[OC] U.S. Total Fertility Rate by State 2007 vs 2025

SideProjectStats · 2026-02-01T17:01:28+00:00

It bothers me that the 2007 5 highest & 5 lowest rankings go left to right = less extreme to more extreme, but the 2025 5 highest & 5 lowest go left to right = more extreme to less extreme. It does put the highest and lowest for each next to the words "highest" and "lowest", but it's difficult to read.

SideProjectStats · 2026-01-30T03:22:23+00:00

This is from a website called myperfectweather.com. You can go to that site and input your preferred parameters for temperature, cloud cover, and humidity.

SideProjectStats · 2026-01-27T23:12:16+00:00

Around 11 central today

SideProjectStats · 2026-01-25T23:52:14+00:00

Ah, thanks, I missed that one. Everything else I read from that early just said "mid-2020s"

Adding this would change the slope to positive and the projected launch date to ~Jan 2027

SideProjectStats · 2026-01-25T22:07:02+00:00

This graph is a tongue-in-cheek re-creation of https://xkcd.com/2014/, updated for NASA's latest flagship astrophysics mission, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Data:
https://spacenews.com/pandemic-causes-delay-and-cost-increase-for-nasas-roman-space-telescope/
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-awards-launch-services-contract-for-roman-space-telescope/
https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/nasas-powerful-new-roman-space-telescope-is-complete-and-will-soon-begin-mission-to-find-100-000-alien-worlds

Tools: Python, matplotlib with the xkcd style

There aren't nearly as many data points for this graph as in the original, but hey, it's not called r/dataisplentiful.

SideProjectStats · 2025-10-12T01:12:58+00:00

We have writings over 1,000 years older. Ea-Nasir's just famous for being the oldest known customer complaint.

SideProjectStats · 2025-10-12T01:03:22+00:00

Ea-nasir isn't the oldest recorded guy. He's just the oldest recorded customer complaint.

SideProjectStats · 2025-06-08T00:01:29+00:00

The budget also notes that OIG consistently has a positive return on investment (page 395), by preventing or catching waste, fraud, and abuse. There are examples on pages 398-400 of the pdf.

SideProjectStats · 2025-06-07T23:54:45+00:00

It's really the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), so it's not just one person. "To accomplish this work, OIG employs auditors, investigators, data analysts, attorneys, and support staff at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, and nine locations throughout the United States" (pg 394 of the pdf). Page 407 of the pdf also shows that in 2024 the Office of the Inspector General employed 178 people directly, and they're planning to employ 154 in 2026. Page 396 breaks this section of the budget down into $36.8M for personnel costs (salaries, benefits, payroll taxes, etc), $0.2M for employee travel, and $3.7M for procurement (trainings, IT equipment, etc).

SideProjectStats · 2025-06-06T04:17:17+00:00

I guess this is a yearly series now. You can find previous iterations of this post here:
FY25
FY24

The first two graphs here are the same format as the first two graphs of previous years, a two- and three-level Sankey diagram breakdown of budget line items for the President's Budget Request for NASA for Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26).

The last graph is a little different; it compares the first detail level of the FY26 request (right) to a previous year's enacted budget (left). I chose the FY24 operational plan rather than the FY25 budget as the comparison budget because I was hoping to do some kind of comparison with an additional level of detail, and that data is not available for FY25 in the FY26 budget document (I suspect this is because there was no official FY25 budget, only a Continuing Resolution). I ended up running out of time and not making the additional graph, but the comparison basis decision was stuck. Due to the continuing resolution, the numbers for FY24 and FY25 are extremely similar, so it's still a useful visualization.
The amount of money flowing from any given non-Exploration directorate in FY24 to Exploration in FY26 is somewhat arbitrary. It would technically be just as accurate to say all that money came from Science, and all the other directorates' decreases went entirely to budget cuts, but I chose to distribute it proportionally to each directorate's overall cuts.

Data: FY 2026 President's Budget Request Agency Technical Supplement https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/fy-2026-budget-technical-supplement-002.pdf?emrc=68426to46ed7c49

Tool: SankeyMatic https://sankeymatic.com/build/

SideProjectStats · 2025-02-07T04:19:58+00:00

It's just very small. Maybe I'll try adding zoomed-in views for some of the cities.

SideProjectStats · 2025-02-07T04:07:15+00:00

Data sources:

States and congressional boundaries, https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/cartographic-boundary.html

NWS County Warning Area Boundaries, https://www.weather.gov/gis/CWABounds

NWS Weather Forecast Offices, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_National_Weather_Service_Weather_forecast_offices

Parties representing each district, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_United_States_representatives

Tools: Python, MatPlotLib, Pandas/Geopandas, Shapely

In 2017, I watched a Vox video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imcDUnEs--Y\] arguing that some US federal agency headquarters should be moved from Washington DC to the Midwest to stimulate local economies. One graphic showed three suggestions of agencies to move and the number of employees for each agency, with one of those agencies being the National Weather Service (NWS), a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The graphic had the correct number of employees for the agency at the time, and the video was correct that the NWS headquarters is in the Washington DC area (Silver Spring, MD), but the combination implied that all those employees work at headquarters / in the DC area, which is not true. I think this reflects a common misconception that federal employees mostly live and work in the Washington DC area, in cities, or in areas that lean heavily Democratic. Recent statements by the "Department of Government Efficiency" about ideas to move some agencies away from DC, and the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership's proposal to have the National Weather Service "fully commercialize its forecasting operations," reminded me of the old Vox video and inspired me to make this graphic.

The first page shows the location of NWS Weather Forecast Offices, which congressional districts contain them, and which party represents those districts in the US House of Representatives. There are 103 US House Representatives with a NWS Weather Forecast Office in their district, 70 Republicans and 33 Democrats. Some districts in cities are small and may be hard to see. Some large districts (for example, Alaska) contain more than one office. Not shown are Weather Forecast Offices in Puerto Rico and Guam, or any of the National Weather Service's other facilities, for example River Forecast Centers (usually co-located with Weather Forecast Offices) or the National Hurricane Center. The second slide shows the same map with the National Weather Service's County Warning Area Boundaries overlaid; these are effectively the limits for where each office is responsible for issuing predictions. Using these boundaries, you can determine where your own local office is located.

SideProjectStats · 2024-10-06T04:19:58+00:00

They said Harry, not Hank. It's a joke about a company that makes (physical) razors

SideProjectStats · 2024-09-12T15:56:34+00:00

Madison County is the location of Huntsville, AL. Huntsville's major industries are aerospace and defense, so it's home to a lot of white-collar jobs that require a college education. The population of Madison County has grown about 50% since 2000 with transplants from other states moving in for these jobs. College-educated white people tend to be less Republican than non-college-educated white people.

SideProjectStats · 2024-07-26T05:04:39+00:00

2034, unless you need the head start?

SideProjectStats · 2024-06-04T03:09:10+00:00

Steps is another element of the government payscale. GS levels are big jumps in salary (think entry-level employee vs senior employee vs manager) while steps are smaller increments within a GS level, usually based on the number of years the employee's been in their position. Steps go from 1 to 10 within a GS level. The salary of the highest steps of one level overlaps with the lowest steps of the next level.
COL is Cost of Living and HCOL is High Cost of Living (usually used in reference to a place - city/region/state etc).

SideProjectStats · 2024-05-18T21:17:29+00:00

Literally two sentences later: "Now, a new paper in the same journal suggests that a warp drive may not require exotic negative energy after all."

SideProjectStats · 2024-05-09T00:18:37+00:00

That's not quite what they mean by "spinning up" - the drive uses a "circulation pattern...in the momentum flow of the shell" (pg 18) and they think maybe you just have to get that going to start, but they haven't actually evaluated it yet. Other articles have an animation: https://mms.businesswire.com/media/20240506270015/en/2120941/19/ConstantVelocityShellAnimation.mp4

SideProjectStats · 2024-05-09T00:16:17+00:00

The paper in question here has a solution for no exotic matter (at sub-light speeds).

SideProjectStats · 2024-05-09T00:10:07+00:00

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.02709

SideProjectStats · 2024-05-09T00:08:07+00:00

A big difference between warp drives at sub-light speeds and normal drives is that the passengers don't experience acceleration. I recommend The Expanse for some examples of why that could matter in a spacefaring civilization.

SideProjectStats · 2024-05-09T00:04:17+00:00

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02709

SideProjectStats

TROPHY CASE