The Curious Engineer

All blogs / AI / ML

Dr. Randal S. Olson

randalolson.com

AI researcher and builder with 15+ years building AI. Creator of TPOT and 50+ peer-reviewed publications in AI/ML.

AI / MLMathSociety / politics / economy

’15’20’25
Posts
210 from 11 May 2012 to 15 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (56 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://www.randalolson.com/feed.xml

2026 54

  1. When to use a decision model instead of an LLM
  2. My optimal road trip maps are back
  3. The people who use AI the most are also the most worried about it
  4. All writing209→
  5. In AI-exposed jobs, only the youngest workers are losing ground
  6. The Strait of Hormuz is Asia's oil lifeline, not the U.S.'s
  7. The world's richest person has never been this far ahead of No. 2
  8. The 2026 NBA Finals drew the biggest TV audience since 1998
  9. GLP-1 use peaks in middle age, then drops at 65
  10. U.S. abortions rose after Dobbs, driven by mailed pills
  11. ICE detention hit a record, and most detainees have no conviction
  12. Curaçao is the smallest nation ever at a World Cup
  13. The rise in LGBTQ+ identification is mostly young women
  14. Honey bees are dying at record rates, but the colony count holds steady
  15. CO2 is piling up faster every decade, and 2026 just set a record
  16. New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker
  17. Gas prices feel like a record in 2026. Adjusted for inflation, they are not
  18. The countries that work the most hours produce the least per hour
  19. U.S. World War II veterans are fading from living memory
  20. How chess openings rose and fell, 1850 to 2026
  21. The Misery Index Stopped Predicting the National Mood
  22. The 2026 Indy 500 was the closest finish in race history
  23. NOAA's hurricane outlook misses one way: it underforecasts big seasons
  24. Inflation worry flipped party lines while inflation itself barely moved
  25. U.S. measles cases broke the post-elimination floor in 2025 and 2026
  26. 1 in 5 U.S. registered nurses are now 65 or older
  27. U.S. federal workforce hits 60-year low after fastest peacetime cut
  28. World Happiness Report 2026: what income can't explain
  29. Mexico ships 83% of every fresh avocado the U.S. imports
  30. No horse has broken Secretariat's 1973 Kentucky Derby record
  31. U.S. women 40+ now have more babies per capita than teens
  32. U.S. drug overdose deaths are down 35% from the 2022 peak
  33. U.S. birth rate fell to a record low in 2025
  34. Artemis II ended humanity's 54-year confinement to low Earth orbit
  35. Sabastian Sawe ran the first sub-2-hour marathon: 118 years of marathon records
  36. Every Atlantic hurricane track, 1980 to 2025
  37. U.S. oil: from peak importer to net exporter in one decade
  38. A thousand springs in Kyoto, in one chart
  39. 130 years of Boston Marathon winning times
  40. Libraries were transforming. Then COVID hit.
  41. The Claude Code leak in four charts: half a million lines, three accidents, forty tools
  42. Every generation rediscovers art: 270 years of cultural interests in one chart
  43. The rise and fall of bowling in the United States
  44. The rise and fall of nuclear weapons testing
  45. Housing and getting around eat half of the average American household's spending
  46. 96% of U.S. counties grew more diverse from 2010 to 2020
  47. The engineering and tech gender gap has barely budged in 50 years
  48. Americans eat 3x more cheese and half as much milk as they did in 1970
  49. Where racial diversity lives in America, county by county
  50. Americans used to outlive their peers. Now they die 4 years sooner.
  51. Working your way through college now takes 5x more hours than in 1970
  52. Coal collapsed and natural gas took over the U.S. power grid
  53. 156 years of marriage and divorce in the United States
  54. The "Are You Sure?" Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind

2025 5

  1. How to Choose the Right LLM for AI-Assisted Coding
  2. The Three Phases of AI-Assisted Coding
  3. 3 AI Solutions That Actually Drive Business Value in 2025
  4. Key AI Technologies That Shaped 2024 and Are Driving Business Value in 2025
  5. Your AI Coding Assistant Isn't Failing. Your Management Style Is.

2024 1

  1. How to beat the Original I.Q. Tester

2021 1

  1. Things I can lift: How I visualize my strength training progress

2020 1

  1. A data-driven look at marble racing

2018 5

  1. Does batting order matter in Major League Baseball? A simulation approach
  2. Traveling salesman portrait in Python
  3. How many college football teams can you watch in-person in one football season?
  4. How Americans make a living based on their age
  5. Top 10 oldest and youngest industries in the U.S.

2017 2

  1. Machine Learning Madden NFL: The best player position switches for Madden 17
  2. Machine Learning Madden NFL: How Madden player ratings are actually calculated

2016 17

  1. Republican-leaning states tend to have more traffic deaths
  2. Python 2.7 still reigns supreme in pip installs
  3. Evolution of active categorical image classification via saccadic eye movement
  4. The Optimal U.S. National Parks Centennial Road Trip
  5. Computing optimal road trips on a limited budget
  6. How long does the average man last in bed?
  7. Why is Reddit replacing Imgur?
  8. TPOT: A Python tool for automating data science
  9. Why did so many Japanese families avoid having children in 1966?
  10. Spurious Extrapolations: Novel and unique research abstracts
  11. Spurious Extrapolations: What if U.S. college tuition costs keep rising?
  12. The correct way to use pie charts
  13. Why posts get removed from /r/DataIsBeautiful
  14. What data visualization tools do /r/DataIsBeautiful OC creators use?
  15. Major League Baseball home run leaders, 1871-2016
  16. Revisiting the vaccine visualizations
  17. Analyzing MMA: The Ultimate Fighting Championship

2015 25

  1. Introducing TPOT, the Data Science Assistant
  2. Visualizing Indego bike share usage patterns in Philadelphia (Part 2)
  3. Small multiples vs. animated GIFs for showing changes in fertility rates over time
  4. U.S. college majors: Median yearly earnings vs. gender ratio
  5. Analyzing the health of Philadelphia's bike share system
  6. The New York Times weather chart redux
  7. Use the Baby Name Explorer to find out when your name was popular
  8. Can the Name Age Calculator guess how old you are?
  9. Visualizing Indego bike share usage patterns in Philadelphia
  10. Rethinking the population pyramid
  11. 144 years of marriage and divorce in 1 chart
  12. Artificial Intelligence has crushed all human records in 2048. Here's how the AI pulled it off.
  13. Optimized walking tours of New York City and Philadelphia
  14. Pure Michigan road trip, optimized
  15. Computing the optimal road trip across South America
  16. Computing the optimal road trip across Europe
  17. Computing the optimal road trip across the U.S.
  18. Top 25 richest living comedians
  19. Revisiting the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
  20. Design critique: Putting Big Pharma spending in perspective
  21. Here's Waldo: Computing the optimal search strategy for finding Waldo
  22. Python usage survey 2014
  23. The Shrinking Battleground: Every 4 years, fewer states determine the outcome of the Presidential election
  24. A data-driven guide to creating successful reddit posts, redux
  25. Over half of all reddit posts go completely ignored

2014 70

  1. The biggest box office booms and busts since 1982
  2. Does a bigger film production budget result in more ticket sales?
  3. Top 10 grossing film studios in the U.S. (1982-2014)
  4. Top 25 most gender-neutral names in the U.S.
  5. What caused the upsurge of unique American baby names in the 1970s?
  6. The most-viewed YouTube videos
  7. Is reddit experiencing "upvote inflation"?
  8. MMORPG Popularity, 1998-2013
  9. Do women on OkCupid follow the Standard Creepiness Rule?
  10. What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2
  11. Where Democrats and Republicans want their tax dollars spent
  12. The evolution of chess openings and why GIFs make for bad data visualizations
  13. The reigns and deaths of the Roman Emperors
  14. The age divide in where Americans want their tax dollars spent
  15. The reddit world map
  16. The ebb and flow of movies redux
  17. Is 2014 the most unpredictable year of college football?
  18. Who's responsible for gas prices at the pump?
  19. What makes for a stable marriage?
  20. The most upvoted post on reddit every day
  21. Do men on OkCupid follow the Standard Creepiness Rule?
  22. Who are the climate change deniers?
  23. Clash of Clans Troop Efficiency
  24. Where the U.S. gets its oil from
  25. The myth of the smarter Atheist
  26. The best and worst times to have your case reviewed by a judge
  27. How to make beautiful data visualizations in Python with matplotlib
  28. Average IQ of students by college major and gender ratio
  29. Why the Dutch are so tall
  30. We can only forecast the weather a few days into the future
  31. Accuracy of three major weather forecasting services
  32. Dolla dolla bill y'all: Relative volume and value of U.S. currency in circulation by bill denomination
  33. Percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women, by major (1970-2012)
  34. Football referees are unfair when awarding penalty kicks
  35. College degrees awarded per capita in the U.S.A.
  36. The key to Magnus Carlsen's success as a chess grandmaster
  37. Fastest growing and declining surnames in the U.S.
  38. Celebrating 2 years of research blogging by analyzing my blog
  39. A data-driven exploration of the evolution of chess: Moves, captures, and checkmates
  40. A data-driven exploration of the evolution of chess: Popularity of openings over time
  41. A data-driven exploration of the evolution of chess: Game lengths and outcomes
  42. Chess tournament games and Elo ratings
  43. Programming Language Breakdown for the HealthCare.gov Website
  44. Skyrocketing student enrollment is partly to blame for rising college costs
  45. Virality trends in reddit's default subreddits
  46. Rising and falling subreddits according to virality trends
  47. Virality trends in niche subreddits
  48. Popular subreddits have predictable cycles of virality
  49. U.S. Racial Diversity by County
  50. If every U.S. state had a surname for bastards, like Game of Thrones, what would each state's name be?
  51. Visualizing evolution in action: Dynamic fitness landscapes
  52. Visualizing evolution in action: Density-dependence and sympatric speciation
  53. Visualizing evolution in action: Survival of the flattest
  54. It's impossible to work your way through college nowadays, revisited with national data
  55. It's impossible to work your way through college nowadays
  56. The window of virality on Reddit
  57. The cost of war in Iraq and Afghanistan
  58. Harnessing Hashtagify.me and social network analysis to maximize your brand's reach on Twitter
  59. A Song of Ice and Fire by the numbers: Chapter titles
  60. Movies aren't actually much longer than they used to be
  61. A tech-focused guide to increasing your influence on Twitter
  62. More lies and bad analyses by Shareaholic are misleading the public
  63. A look at sex, drugs, violence, and cursing in film over time through MPAA ratings
  64. 3 easy steps to avoid deceitful data visualizations
  65. Top 25 most murderous directors of all time
  66. Has violence been vanquished? Not in the film industry
  67. Top 25 most violence packed films of all time
  68. Violence has been on the rise in the film industry
  69. Top 25 deadliest actors of all time by on-screen kills in movies
  70. Top 25 deadliest films of all time by on-screen death counts

2013 22

  1. Political polarization of the U.S. Senate: Is the data fooling us?
  2. Sharing your passion for science with the world through reddit: Interview with Unidan
  3. The curious case of the closed access data set in the open access journal
  4. Answering people's pressing science questions on reddit: Interview with Tobias Landberg
  5. Discussing evolution on reddit: Interview with Bjørn Østman
  6. Which social media platform offers the biggest bang for the buck for science outreach to the public?
  7. Sagemath Cloud makes collaborating with IPython Notebooks easier than ever
  8. Evolving ecosystems can change more than previously thought
  9. Evolution isn't over until you click stop
  10. A short guide to using statistics in Evolutionary Computation
  11. Evolved artificial intelligence can play video games better than humans
  12. Bigger groups make better decisions
  13. How and why do animals evolve grouping behavior?
  14. Is the Open Science movement prone to call-outs, and is that a good thing?
  15. Could the reddit model replace the current scientific publication system?
  16. A data-driven guide to creating successful Reddit posts
  17. Retracing the evolution of Reddit through post data
  18. Why I love open source, and wish science worked this way
  19. Fun with the Python Reddit API Wrapper and word clouds
  20. How do you maximize the Tweetability of your presentations?
  21. IPython Notebook workshop report: still plagued by installation issues
  22. Filling in Python's gaps in statistics packages with Rmagic

2012 7

  1. Neuroevolution: an alternative route to Artificial Intelligence
  2. Insight from "Don't be such a scientist"
  3. Statistical analysis made easy in Python with SciPy and pandas DataFrames
  4. David Eagleman: are we taking the right approach to Artificial Intelligence?
  5. Using pandas DataFrames to process data from multiple replicate runs in Python
  6. A short demo on how to use IPython Notebook as a research notebook
  7. IPython Notebook: Finally, the research notebook I've always been looking for is here!