Noah Kalina’s averaged face over 7,777 days

Noah Kalina has been taking a picture of himself every day since January 11, 2000. He posted time-lapse videos in 2007, 2012, and 2020. Last year was the 20th of the project.

Usually Kalina’s videos are a straight up time-lapse using every photo. But in this collaboration with Michael Notter, 7,777 Days shows a smoother passage of time. Notter used machine learning to align the face pictures, and then each frame shows a 60-day average, which focuses on an aging face instead of everything else in the background.

Tags: , , , ,

All the art in the Oval Office

The President of the United States chooses the art for the Oval Office, and the choices show who the president admires or the image they want to project. Larry Buchanan and Matt Stevens for The New York Times take you through all of the choices since the Kennedy administration.

About half way through the piece, an averaged image of the office through several presidencies shows what changes and what stays the same. Usually these averaged images feel gimmicky or don’t show you much, but as a lead in to separate pictures, the blurred image works.

Tags: , , , , ,

Average view of Earth from space

Using a year’s worth of daily images from NASA’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), Johannes Kroeger constructed the average snapshot for 2018. Fun.

Tags: , ,

Most typical city in America

Here’s a fun piece by Karl Sluis. He looked at eight demographic metrics, such as population, age, and income (based on estimates from the American Community Survey) and found the “most typical” city in America that sat around the median of all the measurements.

According to the averages across these eight measures, the Lynchburg, Virginia Statistical Area is the most typical statistical area in the country. Made of four counties and eleven communities, Lynchburg’s statistics are less than half of a standard deviation from average across every measure. In fact, the median income of Lynchburg’s residents ($46,913) lies closer to the average ($46,871) than any other city.

Congratulations, Lynchburg. You get the award for most average.

Tags: ,

An average life as interpretive dance

BuzzFeed used interpretive dance to describe the average age of the milestones in our lives, from birth, losing the first tooth, marriage, and death. The data points serve more as background, as a way to provide a timeline of events, and the dancing is the primary focus.

I found myself drawn to the comments on YouTube. Typically a cesspool of idiocy and more idiocy, the comment section in this case might be a good representation for how a (younger) general audience interprets averages. All of the top comments are basically, “I guess I’m not average” and “There’s no way that’s the average. [Insert comparison to self.]”

This of course is because averages are just that. They’re the sum of all individuals divided by the total population, and average values represent one aspect of a range or distribution of things.

So in the case of these average ages, most people either fall below or above instead of right in the middle.

But I digress.

Tags: , ,

Every episode of Friends season 1, played simultaneously

All ten seasons of Friends are currently available on Netflix, but watching shows episode-by-episode is for chumps and people stuck in second gear. We Used to Be Friends is a straightforward mashup that plays all episodes from the first season at once, overlaid on each other. Enjoy below.

[via Waxy]

Tags: ,