Often when I’m prototyping a project, I hesitate to use a sqlite database despite their many adavantages. It seems much easier to just dump a bunch of files in a directory and to rely on the universal support for the filesystem API to read/delete/update records. Part of this is avoiding the overhead of figuring out a relational schema, but an equal amount of friction comes from the fact that .sqlite files are just slightly more difficult to inspect: the... Read More
Update (2020-05-31): It turns out that the Dragon 2 actually uses Chromium and Javascript for its flight interface. So there’s a reasonable chance this autopilot would run in the real Crew Dragon‽
That title is a truly horrifying combination of words.
SpaceX just released the ISS Docking Simulator, a browser game where the objective is to very slowly fly the Crew Dragon 2 to dock with the International Space Station, just like the real mission is scheduled... Read More
Boolean logic is one of the foundational abstractions in computer science, from electrical circuits to programming languages. In Boolean logic, all variables take one of two values: 1/0, high/low, or TRUE/FALSE. However, many practical situations require the inclusion of a third value to indicate a variable is unknown, missing, or both false and true at the same time: usually something like None, NULL, NA, or Unknown.
This leads to a complication: for... Read More
Neural networks! They’re everywhere! Can you use them for everything? Do they have anything to do with brains? Are they Skynet or just fancy regression? Let’s find out!
One of the best ways to demystify something is to build it yourself. On the other hand, one of the best ways to re-mystify it is to obfuscate the code you wrote. So I set myself the challenge of implementing a neural network from scratch which fits exactly in... Read More
Yesterday, I spoke at the New York Open Statistical Programming Meetup about quanteda.
You can find the slides from my talk here, and the code used during the demos here.
Read Morehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?t=904&v=gg1bv9XJAek
https://github.com/adamobeng/snake
Read MoreI don’t quite get this article by Robert Gebelhoff at the Washington Post.
Sure, there are well-known pressures on academics to publish significant results, and also to get media attention. But those are conceptually distinct issues. Publication bias (and related problems like p-hacking and the Garden of Forking Paths) tend to inflate the statistical significance of published results. But that’s not related to the substantive significance of the results, to how interesting the questions being answered are. Solving publication... Read More
Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen write in the New York Times that US primary and general elections would be more fair if the winner always commanded an absolute majority of the popular vote. Perhaps, but as it currently stands, neither party nominations nor Presidential elections are actually decided by the popular vote. Even if Maskin and Sen’s criteria were satisfied — and a Presidential candidate’s state victories were all absolute majorities — that candidate could still technically win a... Read More
For some reason, there isn’t a default way to embed a local video file in a jupyter notebook.
If you’re using a python kernel, you can make use of this hack, which inserts the whole video, base64-encoded, into the generated HTML. But because this runs in a code block, not a markdown block, it’s dependent on the kernel you’re running. Notebooks only support one kernel, so if the rest of your code is R, you’ll need an R version.
... Read MoreScientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.
— Terry Pratchett, Mort
# TL;DR
If Vigo County, IN is a bellwether for US Presidential elections, then so is Valencia County, NM.
And York County, ME; Racine County, WI; and Strafford County, NH.
Besides which, we shouldn’t expect any of them to continue getting it right.
# Background
... Read More