Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Online Supplements for Alex Ross's Books

I've been slowly working my way through Listen to This, Alex Ross's excellent second book. His first book, The Rest Is Noise, was also mind-blowingly good. I wanted to point out that the online audio guides for these books are also highly worthwhile, with many music excerpts to go along with each chapter of each book. (The only problem is you may spend a lot more time on those pages than you intended.) I've already bought a couple recordings based on the excerpts he linked, and I still have many chapters to go.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Ranking Shows by Season using IMDB

I enjoyed this recent post by Matt Zoller Seitz ranking the first 14 seasons of The Simpsons. I wondered how this ranking would compare to a ranking based on episode ratings on IMDB. I did some tinkering with node.js and jsdom and came up with this. Sorting the output (and eliding non-existent seasons) yields:

8.34 average rating for season 6
8.33 average rating for season 5
8.31 average rating for season 7
8.26 average rating for season 4
8.18 average rating for season 8
8.16 average rating for season 3
8.01 average rating for season 2
7.91 average rating for season 9
7.82 average rating for season 1
7.63 average rating for season 10
7.39 average rating for season 12
7.35 average rating for season 11
7.17 average rating for season 23
7.10 average rating for season 16
7.09 average rating for season 18
7.04 average rating for season 13
6.98 average rating for season 19
6.96 average rating for season 17
6.96 average rating for season 15
6.92 average rating for season 20
6.91 average rating for season 22
6.90 average rating for season 21
6.90 average rating for season 14

I didn't do anything fancy like try to weight ratings by the number of votes, but the results are still interesting, and pretty similar to Zoller Seitz's ranking. To try another show, just change the URL in the script to the IMDB URL for the show with /eprate tacked on the end.