Eek! A Geek!

I build spreadsheets. For fun.

Okay, after letting that sink in for a moment, allow me to share the love. For spreadsheets. There's not an awful lot for which I haven't built a spreadsheet at some stage in my life. I mean, from spreadsheets calculating the best place to live, to spreadsheets linking real estate prices to a map of Ireland, to spreadsheets keeping track of my cycling adventures, to... well... anything you can dream of and then some.

My favourite spreadsheets are often the ones that are completely useless and are built from completely useless data sets. Latest one in this series is... my 'Vegas Index' spreadsheet. (I'll let that sink in for a moment as well)

I receive spam. Most of the time, it's the usual spam that we all get, you know, how to get products like C1al15 or V1@gra for fr33. But some spam triggers the imagination. Like the ones offering cheap hotel rooms in Las Vegas. For some dark reason, I held on to those instead of immediately trashing them as I should have done.

Then the other day, it all started making sense to me in my head. The spam served a purpose. I could simply use spam to analyze the Economic State of Affairs in The Entertainment Capital of the World. From that, I could draw conclusions about Global Economy, Expected Consumerism and from there it's only a small step to Global Warming and the resulting rise of sea levels of the North Sea. I'd take a simple spam message and use it to create the Ultimate Order in My Chaos!

And that's how my 'Vegas Index' was born. See it as a Dow Jones Index for Global Consumerism. Look at it as a barometer for the willingness to spend money. In fact, if I drop my usual modesty for a moment, you could argue that my Vegas Index is a lot more telling about whether or not we're hitting a recession than the Dow Jones index is. Think about it, Vegas is an exaggerated model of our now almost global desire to spend money. The Vegas index covers the hotel industry and from there the gambling industry, retail sales, transportation, production of goods, energy consumption, etcetera.

So what does the Vegas Index look like? Here's a chart that shows you the development since I started to receive the spam about Vegas:



In short, the Vegas Index dropped almost 20% from April 7th to July 5th. The Dow Jones Index 'only' dropped 12% in that same period. In short, Global economy is not looking good. The good news is that the Vegas Index also indicates the expected sea-level rise in the next 200 years (in millimetres). If you listen carefully you can hear a little polar bear cheer.

And you know... the best thing is... I now check my junk mail folder every day to see if I received another spam message with hotel prices in Vegas!