Content-Type: text/shitpost

Last night's post counting up the last initials of people in the U.S. hit a roadblock just before publication. It included this chart:

But it almost contained this one instead:

I realized at the last moment that this chart was wrong. It claims that ‘A’ is far and away the most common initial. This is because the last item in the Census Bureau's data file is 29 million people with ALL OTHER NAMES and I counted it with the A's. I had to redo the data analysis, rebuild the chart, and rewrite part of the article.

Julia Evans says

this is such a perfect description of data analysis