Bananas

I was curious if there is a way to store bananas to keep them from browning so quickly.
I kept bananas (a) laid flat, (b) in a bag, and (c) suspended for a week.






















Results:
The bananas in the bag kept the longest (apparently oxygen causes bananas to brown).
Bananas laid flat and hung basically browned at the same rate.
Eat your bananas within 6 days of buying them (unless they are kept in a bag).

Bananas laid flat












Bananas in bag












Bananas hung

Fall Gathering Attendance

Attendance pattern at the annual Fall Gathering.

-Data does not include the 3 hosts
-Party was from 7-10pm (at least that's what it said on the invite)
-Peak of the party was between 8:12pm and 8:45pm
-Most everyone arrived before 8:30pm (somewhat linear function)
-People tended to leave in groups (step function)

2011 Summer Movies

This was a good summer at the movies, especially as a superhero fan. I wanted to see how the top box office movie did, not just in the opening weekend but throughout the summer. I only included the movies that reached number 1 status at some point or another between the weeks of 5/8/11 and 9/4/11.

Graph 1 and Graph 2 show that the peaks of summer movie sales were 7/17 (driven by Harry Potter) and 7/3 (driven by Transformers). However, Graph 3 and Graph 4 show that Harry Potter, Transformers, and Green Lantern have the shortest half-life (time it takes for their weekly revenue to decrease by half of its opening earnings). Thor and Super 8 have the longest half-life.

Graph 1 shows the cumulative total of summer movie sales.

Graph 2 shows the totals for each summer movie (note that Captain American and Harry Potter are still going kind of strong).

Graph 3 shows the delay rate of the summer movies.

In Graph 4, the half-life of Harry Potter is 0.7 weeks, Transformers is 0.97 weeks, Green Lantern is 0.76 weeks, Super 8 is 1.5 weeks, and Thor is 1.1 weeks (the x-axis is number weeks from opening day).

Thoughts:

I thought it was interesting how quickly people lost interest in Green Lantern and how quickly it got over shadowed by Cars 2. It was also interesting to see how well Hangover did, especially since it came out only a week after Pirates. Thor and Super 8 held in pretty well (you still see Thor advertisement here and there) considering it didn't make the big bucks. (I'm guessing Thor did well because it was the first superhero movie of the summer and I'm guessing Super 8 did well because it was just something different.) Harry Potter and Transformers was not a surprise but I was kind of happy to see Captain America kick Harry Potter out of the number one spot.

Coffee Hour attendence

The graph below shows the number of people at a GraceDC coffee hour after church (recorded at 5 minute intervals).
It appears that coffee hour is most busy around the 15 minute mark.
Most people leave within 25 minutes.
Those remaining after 30 minutes are typically GraceDC members and they tend to leave coffee hour at a constant rate (linear slope).

Sport Entertainment

It seems like no matter what time of year it is, there is always some kind of major sporting event to watch. So I was curious if this was actually true or just my perception. Below I plotted the typical "Amount of Sport Entertainment" in given year for the 4 major sporting leagues in the US (NBA, NFL, MBL, and NHL).

There is definitely a low in the June/July time frame. Maybe the sports industry does not want to compete with the summer movies.

pre = preseason = .5
r = regular season = 1
post = post season = 1.5
f = finals = 1.5

Jan.1 = first half of January
Jan.2 = second half of January

Birthday Posts

You know how on your b-day, you typically get a ton of Birthday wishes on Facebook?
Well, I was curious if there was a pattern to this madness so I graphed the distribution of facebook birthday messages for each hour on the day of my birthday (by percentage).

There appears to be two peaks around 2PM and 9PM. I wonder if that is suggestive of the times when most people check their facebook.

Salt intake

Inspired by the recent dietary guidelines (http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/dietaryguidelines.htm), I wanted to see how good people are at estimating the amount of salt in food. Below are box-plots of the percentage of one's daily recommended value of salt (based on a 2,000 calorie diet) people THOUGHT were contained in a serving size for the different foods. In addition to what people thought, the green squares represent the ACTUAL percentage of one's daily recommended value of salt.
















It is interesting that, people typically over-estimate the amount of salt included in the foods (except for the bagel and black beans), but at the same time, people thought our daily recommended value of salt is 5.43 grams while in reality it is 2.4 grams or 1 teaspoon.
N = 11

Items include (serving size):
Thomas plain bagel (1 bagel)
Bush's black beans (1/2 cup)
Campbell's tomato soup (1 cup)
Utz wheat n cheddar crackers (1 pkg)
Oscar Mayor bologna (1 slice)
Snyder's sourdough nibblers (16 nibblers)
Peter Pan crunchy peanut butter (2 tbsp)
Planters Lightly salted cashews (1 oz)
Oreo (3 cookies)

Songs during Glee

I like the songs in Glee but not so much the storyline and drama. If I can figure out when the songs typically occur, then I can tune in when there is the greatest probability that there will be a song and not have to sit through the drama. The best chances of catching a song appears to be 11, 27, and 41 minutes into the show.

Average number of song per show: 6.2 songs
Average duration of songs: 1.8 minutes (stdv of 0.6 minutes)
N = 6 shows
I know I need a larger sample size, anyone wanna help me collect data? :)