A Million Dollars Or A Million Minds?

Would you agree to never use the internet for the rest of your life in return for $1 million?

This is a great question and I have asked it of a number of people.

I have not found anyone under the age of 30 who would give up the internet for the money.

You might find 80 year olds who would take the deal but I am sure it would still be a tough call for some.

It just shows how valuable and useful the internet has become in our lives.

In surfing across the world wide web yesterday I came across a couple reasons why it has so much value to us. It literally puts any information in the world at your fingertips.  It connects you with great minds, great thoughts and great ideas as never before.  It is as if you have millions of people at hand to call on for another perspective or to solve a problem.  It provides a platform to extend ourselves while the technology continues to extend itself.  We have seen Google, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Yammer, Instagram, Wayin and the list continues to grow.  The technology continues to expand and it extends our access to the world.

What were my big finds on the internet?

Have you ever wondered how common is your birthday?   Matt Stiles from The Daily Viz answers the question in this heatmap.

Not only is this information readily available at the New York Times but thanks to some cool technology from Tableau you can put together an interactive chart and create a data visualization to display it even more powerfully than what is shown above.  Tableau is a new name for me but I want to explore it some more as I love graphic renderings of data.  A picture truly is worth a 1,000 words or 10,000 columns of data!

A couple of observations on the data on birth dates.

• September has the most birth dates.  September 16 is the most common birthday.  Look at the heavy number of births in September starting with September 8.  Of the top 16 birth dates,  fourteen of those dates are bunched between September 8 and September 25.
• December 25 has the fewest birth dates (excluding February 29).  December 24 ranks #363 and December 26 ranks #363.  January 1 is #364.
• Looking at these numbers you might think not much is going on 9 months before December. However, December 30 is #26, December 29 is #42 and December 28 is #62.  December 31 is #220.
• January does not have any birth date higher than #260.  In fact, between January 1 and January 11 the rankings are (in order from 1/1)---#364, #362, #356, #350, #338, #301, #324, #347, #351, #349, #341.  Not a good time to be selling birthday cakes.
• The week around Thanksgiving also has very few birth dates.  From November 22 to November 29 the highest ranking is #340.
• The low number of birth dates around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays suggest that something besides nature is involved.  It would be interesting to look at the C-section rates right before these holidays.  C-sections make up about a third of all births. If it is Friday it is much higher than that suggesting a high number of "elective" C-sections for convenience.  The rate of C-sections is also much higher with male Ob-Gyns than with females.  In 1970, the C-section rate was about 5%.  Not only do C-sections cost more than regular deliveries but they also carry more risks for mother and child.  This is a trend that needs to be reversed.
• The heaviest birth date months-July, August and September-are nine months after October, November and December proving that the onset of cold weather warms things up in other places.  

A million dollars to miss this kind of data and the charts that Tableau can do? Keep the money!