Answers at the speed of now
A random, rambling late-night conversation with my housemate last week made me want to create a chart of the length of time US Presidents have lived beyond leaving office. John made an offhand comment about an article, or maybe just some factoid, he had read recently about recent Presidents living longer than they used to after leaving office.
Immediately my mind went to the scraping script I could write; get a list of the presidents, scrape their bios from Wikipedia (maybe there’s already a wiki-api?), curl requests, type casting, Date subtraction, JSON to array, oh the charts I could make! But was there anything interesting there in the first place?
And then I remembered my friend Brian’s project Numeracy. When he was showing me Numeracy for the first time, a got an Ah-ha! moment from two features: 1) put a “.csv” at the end of your project’s url and you get a csv returned 2) copy-paste a url from a Wikipedia page containing a table and Numeracy scrapes the data from that table for you. Knowing these capabilities, plus knowing about all the neat features they’ve rolled out since, I was sure I could get answers quickly.
Lo and behold, Wikipedia has a page for what I was interested in: List of Presidents of the United States by age. Numeracy imported the table perfectly with a copy-paste and I was more than halfway to seeing if there was anything of interest to explore.

Thanks to the data-typing capability in Numeracy, data munging was mostly simple; just an easy “subtract this column from this column.” Then I was able to use the built-in charts to eyeball the data with a few clicks.

Along the x-axis are presidents by their number in office, ie 1=George Washington and 44=Barack Obama. The y-axis shows how many years they were (have been) alive since leaving office.
Seven presidents lived for more than 20 years after leaving office: Carter (37), Hoover(32), Ford (30), Adams-2 (25), Bush-41 (25), Van Buren (21), and Fillmore(21). Two of those still alive as of today.
Have presidents been living longer? Sort of:

Six presidents have lived to be over 90; two are still alive and two died in the mid-2000s: Bush, Ford (2006), Reagan (2004), Carter, Hoover (1964), and Adams-2 (1826).
Have we been electing older or younger people as president lately? Both:

Our last six presidents contain two of the top 5 youngest and three of the top 5 oldest presidents. Clinton and Obama were the 3rd and 5th youngest presidents, respectively. Trump, Reagan, and Bush-41 are the 1st, 2nd, and 5th oldest presidents ever elected.
Nine presidents were less than 50 when they took office. Eleven were older than 60. (Remarkably, Ford, Adams-2, and Bush-41 were all older than 60 upon becoming president and lived for more than 20 years after leaving office.)
Thanks to the ability of Numeracy to import, transform, sort, filter, and chart, I was able to turn an idle late-night conversation into answers quite quickly and easily. Taking these explorations to actual insights is another task, which you can explore for yourself here.
