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What I learned by listening to every Beatles album (in order)

Inspired by Get Back I recently undertook to listen to every Beatles album in order. Herein lies what I learned.

  • It’s harder than you’d think to say what is a Beatles album. Wikipedia list 21 studio albums, five live albums, and 54 compilation albums. That’s a lot and a lot more than the 12 I listened to.
  • Singles used to be a real thing. There are a lot of Beatles hits that aren’t on any of the canonical albums.
  • The Beatles were pretty great.

And here’s how I rank the Beatles albums, worst to best:

12) Yellow Submarine

11) Help

10) Magical Mystery Tour

9) Beatles For Sale

8) With the Beatles

7) A Hard Day’s Night

6) Let it be

5) Abbey Road

4) Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band

3) The Beatles (The White Album)

2) Revolver

1) Rubber Soul

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Brimley/Cocoon Line

Last week I was curious when I would cross the Brimley/Cocoon line (the age Wilford Brimley was when Cocoon premiered). The answer is: way too soon.

But it inspired me to create a little R package so that anyone could figure out when they would cross the line. I put the package up on Github and you can find it here.

And since not everyone is an R programmer, I threw it into a little website that you can use here.

This was heavily inspired by @brimleyline on twitter. After the fact I did a search and discovered another site had already made a simple tool for this. But I like mine better 🙂 .

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My first D3 graph

I’ve started playing around with D3. If I’m going to be locked inside for months, I might as well learn something, right? (And it might just take months of being locked inside for me to actually understand D3.). Thought I’d post my first simple bar chart here. It shows the songs Fugazi played most frequently during their live shows. To do this in WordPress, I’m currently embedding another html file, change it to pre-formatted, and then changing it again to paragraph (no idea why this last step is necessary). But is seems to work.

Here’s the same chart as a direct link http://martinbarron.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/t1_simplebar.html