Music

Recently I saw a tweet that shared this hilarious poster of Ramones “wants”. Dan Gneiding (aka Grayhood) is the graphic designer who created this. You can buy it here Very cool, but how accurate is it? I asked Dan and says he took some artistic license, as he should! You may accuse me of being that pedantic “Comic Book Guy” from “The Simpsons” but, when I saw it, I immediately wondered how I could tally these Ramones lyrics myself or, rather, get R to do it for me.

Analyzing deaths of rock musicians Live fast, die young, stay pretty? That’s the stereotype for rockers, or it was. We only need to look at Keith Richards, over 70 and going strong, to find a major counterexample. Do rockers die young? What do they die of? How does that compare to the broader population (in the U.S., anyway). It turns out there are some suprising answers to those questions. Along the way we’ll learn something about web scraping, html parsing and some ggplot2 tricks.