Navel-Gaze Your Listening Habits, Juice Your Boards for Bitcoin
a semi-weekly roundup
Here are some of the latest and greatest Plotly plots! Check out our Tumblr to see this same post with the interactive plots embedded, and to find more awesome content.
U.S. is Using Less Coal, but Exporting More
Although the U.S. has lowered its domestic emissions, it still might not be shrinking it’s global carbon footprint. From a Greenpeace UK article by Zachary Davies Boren:
In the first quarter of this year, the US exported over 27 million tonnes of coal — more than double what it was five years ago. The country is simply shipping its emissions abroad, and it means that production remains higher than what it should be.
The Increasingly Well-Represented South (in the House)
Dreamshot brings you this stacked bar chart on the changing distribution of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Unlike U.S. senators, representatives are allocated proportional to a state’s population, so this reflects the changing distribution of the national population over time.
Getting More Bitcoin for Your Buck
As I write this, one unit of everyone’s favorite cryptocurrency is valued at $507 US dollars. How do you get some? One way is to buy it or trade for it, another is to “mine” it. From Wikipedia:
Bitcoins are created as a reward for payment processing work in which users offer their computing power to verify and record payments into the public ledger. Called mining, individuals or companies engage in this activity in exchange for transaction fees and newly created bitcoins.
Monterosso Ventures is a company mining bitcoin. A short explanation of the plot below is that not all processing techniques are created equal. Monterosso tested the efficiency of overclocking chips produced by a company called Cointerra.
Board efficiency decreases as you overclock the chips — this hardware requires more electricity per unit of production as you increase clock speed. Overclocking has diminishing returns, and at least with this generation of Cointerra boards, it will probably be best to optimize clock speeds instead of trying to overclock everything to the moon.
Solar Charge Your Batteries With Plotly!
User mr.jb.swe has posted a how-to on making your own battery charger at hackaday.io. It can charge an arbitrary number of batteries off of many different power sources, including solar panels and car batteries.
He rigged his multicharger into a circuit with some solar panels as a power source, and a USB cable to stream the data into a plot.
The blue line shows the battery’s voltage. The red line approximates the intensity of the sun in lux, and the orange shows the converted amperes. The green line shows how many cumulative ampere-hours the 8Ah battery absorbed over a few hours of charge time.
Amelia Listens to a Lot of Indie Pop
When user Amelia made an area plot out of her last.fm listening logs, Plotly’s Chris Parmer decided to grab the data from the plot and turn it into a heat map. The brighter spots are month-long periods (from 16th to 16th) in which she listened to a particular artist an unusual amount. The artists are sorted by play count — the most-listened at the top.
To see how Chris got the data and built this heat map, check out the notebook.
Lego Economics
Rhett Allain at WIRED just tackled the question — how much does a single Lego brick cost? He grabbed the data for a bunch of different Lego sets, coded them by “theme”, and plotted pieces versus price:
The slope of this line is 0.104 US Dollars per Lego piece. Boom. There is your answer. On average, one Lego piece costs 10.4 cents. Also, I think it’s nice to notice that this data is fairly linear.
But he also noted that this fit function had a y-intercept, meaning that lego sets as modelled by this function have a ‘base price’: “if you had a Lego set with zero pieces in it, it would still cost $7.34 – you know, for the box and instructions and stuff.”
