Beneath Data

Disclaimer: Yes, this is a blog post about taxes. My wife told me it was a bad idea, but here goes.

Every single year, I overpay my taxes. No matter how many times I adjust my W-4 or sit down with Excel and some pay stubs, I get a big fat refund in the spring. Which, I suppose, can feel nice, until you realize that was your money all along.

So when I got married, I figured I'd finally get this all sorted out. Initially, I assumed that all married couples automatically cut their tax bill. But if that ...

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Email is a window to the soul. OK, nobody has actually ever said that, but email is at the very least a permanent log of our daily lives. In fact, I'd argue that out of all the digital interaction we take part in, email is the most honest representation of our actual behavior. Phone calls are too sparse. Text messages capture only a subset of my closest contacts. But email...everybody emails.

So, I was curious what email could tell me about my daily habits and, naturally, I turned to Python and Pandas. This blog will be about exploring ...

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The vast majority of us carry a little GPS device in our pockets all day long, quietly recording our location. But location is more than just latitude and longitude; it can tell us about our speed, our direction, our activities, and frankly our lives. Some people regard this as terrifying, but I see a wonderful dataset.

Initially, I didn't have much of a drive to fiddle with my own location history. What could I really do that Google Latitude couldn't already? But after Latitude's demise in 2013, I entered full fiddle-around mode, and quickly discovered the incredible ...

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Since Moneyball was published in 2003, the idea that money is as much a part of the game as first basemen or the infield grass has become common knowledge. We all understand the basic notion that in Major League Baseball, money can define who plays on your team and therefore how your team plays. Basically, the story goes like this - wealthy, extravagant teams like the New York Yankees can buy their way to a championship. But the little guys, they have to gain an edge in other ways, developing farm talent and picking out the diamonds in the rough with ...

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I have wanted to run a data blog for a good long while now. And, like any aspiring blogger, I had various failed attempts that never got off the ground. Half the reason was that, well, writing is hard. The other half of the reason is that I can be a ridiculous control freak when it comes to digital design.

I tried Weebly (they let me use a custom domain for free), but the interface was clunky and the UI always looked cookie-cutter.

I tried Wordpress, but I couldn't get fine-grained enough control of the HTML/CSS without forking ...

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