NSKYC: The average color of the New York sky, updated every 5 minutes. A webcam pointed at the sky, showing the average color. Now in Washington, DC as well. Interview in the Village Voice with creator Mike Bodge. Looking for cameras in more cities.
posted by skynxnex on Aug 15, 2011 - 31 comments

The Program for Public Consultation carried out a different kind of budget poll -- they asked each of their respondents to generate a package of tax increases and spending cuts sufficient for substantial deficit reduction, then averaged the results. The outcome was not what you might expect. The mean package included twice as much tax increase as spending cut: big deficit-reducing moves included substantial income tax increases for the highest brackets and deep cuts in defense spending. Republicans cut less spending than Democrats, as did people who identified as "very sympathetic to the Tea Party." Hardly anybody likes the reduction of the estate tax. Why is the public consensus so different from the Washington consensus? Read the full report (.pdf) Or try the interactive budget exercise.
posted by escabeche on Mar 6, 2011 - 52 comments

The most typical person on the planet is a 28 year old Chinese man. For now. [more inside]
posted by phunniemee on Mar 4, 2011 - 50 comments

Face Research (previously) averaged faces of women from 41 countries to create the "average" face in each country. [more inside]
posted by quiet coyote on Feb 12, 2011 - 57 comments

I was never able to relate to FML, but I recently found a website that is much more accessible for the average person. It's decent, I guess. MLIA.
posted by bjork24 on May 14, 2009 - 59 comments

The Average Man's Tax Dollars from thetoiletpaper.com
posted by blue_beetle on Apr 8, 2009 - 40 comments

BBC News is running a weekly ongoing series of articles that describe and illustrate common misconceptions (and manipulations) of statistics using examples from the news and ads.
Lesson 1: surveys. Lesson 2: counting. Lesson 3: percentage. Lesson 4: averages. Lesson 5: causation.
posted by Tehanu on Sep 3, 2008 - 46 comments

I've long felt that the U.S. of A. "jumped the shark" as a country when we rejected the Metric System. The price of gasoline would still be under a dollar (per liter). Yet, we'd drive less because a short 20 mile trip would become a long 32 km trip. Then there's the most important measurement of all [maybe NSFW animated graph], providing us with the joy of 12.9(!) while we try to ignore that Japan is .1 ahead of us and France is .1 more than South Africa. (And is that Korean average North or South?)
posted by wendell on Aug 14, 2006 - 65 comments