Sport activities over the years

Seven years ago I started tracking my daily sports activities. I've created an online form using google docs, it was automatically mailed to me daily, and that's why I almost never missed a day.
Throughout the years I never found the time to fetch the data and do some basic analysis and visualization.
Even though the year 2012 is not yet over, I was curious to see some graphs of my data. After some basic aggregation using a ruby script, you can see a graph showing for each activity the number of times (days) I engaged in it. It is far from being as beautiful as Stephen Wolfram's cool visualizations, but nonetheless I'm proud of it :)



So, what did learn?

• On average I'm engaged in sports for around 200 days of the year. That's more than 50%.
• Since 2007 I gave up on basketball (because I left my previous work place)
• Since 2007 I almost never surfed (because my wife and I left our studio which was located by the beach)
• Since 2009 I started to play tennis
• Starting with 2011 I'm doing dips exercise in addition to pull-ups

TI Launchpad Case

I've been looking around the web for a laser cut case design for TI's launchpad board, but couldn't find anything. I did find an excellent Google Sketchup model for the launchpad here. It wont be hard to design a custom case using this model, and other useful references.

Heads or Tails, 50% chance?

We are all grown to believe that flipping a coin in the air will result in 50% chance of getting “heads” or “tails”. Coin toss became the standard example of a random event in probability courses, but a study by Persi Diaconis, Susan Holmes, and Richard Montgomery on the Dynamical Bias in the Coin Toss proved otherwise. Turns out that the chance of a coin falling on the same side it started on is 0.51, and, respectively, there’s a 0.49 chance that it will fall on the other side. At first this difference might seem insignificant, but in the long run this kind of differences is what makes gamblers lose a lot of money to casinos. The full article is available here, and even though extensive knowledge of physics is required to fully comprehend it, there's still something satisfying in riffling through the pages in an attempt to understand the models, vectors and the long formulas.