Well, the first batch of DVDs has finally arrived and the first film will be prised from its shiny cellophane wrapper this evening and placed with loving care into my DVD player. The first on the List is ‘Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind’ – the first of five Hayao Miyazaki films which I am looking forward to. Watch out for the review tomorrow.
In the meantime, I really can’t resist fusing my working life and my passion for film together. In day to day life, I am very much a numbers man. I enjoy nothing more than getting my hands on a set of statistics or a juicy spreadsheet and therefore my natural instincts tell me that I need to perform some sort of statistical analysis on the IMDB Top 250.
At first I tried to refrain from my urges as I felt that a film blogger should fit a certain stereotype; that they should be spontaneous, arty and abstract. I thought that if I stated I was a numbers person then I wouldn’t really fit in with that image as ‘numbers people’ come with their own stereotype; that they are meticulous, systematic and boring, but this stereotype is something which has bugged me for years, as I know from experience that such stereotypes don’t exist in practice.
In every walk of life, there is great variety of people who share the same occupation, share the same hobbies or share the same values. Therefore, why should I let the fear of a stereotype impact on my interests?
In the end, I decided to add a new tab at the top of my blog headed ‘Lists about Lists’. On this page I will post some analysis of the IMDB Top 250 to try and give a flavour of the variety of films, actors, and directors etc which appear in the IMDB Top 250. I don’t proclaim to be a statistical genius, nor do I expect many people to be interested in detailed statistical analysis, therefore I will limit my analysis to lists, such as a list of the most common directors in the IMDB Top 250, which is the first list I have posted. I hope that this will be as interesting to others as it is to me, although maybe that is an example of high hopes.
I’ll finish with a quote from a man of great wisdom:
‘People can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.’
(Homer J Simpson)
2 comments:
Don't you worry... there's nothing boring about being a numbers man! By day I'm a web developer (involving much looking at lines of code etc) ...hence my statistics section :-D
I can't stand arty farty people, anyway.
Thanks mate. At least web developer sounds more exciting than accountant - although I can assure you accountancy is not as boring as most people thinks (cue laughs of derision!.
I enjoyed your statistics section!
C
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