Heatmaps and Spurious Correlations

Today’s XKCD was good enough to share. As both Sean’s spurious correlations and my pixel maps are relevant, I figure some of you might get a good laugh, too.

There are also a lot of global versions of this map showing traffic to English-language websites which are indistinguishable from maps of the location of internet users who are native English speakers.

As always, the alt-text might be the best part.

Author: Richard

I am computational linguistics student at the University of Saarland; my undergraduate in Linguistics was at the University of Edinburgh. I am interested in evolutionary linguistics, particularly involving Bayesian phylogenetics, typology, and computer simulations. I am also interested in data management, web development, open documentation, and scientific workflows. My undergraduate thesis focused on the evolution and significance of word segmentation.

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