#note to self: include category data for the kaiju when it's available

[unnonexistence]

ok we are doing Pacific Rim Data Visualization live on my blog tonight because i can't help myself

I'm going to put this post in the main pacrim tag in case anyone is interested, but i don't want to annoy anyone, so everything else is just going to be in my #unscientific aside tag. okay? okay.

basically i am making graphs of stuff hermann would have been making graphs of (& predictive models about).

so i'm thinking one nice way to show the increasing frequency of kaiju attacks over the years would be a bar graph along these lines:

2013-2025 is a pretty good time span in terms of number of bars, so it'll look nice, and it'll clearly show the increase over time. i might leave 2025 out because the movie takes place in january 2025 so it'll look funny to leave it in (only 1 attack pre-movie, i think).

now this would be a very broad-strokes graph. this is the kind of graph that just kind of says "hey there have been more and more giant monsters emerging from the ocean lately. that's probably bad". i want to do something with hermann's predictive models, & this isn't going to work for that.

i could do a more specific one, e.g. by month, but even for 2024 when there are a stupid number of attacks in the timeline, that's not ideal. some months are only going to have one or two & it'll look funny. also, his model gets down to "number of minutes between attacks", which is way too specific to use a bar graph.

for the predictive model, when i think about "increasing frequency of kaiju attacks" & hermann's speech about it*, what I picture is a line something like this:

ignore the scale, i just put whatever. the point is Number Go Up.

the problem though is that means the y axis needs to be number of kaiju attacks, and the x axis needs to be time. which like... idk how to make that work? this is probably just because idk what i'm doing, but like... the attacks are happening at distinct points in time. how are we defining "number of attacks"? it would have to be number of attacks over some timespan, right? i guess it could be Total Number Ever but that seems weird.

this maybe should be a dot plot of some sort, but the thing with the axes is throwing me off. I'm going to work on some of the actual data stuff and report back, but at some point i probably need to do some research about the types of graph i can make & what they're used for.

if anyone has ideas or otherwise wants to talk about this PLEASE let me know. nerd bullshit is more fun with other people.

*you know, the one that got meme'd? "In four days, we could be seeing a kaiju every eight hours until they are coming every four minutes."