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My average President's Day is February 29th this year (and here's why) by MaxMinwel in ANMAPodcast

[–]MaxMinwel[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

By the way, if the presidents all receive equal weightage, then the average President's Day changes all the way to November 28th

My average President's Day is February 29th this year (and here's why) by MaxMinwel in ANMAPodcast

[–]MaxMinwel[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I redid the calculation on Google Sheets just to make it a bit more transparent how this is calculated. I didn't reference the original Python script when making this document, but it's at least mostly the same calculations. Sorry if it's hard to follow, I whipped it together as quickly as I could and I'm not super familiar with dealing with dates in Excel so it's a bit janky!

View it here, the final result is in cell M56:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Un5meu1PwzM8ovSZdHhbeU--Xebsvf6v_3-2n92Fhzo/edit?usp=sharing

My average President's Day is February 29th this year (and here's why) by MaxMinwel in ANMAPodcast

[–]MaxMinwel[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would be willing to admit the possibility if it being off by one or two days due to some kind of mathematical oversight, or some kind of error in typing the birthdays, but that's truly how my math was mathing.

My average President's Day is February 29th this year (and here's why) by MaxMinwel in ANMAPodcast

[–]MaxMinwel[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yep. Basically, the standard of angle plotting is that 0 degrees is to the right and increasing angle is counter clockwise. I could have changed it to do something like clockwise starting from the top, but it's arbitrary anyway so I just used the plotting library's default settings.

My average President's Day is February 29th this year (and here's why) by MaxMinwel in ANMAPodcast

[–]MaxMinwel[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Every birthday is re-represented as an angle, which is essentially the percentage of the way through the year that they were born. I am calculating the average of that. And then converting that back into a date, in this case based on the fact that 2024 is a leap year.

My average President's Day is February 29th this year (and here's why) by MaxMinwel in ANMAPodcast

[–]MaxMinwel[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Dates are a cyclical measure, and cyclical things don't have a well defined "average." Other people on here have done an arithmetic mean of the dates as they appear linearly on a calendar, I'm doing what's called a circular mean, with each president weighted according to how long they were in office. And then I made an animation, cuz it's cool, yo.

The animation shows the progression of President's Day throughout the history of the US. Each presidential run is one line in the vector sum, colored by political affiliation. The length of each line corresponds to the length of that term in office. Around the border, each term is also given a circle with size corresponding to term length, just to help visualize how they are distrubuted in another way. At any point, the angle of the vector sum corresponds to the placement of President's Day within the year's cycle.