Hey look! Morale improved! Which means more graphs! Hello and welcome to Wurster Hall, where we use Microsoft Excel and Wikipedia to create a beautiful tapestry of art and mathematics. Join us won’t you?
Touch of Grey
We start this week with some fascinating data out of Wikipedia. Long-time readers of Wurster Hall know that Cal has yet to be beat in the number of Wikipedia Citations. ENTER WAKE FOREST. Clocking in at an astonishing 381 citations, it really makes you wonder what all anyone is saying about Wake Forest. There can’t possibly be that much to talk about right? Apparently! Listen, I’m as shocked as you. This has shaken Wurster Hall to its core.
Scarlet Begonias
Next, we take a look at the total number of shows performed in the vicinity of each University. For fairness sake, we’ve limited this category to shows exclusively performed in Berkeley city limits (58) and shows performed across the entirety of North Carolina (27, btw, did you know that Deadheads keep all manner of concert stats? Fascinating! Shout out Grateful Stats!) All told, the Grateful Dead performed an estimated 2317 shows. In San Francisco, they performed 306 shows and an additional 129 in Oakland. Safe to say California takes this category.
Fire on the Mountain
Next, in lieu of discussing actual wildfires on mountains, we’re going to look at the number of mentions of the word “fire” on each Wikipedia page. UC Berkeley comes up with 2. One such mention is a link to the Berkeley Fire Department Wikipedia page. The other is Nobel laureate Andrew Fire (BA 1978) who “helped to discover RNA interference-gene silencing by double-stranded RNA.” Wake Forest’s lone mention of fire is in an article citation (oh thats how they have so many) about Randolph Childress, former Wake Forest Basketball Player. Grateful Dead gets three by virtue of two Studio Albums (Fire Up, Fire Up Plus) and a link to the Earth, Wind, and Fire Wikipedia page. I’ll let you be the judge of which of those is the most interesting (hint its Cal!)
Terrapin Station
Sticking in the theme of total (I mean turtle) searches, our next category examines how many times the world turtle appears on each universities official website as well as the Grateful Dead official website. Surprisingly, UC Berkeley leads the pack here at 100 (I’m guessing there’s a lot more? Not sure why the page search stops at 100), but for Wake Forest it only stacks up to 70 and a paltry 33 for the Grateful Dead. With a whole album named Terrapin Station, I figured there’d be more! But alas, Bears Win!
Truckin’
We end this week with where we start most weeks, looking at the approximate distance between each Universities Chancellor/Presidential Housing and their respective stadium. Beating an on campus stadium is hard, as once again UC Berkeley is just around 0.9 miles from the University House to California Memorial Stadium while Wake Forest’s Hanes House to Allegacy Federal Credit Union Stadium is a whopping 4.1 miles off campus! Today we all learned!
Well, that about it wraps it up, and what a long strange trip its been. Hope to see you this Saturday for the Grateful Dead theme night as Cal take’s on the Demon Deacons. Thanks for reading and Go Bears!
I moved into Ehrman Hall in Unit II as a freshman on the weekend of the Grateful Dead's last appearance at the Greek Theatre in 1989. The entire neighborhood was rife with Deadheads. I wouldn't catch the bug for another year or so, but I felt that I had made the right decision, as there were many parents milling around with "what did we get our kids into" looks on their faces. Good times.
Here's a link to that final concert: https://archive.org/details/gd1989-08-19.138155.FOB.Schoeps.Mattes.Petty.patch.t-flac16
Peetjay: I want to know when you do your next standup show so I can be there! I lived with a bunch of hippies/Deadheads in the co-ops and all I can say is that you know your stuff.