Author: nickwinnenberg
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Last Frost Date
Last week’s post on false spring had me thinking about when I should actually start planting things in the ground. I was always told “Mother’s Day” is the safest time to plant. Climate data is free, so let’s figure out the earliest planting date in Dayton, Ohio. Feel free to use the NOAA data to…
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False Spring
Spring has finally sprung, and while the veggies might not be in the ground (I’m eying you, Natorps), the weather has certainly turned. Yet every year, I feel like I’m faked-out by a series of days tricking me into thinking it’s spring, way earlier than it should. It’s a known phenomenon called “Fake Spring,” and…
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March Madness Final Update
Results: Not bad! The model ended up in the 99th percentile among all submitted brackets, with an overall rank of 39,059 across all global brackets. It successfully predicted that Michigan would be the ultimate winner and correctly predicted three of the final four (Michigan, Illinois, and Arizona). Overall, the model made 43 correct picks, 11…
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NBA: Strong Link or Weak Link
A few weeks ago, we did a project looking at hockey and identifying if it was a strong-link or whole chain sport. Basically, is it better to have a single all-star or a group of consistent, slightly better-than-average skaters on the rink? With hockey, we identified it as a whole-link sport; yet, since we’re in…
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NCAA Predicted Matches
Here it is! The perfect bracket. Just kidding… probably. How did we get here? Methodology Data Notes I started with a correlation analysis using a Kaggle dataset available here, and I found that the only factors significantly and positively correlated with NCAA bracket success were the following… So, for simplicity, I created a model just…
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NCAA Meets Neural Network
Happy March! For many Americans, March means Basketball (or NCAA snacks, like Buffalo Chicken Dip). I’ve tried a couple of dozen different ways to fill out March Madness brackets. Not because I know sports, but because I really don’t. I’ve picked teams based on color wheels, randomly, by the length of team names, which team…
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Birthday Buddies
In a group of 23 people, there is a 50% chance that 2 people have the same birthday. By the time you get past 50ish people, that number effectively becomes 100%. The first time my little reptile brain heard that “paradox” it gave me a headache. There are 365 days in a year, so the…
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President’s Day
Okay, real talk. George Washington’s birthday was Feb 22nd. President’s day was originally planned to honor George Washington, so I’m sticking to that fact that this post is NOT late, and instead, the exact time it’s supposed to be posted. Afterall, a wizard is never late. In honor of all the presidents that have came…
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Podcast Episode: Can my Friends be fictional?
At the end of my last conversation with Dr. Harry Owen Taylor, he said something that I couldn’t quite shake. He mentioned that technology is going to change the way we experience isolation and loneliness forever. That’s one of those statements that sounds obvious on the surface—and then gets more uncomfortable the longer you sit…
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Is the Groundhog onto Something?
It’s February 2026, and the groundhog, unfortunately, predicted a longer winter. But does that really matter? Who told this groundhog he was going to predict weather? Did he grow up, as a pup, dreaming of being a weatherman? Does he know something we don’t know? I want to know if he’s onto something. I want…
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