Adventures in the Sexy Vacuum: Can We Please Stop Asking Whether Men and Women can be Friends?

Lately, I've been talking with friends, acquaintances and coworkers about the annoyingly persistent question of whether a man and a woman can be "just friends." This all started when YouTube suggested the following video to me. Ten points for spotting the implicit sexism!

If you watch the video, you'll notice several of the factors that contribute to the head-banging, teeth-grinding inanity of this so-called debate. For one thing, the whole question is pretty damn hetero-normative-- pretty sure that the gay trans-men I know don't resent me for not banging them. It's also set up to make women look like idiots. The filmmaker asks leading questions whose answers are unavoidably speculative ("Of those guy friends, do you think any of them secretly like you?") and creates hypothetical situations that change the nature of the relationships in question ("Would Dave hook up with you if you gave him the chance?") Probably the most succinct example of this video's stupidity lies in the conversation that starts at about the 1:50 mark.

Statistics of the Hidden Temple

Nineties nostalgia is so in right now around the blogosphere. My generation hit peak television-watching in the early to mid-nineties. Twenty years later, we're hitting our peak analytical-blogging years. Thus, the ultimate result of this alignment of the planets, the timing of our parents' unprotected sex, and the programing decisions of Nickelodeon executives is an ongoing explosion of blog posts about Legends of the Hidden Temple.

The theme music will be stuck your head all day. You're welcome!

They range from in-depth scene-by-scene analysis to candid interviews with past contestants to impassioned rants, but there are a few themes uniting them all.

You know what's coming next.

Residuals: What the hell are they, and why are they important?

Lady luck has blessed me recently with some AP Stats students in need of tutoring, and it's been wonderful getting to tutor in my area of expertise! Not that I dislike helping students with geometry proofs or trigonometric calculations; it's just nice to work with my favorite flavor of mathematics for a change. The perennial "when am I going to use this in real life?" question is a lot easier to answer when it's asked about statistics.

One of the questions that my students have been asking is why they should care about residuals. It's a valid question! High school math classes don't typically have time to cover the reasoning behind their subjects with much depth, so the only thing most high school students know about residuals is "it's bad if the residuals have a pattern." They don't know why it's bad, or what exactly the residuals are, and they're often confused as to why this is the one time in their stats class when they want to see a scatterplot with no correlation at all. Truthfully, I didn't really understand much about the importance of residuals until late in my college career.

Hysterical Friend

or, "How an Absurd Late-Night Text Exchange with a Sexist Idiot managed to Ctrl + C the Infinite Loop of my Grieving Process."

(This one's not about stats.)

Bird Election!

Everybody knows that Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey appointed national bird of the United States, but the more majestic bald eagle won out. Of course, if you've ever seen a bald eagle up close, you might wonder about the whole "majesty" thing.

Thankfully, the bald eagle is no longer endangered-- but now there are so many of them, people in western states with large bald eagle populations consider them pests. In Alaska, you're less likely to find a parking lot full of seagulls picking at discarded french fries, and more likely to find a dozen bald eagles hanging out in the cart corral at Wal-Mart sharing a couple goose carcasses. They have a weird, high-pitched squeaky call, less a "CAW!" than a "KEE-Ee-ee-eEE-ee-eee...," like a nervous teenager stuck in perpetual puberty. Their unique brow-shape gives them the appearance of ferocity and strength, unless you catch them at a weird angle, in which case they look to be deeply concerned about the colonoscopy results you just read to them. They mate by crashing into one another mid-flight and fucking frantically as they plummet to the ground. On closer inspection, the bald eagle seems less like the proud symbol of American democracy, and more like the really handsome guy at the party who seems cool until he takes a sip of his drink and accidentally spills it down his shirt.



"I totally meant to do that."

 

So let's elect a new national bird.

Battle of the Sexes: Who Tips Better?

Wow, it's been over a month since I posted anything-- sorry, loyal readers (all three of you)! I've been tied up looking for information on the cost of the equipment needed to counterfeit high-quality US currency, the suspected percentage of currently circulating US currency that's likely counterfeit, and the likelihood of getting caught passing counterfeit bills. Surprisingly, the US Department of the Treasury website is less than forthcoming with that information. Also, I think I'm on a couple government watch lists now. Sorry, Abhi. I'll keep working on answering your query about the expected value of a counterfeit dollar.

Lucky for me, my favorite coffee shop has provided an alternate subject to ponder: who tips better, men or women?

 

Does Familiarity breed Contempt?

Thanks to my new job, I have at my disposal piles of data on different radio stations around the country and their listeners' opinions of their songs. Each week, a station sends us 30 - 40 short song hooks, and we set up a survey where people play the hooks, then rate the song. They tell us first whether they're familiar with that song, then how much they like it, and finally whether or not they're sick of it.

Here's some graphs of the data from four different stations who've completed surveys in the last few weeks. In these graphs, each dot represents a particular song, "familiarity" represents the proportion of respondents familiar with the song, and "contempt" represents the proportion of those familiar who said they were sick of hearing it.

I've also included the regression formula, R-squared, and R values on each of these graphs. See, in a linear regression formula, the number in front of the x is the important one: it tells us whether the correlation is positive or negative. The R value tells us how strong the correlation is: when R is close to 0, the relationship is weak; when R is closer to +1 or -1, the relationship is strong. (To be technical, the R value tells you the proportion of the variation in your data that can be explained by the linear relationship rather than random error. The more variation you can explain, the better your model!) The y-intercept is important for positioning the line, but otherwise useless for analysis. It's just telling you the projected contemptibility of a theoretical song with 0% familiarity, which doesn't mean anything. Don't take y-intercepts too seriously in regression analysis. They're just out to confuse you.