So there's a UFO right in front of you: what do you do? Should you get the camera, phone a friend, or seek shelter in the bunker you bought from Danoz Direct one late night?
Well you don't have much time make the decision. Half of reported UFO sightings lasted for two minutes or less (Figure 1). And 90 per cent lasted for six minutes or less.
Figure 1
This would barely give you enough time to cook a quick snack. But it would give you plenty of time to take your phone out of your pocket and snap a quick photo. Some people did this, apparently. About 5 per cent of the statements given after reporting a UFO sighting mentioned the word camera. None of the reports mentioned guns, bunkers, or two minute noodles.
The length of sightings has become slightly shorter over the past two decades (Figure 2). I don't think this means too much. But it does give me an opportunity to put a moving gif on the blog. I guess if you squinted you could say that this gives some evidence that the speed of UFOs has fractionally increased in recent years, which would be consistent with a rise the speed of military aircraft over the period. But this could be bending the data.
Figure 2
Next post, the UFO research will reach a pinnacle with the release of a killer graph. Perhaps it will be so big that I will coincide it's release with Independence Day. A day that will forever be remembered for alien invasions.
Technical stuff
Despite the post's apparent simplicity, getting the unstructured data into a workable format was a pain. In the end, I parsed it using the tm library. But in hindsight it would have been easier and more efficient just to use R's base string functions. I made the graph of the dancing density function using the animation library, which was actually comparatively easy.
No comments:
Post a Comment