Blog on Rock Climbing and Data Analytics

David Bruneau wrote:

Looks like the data was scraped and posted to Kaggle by some other guy in 2017, who was then threatened with legal action and took the data down.

Haven't head about that. The data is still via Kaggle available?

JNE wrote:

Seriously, those rotating plots are awkward. I really like the concept, but I would like it so much more if I could rotate the plot myself, or at least slow it down or speed it up. 

Also, while I don't disagree with the data presented there which says that weight is the larger factor (as opposed to height) in determining overall climbing grade and that the larger/heavier climbers are at an overall disadvantage in terms of overall difficulty, I find that presentation of the data fails to capture what most people are talking about when they claim 'climbing is easier for the tall'. When people say 'climbing is easier for the tall' they mean that a taller climber can have a lower power to weight ratio and still climb any particular grade, not that the ceiling of achievement for taller climbers is higher than it is for shorter climbers.

Hi JNE,

Thanks for the suggestion! Unfortunately it is not so easy to make them stop on mouse click. I will therefore either provide the individual graphs or at a minimum slow down the speed of the animation.

Arne

Phil Lauffen wrote: Super interesting! I'm curious how you got the data from 8a.nu? I've always been interested in building something with the treasure trove that exists, but I've heard Lars is quite aggressive with his lawyers when someone crawls his website to extract data.

The data is online available via Kaggle.

StatJuan wrote:

The rotating plots look like they were generating using persp() in R.  

I used the np package in R (which might use persp in the background, I do not know). Here you can find further information: cran.r-project.org/web/pack…

John Reeve wrote: Neato stuff there.

For what it's worth, after a quick scan I'm mostly curious about how things break down by age.  For instance, I didn't start making climbing a priority in my life until last year when my kiddo graduated high school and liberated me to go do what I want.  If you're looking for stuff to prioritize, the "how many years does it take to climb 7a" charts examined by age would be interesting to me.

Thanks! I will take that up. Interesting for me is especially a very related question: to investigate the role of a critical period (or critical age) after that it is really hard to become excellent.

Kevinmurray wrote: Yeah I do find statistics mind numbing. But climbing is something we do for fun, or we wouldn't do it right, so does it need to be dissected to a mere number and equation.

Arne Warnke wrote:

Haven't head about that. The data is still via Kaggle available?

This was the link I followed from you blog, which I can't find on your blog anymore? Maybe the data is still available but the scraping code isn't.

Arne Warnke wrote:

Hi JNE,

Thanks for the suggestion! Unfortunately it is not so easy to make them stop on mouse click. I will therefore either provide the individual graphs or at a minimum slow down the speed of the animation.

Arne

Cool, thanks.