The first blog

I am a data scientist by profession, but I have a fervent hobby which is perceived as "old" by many - stamp/coin collecting.  And, so here comes the name of this blog.  I will discuss my findings and questions in collecting the "collectibles" most of the time.  Sometimes, I may also post interesting little applications of quantitative methods for enhancing the experience of the hobby.

First observation of the day: In coin collecting (a.k.a. numismatics), collectors often like to preserve the original "government packaging" from US Mint - be it the modern hard plastic box or the old-fashioned cellophane pockets, when they acquire a yearly mint/proof set.  I have seldom seen people crack open the plastic box to take out the pristine uncirculated coins and put them into albums.  Album coins are usually of lower coinage grades (MS 60 or lower), i.e. circulated coins or uncirculated ones with many contact marks.  This appears reasonable due to the air exposure that the album coins are subject to.

Now, turning to stamping collecting (a.k.a. philately), the USPS also issues year sets, or more precisely, a fancy illustrated album book together with all the stamps (and mounts) published during the past year sealed in one plastic bag.  Here, whether or not to take out the stamps and mount them into your album really depends on whether you are a collector or more like a dealer.  For collectors like myself, I always mount the stamps so that I can enjoy the text and stamps in a nice presentation.  Moreover, for the sake of protecting the stamps from sticking with each others over time, it is also imperative to mount the stamps.  However, I have observed on eBay that buyers still prefer year sets that are sealed in original packaging, even though stamps do not have the oxidization problem as album coins.   Apart of the the buy-original-unopened mindset, there is another practical reason as far as I see it: Compared to coins, stamps pricing shows much variance, even for the same set of stamps at a given time.  Sometimes, it is even hard to be sure which stamps form the "complete set" for a year, due to additional souvenir sheets, sheetlets, and other variations.  The government packaged year set, on the other hand, has a known issue price and is supposedly to contain all the official issues in that year.  So, if I were the buyer, it would be an easier purchase for me too.