Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Commentary

Gun Violence Statistics

There’s a lot of gun violence in the news. I’m not going to get into the politics of it, but it did make me take a look at how bad things really are. Here’s the hypothesis that we’ll test: Gun violence is worse than it’s ever been before.

First, a couple caveats. As a data scientist, I know first hand that data can be beaten into submission to “prove” any hypothesis you want. It takes extra work to really let the data speak for itself and possibly disprove your hunches. And on a related note, it’s difficult to find good data sources. Articles are not reliable because they’re generally very doctored to get their intended point across. The bigger, more reliable studies that publish raw data don’t publish data every year.

The most reliable numbers I could find were from the CDC’s National Vital Statistics Reports published in February 2016. Unfortunately the data in that report is from 2013, but it’s the most recent and trustworthy that I could find. That report states that in 2013, 11,208 of those were firearm homicides. That comes out to 3.5 people out of 100,000 or 0.0035% of the population. Other causes of death in the same range are aortic aneurysms, emphysema, multiple myeloma, stomach cancer and intestinal infections. Homicides by firearms accounted for 0.4% of the all deaths in 2013. By the way, do you want to know what the top three causes of death were?

  1. Heart disease: 23.5%
  2. Cancer: 22.5%
  3. Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 5.7%

My go-to comparison is always vehicle deaths. You’re 3.15 times more likely to die in a car accident than by a gun homicide. Do you worry 3.15 times more about the car accident than the gun homicide?

Those are all numbers from a single year. The original hypothesis was that we’re worse off than we were before so let’s look at some trend data. I spent a bunch of time doing searces in the http://wonder.cdc.gov system. It has data for 1999-2104. Here’s the summary I built for that data:

deathsbyyearregion

I had no idea that 45% of gun homicides were in the south! But back to the main point: those numbers don’t show much change. But hold on. They are slightly misleading because they are raw counts. The population grew significantly over that time range. We should be looking at the number of deaths per 100,000 people. That average has decreased:

gunhomicidesper100k

We’re not finding much data to support our hypothesis, but what about pre-1999? I couldn’t find data in that CDC system pre-1999, but I did find this chart showing that we had a peak in the 90s that was much worse than today. This data comes from the Bureau of Justice Statistics via Wikipedia. Note that these numbers are a bit lower than the CDC numbers for the overlapping years. The CDC has their gun homicide deaths broken down into a number of categories (rifles, shotguns, pistols, terrorism, etc) and I’m guessing the Bureau of Justice Statistics has a slightly different categorization. However, I think it’s still valuable to look at the data:

Ushomicidesbyweapon

I lived through that huge spike of gun homicides and had no idea that it existed.

I learned that you have to be really careful when comparing numbers because “gun deaths” can mean a lot of things. Some sites will include suicide by guns in their numbers. Suicide with guns are roughly twice as common as homicides with guns so they really change the numbers. Other articles will do their ratios and percentages based on people under 25. A large majority of the gun violence happens to and by people under 25. Some sites even include war related deaths in their gun numbers. And as you saw above, even reporting the raw totals can be used to trick people if you’re intentionally leaving out the fact that the population changed over that time range.

Do we have a problem? Yep. Would it be a horrifying event to witness? Yep. Should we analyze the data and run experiments to see how we could improve the problem? Yep. Is it worse than used to be? Nope.

P.S. Will any of this data stop people from yelling at other on TV? Nope.

New Truck

The truck is here! I got a call Saturday morning saying it had just arrived on the train at the depot in Kent. They put a rush on it and I got to pick it up on Sunday afternon. Kudos to Evergreen Ford in Issaquah for helping me do a bunch of the paperwork by phone and email on Saturday so that Sunday went faster. That was really appreciated since we had Elijah in tow.

The final deal went very well. When you order, you get the rebates and factory incentives at the time of the delivery. That equated to $4200 in extra savings that I hadn’t planned on! They gave me a fair deal for the Subaru and incorporated a change to our previous agreement because Uncle Mark was able to let me use his A-plan family pricing deal. Ford temporarily extended it to nieces and nephews. Yay!

I got out without paying any extra money except I did add mud flaps and the spray in bedliner. Both were planned purchases at some point in the next month so I just tacked them on there. It’s in the shop today getting those things done.

I’ve only had it for a couple days so I can’t give a full review, but I have no buyers remorse. The Sync 3 system is a great improvement over Sync 2 and it will get even better once we switch to Android phones this winter. The truck drives nicely and the big backup camera view is a help trying to maneuver this beast into parking spots. But enough jibber jabber, how about some photos?

f150_1f150_2 f150_3

 

Truck Downsides

f150builtfordtoughTired of hearing about the upcoming truck delivery? Too bad! Ha! I think about it a LOT so that’s what ends up coming out of my mouth and my fingers. Most of my thoughts are excitement and anticipation (current estimated delivery date is 6/28), but I’ve also been taking time to enjoy my Subaru. Here are some things I’ll miss about it:

  • It’s so inexpensive and reliable! I only paid about $17K for it brand new and other than oil changes and standard service, I’ve only put about $4-5K into it. The cost per mile was phenomenally low.
  • It’s a manual and I really enjoy driving manual transmissions. I drove an automatic for a couple years after getting my license but then I started a run of manuals: 1991 Ford Probe, 2002 Ford Mustang GT and this 2006 Subaru Impreza. That adds up to about 16 or 17 years of driving a stick.
  • I’m pretty sure that the Subaru will be a lot better in the slippery conditions than the truck will be.
  • The small size is very convenient for parking and driving in traffic. I’m sure that there will be plenty of annoying times trying to find a parking spot for the huge truck.
  • Oddly enough, some types of wood purchases will be more difficult with the truck. For example, I can fit 20-30 8 foot 2x4s in the Subaru with the hatch and the windows closed. That means I can get wood even if it’s raining. With the truck those will have to go in the bed and they’ll hang out over the tailgate. Obviously there are plenty of other hauling situations which are way easier with a truck, but the Subie was no slouch.

And I guess the final one isn’t specific to the Subaru and the truck, but it’s kind of relaxing to drive a car that’s already dinged up. Those first few scratches in a new vehicle can be extra annoying.

So yes, I’m going to be thrilled when I swap keys for the truck, but this Subaru has been an excellent vehicle for me.

Beer Festival

WP_20160618_001This past weekend was the annual beer festival at Marymoor. Last year I went with Don and Logan. This year Don was out of town, but Logan went again and Luke and Tim came too. It was a pretty wet day but somehow it didn’t rain while we were there.

There were 111 breweries there and most breweries had four or five different beers on tap. You get a 5 oz glass and 10 tokens. I definitely didn’t hit a home run with every beer, but it’s a fun way to try beers that you might not normally buy.

A huge thanks to the ladies for watching the kids while we enjoyed ourselves. I love this event!

Housing Market

Real-Estate-Sellers-Market-PictureI’ve been happily watching my house value skyrocket since we bought it. In less than 5 years, Zillow says we’re up 44%! I say “happily” because it’s nice to see that I bought in a trough instead of at a peak like last time, but since I have no plans to move for quite a while, all it really does is raise my property taxes.

The market is crazy though. It feels like we have to be heading toward another bubble pop. I don’t see how it’s possible to sustain growth like this. I have a couple friends at work looking for houses. This is their routine:

  • Thursday: Browse online to see all the new houses that come online.
  • Weekend: Go to an open house and make an offer.
  • Monday: Hear if you won or not.

You probably didn’t get the house. It’s not uncommon to have 10 offers on the house and the top one probably waved the inspection, paid $20-100K over asking price, and might even be paying cash. Yikes.

Flat Rainbow

On Tuesday, my Facebook and Instagram feeds lit up with pictures of a “flat rainbow” in the area. It turns out that this was a “circumhorizontal arc”. Cliff Mass has a good blog post explaining it. “The sun’s light was refracted (bent) by ice crystals in the thin upper clouds”. Wikipedia describes it like this: “The complete halo is a huge, multi-coloured band running parallel to the horizon with its centre beneath the sun” I’ll let you read those two linked articles if you want to learn more about the science, but for now, enjoy this beautiful flat rainbow over Stevens Pass.

stevenspassflatrainbow

Truck VIN

Now that Ford has assigned a VIN to my truck, I can use some interesting tools. For example, did you know that the letters and numbers in the VIN tell all kinds of things like what range the gross vehicle weight is in, the type of engine, the plant it was built in (mine is Kansas City) and how many vehicles were built before yours?

Another nifty tool for Ford buyers is COTUS. It’s a website that lets you check the status of your order. You can get to it either at http://www.cotus.ford.com or http://wwwqa.cotus.ford.com. The sites are notoriously flaky but I finally got the second one to work for my order. As expected, it shows that my truck is “In Order Processing”. That’s the longest phase, but you know I’ll be checking this site pretty regularly!

cotusIt’s amazing what you can find on the Internet if you look around! If you’re in the market for an F150, I highly recommend F150Forum.com. It’s a goldmine of information.

UPDATE: This afternoon when I logged in, COTUS told me the estimated delivery date was July 9! Let’s see if that holds true…

CrashPlan Success Story

crashplanlogoAll of our photos, including the ones we take on the phone, end up getting stored on our computer. This week, Tyla was looking back at photos from 2013 and she noticed that all the photos from her phone between January 1 and June 6 were gone. Uh oh.

I said I’d take a look but obviously they were nowhere to be found on the computer. Thankfully, it wasn’t a problem. I fired up CrashPlan, told it to show me all the files including ones that were later deleted from the computer and voila, there they were. A couple clicks and I had all the photos back on my machine again.

We’ve been happily using CrashPlan for five years now and this is the first time I’ve used it for a major recovery operation. But even if we never used it, I’d still pay for it. It’s only $60 and that’s cheap insurance.

Truck Update

boywaitingatwindowIt’s time for another update on my truck order process. The dealer contacted this week and said that I have a VIN! This means that my order is starting to move forward. General estimates from this point are 10-14 weeks which puts me into August so hopefully we’ll have a shiny new truck in the driveway for my birthday. He said that in a few weeks he should have a better estimate, but honestly I’m just happy to know that it’s starting. I was worried that they were going to cancel the orders for these heavy duty F150s like they did last year.

This whole process kind of reminds me of my childhood on days when we had relatives coming over. I’d pull a chair up to the window and stare down our long driveway trying to catch a glimpse of the car. I’m not sure I can spare 14 weeks to sit at the window though…

No Complaining Debrief

peacefulTwo weeks ago I said I was going to try not to complain for the next 14 days. That period is up and it was an interesting experience. I definitely failed more than once, but I told many of the people around me that I was doing it and they were happy to call me out when I complained.

I have a couple takeaways from the experience:

  • It’s hard to define complaining. I think you can tell facts with zero emotion and still be complaining. But those same words said at a different time of day might not be complaining. It’s tricky to pin down exactly what the bad behavior is, but just being reflective on your behavior is a net win. And if it causes you to keep your mouth shut because you aren’t sure if it’s complainig, that’s probably not a bad thing either.
  • Once I had a better handle on complaining, I became accutely aware of people complaining around me. It’s easy to get sucked into that mentality. Bad behavior spreads more easily than good behavior.

Now that it’s over, I’m free to complain! Or not. Obviously the point of this was to break a habit and try to get on a better track. I’ll try to make this one permanent and pick up another one going forward.