comments encouraged..: August 2014

this week i

celebrated this city's 813th birthday..

..allegedly synchronized to the music. i couldn't hear it.

converted five pairs of underwear to five pairs of panties. those will not look good on my hips.

clarify that this is for me to read later. but if you like, no reason you can't also read it now.

got carded the evening before my thirty-second birthday. drinking age here? eighteen. russian-accented quote: "you looking so young."

finally met some people who i like. a lot. and of course, i'm leaving town tomorrow..

..they bought me a shirt and well other things for my journey across capitals on this 25th anniversary.

waved goodbye to the buskers and everything else just outside my window.

left riga for number seventy.

8/28

this week i

paraphrase janis: i'd like to do a site of great social and political import. now with the oecd's cross-national worker skills survey.

visited the latvian botanical garden with..

one

two

..three massive indoor trees.

fucked with my camera's auto-focus.

dunno what are these.

beat the tourists at their own game. hi-res below.

walked out on the bridge to see the cloud-covered supermoon..

..nice background here on earth, though.

bought nature's fractal for a window bouquet.

cannot believe how many have sung careless love. listened to a dozen, only the first and the last caught the memo that this is for the parade. speaking of best versions, here's one more.

watched treme. all of it. you know it's good when it hurts.

portland, oregon? i played portland before, nice folks. but you know they clap on the one and three?

don't worry sweetie, it'll swerve at the last minute like it always does. we can all go back to pretending the levees aren't actually made of out spanish moss and krazy glue.

follow me or die trying, fellas.

8/21

this week i

computed the number of uninsured americans exempt from the individual mandate if the halbig lawsuit sneaks through.

rented a cozy little place..

..in the old city.

visited a 3-d printing presentation. only men, so what did they print? decapitated venus de milos, of course.

don't know if they know what that means.

went to the zoo..

..they milk that seal for all it's worth.

found a little festival by the riverside..

..and, to my relief, the sun set by ten.

read edward tufte's first book: the visual display of quantitative information.

[county maps] wrongly equate the visual importance of each country with its geographic area rather than with the number of people living in the county

lies are systematic and quite predictable, nearly always exaggerating the rate of recent change

style replaces content

redundancy, upon occasion, has its uses: giving a context and order to complexity, facilitating comparisons over various parts of the data, perhaps creating an aesthetic balance

if the paper is heavily gridded on both sides, throw it out

note the bimodal distribution in the histogram of college students arranged by height

tables sometimes reinforce recency bias by showing only current levels or recent changes

statistical graphics became segregated from text and table as printing technology developed

8/14

this week i

published syntax to analyze the fda's adverse event reporting system. built from voluntary reports without assessing causality, but what the hell.

crossed the river into riga.

consider the monty hall problem a glitch in the matrix.

outdid the tallinn churches on the very first try..

..coolest library since seattle, too.

asked for some preliminary advice on my next art project.

should get a hold of some chalk, then start outlining these sunbathers where they lie just to see how they react.