In honor of the launch home improvement network Porch (my employer), I created this Internet-meme-ish slideshow that ties together video games and home improvement.
Enjoy… OR ELSE.
[slideshare id=26285361&doc=11-classic-video-games-130917164657-phpapp01]
P.S. – I also posted it to BuzzFeed, if you’re more into reading these kinds of things in a flat format.
Here’s another great story about data, this time on a small scale.
Dan Anderson is a high school math teacher. As part of a class exercise, he had his kids measure the “stuf” content of regular Oreo cookies, “Double Stuf” Oreo cookies, and “Mega Stuf” Oreo cookies.
According to his kids’ calculations, the “Double Stuf” Oreos contained 1.86x as much filling as regular Oreos. Oops.
After his original blog post blew up on the internet, Dan did a more extensive experiment of his own and came up with similar results: “Double Stuf” Oreos contained just 1.89x as much filling as regular Oreos.
The experiments got quite a bit of attention online, and even drew an official response from Nabisco, as covered by ABC News:
A spokeswoman for Nabisco told ABCNews.com the company’s Double Stuf Oreos are made to have double the creme filling as the original Oreos.
“While I’m not familiar with what was done in the classroom setting, I can confirm for you that our recipe for the Oreo Double Stuf Cookie has double the Stuf, or creme filling, when compared with our base, or original Oreo cookie,” the spokeswoman said.
And yet… That’s not what the data actually shows.
Score
Data-driven observations: 1
Nabisco: 0
via BoingBoing
Today on a group chat at work, the topic of “Sharknado” came up. Because of course it did. In said chat, someone linked to an article in which the writer of “Sharknado” claims that “the shark genre has reached its natural and logical conclusion.” I believe that we proved his thesis wrong.
For reference, here is the “Sharknado” trailer:
RT: NPR: ‘Sharknado’ Dares To Ask: Is It Going To Rain Giant Man-Eating Sharks?
YO: I feel like I should revive our shark air-swimmer.
NG: Sharknado was all the rage lat night on Twitter. 9/10 tweets were about it
FN: OMG. Seriously, EVERYONE I follow on Twitter was going nuts about Sharknado.
OS: Fin’s name should have been Foo. Then Foo could have owned a bar, and been friends with Baz.
FN: The company that makes these movies is called The Asylum. They were also responsible for the “Megashark vs.” series and other recent super low budget classics. There was one with a mega piranha. Here’s a 2010 article about The Asylum.
OS: The low-budget big action knock-off is such a funny niche. I’ve been watching a lot of Rifftrax recently of mid-80s straight-to-video knockoffs. There’s always the one or two big-name actors who are slumming or fallen on hard times, the incomprehensible plot, and the strangely professional cinematography and sometimes stunts.
FN: Last sharknado bit from me for today (I have so much work I’m avoiding!): io9 did an excellent interview with the writer.
GR: Ha ha, awesome: “Honestly, I don’t understand why people are so perplexed by this concept. The logic is undeniable.”
TO: That interview is hilarious.
TO: “Has the shark disaster movie run its course, or are we just ramping up? It’s called Sharknado. I think the shark genre has reached its natural and logical conclusion.”
NO: In other words, have shark movies… jumped the shark?
YO: What about sharks in space?
YO: “Freddy vs. Shark”?
OS: “Sharks on a Plane”?
XW: Zombie laser sharks in space. On fire.
OS: Tsusharkmi
GR: What if the Yellowstone Caldera were full of… SHARKS?!? “Megasharkano,” in theaters 2014.
OS: (clap)
RF: “Shark Impact” – Asteroid containing space-sharks on course to destroy Earth. …or would that be “Shark-ageddon”?
OS: Megalogeddadon
RF: Ooh, nice.
RF: I guess for the logic to be undeniable, it would have to be a comet containing frozen space sharks
RF: +1 if the sharks are sentient/intelligent. Then you could pull in the “Independence Day” trope.
ET: RE: intelligent sharks — Deep Blue Sea
RF: @ET good point; the movie should also feature the star power of LL Cool J.
TO: Microscopic sharks (ala Fantastic Voyage; 1966) attacking the body from within!
GR: Megashark vs. Microsharks!
TO: Megashark thinks it killed microshark by eating it, microshark kills megashark from within, microshark dies due to a lifeless host. A shakespearean shark tragedy!
GR: You know what guys let’s just forget this real estate thing and pivot Redfin into a shark disaster movie company.
YO: We can keep the company name.
RF: Can we work zombie sharks into this?
QS: @GR How do you know that this ISN’T a shark disaster movie?
QS: Oh, hang on, guys. I’ll be right back…
RF: Somebody’s at the door!
RF: (Landshark!)
RF: Man, the internets are sadly devoid of any SNL Landshark skits. Wow; first aired in 1975. Now I feel *really* old.
NO: You know what Twilight needed? Hunky teenage sharks.
QS: [Vampire Sharks]
NO: Would vampire sharks work together with vampire ents?
QS: I found this trailer when googling Vampire Sharks. It has, ah, homegrown charm.
RF: How about weresharks?
RF: That would be an unfortunate affliction to have you if you were landlocked during a full moon.
FYI: I anonymized the chat participants and cleaned things up a bit for readability.
For most of this year I’ve been making the same Paleo breakfast every morning when I get to work. During that time, I’ve been asked some variation of “What are you making?” or “That smells delicious, what is it?” by roughly half of my coworkers. The short answer: It’s scrambled eggs with salmon and sun-dried tomatoes.
For those who want more details, and for the other half of my coworkers who would have asked me about my breakfast in the coming months, I decided to provide the following step-by-step breakdown.
First up, here’s a summary of the costs and calories in table format, because who doesn’t like tables.
| Item | Cost | Calories |
|---|---|---|
| eggs | $0.58 | 200 |
| salmon | $0.93 |
35 |
| tomatoes | $0.48 |
140 |
| Total | $1.99 |
375 |
Next, let’s take a look at what you’ll need to buy from the grocery store if you want to eat like me for some reason. I get all my ingredients for this Paleo breakfast from Costco, which is what I’m basing the prices on in the lists below. Okay, technically that last sentence was a lie since Redfin (my employer) provides the eggs as part of their regularly-stocked kitchen items, but I’m including the price of the eggs so other readers can get a complete picture of the total cost.
Here’s what I pick up at Costco:
[October 2014 Update – A few months ago Costco stopped stocking Bella Sun Luci Sun-Dried Tomatoes, replacing them with Kirkland Signature Oven-Dried Roma Tomatoes. The new tomatoes come in the same size jar and cost around the same, but do not taste the same. In my opinion the taste and texture of Costco’s store brand dried tomatoes is inferior. I am now purchasing the Bella Sun Luci tomatoes directly from the manufacturer, who sells them for $50.67 + $18.13 shipping for a case of six, which comes out to $11.47 each. I have updated the prices above to reflect this change.]
[August 2015 Update – Good news, everyone! Costco dropped their terrible Kirkland Signature Oven-Dried Roma Tomatoes and brought back the Bella Sun Luci sun-dried tomatoes. They’re a little more expensive now than they were when I first put this post together, but the price of the salmon has gone down, so the overall cost is back down to just under two dollars. Nice. I never got a reply to the email I sent Costco corporate complaining about the inferior quality of their tomatoes, but I am going to take credit for this victory anyway.]
Next up, the daily portion size:
Technically that’s half a serving of salmon and two servings of sun-dried tomatoes. Obviously you should adjust the portions to your liking, but that’s what I happen to use. It’s also worth noting that I typically use a fork to get the tomatoes out of the jar, allowing as much oil as possible to drain off. This means that rather than the labeled 48 servings per 2-pound jar, I get about 36 servings per jar. In other words, about 25% of the contents of the jar of sun-dried tomatoes is olive oil.
If you’re making this at home the instructions are easy:
Unfortunately something the Redfin kitchen doesn’t have is a burner, which means the skillet method isn’t available to me at work. Consequently, I’ve had to learn how to make the perfect scrambled eggs in the microwave. Here’s what the complete process—store to serve—looks like for me:
And here it is in pictures, if you’re more of a visual person (click for slideshow):
That’s it! Add some salt & pepper or your favorite hot sauce (I prefer Frank’s Red Hot) and you’ve got yourself a healthy, delicious, energy-packed breakfast.
P.S. – If you’re wondering what “Paleo” is, in short it’s a way of eating that consists primarily of meat and vegetables. Basically you eat no sugars, no processed foods, and no grains. I’ve been eating this way (though not 100% strict) for most of 2013. I don’t care about nor buy into Paleo’s evolutionary mumbo-jumbo backstory. All I know is that eating this way helps me feel great and have more energy throughout the day. Plus I shaved about 15 pounds in the first month, so that was a nice bonus.
I love stories of people or companies using data in interesting ways, and today I came across a great one.
From the Los Angeles Times: 6,297 Chinese restaurants and hungry for more
[Los Angeles attorney David] Chan, 64, has eaten at 6,297 Chinese restaurants (at press time) and he has documented the experiences on an Excel spreadsheet, a data-centric diary of a gastronomic journey that spans the United States and beyond.
…
Chan was eating at new restaurants faster than they could open up. Soon there wasn’t a single one in the area he hadn’t tried, but still, he was unsatisfied.
In 1985, he hit 86 restaurants in the Los Angeles area and around the country. The next year, 119. Before long he was trying more than 300 restaurants every year.
In Toronto, he hit six dim sum restaurants in six hours. When he traveled for business in Florida, he zigzagged the state to sample 20 Chinese restaurants.
Chan had always wanted to travel to all 50 states, and Chinese food gave him an excuse. In places he would have never imagined, he found Chinese people with their own version of Chinese food.
They’ve also created a neat interactive timeline visual of the LA-area visits documented in Chan’s spreadsheet, a static portion of which I’ve excerpted above.
The article doesn’t really get into the details of how he’s kept his list, or what types of information he keeps about each visit aside from the date, location, decor, and his order. Since he started his list in 1955, he must have kept it in a paper journal for decades before taking the time at some point to transcribe it all into Excel.
That is a seriously impressive dedication to data.
via BoingBoing