I’m not sure why I named this post after the dreaded statistics class that all Psych majors at my college had to take, but it’s as good a name as any for my post about numbers.
In addition to drawing on the map when I return home from a walk, I update my super amazing spreadsheet. Here is a sample:
I imported a list of Cambridge street names into a Google sheet then sorted it into the city’s five zip codes. A guide to the colors:
- Green indicates a street that is finished
- Yellow indicates a street that is partially finished
- White indicates a street that has not been started
- Red indicates a street that was on the list but doesn’t exist
- Orange indicates a street that needs investigation (likely doesn’t exist)
- Black: visible for a limited time only. There was one day that got away from me, and I set out for an evening walk later than planned. It got dark. The point of this is to see Cambridge, and I realized that those streets’ architecture and gardens (and potentially pets) were lost on me. I classified those streets as black and mapped them with a dotted line, planning to return in the daylight.
A guide to the numbers:
- I assign half a point to a street I have begun
- I assign one point to a street I have finished
- So, my completion percentages are based on the sum of streets started/finished out of each zip code’s total street count
Of course, it’s not a perfect system. Ideally streets would be weighted, since at the moment four-mile Massachusetts Avenue gets the same point value as Norfolk Court which is approximately 2 inches long. But it’s a nice way to measure progress!
Another flaw in the system is that streets that span multiple zip codes show up multiple times. I suppose that does counteract the above problem, since Mass Ave actually is eligible for three points, but there are also much smaller streets that cross those borders.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have the idea to add the dates until about a month in, so that data point is unattainable, unfortunately. Can’t wait to see that green sweep!
Sophie Strollin' Streetblocks 