oh good, I'm not the only one

NY Times has an article on Dynolicious, for iPhone, lets you record the 1/4 mile times of cars via the iPhone's accelerometer.

Or anything else you happen to be riding in...

Airbus 320

0-60 11.82s

1/4 mi 19.11s @ 106.5 mph

Boeing 737-500

0-60 12.92s

1/4 mi 20.01s @ 95.4 mph

Airbus 319

0-60 13.18s

1/4 mi 20.4s @ 93 mph

Boeing 757

0-60 13.52s

1/4 mi 20.56s @ 97.7 mph

Boeing 747-400

0-60 14.29s

1/4 mi 21.18s @ 90.3 mph

BART

0-50 24.11s

1/4 mi 23.58s @ 49 mph

Accelerometers are cool.  How else would you end up knowing these numbers?  What other machines -- elevators, roller coasters, ferries, etc -- would generate interesting results?

538

I'm noodling on schema questions, so quick little posts work well as mental palette cleansers...

Probably not new to anyone who reads my blog, but fivethirtyeight is an amazing site for a bunch of reasons.  It dives remarkably deeply into statistics, including lots of great math and discussion about the decisions Sean and Nate make.  It has some beautiful charts that convey a ton of information.  Sean got into stats -- like so many people -- from digging into baseball.

Great stuff.

why i like data

The Easterlin paradox is a bedrock of social science and pop culture. Roughly, it argues that beyond a certain level of wealth, happiness no longer increases because you just end up wanting more stuff. It emerged from research in Japan in the 1970's and it tells a nice story, that we're more attuned to relative wealth and "money doesn't buy happiness." There are a host of reasons to want it to believe.

However, according to a story in the NY Times today, it might not be.

Feel free to read the story, but be sure to check out this graph:

Sure looks like a tiny bit of a trend there.