Comments on: Love is Old-Fashioned, Sex Less So

By: singingfish

singingfish — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:58:25 +0000

love the mosaic plot! Much prettier than the ones I’ve used in JMP as well!

Notched boxplots are a bit of a “best of both worlds” (short of bootstrap anyway), although the literature is a bit vague. You can also prod the boxplots to have the box width proportional to sample size, for even greater data density.

By: sanjay

sanjay — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 08:00:04 +0000

Mule’s note: I don’t usually let spam through, but this comment was sufficiently amusing that I’m letting it though (stripped of contact details):

Hi
I Am Sanjay india No-1 love guru
What you have any Problem in your love
plz… call me….962884xxxx , 993604xxxx

Email- sanju.xxxx@gmail.com
your love guru
sanjay kumar

By: Stilgherrian · Links for 24 July 2009 through 26 July 2009

Stilgherrian · Links for 24 July 2009 through 26 July 2009 — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 01:39:42 +0000

[...] Love is Old-Fashioned, Sex Less So | A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective: Comparing the music in the Triple J Hottest 100 and The Guardian’s recent list of 1000 songs to hear before you die, the Mule comes up with the view that love is out of fashion. Also, chart pr0n. [...]

By: Michael Michael

Michael Michael — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:13:02 +0000

Ooh, just noticed some ‘chartjunk’ on your mosaic plot, yo! The bottom right ’stubbornmule.net’ is TOTALLY blowing out your data:ink ratio. Yo!

By: Mark L

Mark L — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 06:00:52 +0000

That mosaic chart, erm, rocks — brilliant.

Another tenuous interpretation: The Guardian list appears to have a dip in frequency during the 1990s, while this is the most popular decade in the Hottest 100 list; so perhaps the two audiences are complementary. The alternative-rock-loving Gen Y has turned its back on the newspaper, leaving a Hottest-100-shaped hole in the Guardian list.

By: stubbornmule

stubbornmule — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 01:11:51 +0000

Michael Michael: your point is well made. Also, given that the Hottest 100 was determined by votes and the Guardian’s list was based on nominations that were then curated by the Guardian. Perhaps a case could be made that the Hottest 100 reflects popular songs (among the listeners of Triple J) while the Guardian’s list more simply reflects what is memorable. A long bow perhaps, but that is the spirit of this post after all.

By: Michael Michael

Michael Michael — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 01:05:10 +0000

Yo yo yo yo yo. Just don’t get too cray-zee here. There’s the faintest whiff of the error that you warned against in your Hottest one hundy post. I know you haven’t actually made it in your brainbox, but that whiff is there in the text, yo.

Said error: This doesn’t show that – say – party songs boomed in the 70s and 80s. That’s poppycock. I’ve heard plenty of songs from the 20s-30s about jumpin’ joints and drinking blueberry wine etc. What it does show is that UK-ers ‘remember’ the ‘more important’ songs (i.e. people and places) and so vote for them accordingly. So, yes, maybe 20s-50s party songs are underrepresented in this list, but that doesn’t show they were so at the time.

Also: why the goddamn-it do 40-sumthin’ UK-ers have such terrible taste in music?

By: stubbornmule

stubbornmule — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:21:18 +0000

I just realised that there are a few songs that are repeated, albeit under different themes:

“Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” by Bing Crosby (people and places, politics and protest)
“Short People” by Randy Newman (politics and protest, party songs)
“I Want You” by Elvis Costello and the Attractions (heartbreak, sex)
“My Generation” by The Who (politics and protest, party songs)
“Smalltown Boy” by Bronski Beat (people and places, politics and protest)
“The Village Green Preservation Society” by The Kinks (people and places, politics and protest)

Strictly speaking, this means that Randy Newman and The Kinks should drop down a notch in the top 12 ranking.

By: stubbornmule

stubbornmule — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:44:38 +0000

Mark: I’ve added a couple of additional charts that should make the distribution a bit clearer. What is happening is that the skew to early years is due to a very small number of songs. Stripping them out, the skew is actually to the more recent years.

By: Mark L

Mark L — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:57:28 +0000

I agree that pie charts are (mostly) evil. A better approach would be a histogram of all songs with colours within each bar showing decomposition according to theme. This would give a good visual representation of the relative prevalence of different themes, both overall and in each period.

While the averages seem to indicate “skew to the right”, I don’t understand how that happens — it is, at least for me, highly unexpected.