Turtle Butt: September and October 2018

2 NOVEMBER 2018

Over the summer, I started a small data analysis project by collecting screencaps of Pi’s bum from the Pi cam. I was curious about which direction, left or right, Pi frequently curls her tail to.

I continued collecting screencaps to see if I can observe patterns or learn something new about a turtle’s tail curling. The below collage is assembled from screencaps taken in September and October 2018.

Here is a summary of turtle butts for September and October 2018:

14 data points gathered (the 14 screencaps above) Pi curled her tail to the left half of the time (50%, or 7 out of 14) and to the right the other half of the time Since I track all of the data in a spreadsheet (I used Google Sheets), I can quickly manipulate the data for better understanding. Pivot tables are handy to aggregate data, as well as let you slice and dice data in various ways. I like organizing data into tables because tables are concise. I can add a couple of calculations off to the side to derive other values, such as percentage of totals.

From the pivot table above, if I only consider the data from September and October, then it seems like Pi did not have a preference in curling her tail to either direction. If I consider all of the data I have gathered since the beginning of the project (July 2018), then Pi curled her tail to the left 62% of the time and to the right 38% of the time.

Another method to display and communicate about data is through data visualization, such as a chart. Using the same data, I created a simple bar chart to show how the proportions of Pi’s tail curling change over time. You can clearly see that Pi curled her tail to the left most of the time in August compared to the other months.

So far, this analysis has been fun and interesting to put together, and I plan to update it about every two months. I wonder what the Pi Cam will capture in the future! :)