Inaugural Post

Hey, everybody! I've got a new statistics blog, and this is the first of hopefully many (but probably few) fascinating (but probably not) posts about the mysteries of statistics!

I know it's a bad plan to poison the well against myself right from the start, but I feel it prudent to point out that I only have a bachelor's degree in statistics, and I don't consider myself a mathematical genius by any means. My investigations will be therefore somewhat straightforward, pedestrian, and probably won't uncover any truly amazing relationships or startling results-- I'm no Nate Silver, just a curious soul with a graphing calculator and a standard normal table.

 What I need from you, my friendly reader(s?), are ideas for posts! Are there any questions you want answered, that might be answerable with the power of statistics? If you can point me toward where I might find some data, I'll happily scurry off to analyze it for you and get you an answer! Not necessarily a nice answer, and not necessarily a correct answer, but an answer nonetheless.

 Currently, these are the ideas I'm working on:

 - Should I play the NC Education Lottery? I can use the expected value formula to find out! We'll examine what kinds of lottery playing give you the best chances of winning the most money-- or, more likely, how to play the lottery so that you don't lose money (spoiler alert: the secret is to not play the lottery).

 - Exactly how weird is it to be gay? If I can get my hands on the percentage breakdown of the Kinsey gray scale data, I should be able to fit human sexuality to a (totally oversimplified) numeric scale and apply an appropriate probability distribution. It might turn out that colloquially "deviant" behavior actually falls nicely within +/- one standard deviation of the mean!

 - When listening to music on the radio, does familiarity breed contempt? Do fans of different kinds of music get tired of songs at different speeds? (Preliminary analysis suggests that country fans never get tired of anything, ever.) I've just got a new job working for a market research firm testing new music for radio stations, so I've got loads of fun data for this one! I'll just have to scrub it of any identifying characteristics so as to preserve client confidentiality.

 Send me ideas, and I'll try to keep your interest!