Little R == r

There's big R, the R that I use to do most my work, the environment that makes pretty graphics, et. al. It's like matlab, only cooler. Or more cool. Or less uncool. You can see my prejudices here.

Today i discovered little R. It's like big R, only little. Holy shit.

Dirk gives a thorough rundown here http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/littler.html Suffice to say, for someone who's been using pipes and #!/usr/bin constructs for years (though not quite yet decades), this is cooler than cool. One might say, super-cool.

It's also a nice intro to R for some of the systems geeks out there. Need a million random numbers uniformly distributed between 0 and 1, specified to 7 decimal points? Need it in a file? Need it fast? r can help:

time r -q -e 'for (i in rnorm(1e6)) cat(sprintf("%1.7f\n", i))' >> randomnums  

Or perhaps you have a million numbers in some file that you would like to plot as a histogram, fast, every day, in an automated fashion, from the command line...

cat randomnums | r  -e 'myrandoms <- as.numeric(readLines()); png(filename="myplot.png"); 
plot(histogram(myrandoms)); 
dev.off()' >/dev/null   

No, it won't mungle strings with the ease of python, but it can chew a spreadsheet and spit it out *fast*. And since it's a stream, you can always pipe it to/from python. If you ask me, pretty fucking cool.

The new face of CouchSurfing

Really? I've gotten a few borderline disrespectful CS requests lately (my profile is here). Sure, young and inexperienced, have mercy on them, etc. etc. Nonetheless, I think it's time for a bit of gentle schooling... The Request >USERNAME: *** >GENDER: Male >AGE: 23 >LOCATION: United States - New York - *** > >ARRIVAL DATE: 4/9/10 >DEPARTURE DATE: 4/13/10 >NUMBER OF PEOPLE: 1 >ARRIVING VIA: Plane > >Hi, > >My name is *** ***. I'm going to Albuquerque this weekend to attend a seminar at the **** Institute. I know it's short notice, but I was wondering if you would be able to host. It's a lot of last minute planning, I just created this account because my girlfriend suggested I use couchsurfing to try to find a place to stay, so sorry that my profile isn't very extensive. > >Thanks! > >*** My Reply First rule of a successful couchsearch - read the profile of the person that you're addressing. Second rule of a successful couchsearch - tell the person what specifically about them you think would make you a good match. what do you bring to the table? What about them interests you? Third rule of a successful couchsearch - add relevant information and a picture or 2 to your profile. A couchsearch is asking someone to take time out of a busy life to provide you with a place to stay. It makes sense to reciprocate the effort by spending some time to write out a real, decent profile that tells your prospective host something about who you are. Good luck! christian

Postgres + PL/R = magic information swiss army knife

I just wrote up an extensive example using PL/R to build a logistic map for a range of values of r. The end result is a pretty picture generated within the database and handed back to the webserver. Very cool. For complete details, see http://www.joeconway.com/web/guest/pl/r/-/wiki/Main/Bytea+Graphing+Example

thesis take 7 part 2

human agriculture, which is central to human ecological dominance, in fact relies upon ecosystem disturbance.

as humans stabilize niches against disturbance, characteristic changes in species abundance and guild specialization may be expected. using two model guild strategies for exploiting disturbance (fire and flood), i aim to characterize the effect of disturbance supression. negotiation of abiotic and intra-guild constraints are the primary mechanisms of ecological prosperity that are considered.

thesis topic take 7

environmental disturbance is a key ecological determinant of species composition. long lives and lack of motility in woody plants can lead to characteristic relationships to disturbance, either through close life-cycle coupling to dominant abiotic disturbance (i.e. flooding), or through biotic forcing of disturbance (i.e. fire).
these relationships to disturbance are mediated by nutrient and organism cycling, yielding causal, fitness-driven mechanisms of species abundance in woody plants. woody plants provide a fundamental, irreplacable ecosystem service of energy production. driven by intra-guild competition and abiotic limitations such as water, nitrogen, and phosporus, many woody plants have adapted to exploit a priori disturbance, or to drive new disturbance.

contrary to contemporary memes, many terrestrial ecosystems have been subject forceful stabilization as a result of human activity. humans supression of fire and flooding has ecological consequences, especially for woody plan

biking and pixing and blogging

dont try this at home, kids. weird downtown industrial scene, not much traffic.

bonus pic - tincture making

this is percolation, michael moore (the herbalist) style, easily the most irritating method imaginable, but the man is right. it works. well. this is a ridiculous amount of coltsfoot. if you got lung issues, lemme know...

the herb is soaked for some time, and then packed into the cut bottle with a coffee filter below and above, not too tight, not too loose, then alcohol is poured on top, and it seeps through and carries the goodness away with it. the cap on the bottom is screwed just so, such that one or two drops a second leave one bottle asnd enter the other.

this particular batch is pretty bitter. the color tells me that it more-or-less worked as advertised. one outstanding question is whether "waste" of alcohol or plant matter by using excess of each is preferable. tincture-making is a fine line between the two. depends on the plant (and the booze), i suppose...

baseline

the sg of water should be 1.0000000. it's close enough. sanitizer water in the pot in the background. the decidedly unsexy part of brewing - keeping everything clean. ive got some strange strains living down here...

it floats!

here's the sweet-and-sour water getting tested with the hydrometer in the test tube. the higher the hydrom floats, the denser the liquid, the more sugar is dissolved in it... specific gravity, s.g. = 1.15... that's a *lot* of sugar. my fingres are sticky nasty now.

my new favorite toy

it's a laser thermometer - some real star trek shit! im cooling the honey water in a sink of cold water. it's not perfect, but pointing the magic yellow thing at the surface and pressing the button gives me the temp within a few degrees. 90 degF is definitely too high for the yeasties.