I’m excited to be speaking & hosting a workshop (November 30) at this year’s R Gov Conference (@rstatsai) along with many others on December 1-2! Join us in-person or virtually online for a fun filled event! Get your ticket now at rstats.ai/gov #rstatsgov | #rstats
We’re called to think about writing better, not about following the rules of writing. Your writing must be valuable. It is when it helps readers to change what they think about the world.
Academic writing too often is not valuable. Instead, academic writing is only ever considered by those who have motivations other than seeking to change their own minds.
Paul Ricoeur famously said, “the duty of memory is the duty to do justice.” We are our memories, both as individuals and as a society.
I and a dear friend experienced David Strathairn’s performance of this one man show about another man at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC, October 9, 2021. It was touching, deep, and disturbing. It speaks as much to our time as to our history.
I commend it to you: remember this.
Being right isn’t as important as being willing to be wrong.
Matthew Shepard is one of uncountably many LGBTQ+ individuals murdered each year for having the temerity to be themselves. While the circumstances of Matthew’s last day are complicated, the perpetrators claimed at trial that their actions were in large part motivated by their hatred of Matthew simply because he was gay. On a remote stretch of pasture in Laramie, Wyoming, they stripped, beat, and tortured Matthew, tied him to a fence , and left him there to die, alone, freezing, slowly.
This is a selection from Considering Matthew Shepard by Craig Hella Johnson in which a part of Matthew’s story is told from the perspective of the fence to which he was tied.
Nod to the Resonance Women’s Chorus of Boulder, Colorado, for introducing me to this work through their performance of All of Us.
Learn more about The Trevor Foundation. Save a life.
Visit https://www.thetrevorproject.org/
If you are in crisis or know someone who is, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HELLO to 741741
PSA: You should absolutely setup or update your iOS Medical ID information and select your emergency contacts right this very minute.
This feature, found in the Health app on your iPhone or iPad, makes your medical information—medications, allergies, organ donor status— available to first responders and allows calls to your emergency contacts even when your device is locked.
This could save your life. For instructions on how to setup this feature, see support.apple.com/en-us/HT207021
I had the pleasure of seeing this performed in 1997 with dear friends from my days at Hampshire College. It was performed by Ossie Davis, Susan Sarandon, Mandy Patinkin, Pete Seeger and others. Quite a thought provoking night.
https://www.rfc.org/celebratethechildrenofresistance
The full playlist of the 2007 performance can be found: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAA3F8AF3C23133B2
Richard Hamming was a 20th century mathematician who contributed greatly to our understanding of information and information encodings. In this talk he shares his thoughts on how to be good at what you do. In short: work on the right problem, at the right time, and using the right methods. Were it so easy!
Here’s an interesting throwback to my early days of computing. I learned about computing and programming on a Times-Sinclair 1000 back in 1982. For a “reasonable” cost, it was a keyboard and computer all-in-one that you plugged into your TV set (for display) and audio cassette player (for data storage).
This is a nice intro to the new Raspberry Pi 400 all-in-one computer… This is 1,000 generations follow-on from the Times-Sinclair 1000. And yet, it’s so very similar: all-in-one, connect to your monitor, etc. Also, it’s the same current dollars cost: The Sinclair cost $99 in 1982 dollars and the PI 400 costs $100 in 2020 dollars for a kit that includes a hefty beginner’s guide, power supply, mouse, and video cable.
These kinds of devices allow for discovery and tinkering in a way that tightly controlled ecosystems such as the iPhone, iPad, and even Android platforms generally do not. Here’s hoping such systems inspire more generations to explore the possibilities of computing.
“The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”
“…doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong.”
There are plentiful examples of spreadsheet applications leading analysts astray. Believe all the scary stories. Spreadsheets can silently damage your data, converting numbers to dates or dropping leading zeros from what should be fixed-length identifier (where did the U.S. Zip Code 01002 go?).
The U.K. Lost 16,000 COVID Cases Because It Doesn’t Understand Microsoft Excel
The Reinhart-Rogoff error or how not to Excel at economics
For a set of best practices when working with data in spreadsheets, take to heart the advice offered by Data Organization in Spreadsheets. Please!
One night, when I was 15 or 16, my father called me to his bedside to pronounce. “Your mother tells me,” said he, “that you don’t feel you can talk to me.” Truth. “I wan’t you to know you can talk to me about anything. It’s just that I’m never going to say another word to you.” He was true to his word; one of the very few times that I’m aware of. He died 10 years later with us having never exchanged another word.
Continue reading Self-portraitsYou will be asked to write. Think about your writing process carefully and be open to new ideas about how to approach it.
Writing is, at a minimum, a two-step process: you write, you edit. Writing and editing are distinct steps. Don’t try to edit your writing as you write your first draft; you’ll trip over your own creativity. Get your ideas down, then edit. Then get more ideas down and edit them.
Ideally, you would repeat the writing-editing process several dozen times to further refine your prose. After you’ve written and edited your work, you’ll need to share your draft with others, who will edit it and rewrite portions of it. Set your ego aside. Focus on improving the writing and, through that experience, your default writing style.
This takes time.
Continue reading Learn to Love WritingAre there problems for which the best possible approach is to perform a brute-force search of every possible solution?
During the Soviet-era, the perebor problem addressed this question. There are connections here to the question that arose in Western computer science: P versus NP. That is, is the set of problems that are easy to verify the correctness of necessarily also easy to solve?
I’ve found and lost and found again the idea of perebor so many times that I wanted to take a moment to document it here. Most recently, I was revisiting a 1984 paper on the topic: A Survey of Russian Approaches to Perebor Algorithms.
The Golden Rule relates the perebor problem to Communist ideology: a desire to believe that some problems rightly require effort and that the search for shortcuts—also known as more efficient solutions, as were pursued in the west—was anti-Marxist.
Whether or not one decides to anthropomorphize complexity, it has long fascinated me that the “East” and “West” divisions of the 20th century carried over into the conceptualization of fundamental properties of computational complexity.
Other related ideas: Kolmogorov Complexity, Computational Irreducibility.