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?
Read MoreWe all love math. We just don’t know it.
What is truth? Andrew Farah tweeted this the other day, stating “we have infinite access to information and we can’t agree on truth”. Andrew is right. We do have a lot of information. But having information doesn’t mean we know what to do with it. Just because information is readily available, doesn’t mean it’s parsed…
Read MoreMemes as news: The Importance of Short-form Content
Meme — is an idea, behavior, or style that becomes a fad and spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. Wikipedia This week has been a whirlwind, to say the least. On October 1st, the President announced that he had tested…
Read MoreNatural Language Processing and Naval: The Art of the Podcast
Podcasts are a harmonic creation. They are fascinating tools, connecting us to the speakers in a very personal way, almost like we are a part of the conversation too. I laugh out loud at some things, or nod along, reacting emphatically, despite being in a different time and place than both the interviewer and interviewee.…
Read MoreThe Paradox of Societal Polarization: We are all Hedgefoxes
“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” — Archilochus We are so quick to organize ourselves into different categories. Politics. Religion. Sports teams. Keto vs paleo vs aerivore. We like labels. It’s an iteration of community building, which is a key part of the human psyche. We are social creatures, and…
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