Friday Delight: 5 charts that will inspire, inform or make you laugh
Friday Delight: 5 charts that will inspire, inform or make you laugh
Americans splurging on boats, Taylor Swift's billion dollar tour, Baggy jeans or skinny jeans, AI vs. Humans & Timezones in Antarctica
Happy Friday to all my readers!!!
This week, I launched The Pragmatic Optimist. And I thank you all who have subscribed. I truly appreciate your support in this journey.
So, without further ado, let’s end the week on a high note with 5 charts that I have collected from various sources on the internet.
Chart 1: Americans sound miserable, but are buying lots of boats
Americans are splurging on pleasure boats at remarkable highs.
Why it matters: You don't buy a boat unless you're fairly confident the economic wind is at your back, so this is a good sign that Americans are actually feeling pretty good.
By the way: Axios' Joann Muller, who's reported in depth on the trend, says this isn't just about the rich. "It's not the yacht-owning one-percenters responsible for America's booming boat economy," she wrote in June. "Rather, it's the vast numbers of regular folks fishing, water-skiing, sailing and jet-skiing, according to the National Marine Manufacturers Association."
Chart 2: The Unstoppable Pop of Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift fans battled hourlong lines and incessant technical difficulties trying to get tickets to the tour of the year.
But did you know that the average resale value on SeatGeek for a Taylor Swift concert ticket is $1651.
That is 367% above the face value of the ticket price, which ranged between $49 and $449.
As the U.S. tour comes to a close and the international tour begins, Pollstar estimates that the tour will be the highest-grossing on record. Elton John holds the current record at $939.1 million. Swift is expected to wind up with around $1.4 billion, the first-ever-tour to break into the billions.
Chart 3: Baggy jeans vs. Tight jeans
Did you know that that US search interest in “baggy jeans” surpassed that of “tight jeans” in 2020, and is currently at an all time high?
Chart 4: AI vs Humans: Which performs certain skills better?
Thanks to revolutions in computing power, data availability, and better algorithms, AI models are faster, have bigger datasets to learn from, and are optimized for efficiency compared to even a decade ago.
This has led to AI outpacing human performance in areas such as image recognition, speech recognition, reading comprehension and others.
Yet, there remains to be a doubt in the near future of AI performance plateauing, as AI developers run out of high quality data to train their models on, as early as 2026.
Chart 5: How does time work in Antarctica
Technically speaking, Antarctica sits across every time zone since all lines of latitude pass through it, allowing you to walk through time at the south pole.
Since nobody owns Antarctica and it has no government, there is nobody to clarify the time zones.
Therefore, the TZ database (the international organization that keeps track of time zones), splits Antarctica into 9 time zones which are loosely based on the original territorial claims before the Antarctic Treaty.
Most research bases will use these times or the times of their home country.
That’s all for today, folks!!
If you enjoyed the charts, please spread the love by sharing it in your network and helping The Pragmatic Optimist grow.
Have a great weekend.
Amrita