doing stuff. I spent the weekend in Raleigh, NC playing free poker tournaments (made two final tables, woo hoo!) and helping my friend load a UHaul. I’m soooo sore today, but I had a blast. Sometimes it’s nice to get far away from your everyday routine to get some perspective. Today I have a boatload of perspective, along with some scrapes and really sore muscles.
Another weird thing happened this weekend, but just explaining how weird it was would take too long. Maybe next month 
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