Somebody find Tom Blumer a hobby

by Eric on December 11, 2007 · Comments

Please. Dude needs help. Recommend good hobbies in comments. Bonsai. Painting. Soup can label collecting. Anything. I think he’s desperate. This post is a cry for help!

  • I have really not much clue wtf you are talking about, but it sounds like Tom just got Blumered.
  • Out of curiousity, I plugged those numbers into my statistical software, and found a few interesting things. First - and this isn't exactly a relevation, since it's plainly obvious - the use of the word "holiday" widely outstrips the use of "christmas" in both "positive" and negative contexts. (I'm assuming Tom is claiming that rampant consumerism is positive.) Second, the use of "holiday layoffs" has been trending rather consistently upwards in frequency. Conversely, "christmas shopping" and "holiday shopping" both showed a minor uptick in 2006, followed by a huge jump in 2007. "christmas layoffs" actually dropped in 2006.

    However, what's most interesting are the pairwise correlations of the trends over time. All, of course, were positively correlated, but only one was significant: the more frequently someone uses "christmas shopping season", the more frequently you'll see "christmas layoffs". If you expand your confidence interval out to 90%, you see a significant correlation between "christmas shopping season" and "holiday shopping season". That's it.

    Anything else is pure speculation.
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