It’s springtime in Japan and I recently saw a series of posts in the The Economist magazine and on Twitter about the latest dataset release for the Kyoto cherry blossom time (‘Hanami‘ 花見, “flower viewing” in Japanese). The remarkable thing about this dataset is that it contains observations of the day of maximum blossom going… Continue reading Hanami Time
Small Thing
I was just coming back from the pharmacy after picking up some supplies for a minor injury. It struck me how little I’d paid (less than £3) for quite a lot of stuff, and how in a richer country (or an African country that must import everything from richer places) I would have paid five… Continue reading Small Thing
GE2019 (Part 2)
Doing some more work on the GE2019 data set this regional breakdown of the vote was striking to me. Looking at the Conservative voter regionally, the region of England with the highest mean Tory vote across its constituencies was the West Midlands. Imagine predicting that twenty, or even ten years ago, and most people would… Continue reading GE2019 (Part 2)
GE2019
A lot of the the Python and R data skills work I’ve been doing over the last year or two have used the UK General Election 2017 dataset as a basis (I subset the data to include only English seats). When you are building your skills it’s good to use a dataset that you are… Continue reading GE2019
DIY Hifi
Recently I started thinking about building my son a hifi system for his birthday. Not a system with expensive separates though. I thought I would go the way of building from base components, to make it easily repairable and upgradeable. The Raspberry Pi (RPi) system I’m pretty familiar with is a decent base for such… Continue reading DIY Hifi
The Second Coming
Eight years ago I started keeping a private blog of poems that I particularly like, it’s still kept here. There was never intended to be much crossover between that blog and this one, but a friend referenced the Yeats poem ‘The Second Coming‘ during a brief political discussion on WhatsApp earlier in the week and… Continue reading The Second Coming
The Strangest Man
I am reading Graham Farmelo’s excellent biography of the 20th century quantum physicist Paul Dirac. I was fascinated by Dirac as I kept getting glimpses of him in other material I was reading over the years, but never had the chance to read more about him. It’s amazing that a physicist on a par with… Continue reading The Strangest Man
John Snow’s Ghost Map
The John Snow data of the Soho (a central district of London) cholera outbreak of 1854 is a classic study for those learning data visualisation. Snow is recognized as one of the founders of modern epidemiology (I learn that some also consider him the founder of data visualization, spatial analysis, and data science in general). By… Continue reading John Snow’s Ghost Map
National Numeracy Challenge
Yesterday, I went looking for a tool that could test my mathematical gaps. I was hoping to identify areas I should work on. Data analysis and programming makes varying demands on your mathematical skills, ranging from the very basics of logic to super tough. There’s a tendency of programmers to neglect building their maths skills… Continue reading National Numeracy Challenge
Reworking some old photographs
I finally got around to retiring some old software called Aperture that Apple have been in the process of dropping for sometime. I’d been dreading the process of importing thousands of images taken over the last 10 years, mainly in Africa. I spent a whole day importing the library in Adobe Lightroom and straightening things… Continue reading Reworking some old photographs