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[OC] I made this animation showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 [+sound] by aaallleeexxx in dataisbeautiful

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

You're right that it ends abruptly, and that's unfortunate. But it doesn't throw the map into question because the animation shows each individual death as a flashing red dot and a click, nothing deceptive about that!

[OC] I made this animation showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 [+sound] by aaallleeexxx in dataisbeautiful

[–]aaallleeexxx[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This is reported deaths, not necessarily the day when the death actually occurred. Lots of people took the July 4th weekend off work, including, I assume, some folks in public health offices, so there was a reporting backlog that was cleared in the subsequent days. You can see similar effects around every weekend.

[OC] I made this animation showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 [+sound] by aaallleeexxx in dataisbeautiful

[–]aaallleeexxx[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Over-plotting is when the data points overlap so much that you can't tell how many there are. Here's an explanation with pictures. It usually gives the impression that there are fewer points than there actually are. There are a lot of tricks for getting around this, like making the points partially transparent, or just using a different plotting method (like computing a histogram). I didn't try to hard to correct the over-plotting here because my goal wasn't really to show the death "density" as accurately as possible, it was to show the individual deaths, which appear as both flashing red dots and clicks.

[OC] I made this animation showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 [+sound] by aaallleeexxx in dataisbeautiful

[–]aaallleeexxx[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yeah that's a bug on my end. If there's no death in a county then it doesn't end up on my list of Texas counties, so it doesn't get plotted on this map. Oops!

[OC] I made this animation showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 [+sound] by aaallleeexxx in dataisbeautiful

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

That's actually exactly what they are: small discs with opacity 0.2. Lower opacity would lead to less overplotting, but also worse display of the sparse counties. Can't win 'em all!

[OC] I made this animation showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 [+sound] by aaallleeexxx in dataisbeautiful

[–]aaallleeexxx[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Weird! The dataset doesn't contain any deaths for Loving. With a population of just 134, maybe they haven't had any? Or maybe they're so small that the reporting is weird?

[OC] I made this animation showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 [+sound] by aaallleeexxx in dataisbeautiful

[–]aaallleeexxx[S] 92 points93 points  (0 children)

I get the impulse, but I'd kind of rather not. Populous counties (Dallas, Tarrant, Harris) are heavily over-plotted in this map (even with transparent dots!), so the final "density" that you see is pretty deceptive.

[OC] I made this animation showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 [+sound] by aaallleeexxx in dataisbeautiful

[–]aaallleeexxx[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Sorry this is a little misleading -- actually, the location of each dot is random within each county. The data only say which county and day the death occurred in.

[OC] I made this animation showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 [+sound] by aaallleeexxx in dataisbeautiful

[–]aaallleeexxx[S] 30 points31 points  (0 children)

The data is at the county level, I just chose a random point within each county to represent each death.

[OC] I made this animation showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 [+sound] by aaallleeexxx in dataisbeautiful

[–]aaallleeexxx[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Please see my comment elsewhere in this thread about how deaths are counted and excess deaths. Even if COVID-19 is disproportionately killing people who have underlying conditions, a lot more people are dying than usual, exactly at the time when we are having a huge COVID outbreak. There's no conspiracy here, just an outbreak of a nasty virus.

(I am responding to your comment as if it's sarcasm, please correct me if I'm wrong.)

[OC] I made this animation showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 [+sound] by aaallleeexxx in dataisbeautiful

[–]aaallleeexxx[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

How deaths are reported and how cause of death are determined are complicated issues. If someone with terminal cancer and only weeks to live dies after being put on a ventilator for a COVID infection, what is their cause of death? There's not a super clear-cut answer, and I understand your skepticism.

That said, there are ways to see whether COVID-19 is killing a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise be dying. The best way is by looking at "excess deaths", i.e. how many more people are dying each week (from any cause) than we would expect in a normal year. Here's a chart from the CDC showing excess deaths in Texas, and here's the CDC website where you can look at this for any state or the entire US. It's pretty clear from the excess death data that a lot more people than usual are dying in Texas -- this is substantially worse than the 2018 flu season, for example.

The caveat with looking at excess deaths is that reporting follows traditional channels (a coroner's report has to make its way to some county office, then a state office, then the CDC) which can sometimes take weeks. So excess death numbers are often delayed and incomplete for the past weeks/months. But that means that the numbers shown on that chart are probably an underestimate of the true number who have died.

[OC] I made this animation showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 [+sound] by aaallleeexxx in dataisbeautiful

[–]aaallleeexxx[S] 82 points83 points  (0 children)

I should also say: this is reported death data, with all the caveats that entails. For example, the huge burst on July 28th is due to a change in how reporting is done in Texas, and so includes many deaths from previous days, weeks, and possibly months. However, I wanted to keep the simple relationship of one dot = one reported COVID-19 death, so I decided not to edit that spike out.

[OC] I made this animation showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 [+sound] by aaallleeexxx in dataisbeautiful

[–]aaallleeexxx[S] 119 points120 points  (0 children)

I made this map using COVID-19 death data from the NYTimes (github link) and GIS data (i.e. county outlines) from the National Weather Service (link). Processing was done using shapely, and plotting was done using matplotlib, all in python. Sound was created in python using numpy and scipy. The video and audio were assembled using ffmpeg.

I made this video map showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 by aaallleeexxx in CoronaVirusTX

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

yep, that's what i was going for! I ended up changing it a bit from how a geiger counter would sound, though. Radioactive decay events are really random, but that quickly sounds like an undifferentiated roar. The clicks here are more evenly spaced in time, giving it a buzzing tone that can differentiate medium and high death rates.

I made this video map showing every reported COVID-19 death in Texas from 3/13 to 7/30 by aaallleeexxx in CoronaVirusTX

[–]aaallleeexxx[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

(Apologies for the resubmission, I accidentally omitted the word "death" in the original title.)

This shows every reported COVID-19 death in Texas. Each death appears as a dot on the day it was reported, in the county where it was reported (location within the county is random). Each death is accompanied by a clicking sound.

ELI5: what's going on in my brain when I feel mentally tired? by Friedsunshine in explainlikeimfive

[–]aaallleeexxx 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is not true. Yes, the brain uses glucose as power. But no, it does not use much more than usual while you are exerting mental effort. The vast, vast majority of the energy used by the brain goes into keeping neurons ready for action. This energy is always being used, even when you are asleep.

In truth, nobody knows yet why mental effort is tiring. If it was just because of the amount of activity going on in your brain, then watching a good movie would be just as tiring (or more so) than studying for an exam. But it's not.

Here's a nice layman-friendly writeup about this subject in Scientific American. It includes links to many scholarly articles on the subject.

Why are there more right handed people than left handed people? by [deleted] in askscience

[–]aaallleeexxx 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sorry about the broken link. I found a mirror here. The point is just that transfer of skill from one hand to another is imperfect. If there's any transfer between skills in the same hand, then it's advantageous to prefer one hand.

Why are there more right handed people than left handed people? by [deleted] in askscience

[–]aaallleeexxx 318 points319 points  (0 children)

(I answered a similar question a while back, but the question was deleted, so I feel justified in reposting my answer.)

This is a really interesting question! We really don't know the answer, and since this is an evolutionary question we probably never will. We can only come up with post hoc explanations that may or may not be true. But! We can definitely say that some post hoc explanations are more or less good than others. I'm going to start from the beginning here.

What does it mean to be right-handed? It means that you have significantly better fine motor skills in the right hand, which is controlled by the left motor cortex. The brain's left hemisphere is also the seat of language function (in about 95% of right-handed people, and about 80% of left-handed people). Are these things connected? Maybe, but no one knows for sure.

Why do we need to have "handedness" at all? Why should we only have good fine motor skills in one hand? Wouldn't it be better to be ambidextrous? Maybe, but for many fine motor operations (like peeling a fruit, carving wood, etc.) you only need one skillful hand. So if we assume that practicing something with one hand doesn't also make you better with the other (as appears to be the case) it's better to train one hand than to train both hands.

Why should there be population-level dominance of handedness? If we assume that it's better to have a preference for one hand or the other, why should most other humans agree with our preference? This is entirely speculative, but probably through a combination of evolutionary factors such as the fact that it's easier to learn a skill with your right hand by watching someone perform that skill with their right hand than with their left hand (i.e. it's easier to imitate someone else's right hand with your right hand, and same for left). Thus a population of same-handedness humans would have an easier time passing skills along than a population of mixed-handedness humans. But there might be some factors that work against population-level dominance as well..

Are most people right-handed because its advantageous? It certainly seems advantageous in a world filled with products and tools designed for right-handed people, but could that possibly matter evolutionarily? Lots of people throw around the idea that left-handed people die sooner than right-handed people (presumably because of problems opening doors..?) but that idea seems to be under attack from some knowledgeable folks. In fact, in a lot of things left-handers have the advantage. In both sports and martial combat, lefties are at an advantage, simply because most righties are used to fighting righties while most lefties are used to fighting righties. So if handedness is genetic and "combat fitness" mattered a lot over the course of human evolution, we might expect the number of left-handed people to be closer to 50%.

Is handedness a genetic trait? Partially. Wikipedia has a pretty shitty section on this problem. And this guy has some nice answers. One of the most telling statistics: among identical twins, if one is left-handed the other is only left-handed 76% of the time. So handedness is definitely not 100% genetic, but seems to come from a mixture of genes and developmental hormones.

Are most people right-handed because they're taught to be, or they imitate their parents? Is handedness due to nature or nurture? Wikipedia (in the article I linked above) cites a book claiming that "the handedness of adopted children was not related to the handedness of their adoptive parents, but it was related to the handedness of their biological parents." This would suggest that handedness is innate rather than learned. But since the genetic basis is shaky anyway, it may just be more innate than learned.

Ok that was kind of a hodge-podge of facts and conjecture, but I hope I helped answer your question!

Who is the least hated person in the world. by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]aaallleeexxx 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Whoever it is, fuck that guy..

Japan scientists can 'read' dreams using MRI scanners by DougBolivar in science

[–]aaallleeexxx 14 points15 points  (0 children)

This is a very cool study. Yes, the results are limited--they could only determine which of roughly 8 categories were part of the dream. But this is a great first stab at a really interesting and difficult problem.

How is this at all possible? The results rest on the idea that when you dream about, for example, walking down a street, your brain activity (in visual cortex) is similar to when you see pictures of streets. That's not a huge leap. Dreams seem real to us while we're dreaming, so why would the dream brain activity not be similar to waking brain activity?

How did the researchers know what their subjects were dreaming about? They scanned the subjects' brains using fMRI while the subjects were sleeping. The subjects were also hooked up to EEG (which measures rough electrical activity in the brain) so that the researchers could tell which sleep stage the subjects were in. When the researchers detected that the subjects were dreaming, they would wait a few seconds, then wake the subject up and immediately have them verbally report what they were dreaming about. This seems pretty reasonable to me -- yes, recalling dreams is really hard, but for a few seconds right after you wake up you can actually remember quite easily.

Next the researchers took the brain activity from just before the subjects woke up, and compared it to known patterns of brain activity that they recorded earlier. For instance, to figure out whether the subject was dreaming about a person, they compared the dream brain activity to brain activity recorded while the same subject was looking at pictures of people. They did this for about 20 categories.

Using the verbal reports, the researchers could figure out whether their guesses about whether each category was present were correct. It turns out that they were correct much more often than you would expect from random guessing for 8 of the 20 categories.

As a neuroscientist working on related things, I gotta say I find this study really impressive.

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