Okay, here’s my blog post about figuring out birthdays from “jan 16 birthdays”.
Alright folks, let me tell you about this little project I kicked off. Saw “jan 16 birthdays” floating around and thought, “Hey, why not try to wrangle some data and see what I can dig up?” So, that’s exactly what I did.
First thing’s first, I fired up my trusty browser and just started searching. I mean, literally just typed “jan 16 birthdays” into the search bar. Got a bunch of results, mostly celeb birthdays and random lists. Nothing super structured, but it was a starting point.
Next, I tried to narrow it down. I added “famous people” to the search. That gave me some better lists. I started copying names and birth years into a simple text file. Yeah, real old-school, but it worked for getting the raw data down.
Then I thought, okay, gotta get organized. I opened up a spreadsheet. Pasted the names and birth years in there. Added a column for “Profession” – you know, actor, musician, whatever. This was all manual, mind you. No fancy APIs or anything.
After that, I spent a solid hour just filling in the gaps. Cross-referencing names on different sites, checking Wikipedia for professions and details. It was tedious, but I wanted to get a decent list going.
Once I had a good chunk of data, I played around with sorting the spreadsheet. Sorted by birth year, sorted by profession, just to see if any patterns popped out. Nothing earth-shattering, but it was interesting to see the distribution.
To make it more interesting, I decided to try to find some lesser-known folks with January 16th birthdays. Digging through historical records and obscure websites. Found a few interesting figures – scientists, artists, even a few historical nobodies with cool stories. Added them to the spreadsheet.
Finally, I wanted a visual. I threw the data into a simple chart – a bar graph showing the number of people born on Jan 16th in different decades. Nothing fancy, but it gave a quick overview.
Lessons learned? Data wrangling is messy, but rewarding. A simple spreadsheet can go a long way. And there are a lot more interesting people born on January 16th than I initially thought.
Here’s a quick summary of what I did:
- Started with a simple search.
- Collected names and birth years into a text file.
- Organized the data into a spreadsheet.
- Filled in the gaps with research.
- Sorted and analyzed the data.
- Searched for lesser-known individuals.
- Created a simple visualization.
That’s it! Just a fun little dive into the world of January 16th birthdays. Maybe I’ll do another one sometime.
