My triathlon club has tracked club race results in a few methods over the last couple years. So, I decided to create a triathlon race workbook that allowed the race director to do everything in one place: record registration, track time, and get results. In addition, one spreadsheet predicts a racer's future performance. The workbook also includes a graph that let's racers see the portion of time they take for each section of the race (swim, transition 1, bike, transition 2, run).

After reading a list of U.S. states ranked by carbon dioxide emissions I began to wonder if Red (politically conservative) states had higher or lower annual average emissions of carbon dioxide than Blue (politically liberal) states do. In this analysis, I included the state's:

• annual CO² emissions
• population
• conservativeness (how conservative the state voted in the last 5 presidential elections)
• total square miles
• population density

What I found may shock you . . .

Forever Stamps went on sale in April 2007 for $0.41 each and are good for use as First Class stamps . . . forever. So in April 2008, a month before the price was to change to $0.42/stamp I prepared an analysis of an investment in Forever Stamps.

Taking this historical cost of stamps I charted the real and nominal price of a first class stamp since the beginning of the US Post Office. Then, I figured out the annual average increase in the cost of sending a one-ounce letter (not including inflation) was 3% per year with a standard deviation of 0.09. If one was to hold the stamps for 10 years then they could have earned 14.3% on their money. To make the changes in value more recent, I considered only a 10-year moving average, which had an average annual increase of 2.67% with a standard deviation of 0.01. Taking this in to consideration, if you were to hold the stamps for 10 years you have made only a 12.36% gain on your money. All of this assumes that there is no spoilage and that the stamps are sold at 100% of their value (e.g. you use them yourself). Currently, stamps are increasing in value per their historical average, rather than their average in the last 10 years.

When I first moved to my house near Howard University, locals would stop and stare at me, people wouldn't sit next to me on the bus, and a couple "brave" souls called me "white boy", "opportunist", and one person even threw something at me.

What had I done?

Generally, the thought was that I had invaded a neighborhood and my presence was interfering and unbalancing it. Crying "reverse racism" is obvious, but there must be something deeper. Did my fixing up my house and improving my property interfere with a way of life (as more than one person told me that it did)? What balance did I upset by getting the city to prevent dumped trash from accumulating the alley, to board up a vacant home, and to get barrels of dangerous chemicals removed out from a vacant lot? The accusations couldn't have been consensus since I befriended the Section 8 family two doors down – all three generations of them including: the out-of-work father, his continually pregnant daughter, her and her pot-smoking siblings and cousins, and all of the seven unwashed and malnourished children that lived there.

Someone said that my actions were causing old people on fixed income to lose their house. Let me get this right ... previous leaders of the community desire crime and dilapidation in order to make sure that their senior citizens have a place to live? A common response to that has been that has been that my actions raise property taxes, which people on fixed incomes can't pay. So if these senior citizens own their house, why don't they get a reverse mortgage and live well on the new wealth their appreciating house has provided them? Well, one economist rebutted that this would not allow the house to be given to the owner's offspring. But if the offspring are to get the house, why don't the offspring pay the increasing property tax? It is a lot less expensive than paying a mortgage! In return I was told that the offspring may not have sufficient income to pay even this amount. Isn't that the fault of the people and their previous leadership?

What am I not getting?

Please drop science on this nooblet.

Set me strait so that I may understand.