Recently, the news has been all abuzz about William Shatner traveling into space. This was a cool event because he's the oldest person who has traveled into space (at 90 years old) ... and he was also the iconic Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek television series. This got
When it comes to plotting mortgage rate data, I often look to Len Kiefer for inspiration. He recently posted a retro-looking graph on twitter that caught my eye ... and of course I had to see if I could create something similar using SAS. For lack of a better term,
I recently saw in several social media posts that sales of vinyl records are forecast to be higher than sales of CDs this year (2019) for the first time since 1986. Two questions came to mind - 1) Is this true? and 2) Is this a big deal? Let's analyze
Do you remember The Matrix movies, that started coming out in 1999? Hopefully this movie franchise didn't give you a fear of virtual reality and AI. The thing I remember most from the movie was the really cool slow-motion video effects (from multiple angles) in the fight scenes. And the
These days, it's all about music streaming ... You sign up for a service, you let them know your music preferences, and they create a virtual "radio station" that plays the songs you probably want to hear. But that just doesn't compare with going to a physical record store, buying
When I was growing up, our family had a bookcase containing a set of encyclopedias - it was where I went to obtain information and facts about various things, to satisfy my curiosity and impress my friends. Now that we have the Internet, Wikipedia has taken the place of encyclopedias
A lot of my friends seem to be getting married these days. Which got me thinking about wedding parties. Which then got me wondering what songs DJs do/don't play at weddings these days. And what was the outcome of my meandering thoughts ... a fun & interesting graph, of course! It
If you were a fan of the original Star Trek television series, you probably remember lots of little details about the show. And you might even feel sorry for the people who don't get the clever references you make to things from the show. If you're that person, then you'll
As a kid who grew up in the 60s & 70s, I was a big fan of the original Star Trek TV series. And in the years since, I have seen lots of the Star Trek “technology” become a reality: cellphones, portable tablet computers, talking computers (Alexa/Siri), etc. But I
If you're into 1980s pop music, then I bet you love Billy Joel's song We Didn't Start the Fire. But do you know every word, and the significance of every reference? Let's use SAS software to create an interactive visualization that will help you fully understand this song! I first saw
With the Pokémon Go craze sweeping the world, techies and programmers are looking to apply their skills to gain an advantage over the average user. In this blog post, I show how to use some of SAS' geospatial analytics capabilities to capture a Pikachu. Let's say you know of a building that has
So, how many different Pokémon have you caught - and more importantly, how many different kinds are still out there that you haven't caught yet? I've created some graphs that might help you figure it out! I think my previous blog post might have irritated some of the hardcore Pokémon players out there
I was sad to hear that one of my favorite singers, Prince, died last week. This blog post describes a graph I created to show his legacy. Prince was at the height of his popularity when I was in high school and college, which were the formative years for much of
Choosing the perfect Halloween costume can be a tough decision ... especially when it comes to choosing between two awesome favorites like Superman & Batman!?! I think we're gonna need a bigger boat! (and by 'boat' I mean analytical software, of course!) Let's start with Superman. This character has been around since
A couple of years ago, I blogged about the most popular baby names in the US over the past 100 years. This time, I focus on the most recent year, and take it to the state level! But before we get started, here's a picture of my friend Jennifer's daughter,
In this blog post, I put some classic rock song data under the SAS Analytics microscope, to see if I could get a better picture of exactly what is considered 'classic rock' these days... Michael Raithel recently pointed me to an interesting article/study about 'classic rock' music, and invited (or is
