In a letter to Helen Keller, Mark Twain wrote: “It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing — and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite —…
Read More50 Miles Later, I Found Myself
Note From Kyla: Another non-analytical piece (however, the human mind is the most complex system of all) Thank you for reading, if you choose to do so! Also, if anyone wants to chat about biking – it’s a huge passion of mine, and I plan to do some bikepacking as soon as I logistically can!…
Read MoreThe Cost of Love: Appraising The Twelve Days of Christmas
How to get into the holiday spirit? Do some math! The Twelve Days of Christmas is a Christmas carol that lists out items that a (supposed) lover is purchasing for his love. The earliest version of the song appeared in a kid’s book titled, Mirth With-out Mischief in 1780. However, the version that we are most…
Read MoreThe Why Behind Writing
A less analytical piece today. I have several pieces in the work, so we will get back to ‘Data Data Data’ soon, but this hopefully will answer the question: why does this blog even exist? Recently, I had the opportunity to participate in the inaugural OnDeck Writer Fellowship (fellow writers, I highly recommend that you…
Read MorePizzmathematics: Which Pizza is Truly the Best?
An age-old debate still rages: Papa John’s or Domino’s? This piece won’t be a qualitative answer to the above question, but rather, a quantitative one. I recently did a chicken nuggets math piece, breaking down exactly how much chicken is in a chicken nugget. I wanted to do the same for pizza. I went to…
Read MoreFermata and Staccato: Does Music Predict the Stock Market?
Spotify Wrapped is making the rounds at the end of this very *insert preferred adjective here* year. Everyone shares their top artists and songs of the year, and we rejoice in the gift that music gives us. But, can music actually be a predictor of our moods? And if it can predict our moods, does…
Read MoreMidwest Arbitrage: Capturing One of America’s Most Undervalued Assets
This week, I partnered with a fellow Midwesterner (though a bit more Midwest than I am) and startup operator Lea Boreland to take a quantitative look at innovation and the Midwest. This was a really fun piece to work on. I grew up in Kentucky, but now live in Los Angeles. I miss Kentucky deeply – and…
Read MoreA Visualization: Correlation vs Causation
There are a lot of charts floating around, discussing how x is related to y because they are “highly correlated”. Our brains tend to make nonsensical connections to try and explain the world to us. We draw two lines and claim a relationship, thinking that we have effectively answered the question in the process. Not…
Read MoreThe Nugget Numbers: How Much Chicken is in a Chicken Nugget?
A lighter piece for a long day. A Nugget Analysis According to Epictetus, the right way to eat is the same as the way to live: “just, cheerful, equable, temperate, and orderly.” More precisely: So when I came across a chicken nugget dataset on Kaggle, I was fascinated. This person had weighed their individual nuggets…
Read MoreTikTok and Content Strategy: The Power of Creation
What creates a TikTok star? What’s the relationship between content and fame? What’s the secret?
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