Tag: statistics

Month 23 Weigh In

Robert, if you’re not weighing in monthly anymore, why did you bother doing it on the 23rd monthiversary rather than waiting 30 days and doing it on the two year anniversary? I don’t know, leave me alone.

I walked past the scale yesterday and without thinking about it stepped on it. I was expecting to be around 220 pounds. I was less than that. It pleased me. It made me want to step on the scale today, which is the one year and 11 month mark since my gastric bypass surgery. It made me want to update my weight loss spreadsheet for the first time since January 9, 2024 (which was the two year anniversary of the first appointment at the weight loss clinic). So feeling thusly inspired (is thusly a word?), I stepped on the scale this morning… and I was down from yesterday. I was also down from January 9, 2024. Nice.

The last weigh in, almost three months ago, had me at 213.20 pounds. Today’s weigh in has me at 211.60. I am down 1.6 pounds over the last three months. That pleases me a lot. I thought I would be way up. I’ve actually had to start using a looser notch on my belt. I thought I was putting the weight back on, slowly but surely. Nope. 1.6 pounds over three months, I would say that I am officially maintaining. I’m up 13.2 pounds since I hit my low point, which was while I had Covid. I’d love to be below 200 pounds again, but I am more than happy to be at 211.6. It’s an indescribable improvement over weighing more than 430 pounds the way I did back in April of 2022.

Here are the totals over the last two years or so. I have lost 219.8 pounds since the last weigh in before the surgery. I told my father yesterday that I was at 220. Close enough. I am down 240.4 since the first weigh in. My BMI was 55 on that fateful first weigh in day back in January 2022. Today it is 25.8. That is technically still considered overweight, but given the circumstances, I freakin’ love it.

So there we have it. The current state of the weight loss journey. I plan to weigh in again on the second anniversary of the surgery. That will be May 4, 2024. After that… I might not weigh in again for another year. This was never about the numbers for me. It was always about the way I feel. That and being able to be there for my family, when prior to the surgery I had reached a point where I couldn’t function under normal circumstances. In those terms, this is the most successful healthcare experience of my life. The numbers are fun for the stats geek that I am at heart. For that reason, I’ll keep that weight loss tracking spreadsheet around.

Happy 23 months, everyone.

Commute Stats

Forgive me for being a stats nerd here.

I zeroed a trip odometer in my car before the morning commute and took a picture to record the result when I arrived at work. I did the same on the evening commute home.

Oddly both drives were mostly devoid of traffic jams. There was one bad spot this morning and none this evening.

Here are the results.

Morning commute:

Evening commute:

Isn’t that fascinating? One bonus pic that some of you may be expecting… the odometer:

I could not resist.

I’ll do this again on Wednesday (unless I forget, which is very likely) and we will see how things look with normal traffic.

Road Trip Stats

This is going to be the most fascinating post ever. 100 years from now they are going to be writing graduate school thesis papers about this sucker, believe me.

Stats from the road trip today.

Home to school
196.8 miles
Three hours and 37 minutes
Average speed 54 miles per hour.

School back to home
190.2 miles
Three hours and 40 minutes
Average speed 51 miles per hour.

Round trip
387.0 miles
Seven hours and 17 minutes
Average speed 52 miles per hour.

I think we made the same number of stops each leg of the drive, but the short detours the first time around were longer than the second. The average speed on the second leg would have been faster but there was a two mile traffic jam merging from I89 to I93.

See? I told you this one was going to be fascinating. I can see by the look on your face that you are utterly fascinated. Like, your mind is blown.

Music Nerd Meets Stats Nerd

Okay, this post is going to be dumb. Just making that claim ahead of time. Transparency, right?

Right.

The Great 2015 Re-recording project was meant to take songs from older music projects and update/upgrade them. Last night I was wondering, which old projects contributed the most songs? In other words, out of all the crap I’ve done, which ones had the best songs?

So I made a spreadsheet because I am a fricken nerd.

There are six Quarantine Tunes projects. Number five is all from this year’s 50/90 so it really doesn’t count. For the other five projects there are a total of 47 songs, which is WAY more than I was originally planning.

Here’s the breakdown of where they all came from:

Original ProjectNumber of Songs
2007 RPM Challenge2
2008 Song Fight1
2009 RPM Challenge2
2010 RPM Challenge3
2011 Test Drive GarageBand for Mac2
2011 RPM Challenge2
2013 NaSoAlMo1
2013 RPM Challenge2
2014 50/905
2014 April Music2
2014 June Music3
2014 RPM Challenge3
2015 RPM Challenge2
2016 50/901
2016 RPM Challenge6
2017 RPM Challenge1
2018 RPM Challenge1
2019 Album in a Day1
2019 RPM Challenge1
2020 50/901
2020 June Music1
2020 RPM Challenge2
2021 RPM Challenge1
2012 RPM Challenge*1

There you have it. The 2016 RPM Challenge has contributed six songs for the win. The 2014 50/90 is a close second with five. Good work, folks! Now I have all the facts. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle**.

*Yes… when I was typing all of that garbage out I missed an entry. Sadly, the wordpress.com editor’s table function doesn’t let me insert a row, so I stuck it on the end. Yeah… I suck.

**Go Joe!

It’s November All Right

It’s November. In terms of weather and seasons that blows chunks. In terms of music… get ready to be bored to tears, boys and girls!

One song underway. 7/8 time and it has a keyboard part. I must be completely insane. Keyboards? Blah!

On the blogging nerd front, I mentioned about seven days ago that we broke the record for page views in a month with a whole seven days still to go. Well, those seven days are up now and did we ever destroy that monthly record. Boy howdy, did we ever! September broke the record at the time. The September count was 3% higher than the previous record. The October count though… holy shit, the October count was 31% higher than the September count. THIRTY ONE PERCENT! I don’t really know what happened. Sure I posted more than any other month, and sure I was bombing the universe with baseball playoffs and Red Sox panic. Still… a 31% increase? How the fudge did that happen?

Okay, I still have seven minutes of exercise to finish. I think I’ll get to it now.

In the immortal words of Bender Bending Rodriguez, it’s fun on the bun.

Stats Nerd

This is becoming like a thing around here.

Stats. Blog stats. WordPress.com doesn’t give us a lot, but what they do give us provides endless fun for a stat nerd like me. I assume I could be lamer if I tried, but I really don’t see the need. I am already pretty much as lame as it gets.

So last month we set the blog’s records for most unique visitors and for most page views. A couple of days ago October topped the unique visitors record and then earlier today October also topped the page views record. The interesting item of note here is that both stats have new records and there are still seven days left in the month.

Holy shit snacks, folks. Thanks for coming by! I assume a lot of it had to do with the Red Sox in the playoffs. Also, a lot of it may have something to do with the fact that this month is also going to demolish the record for most posts in a month. The goal here, when I started back in November of 2008, was to post once, maybe twice a day. Over the last few months I’ve been hitting more like six posts a day, and this month it’s even more than that.

I wonder… should I calm the fuck down a little? I probably should. I don’t think I will, but I probably should. Also, how much of the crap this month would have gone to facebook had facebook and I not decided to spend some time apart from each other? Red Sox-ily speaking, probably a lot of it. Otherwise, probably not a lot.

Oh well. I really do enjoy crunching the numbers they give us. All like… four of them. Also, I get to see which countries the IP addresses that visit the page come from. All sorts of fun and interesting places. Do I have regular viewers in far flung locales? Did I spell locale correctly? That would be cool. Do I have American viewers who are connected to VPN’s that show as coming from the farthest reaches of the globe, and if so are they spam? How many of the page views are russian bot farms trying to trick me into voting for trump in 2016? I’m guessing a few, at least. Not like twitter where it seems like 3/4 of the place is russian propaganda bots.

But what does it all mean in the end? Nothing. When all is said and done it means nothing. Do I care? Nope. I don’t. So why do I keep writing about it?

Ummmm… I haven’t got an answer to that one. Let me think on it for about a month and get back to you.

Wasted Opportunity (Also, blog Stats Review)

I’m serving another 24 hour prison sentence. Dinner has been served to both of us, the doors have been alarmed so she can’t wander off without making a huge noise (I can’t either of course, but I know how to turn the alarms off so there’s that at least), her meds have been delivered, and my intermittent fasting period has been kicked off for another night (a little early, but that’s okay).

If I were smart I would be using my prison sentence to work on some 50/90, but the SyFy channel is running both parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and how can I not watch that? The only horcrux left is the snake.

We only have one more day in July, and lately that means I have been paying attention to the hit stats for this blog. I created this account in March of 2017 and the monthly counts for 2021 so far have (with one slight exception) destroyed every other month since the account was created. I’m not sure why (though I do seem to be posting more than ever before) but the numbers have been way up since last November and they skyrocketed starting in January. As always, please remember that skyrocketing monthly numbers for me look more like terribly bad afternoons for real blogs. All of you folks paying me visits are my new best online friends, but there aren’t that many of you, you know? Select company, right?

This is not my first wordpress.com account though. The first ran from December 2012 to July 2016. I was curious how my current stats compared to the old account’s. Turns out I am generally getting more hits now than I did then. Mostly. There were two months, December 2015 and January 2016, where the monthly hit count was higher than anything I’ve had with this account. Every other month was significantly lower than what I have been consistently getting in 2021. Why were those two months so much more popular than any other months since I started? No idea. I look at the summaries and I don’t see anything resembling a spike. There wasn’t one post that somehow, magically, drew in the people in droves. Nope, everything looks normal. I just had way more hits in those two months.

I set the record for this account last month, by quite a bit. This month has a chance to come close, but it’s going to take a crazy good night tonight and a really great day tomorrow to set a new record. Also, July has one more day than June so even if I do set the record it should have an asterisk. Roger Maris like a mutha, right?

Okay, I am going to ride out the rest of Deathly Hallows 2 for the next hour or so. Maybe I’ll try to write some lyrics, or a bass riff, or something. Anything, just so long as my mother doesn’t have a bad night.

Please don’t let her have a bad night. Pretty please.

Still Can’t Believe It

I still can’t believe that I made a four of a kind in a game of five card draw last night.

I took statistics in college, but that was 10 thousand years ago and I don’t remember how to calculate the probability of pulling four of a kind.  So I googled it:

A four-of-a-kind is four cards showing the same number plus any other card.

If we order the 5-card hand with the four-of-a-kind first, we have 13C1 choices for the number showing on the first four cards. Since we will have all four suits, we have only 4C4 = 1 way to choose the suits. The remaining card will be any of the 48 remaining cards:

# 4-of-a-kinds = 13C1·4C4·48C1 = 13·1·48 = 624

Dividing by the number of possible hands gives the probability:

P(4 – of – a – kind) = 624/2,598,960 = 2.401⋅10−4 or 1 in 4165

1 in 4165.

Can you believe it?  I mean it was just a friendly game with my wife and my step kids.  We were betting pennies, but each player’s pennies came out of the same little jar.

But still… four of a freakin’ kind!

It would have been cooler if it was aces instead of twos, but it was still uber awesome.