We already knew that model/cookbook author  Chrissy Teigen is really good at Twitter. We recently learned that, delightfully, she is also good at spotting misrepresented statistics. This came to light when she asked for help understanding the whole Jacob Wohl Debacle . She asked her Twitter followers for a clear, quick explanation of the whole deal. She didn't even @ Jacob, but Jacob got snippy and replied back with Google Trends data (how have I not blogged about Google Trends yet?) in an attempt to use data, beautiful data, in order to own Chrissy. And Chrissy was having none of it.  Yes, her sweet burn is an inspiration to us all, but it also a good demonstration of that fact that the exact same data can be interpreted in two different ways. And jerks lie with data, too, and can lie with actual, truthful data. And Chrissy knows her way around a chart.

I think that language is fascinating. Back when I taught developmental, I always liked to teach how babies learn to talk in sort of the same way all across the world. I like regional difference in American English (for example, swearing and regional colloquialisms ). So, I really like this research that investigates the rise and fall of slang in America. And I think it could be used in a statistics class. How to use in class? 1. Funny list of descriptive statistics. 2. Research methodology for using Google searches to answer a question. A good opening for discussion of archival data, data mining, and creating inclusion criteria for research methodology. 3. Using graphs to illustrate trends across time. This feature is interactive. 4. Further interactive features demonstrating how heat maps can be used to demonstrate state-by-state popularity over time. Here, "dank memes" peaked in April 2016 in Montana. 5. The author eye-balled the data can came up ...

Make pretty Venn diagrams via this archived version of the Google Doodle that celebrated John Venn's 180th birthday. A good example of a Venn diagram as well as a way to (approximately) illustrate shared variance. The overlap between vegetation and things that can fly