June 2013

There were 4 posts published in June 2013.

U.S. Skatepark Density

Number of Skateparks

 

Number of Skateparks Per Million People

It's no surprise that California has the largest number of skateparks in the country.  But when you adjust for population size - dang Wyoming!  I want what you're having.

Data sources:

wools++: Major update!

I've totally revamped wools++.  Major changes include:

I have ideas for plenty of other features as well, and I'd be happy to take further suggestions.

Related, Overcast Network recently updated their stats system as well, providing statistics breakdowns based on game mode and playing time which is really cool (except, oh god, now I can easily see how much I play each day).  I plan on incorporating some of this new information into wools++ in the future.

What do skateboarders talk about?

It turns out, mostly skateboarding, videos, teams, and people named Mike.

To find out, I analyzed over 50 interviews from the wonderful skateboarding blog the chrome ball incident.  I did this by scraping the content from the site (with python, of course) and then filtering out some common words (stop words) to get meaningful results.  I then used Wordle (which is really, really cool) to make tag clouds of the 150 most frequently used words in all of the interviews.

The total word count was a whopping 229,199 words (for comparison).  The first round of filtering was pretty modest - I only removed the 186 most commonly used English words.  Here are the results (click the photo to embiggen):

skate_text1_wm
Including a slightly larger list of stop words reveals a bit more character:

skate_text2_wm

Amongst the expletives and common skate-slang ('dude', 'stoked', 'rad', 'spot', etc.), the word 'street' (as in, street skating) is mentioned 3 times as frequently as 'vert' (as in, vert skating) - something we've seen before.

You can see the raw data here and here for each stop word filtering.  Play with it please!

The physics of Jake Brown's ollie 720

I'm a couple weeks late on this, but recently Jake Brown landed the first ever ollie 720.  To put that in layman's terms, he did two full rotations without holding the board on his feet with his hands.  Check it out:

 

 

So this seems crazy.  How did he do that?  How did he keep the board on his feet?  Magnets?  It turns out, it's actually very simple physics:

The Conservation of Energy

 

That's it!  Jake Brown doesn't really have to do anything because the conservation of energy won't be violated (it's a law!).  So yeah, thanks physics!  Skateboarding is so easy.