Recently updated blogs

This week in Modern Plain Text Computing we put together some of the things we’ve been learning about cleaning and tidying data. Here’s a somewhat sobering example using data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, which is how the NTSA tracks information about road accidents in the United States. Our data file shows counts of pedestrians aged <16 killed in road accidents on each day of the month in the …

The point of a blog is to catalog writing. I've switched platforms a couple of times and I decided it was time to get archives front and center again. With this small update, there's now a link to posts by year on the right (you might need to do a refresh to get the addition). This is an easy way to jump from one spot to another and will help …

Today I turn 57 years old. I’m quite certain I say more or less the same thing, every year, but I never seem to know what to do with the number in question. More so than ever, though, that number is one I’m pointedly not excited about. What’s that line from Pink Floyd? “Shorter of breath … and one day closer to death!” Yeah, cheers, fellas. In any case, being …

It’s super late at night on Thanksgiving weekend in Canada. I shouldn’t be thinking about weird internet drama, but here we are. Since I last wrote about the ongoing WordPress situation: Matt Mullenweg promoted a “fork” of WordPress that wasn’t actually a fork. He then hijacked one of the most prominent plugins in the WordPress development world. The first point is pretty minor, but highlights the depths of strangeness at …

The comet has returned! Will it live up to expectations?

The video game market is far wider than it has ever been. If someone were to ask what the target market was for video games in the 1990s, most people would respond, “Elementary and teenage boys,” and the games being made reflected that. Now, however, the market has become so broad that it essentially includes everybody, and the games being made today reflect that as well. You can see it …

Recently I came upon these action figures at the Dollar Tree. They stand around 4.5 inches and are well detailed.

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In 2016, I had returned to America after several years outside the country. I did an amazing job of avoiding most, but not all the election season. I didn’t see any meaningful difference between either candidate. Hillary Clinton was evil and corrupt1, and her name is associated with a “two to the back of the head” suicide2. I joked with a friend that I hoped Trump won, just so that …

. Readers: I gave the Neyman Seminar at Berkeley last Wednesday, October 9, and had been so busy preparing it that I did not update my leisurely cruise for October. This is the second stop. I will shortly post remarks on the the panel discussion that followed my Neyman talk (with panelists, Ben Recht, Philip Stark, Bin Yu, and Snow Zhang), which was quite illuminating. “I shall be concerned with …

If you love reading about the history of science fiction, you should love reading Jim Emerson’s series Futures Past. I’ve previously reviewed the volumes for 1926 & 1927, and 1928. In the early 1990s Emerson started this project as a fanzine focusing on the history of science fiction, and published four issues: 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1929 before he had to stop. Then a few years ago when he retired …

Almost three weeks ago, I proposed a collaborative project, combining the efforts of professional and amateur mathematicians, automatic theorem provers, AI tools, and the proof assistant language Lean, to describe the implication graph relating the 4694 equational laws for magmas that can be expressed using up to four invocations of the magma operation. That is to say, one needs to determine the truth or falsity of the possible implications between …

Last Friday we said goodbye to 159 colleagues as part of our alignment offer. It was a tough day, there are a lot of close relationships within Automattic, and goodbyes are always hard. On Monday, I got to be Oprah for a few minutes. We had scheduled a town hall for leaders around the company to speak to everyone, and our Woo team had ~350 people in person at a …

We made one stop in the Grand Canyon that I’d never visited before, or even heard of. Some of our group had found it on a previous trip, a short scramble up a small side drainage flowing with a tiny stream of salt water. All around the edges of the trickling flow, the stones were encased in salt, gleaming white under the sun. And not just stones: There’s so much …

I hadn't been to a poetry event in a little while, so when I saw Milk Poetry were doing a special horror themed slam I signed up immediately. My work has often traded in the bizarre and surreal, mixing elements of horror in with poetry so it seemed a good fit. I performed G-Man which has become a favourite of mine. I didn't win, but that's not really the point …