Behind the Scenes of DESTINATION MOON

WOW!! I got to attend the "press preview" of the amazing new exhibit Destination Moon at the Museum of Flight (opens April 13, 2019) in Seattle! Here is an exclusive FIRST LOOK at this exhibit, including interviews with curators from the Museum of Flight (Geoff Nunn) and Smithsonian (Kathrin Halpern), and insights from the Museum of Flight's CEO (Matt Hayes). Plus tons of cool space stuff!

I've only scratched the surface of Destination Moon in this video. Of course the centerpiece is Columbia, the Apollo 11 Command Module. This is THE BEST view you'll ever get of the CM, no glass or case covering it! But there is so much more... flight suits, EVA gear, tactile and VR exhibits, and even the real "F1" engines from the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 (they were rescued off the ocean floor!).

If you're in Seattle, GO SEE THIS to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing!


The Museum of Flight
https://twitter.com/MuseumofFlight
https://www.youtube.com/museumofflightNW

Special thanks to @spacefactswax for connecting me with this press preview!



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24 Hours of King County Metro

24 Hours of King County Metro from James Davenport on Vimeo.



A couple weeks ago a colleague approached me, asking if I would be interested in making some kind of data visualization to help raise awareness of an important issue: funding for the local bus system.

I ride the bus almost every day in Seattle, and all my fellow graduate students depend on it. Seattle is a fairly large, dense, and hilly city, with many water and land barriers. The only practical way to get around the city is often via bus.

While our region is in the process of upgrading and building new infrastructure, we must maintain and fund the existing mass transit systems we have. How can our local economy survive if people can't get around the city?!

I mused about the challenge of finding a data visualization to capture the emotion and gravity of this issue. Rather than produce some big infographic or series of detailed graphs, I decided to make an animation. This traces every bus through every stop, for one entire weekday.  Note how our entire city, every major landmark and neighborhood, is traced by just plotting the bus stops. The buses thread the city like ants in a colony, connecting everyone and everywhere.


Here's one cool other figure: the total number of bus stops per minute for an entire day. You can clearly see the AM and PM rush "hours", and the long tail in the evening.

King County Metro has done a fantastic job of making their data for routes, timetables, stops, etc all available online. Playing with and reforming this data was a real delight, and I think you're likely to see other examples of metro data on this website in the near future
(Alex Parker, I'm serious about collaborating on something man!)

Please register to vote, and if you're passionate about transportation in our region (or just cool visualizations!) help keep the buses running!

The Greasiest Spoon in Town

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Last month KIRO 7 reported on the "10 Dirtiest Restaurants" in Seattle (link to story now dead).  Several establishments near UW were featured, and in the past month its been fascinating to watch how they (and the student patrons) reacted.

One UW-area Thai place on said list was quite upset, as they apparently have the same name as another Thai restaurant, and felt it was a case of mistaken identity. They posted a sign decrying the bad press, which didn't last long. My by-eye gauging is that their business maybe took a couple day dip, but has remained strong. Also - the place is by no means "clean".
Just down the 'Ave is a teriyaki restaurant, which absolutely deserves to be on this filthy list. I've had some frightful meals here over the past decade...

This got me thinking about restaurant inspections and food safety across the city, and I went in search of the data that could answer the question: where are the best & worst places to eat in Seattle, according to food inspectors?  Mixing in some GIS shapefiles of Seattle neighborhoods, here's what I came up with:

The data contained about 192k inspections, spanning 2002 - 2009. More recent data was also available, but to get the general map this was all I needed.

There's lots of other fun things one can do with such a large database, including looking at when the food inspectors are most likely to visit a given location, and even when most restaurant inspections occur:

This map, and the initial KIRO report, are examples of the every-day insights you can gather from public data that society is collecting every day. Personal food/restaurant reviews are another great source of insight. Combining these, it could be very interesting if (e.g.) Yelp included the most recent food inspection reports for restaurants. Wouldn't you want to know? Fun stuff.

FYI: King County's Public Health reporting system can be found here.

My Ignite Seattle 19 Talk

Last month I gave a short talk at a super fun event: Ignite Seattle. If you don't know, Ignite is an awesome ongoing series where people give (hopefully) interesting talks. Each presentation is only 5 minutes and the slides auto-change every 15 seconds. This makes it especially fun and challenging for the presenters!

The wonderful Ignite organizer, Monica Guzman, also interviewed me for the Seattle Times Blog, which also led to a fun radio interview last week! I had a total blast with the Ignite talk. The crowd was about 730 people, and tons of positive energy! I'd love to do another Ignite, maybe next time on astronomy stuff.

I also learned a lot by prepping for this talk. I probably practiced 25 times over a couple days, which I think helped immensely. Everyone should be required to give talks like this where you have no control and no ability to go over time (*ahem* AAS)

When to find an apartment

Last September my friend Sarah asked me: "When is the best day to find an apartment in Seattle?"

My buddy John suggested it would be around the 10th of the month, since Seattle's Landlord-Tenant laws dictate that 20 days notice is typically required to terminate rentals. This seemed like a reasonable guess to me, though I imaged there could be an increase towards the end of the month, and possibly a sharp drop at the 1st of each month.

I couldn't find any studies on the topic via Google (please point me to them if you find any!) so it was time to generate some data. I recorded the number of apartment listings for "Capitol Hill" four times a day (7AM, 1PM, 7PM, 1AM) over four months.

Viz: Rain in Seattle? Really?

Today I'm happy to feature a cross-post from my good friend and fellow graduate student, Nicholas Hunt-Walker. He's written a fun post about data and weather, and has some great looking visualizations! The post is reproduced below, but check out his awesome blog: The Roda, The Stars, The Lessons, The Life

Take it away, Nick:

This is my face most days...

Before I moved out here to Seattle for graduate school I was repeatedly warned about how rainy it tends to be out here.  One person even described it as "London-esque".  However, when I first visited back in March 2010 (this becomes relevant later), not only was it barely raining, but it was absolutely gorgeous for each of the 4 days I was here.  I left here thinking, "where's all this rain people were talking about?  It's beautiful here!"

Two years and three months later, I can confirm the well-known Seattle drear.  It feels like it's cloudy more often than not, and it's nearly always wet.  ALWAYS!  Am I just suffering from confirmation bias, or is Seattle's weather always just generally crappy?  Well, being the scientist that I am, I sought to answer these interesting and personally-relevant questions. 

Voting: Do Small Counties Matter?

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With the Aug 7th primary voting already fading to a distant memory, it occurred to me that I never bothered to look at the results! Between the Summer Olympics, fabulous recent weather in Seattle, King Felix's coronation, and signs from God, I can hardly be blamed for this minor oversight.

Getting "out" the vote has been a major movement for most of my life it seems. Who can forget "Vote or Die", which I still consider to be the most benevolent of any voter sign-up organization. The stench of partisan agenda is never far from such campaigns....

I grew up on the Eastern side of Washington State, and have spent most of the last decade on the Western side. Party lines are drawn through our state as if by Creation itself. Even "Seattle conservatives" believe the East siders live in an intellectual rain shadow.

Of course, the primary results yielded almost nothing surprising. Since they provided nothing witty nor urbane to be overheard discussing about, I intended to promptly forget about them. That is... until I realized there was interesting data on the results webpage: voter turnout statistics. Jackpot.

The Lazy Metropolis

It has been reported that voter turnout flirted with record low levels this year. Let's take a look...

Washington State historic voter turnout percentages for
gubernatorial races, with 2012 shown in blue.

This history of diminishing turnout is fascinating to me. What could it mean? A population that is steadily becoming lazier? Or perhaps more disenfranchised and disconnected from the political system? It's difficult to say - indeed I can scarcely think of a rigorous way to test such sentiments. Figures such as this certainly tell a strong story though, and give cause to wonder: will voter turnout continue to linearly decline? Will we reach a point of negligible participation in our own governance? (In so much as voting qualifies as participation. Whether the entire machine has been taken over by the bipartisan corporate-backed military industrial complex... or aliens... is an exercise for the reader) 

Looking in detail at the voter turnout for just this year's primary may give another clue to the nature of such low numbers.

Washington State Primary 2012 voter turnout for all 39 counties,
as a function of the number of registered voters per county.

Another intriguing (somewhat weak) trend is found when looking at the 2012 Primary turnout for each county: more populous counties tend to have lower turnout! This is especially fascinating, indicating to me that the more metropolitan people can't be bothered as much to vote. In other words, Urbanization may negatively affect voter turnout.

The story might be that over time people move in to cities (Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, etc), and as they do they lose incentive to vote. Again, whether this is due increased laziness towards politics seems difficult to prove with testable predictions. Considerably more data exists for WA, and it would seem beneficial to conduct such a study in order to reverse this trend.

And with an increasing percentage of people living in cities, we do need to reverse it. If such a model for decreasing voter participation is true, we must learn why.

Little Fish

Along the lines of urbanization discussed above, it is worth considering the impact that the more dutiful counties are having. This question results in my stupid title: Do Small Counties Matter?

Here we have the cumulative distribution of registered voters in WA. The way to read this is that we have sorted each county by the number of voters (left to right), and then added them up one by one. The incredible result is that the four largest counties (Spokane, Snohomish, Pierce, and King) contain more than 50% of the registered voters! (actually 58.9%) Urbanization in Action!

This also means, naturally, they have the majority of the voters. But, didn't we just see that the rural counties had higher turnout? Well, yes. Unfortunately it's almost insignificant...

As you can see, the cumulative distribution of actual votes in the 2012 Primary is nearly the same as the distribution of the voters. Nearly - but not quite the same. The proud sense of civic duty earned the 35 other counties 1.1% more of the total votes.

So, it would seem something worth talking about did come from looking at the election results! Vote or Die: participation is not the worst of evils.

Never Take SR-520

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Fuel prices have always been higher in Seattle than in many other places in the country. I've been paying around $4.30, and looking at this map from AAA that seems about average for the west coast.

AAA Fuel Gauge Report Map

This year the State Route 520 floating bridge in Seattle become a toll road, after several delays. Besides enabling the automatic tolling service 8 months behind schedule, it's been a rough year for 520. The tolls have been occasionally overcharging drivers, the bridge has been closed many weekends for maintenance (see picture below), and a yacht got wedged under the highway. Yikes.

SR520 closed for weekend

With gas prices climbing, and the 520 tolls due to increase by 2.5% starting July 1st, I thought it high time to finish a post I'd started working on months ago! The premise is simple:

Is it cheaper to take 520, or drive around on I-90?

Tolling prices for weekdays (black) and weekends (blue)

To address this question, we must first understand what the tolling prices are like. Above I have reproduced the weekday and weekend prices as a function of time. You can see the variable price scheme, whereby the drivers in morning and evening rush-hours are relatively fleeced. On the weekends it's a single-peaked distribution, cashing in on (for example) Saturday shoppers headed from Seattle to the popular Bellevue Square shopping mall.

This flat cost is the first part of the equation. Next we need to estimate how fuel efficient your car is, so we can calculate the price of driving the different length routes.

Here I'm showing the fuel efficiency of a car as a function of its speed. The black line describes this efficiency for a fairly ideal passenger car, like my 1999 Honda. The blue line has been reduced in efficiency by 20%, and I believe is more representative of a typical "light SUV", such as the extremely popular (in the northwest) Subaru Outback. I'll be assuming the SUV case below. I don't really know how accurate this data is, but I've assembled it from fueleconomy.gov and I'll let you decide if you think this is a reliable or impartial source.

The last piece of the puzzle is a route to consider! For this example I'll be traveling from UW to Bellevue Square mall. Route A is the direct across 520, route B is the long drive around I-90, via I-5 and I-405. I played with other routes as well, but this is the simplest and most dramatic.

Route A: the direct trip

Route B: the long way around

a

So the game works like this: At every hour of the day, for every speed between 0 and 80mph, I have calculated the cost of going to Bellevue via both routes. The reason I have gone through the silly process of computing cost for every road speed is that I was curious if the distance would be the deciding factor at certain speeds. As such, I apologize if the result figure is complicated. 

Weekday price difference grid, assuming $4.20/gal fuel. Black lines highlight the price
difference over time at 60mph, the nominal speed limit on both roads.

You can almost read off the data from the grid. The color indicates the difference in price between driving around and taking 520. Red indicates that 520 is more expensive. Green to black is I-90 being more expensive, 520 cheaper. The color-bar (legend) at top was capped at $1, but the maximum price difference was actually around $1.80.

The result gives rise to the pointed name I chose for this post: you should (almost) never take SR 520 if you want to save money. The exceptions are:

• late at night, when the toll is not in effect
• if you're driving 5mph
• if your time is worth more than the amount you save driving around. As a graduate student, the choice is laughably clear.

During the off-hours (11pm-5am) you can see the shape of the fuel economy curve quite nicely. Some of that effect can also be seen at the high-speed end. A reminder to you all: going 55mph saves lives and gas, which in turn saves other lives.

It may occur to you (or, it did to me at least) that this result depends on what the price of gas is, and you'd be absolutely correct. So I turned that knob in the model, and found that at ~$7/gallon gas it becomes cheaper to take 520 at all times except rush hour.

The result also depends on your fuel economy in as similar way. I've only explored the case of a small SUV, but consider a semi truck that gets 6-8 miles per gallon! In almost every conceivable scenario it would be cheaper to save a gallon or two of gas and take 520.

Maybe I'm an optimist, or a fool, but it seems like a reasonable proposal for the toll prices would have been to make them price-neutral to driving around. Tolling also increases traffic on other roads, decreasing the profitability some. I did enjoy seeing that the tolls don't affect low income families greatly. I read through a few of the initial reports released about the 520 tolls, but I'm very interested in looking at the traffic statistics and financial data to see if it meets predictions.

Overall I'm struck with how different the data analysis seems to be in this field. Figures don't seem precise, but rather very bold and contrasting. Sometimes this is effective and accurately tells a story better than a very precise figure. Frequently I find the plots burdensome, but that's the subject for another post...