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I wrote an open-source app called NBA Shots DB that uses the NBA Stats API to populate a database with all 4.5 million shots attempted in NBA games since 1996. The app also processes a dataset provided by Sportradar of over 1 million NCAA men’s shot attempts since 2013 into a format that ... [Read more...]

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Every day in New York City, millions of commuters take part in a giant race to determine transportation supremacy. Cars, bikes, subways, buses, ferries, and more all compete against one another, but we never get much explicit feedback as to who “wins.” I’ve previously written about NYC’s public ... [Read more...]

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The Simpsons needs no introduction. At 27 seasons and counting, it’s the longest-running scripted series in the history of American primetime television. The show’s longevity, and the fact that it’s animated, provides a vast and relatively unchanging universe of characters to study. It’s easier for an animated ... [Read more...]

The NBA’s Stats API provides data for every single shot attempted during an NBA game since 1996, including location coordinates on the court. I built a tool called BallR, using R’s Shiny framework, to explore NBA shot data at the player-level. BallR lets you select a player and season, ... [Read more...]

In the conclusion of my post analyzing NYC taxi and Uber trips, I noted that Citi Bike, New York City’s bike share system, also releases public data, totaling 22.2 million rides from July 2013 through November 2015. With the recent news that the Citi Bike system topped 10 million rides in 2015, making it ... [Read more...]

The New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission has released a staggeringly detailed historical dataset covering over 1.1 billion individual taxi trips in the city from January 2009 through June 2015. Taken as a whole, the detailed trip-level data is more than just a vast list of taxi pickup and drop off coordinates: it’... [Read more...]

LearnedLeague bills itself as “the greatest web-based trivia league in all of civilized earth.” Having been fortunate enough to partake in the past 3 seasons, I’m inclined to agree. LearnedLeague players, known as “LLamas”, answer trivia questions drawn from 18 assorted categories, and one of the many neat things about LearnedLeague ... [Read more...]

[M]ortgages were acknowledged to be the most mathematically complex securities in the marketplace. The complexity arose entirely out of the option the homeowner has to prepay his loan; it was poetic that the single financial complexity contributed to the marketplace by the common man was the Gordian knot giving ... [Read more...]

I was pleasantly surprised when somebody shared my traveling salesman animation to reddit and the post made it all the way to reddit's default front page (i.e. the top 25). The gif racked up over 1.3 million pageviews on Imgur, a testament to reddit's traffic-generating prowess. Before the post made it ... [Read more...]

In honor of the Ryder Cup, here's a fun puzzle for the mathematically inclined golfer to consider: how many different paths are possible in an 18 hole round of match play golf? If you'd rather not wade through the math then you can skip ahead to the "practical exploration" section of ... [Read more...]

I built an interactive Shiny application that uses simulated annealing to solve the famous traveling salesman problem. You can play around with it to create and solve your own tours at the bottom of this post. Here's an animation of the annealing process finding the shortest path through the 48 state ... [Read more...]

The puzzle: find two points inside the United States such that Both points are in the same state The straight line segment (shortest great circle) connecting them crosses the largest number of distinct states This came up during a recent road trip through Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia, where ... [Read more...]