Data Walk Update

Hello mathematicians, puzzlers, and other curious people!

It\’s taken me a little while to get to this, but I finally collected some data from a quick walk today. I\’m going to leave the whole dataset publicly viewable as I add to it, but here\’s what I got today:

If you click into the spreadsheet you\’ll notice that I used formulas to do the subtraction, just putting in the figures from my Fitbit. (I think there might be a way to make this more automatic by using references to cells where I put each figure, so I don\’t have to carefully keep from messing up the formula.)

Notably, at first, I had subtracted my initial count from my final count and came up with 469 as the number of steps on the return trip. While it was plausible for a person\’s steps to be a little longer as they start because they\’re less tired or more eager to get somewhere, it didn\’t make sense to me that they\’d be so different, especially in such a short trip — I wasn\’t tired at all when I got back, because I picked a very nearby landmark to walk to in order to make it convenient to do so many times, so I didn\’t think my steps becoming only half their initial length made sense.

I thought maybe I\’d made a mistake like not letting my Fitbit finish updating how many steps I\’d taken at the point I walked to, so some of the steps there got into the figures as part of the return trip instead. If that had happened, I probably would\’ve needed to take this walk out of my analysis later on because I\’m not sure how to correct for that. But, when I looked at my formulas and saw that they were both something minus 763, I was able to fix my work. As long as you\’ve written down the right measurements somewhere, you can fix wrong calculations.

Now I\’m wondering, though, is there going to turn out to be a difference in step counts on the way there and on the way back? It doesn\’t look from this data like there\’s much of a difference, but on the other hand, this is just one of each so maybe the averages will turn out different. Or, maybe there is a difference but it depends on the length of the walk, if it\’s related to being tired like I considered before, so I might need to start another list for longer walks to find it.

Let\’s keep collecting data and see what we can find out.

Calc You Later!