Figure 1. Raw TPS and Weather Data.
Summary
Track pants are a bad fashion trend. Anyone seeing wearing them while
not engaging in physical exercise should be shot. In order better
understand the demographic of track pants wearers ( in order to kill them), a month-long study
was undertaken. The following report examines the findings.
Abstract
This study meant to seek out patterns in the frequency of time I
had to see people wearing track pants from my office window above
Castro Street. My theory was that track pants sightings (which I
will now call TPS in this paper) would strongly correlate with
day of the week and with average daily temperature.
Introduction
Track pants were probably first worn by athletes on the track while
warming up before competition. A later casual fashion trend came about
with the invention of the "sweatsuit", which were worn by athletes and
non-athletes alike in the 1970's. It was in the early to mid 1980's when
the track suit became more popular as a fashion statement following the
pattern of Rappers RUN DMC as they paraded around in their Adidas sweatsuits.
In the late 80's and early 90's the track suit was generally not seen in public. Eventually a group of hooligans calling themselves "ravers" brought back this trend starting in 1993. It took a few years for the "rave" fashion trends to catch on, but soon popular media was hyping the striped-leg track pants as the new look. Even superstar groups such as the chart-topping "spice girls" sported track pants everywhere in 1997. After that anyone had easy access to track pants as they were being sold in more stores than Burger King. (J.Crew,GAP,Abercrombie & Fitch,Banana Republic, etc.)
Now that the trend is mass marketed, only the truly fashion unaware person could possibly be sporting track pants. These people want to be one of the group; accepted; clones of each other.
A Place where people come to be clones of each other is Castro Street in San Francisco, California. They are tired of being different for being gay and have found a place where they can be exactly like everyone else. Naturally Castro Street became a hotbed for TPS.
I decided that I must discover what environmental factors there were that influenced people to make such a horrid public fashion faux-pas.
Methods
From my second story window over Castro I was able to observe a large
number of people during the week. I recorded on my 1999 Camper Calendar the
number of TPS per day.
Weather data was compiled from the National Weather Service website for the San Francisco Bay area. The raw data is shown in Figure 1.
Findings
We first looked into the correlation between TPS and day of the week. Though
my theory was that we would see the number of TPS increase with increasing
day of the week, I found that in fact that the order of least to greatest TPS
was Tuesday, Wednesday, Monday, Thursday, Friday. This is best illustrated by
Figure 2.
As these findings were interesting, I decided to correlate this data with that of the temperature highs, lows, and humidity findings for the same time period. In order to best compare these values, the data was normalized by dividing each data point by the average of all data points for that week. The results are shown in Figure 3.
In order to calculate the general trends and correlations between data points, the normalized data was averaged by day of the week. The results are shown in Figure 4.
Conclusions
As we can see in Figure 4, TPS is inversely related to temperature
change. That is, as the the tendency toward increasing TPS from one day to the
next generally signifies a trend toward decreasing Maximum Temperature, Minimum
Temperature, and Precipitation. This is true for every day except Friday,
which has a strong TPS regardless of conditions.
Analysis
The data presented here are quite subjective to the sole observer (C.E.).
The amount of work I actually did that day most likely inversely correlates
with the number of TPS for that day.
There are not enough data points in this preliminary study to make
any strong conclusions. The data does however show a tendency towards an
inverse correlation between Temperatures and Precipitation with
the exception of Friday. More study will need to be done in order to
confirm these findings and draw further conclusions.
Discussion
I was very surprised to find that the data did not correlate strongly
with weather patterns nor with increasing day of the week. Honestly
I do not know if further study will prove these findings incorrect. Perhaps
there is no reason whatsoever for wearing track pants and trying to
put logic to it is inherently flawed.
Email for suggestions, comments, etc.
camper english <camper@cramper.com>