My Italian Vacation

My family and I spent incredible two weeks in Italy - first 5 days in Rome and then moving to Syracuse in Sicily. With my iPhone that monitored distance and steps walked I created simple spreadsheet in Google docs to keep daily distances walked. After I augmented it with main attractions visited each day I decided to recap whole vacation with simple line plot:

Interestingly, we walked the most on our first day. The Rome part of the trip included only one day that we walked less than the top day in Sicily on June 28 in Taormina. There are many reasons why, for example, renting car in Sicily or spending time at the beach or playing tennis definitely reduced time spent walking. Of course, more detailed analysis is possible having I imported real time steps data from my iPhone but it was a vacation after all so I am happy with aggregates and shortcuts instead.

How Flynn's Term Compares to the National Security Advisor Tenures since 1953

First National Security Advisor appointed by Trump lasted 25 days - how long Michael Flynn held this role since inauguration until yesterday night when he resigned amid Russian sanctions scandal. It sets record for the shortest term held in this role since its inception in 1953.

This record should hold for a while as seen from the chart below that compares all terms since Robert Cutler became first NSC advisor in Eisenhower administration:

This is unheard of - NSC advisor lasted less than about a year just once before: William H Jackson held position for 4 months being removed amid changes on the National Security Council without any apparent controversy.

How significantly shorter Flynn's term is could be seen in the same type of chart with his tenure in days compared to the rest in weeks: 

When compared to the rest of tenures in months (Flynn's tenure is still in days) it does break through the bottom but hardly stands out, again, days vs. months:

Sources:

• Wikipedia: National Security Advisor (United States)

Trump's Travel Ban: Is That a Muslim Thing?

To analyze how much recent travel ban by Trump's administration could be called 'Muslim' one might look at the whole Muslim world (by population):

Countries in red (whose citizens are banned to travel to U.S. for 120 days by Trump's executive order) all except Libya appear in top 30 above. But occupying quite sparingly positions among other top 24 Muslim countries they don't appear to dominate this chart.

But if instead we switch the focus to U.S., in particular, immigration to U.S. things change. By arranging all countries (not just Muslim ones) by their refuge (and asylum) immigration to United States picture becomes drastically different: by removing 5 countries in red (banned by executive order) mostly Muslim immigration is eliminated from the top 12 positions completely:

Indeed all top five Muslim countries (in green) contributing to immigration are part of the ban. So based on the refuge immigration to U.S. it appears to pertain calling this ban "Muslim".

Sources:

• Muslim population by country
• United States Immigration