Overthinking it

One dumb thought at a time

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Defining the generations

November 30, 2022 /

Generations is a very… imprecise… sociological concept. People just sorta look at a rough cohort of ages and say “yeah, you all are a generation.” Start and end points (as well as labels) just sorta coalesce out of the ether.

Nevertheless, they have their use and certainly are cemented in the popular imagination. I’ve been doing some reading on generations and really appreciated this diagram and article by Pew Research. But I wish it went a little earlier and a little later. So I made my owner version, *heavily* influenced by the Pew version.

A diagram showing generation birth year starting with the Lost Generation (born 1883 - 1900) and ending with Generation Alpha (Born 2013-2030).

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

January 4, 2022 /

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

Brimley/Cocoon Line

October 21, 2021 /

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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