It’s open enrollment season, which means it’s time for my wife and I to select our health insurance for next year.

Not only is today Friday the 13th, it’s also October. And I don’t know about you, but I feel as if a disproportionate amount of Friday the 13th’s happen in October.

If something takes more time, that means it involves more effort, right? And if you want something done quicker, just add more people, right? Right…?

When most people think of three dimensions, they think of three positional (spatial) dimensions. Up & down, left & right, forward & back. I was thinking - instead of a positional dimension, what if we used something else that we can perceive such as color?

Have you ever read the back of the cereal box while eating breakfast? Checked out the nutrition label? Read the ingredient list?

Time as distance. We live in three dimensions spatially. Add time, and now we have four. But is time really that different than space?

I’m a data-minded guy. Being that it’s Easter time (technically Lent right now, Easter season begins on Easter) I was wondering… How frequently does Easter occur for each date?

The other night I attended an event with my wife’s mom group for their annual Christmas event. During the course of the evening, there was a bit of a Christmas trivia event where we had to answer various holiday-themed questions.

I was playing around on the new Mix.com social media website and came across this click-bait article from MentalFloss: This Math Problem for 8-Year-Olds Left Parents Stumped. The problem, which I’ll repeat below, turned out not the be that complex. I have no idea why it “left parents stumped.” That said, I’m a sucker for math problems, and I wanted to explore the question further.

One of the more popular articles in the financial independence blogosphere is Mr. Money Mostache’s The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement. If you haven’t read it, check it out. While I found it interesting, I think that the simple math is lacking, well, math, so I wanted to dig a bit deeper and figure out where the numbers came from.

An old “ridiculous” math problem about how long it takes an orchestra to play Beethoven’s 9th that went somewhat viral on Twitter and elsewhere a year or so ago made me think about less-obvious problems in math word problems.

I’ve been pretty successful selling t-shirts on Amazon these past few months. I normally only sell one, maybe two shirts per order, but one particular order caught my eye. I sold eight of these Euler’s constant t-shirts on January 15th. Cool, easy money. When February 7th rolled around, Wikipedia shared on their Facebook page that it was Euler’s Constant Day.

A common topic of conversation is what people would do if they won the lottery. People often dream of winning it big any buying big houses, nice cars, and quitting their jobs. My brothers and I weren’t immune to this topic, however, we often would have another answer as to what to do with lottery winnings: put it in the bank and live off the interest.

One of the more interesting and important parts of studying two different sets of data is to see if they are correlated. It might make one wonder if the order of the data matters. In this blog post, I show with three different methods - by an empirical example, by looking at the correlation function, and visually - why the order doesn’t matter so long as each data point is matched to the same datapoint each time.

$10,000 a month is $120,000 a year.

The City of Dayton is asking is residents and workers for another 0.25% of their income this November. Currently the rate is 2.25% - one of the highest in Ohio - so, if the tax is passed, the rate would climb to 2.5%.

I was curious as to the difference between the two methods of snowballing debt. The snowball method, if you're not familiar with it, is often used when you have multiple debts. You keep paying the same amount each month...

A line / spline chart of the average and median ages per death year… This time showing correlation!

A line / spline chart of the average and median ages per birth year... Showing no correlation.

Just a bar chart, the five-number summary, and the average of known ages in my family tree.

An updated table from the previous post plus two more scenerios.

Just a table on what the effect of increasing a wage would be. It is assuming that it takes one hour to make one loaf of bread.

Say we have a hungry caterpillar that wants to eat a leaf off of a tree. There are ten trees it can choose from. So, as far as we know, the probability of it choosing a specific tree is