Thanksgiving isn’t about filling your plate with as much turkey as you can fit. It’s about putting as many different kinds of sides on your plate as humanly possible.
In that spirit — and, I must admit, as a result of shorter Thanksgiving-week deadlines for our print section this week — I’m going to use this week’s data column to show you a few shorter items that I’ve found interesting but weren’t suitable for the full data-deep dive article treatment.
Yes, it’s a Thanksgiving grab bag.
The hum
My October article about noise complaints actually started with a look into another subject of ambient noise: The Hum.
Essentially, a minority of people around the world hear an ongoing low-frequency hum. Some describe it as a droning noise, or a rumbling. And it doesn’t seem like there’s a single source, but multiple sources around the world of various types.
But such hums can be exceptionally difficult to track down, especially given how few people can hear them. Probably the most famous hum in the world is the Taos, New Mexico Hum, which about 2% of residents can hear. But, despite some pretty significant searching, the source is still undetermined. A 1995 study, which recorded sounds at two different locations in Taos, couldn’t find evidence of it, nor could researchers find any seismic or electromagnetic signals that would maybe explain what was happening. There weren’t real connectors between those who hear it, either — they were approximately equally split among genders and age groups.
The World Hum Map online at thehum.info tries to document the phenomenon worldwide, asking hearers of the hum to share their experiences. Along the Wasatch Front, 17 reports have been filed on the site.
Those reports vary widely. A couple separate reports describe the noise they hear as similar to a truck idling in the distance — but constantly. One report calls the hum they hear as “like an annoying teenager playing the bass at 2 a.m.” Another says it’s “similar to a home theater subwoofer that is on but not receiving any signal.”
Like the Taos Hum, the Auckland, New Zealand Hum, and the St. Louis Hum, the hum these local folks have experienced has yet to be explained. However, hums in other parts of the world have found explanations. The Windsor, Ontario hum died as the U.S. Steel blast furnaces were stopped, and the West Seattle hum was traced to a vacuum pump used by a shipping company to offload cargo.
However, the coolest source of hum in Utah is undoubtedly arches. Yes, I’m referring to the rock formations that make Arches National Park famous, though obviously they’re scattered all over the state. Like massive guitar strings, the arches vibrate due to wind and traffic, which creates sound. While they do so subsonically, researchers can hear the sounds if sped up; tracking the hums also allows scientists to know if arch structure is changing.
Neat.
John Doe around the world
Why do we use John and Jane Doe as placeholder names?
There’s no certain reason. We’ve been using those names for anonymous criminals, defendants, and murder victims for a surprising number of centuries, perhaps even going back to the 14th century in England. We also sometimes use “John and Jane Doe” as example names in advertising. There are plenty of tales of how “John Doe” came to be, but we really don’t have much evidence for any of them.
But never is it more clear that “John Doe” is an arbitrary choice when you look at placeholder names in other countries.
The Russians use “Ivan Ivanovich.” Germans use “Max Mustermann” — which translates to Max Exampleman. Names involving the word “fulan,” “fulano,” or “fulana” propagate in both Africa and many Spanish speaking countries. Ola Nordmann is the most common placeholder name in Norway, “Nordmann” means Norwegian.
The full list was posted by user “chickenshrimp92″ on Reddit, and it cracked me up.
The Utah teapot
It’s been called “the most important object in computer graphics history.” It’s also called the Utah teapot.
You see, England’s Martin Newell was getting a PhD from the University of Utah in the mid-1970s in computer graphics, when he needed a complicated enough object to render for his studies. His wife, Sandra, suggested their teapot.
Why? Well, it had a number of characteristics Newell was looking for. As Tribune reporter Matthew Piper explained in a great story from 2016, “It cast a shadow on itself, it was round but didn’t have overly complex curves, and had a concave space created by its handle.”
The teapot echoed throughout computer science research at the time — Newell wasn’t the only one who needed a model with the level of complexity of a teapot. It went viral in a burgeoning computer community, and by 1989, Newell was giving opening speeches at conferences about his teapot model.
“It was quite bizarre… This room full of thousands of people hanging on my every word about the teapot,” Newell said. It’s still frequently used as a model in rendering experiments, even today.
The original teapot modeled was purchased at a ZCMI department store. Now, it’s in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
Age, gender, and voting trends in the LDS Church
We’ve used a lot of religion statistician Ryan Burge’s graphs in recent articles, most notably in this article back in September. This is one that fell on the cutting room floor for that article.
In general, the trend of Latter-day Saints who identified as Republicans vs. Democrats in the Nationscape data set tends to be pretty similar across age groups, with one exception — those from 18 to 24. In those ages, young males identify as Republicans about 50% of the time, while young women identify as Republicans only 25% of the time.
That brings more nuance to what we identified in the September article, which showed the partisan differences between young and old Latter-day Saints. Upon further inspection, the majority of those differences are because young women are leaning away from the Republican party.
Andy Larsen is a data columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune. You can reach him at alarsen@sltrib.com
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