u/Mastbubbles

The setup, from Arkes and Blumer (1985): you've bought a $100 ski trip to Michigan. Weeks later you buy a $50 one to Wisconsin, which you think will be more fun. Then you notice they're on the same weekend, and neither ticket can be returned.

Both are already paid for. The only question left is which weekend you'd enjoy more. 33 of 61 students still picked Michigan.

The second experiment used real money. The Ohio University Theater sold season tickets at random prices: $15, $13 or $8. Over the first five plays, full-price buyers used 4.11 tickets each. The discount groups used 3.32 and 3.29. By the last five plays, the difference had gone.

I put these together with Levitt's coin-flip study (20,000+ people; the ones the coin told to make a change were happier six months later) in one page. It also has a quiz on when past costs do count: https://sheets.works/data-viz/sunk-cost-fallacy

Happy to be corrected. The theatre figures are from page 128 of the paper

Billions of phones and most of the servers on the internet run on code that one or two people look after, a lot of it unpaid. I went through a year of commits for 23 of these projects, and 11 of them came down to one or two people. xz is still basically Lasse Collin on his own after the 2024 backdoor, and the time zone file every phone reads is kept by a UCLA lecturer in his spare time. If I've got one of these wrong, tell me.

https://sheets.works/data-viz/holding-up-the-internet

I teach the first ten minutes with an argument. One situation on the board, one question, hands up.

https://sheets.works/english/what-would-you-do

Today's is a woman dropping a tenner in a shop without noticing. Do you say something. Everyone says yes. Then you press Make it harder and it turns out she'd just been rude to the cashier.

New one every school day, same for everyone, nothing to log into.

I only found out this week that what colour scripts are, and how do they work, the first thing I did was to go and find Up's Colour Script.

Which is online only because Lou Romano posted the whole thing himself in June 2009, with an eleven word caption: A closer look at the colour script (done January-March 2008). Digital. His post 404s now, so this came off the Wayback Machine. 121 pictures, painted more than a year before the film came out.

Then I could not leave it alone and measured the colour in every one. A mark out of 100, where 0 is grey and 100 is the most colourful painting in the script:

- the opening newsreel, 13 paintings: 5

- Carl and Ellie, 25 paintings: 35

- the whole adventure after the funeral, 58 paintings: 13

- the house going up, the picture on the poster, 4 paintings: 10

- the last 16: 36

The loudest painting in the film is number 47, a gust of autumn leaves going past the empty house four pictures after the funeral. Nothing in the jungle, the storm or the airship gets near it.

The one I keep coming back to is the balloons. That is the image the film is sold on, and in the plan it sits closer to the black and white newsreel than to anything else. The colour went on the ten minutes about a marriage instead.

Romano also said the colour script was the last thing he did on Up, and that other artists finished the lighting after he left.

If anyone wants to learn more: https://sheets.works/data-viz/up-colour-script