Helpful Data Hacks

We decided to be a little more light-hearted for this post and created a giphy channel for HelpfulDataHacks . More content will be added to the channel over time, and hopefully it will be accepted as a Creator account and the gifs can be discovered on apps like WhatsApp, but in the meantime here are a few of our favorites.  Go to the HelpfulDataHacks giphy channel to view more.     When only Travolta can express how ridiculous a situation has become.     One of the most unexpected movie scenes, proving that Sam Jackson has a great sense of humor.     Tired of being mansplained to?  Let Ripley handle it.     Sick of hearing the same complaints over and over?  Lestat feels your pain.     Thrown to the wolves after keeping the place running for years?  Maybe it's time to quit.

As discussed in Water: Density vs Temperature and Salinity , the density of water changes as a function of thermodynamic properties like temperature and pressure.  Since density and volume have a simple inverse relationship, the volume of water also changes as those properties vary.  One commonly studied instance of this is the Coefficient of Thermal Expansion: the rate at which a substance's volume changes as the temperature changes and pressure is held constant.  For Water this Coefficient is particularly interesting because it starts off negative (volume decreases as you increase temperature) and then transitions to positive (volume increases as you increase temperature). Unfortunately, finding high-accuracy values for this Coefficient as a function of Temperature and Salinity on the internet proved difficult.  However, since we already did research and found high-accuracy values for Density we can use that data to numerically det...

Like all substances, water changes density as a function of thermodynamic properties like temperature and pressure.  For most substances, as you decrease the temperature, the density will increase.  This makes some logical sense: temperature is just a measure of the typical kinetic energy of the water molecules, and if you decrease the temperature then they will have less energetic collisions and spread out less.  Water behaves this way for most temperatures (4 - 100) ℃, but when you decrease the temperature below 4 ℃ the density decreases rather than increases.  It continues to decrease slowly until you reach 0 ℃, at which point water freezes into ice and the density decreases by nearly 10%.  This is a well known and studied property of water, and the reason icebergs float with 10% above the surface of the water and 90% below.  However, this behavior is not true for all types of water.  In particular, when you start dissolv...

This isn't really a "data hack", nor is it "helpful" to most people in their current daily lives, but we wanted to comment on a December 13th announcement by the U.S. Department of Energy that a breakthrough had been made in one type of controlled fusion: Inertial Confinement Fusion.  While this is  a theoretical and technological breakthrough, most media coverage was misleading enough that we wanted to clear up some confusion: A commercially available Nuclear Fusion Reactor utilizing Intertial Confinement Fusion is still decades away As Secretary of Energy Granholm says in the Press Conference video link below (emphasis added), "This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon, abundant, fusion energy powering our society".  This is a very deliberate statement on her part: it is still unclear whether Fusion Reactors will become a reality, but this breakthrough brings hum...

It's been known since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic that its  Infection Fatality Rate has a strong dependence on the patient's Age, with the chances of death increasing exponentially as the Age increases.  This dependence means that two populations (e.g. - countries, states, cities, etc.) that are identical in all ways other than Age Demographics, and take the exact same legislative steps and preventative measures, should expect different  Mortality Rates .  Debates about which measures were successful in controlling the spread of Covid-19 and keeping the Mortality Rates down must take Age Demographics into account to avoid reaching the wrong conclusions.  While Medical Professionals and Statisticians know to correct for such factors when making comparisons, the typical person likely doesn't know how big an effect their State's Age Distribution has on overall Covid-19 outcome. Here we examine what one would expect the Morta...

We took a look at the Mobile App: "Bloodline: Heroes of Lithas", a mobile Collection/RPG game available from both  Google  and  Apple .  The game has some interesting aspects that distinguish it from other Collection/RPG games, but there's definitely a learning curve to understand what's going on due to a lack of in-game explanation. Bloodline: Heroes of Lithas Image by  Goat Games Last Updated: 2023-06-22 Topic Links To reach the top of the Leaderboards without spending money, we had to deep-dive a few aspects of the game: Traits: Tier List - Which traits are the best for different Champion Classes? Traits: Generation - How likely are yo...