JaeWeb

go cartoons

Just found this rather cool site with Go cartoons, called the Empty Triangle. Especially this depiction of the online Go server KGS is quite funny and accurate. Yesterday I also found another server, Dragon Go Server, where you can play slow-paced, play-by-email games of Go. Very interesting.

Add comment October 30th, 2007

talking R

Based on this post in Andrew Gelman’s blog, which I read religiously, I wrote a little R template for the bootstrap procedure. Well, the template is simple, but the cool thing is that it tells you when it is finished, so you can stop going back and forth to the R window to check whether it’s done. This one is fast, but for a long, slow procedure, that’s pretty cool. Alas, only works on a Mac (and perhaps Linux?).

x <- rnorm(100,3,2)

bs <- NULL
for (i in 1:1000)
{
bs.sample <- sample(x, length(x), replace=T)
bs[i] <- mean(bs.sample)
}
system(sprintf("say The bootstrap has finished. The result is a mean of %4.2f, with standard error %4.2f. You can access the result with the b s variable.", mean(bs), sd(bs)))

Add comment October 28th, 2007

skim

I discovered recently that Skim, a free PDF reader for the Mac, has an option that it can detect when a file changes. Anyone with any experience using LaTeX for document formatting knows the pain of having to close an re-open the PDF file after each change. Besides that, Skim is also very easy for adding notes etc. to PDF files, which I do regularly in my effort to reduce the amount of paper in my office. (No, I’m not really an environmentalist, but it’s nice that while you are trying to avoid this huge pile of never-to-be-found-again papers on your desk, you’re actually helping future generations.)

Add comment October 25th, 2007

r tutorial

This video tutorial is an interesting way to get a basic idea of how the statistical package R, which I use for teaching statistics, works.

Add comment October 10th, 2007

an blascaod mor

This weekend I enjoyed a spectacular hike on the Blaskets Island, or rather, on the main Blasket island, which is An Blascaod Mor (The Great Blasket). I uploaded the pictures here. I received non-stop complaints that I upload too many pictures, so here I reduced a set of 160 to just 18 pictures - half of them to keep a log of events and half of them because I think they are beautiful ocean shots. If you have any further complaints, let me know.

To give you a feel of the Ferry to the island, I also uploaded a movie. No idea whether this works well, though.

Here is a small map of the islands, just to give you some perspective. They are located at the far end of the Dingle Peninsula, in south-west Ireland.

Add comment October 9th, 2007