Around the same time I was working on the Name Age Calculator, I developed a simple tool to visualize trends in American baby names. Ever inventive, I named this web app the U.S. Baby Name Explorer. The idea behind the…
Can the Name Age Calculator guess how old you are?
Can you guess someone’s age when all you know is their first name? That was the crazy idea behind one of FiveThirtyEight’s articles last year, and their surprising answer is, “Yes.” The idea behind guessing someone’s age based on their…
Visualizing Indego bike share usage patterns in Philadelphia
One of the many things that I love about my new home town of Philadelphia is that the government openly shares curated data sets covering most of the governmental functions. Since I recently joined Philadelphia’s Indego bike share program, I…
Rethinking the population pyramid
If you’ve ever browsed the U.S. Census population statistics pages, you’ve no doubt come across the famous population pyramid that they so frequently use to display the distribution of the U.S. population by age and gender. I was reading up…
144 years of marriage and divorce in 1 chart
I’ve always been curious about the history of marriage and divorce in the United States. We often hear about how divorce rates are in flux, or how marriage rates are declining, but we’re rarely given a real sense of the…
Artificial Intelligence has crushed all human records in 2048. Here’s how the AI pulled it off.
By now, we’ve all heard of the addictive tile-mashing game called 2048. Last week, I picked up 2048 for the first time and — true to my nature — I started designing an AI to beat the game for me…
Optimized walking tours of New York City and Philadelphia
In the past couple weeks, I’ve shown you how to use machine learning to improve the efficiency of road trips all over the world, including the U.S., Europe, and South America. In this post, I’d like to show you how…
Tagged with: genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, traveling salesman problem, walking tour
Pure Michigan road trip, optimized
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been computing optimal road trips across the U.S. and Europe. This time, as a shout-out to my current home state, I made a road trip around Michigan. With the snow melting and a warm…
Tagged with: genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, road trip, traveling salesman problem
Computing the optimal road trip across South America
By popular request, I’ve created another follow-up to my posts about computing optimal road trips across the U.S. and Europe. This time, I made an optimal road trip around South America. If you’d like to get into the nitty-gritty of…
Computing the optimal road trip across Europe
As a follow-up to my post about computing optimal road trips across the U.S., I thought it’d be fun to make a road trip map for Europe as well. If you’d like to get into the nitty-gritty of how these…
Tagged with: Europe, genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, road trip, traveling salesman problem
