I’d seen the small multiple artwork of running and cycling routes from Marcus Volz’s R package Strava all over the web. Ads for “posters of your GPS tracks” pop up on Reddit and I’d notice a few #Rstats people put up their posters on Twitter. I’ve had the package bookmarked for a while and this week […]
Category: adventures in code
Adventures in Code VI: debugging and silly mistakes
This deserved a bit of further explanation, due to the stupidity involved. “Debugging is like being the detective in a crime movie where you are also the murderer.” – Filipe Fortes My code was giving an unexpected result and I was having a hard time figuring out the problem. The unexpected result was that a […]
Frankly, Mr. Shankly
I read about Antonio Sánchez Chinchón’s clever approach to use the Travelling Salesperson algorithm to generate some math-art in R. The follow up was even nicer in my opinion, Pencil Scribbles. The subject was Boris Karloff as the monster in Frankenstein. I was interested in running the code (available here and here), so I thought I’d […]
Paintball’s Coming Home: generating Damien Hirst spot paintings
A few days ago, I read an article about Damien Hirst’s new spot paintings. I’d forgotten how regular the spots were in the original spot paintings from the 1990s (examples are on his page here). It made me think that these paintings could be randomly generated and so I wrote a quick piece of code […]
Esoteric Circle
Many projects in the lab involve quantifying circular objects. Microtubules, vesicles and so on are approximately circular in cross section. This quick post is about how to find the diameter of these objects using a computer. So how do you measure the diameter of an object that is approximately circular? Well, if it was circular […]
The Sound of Clouds: wordcloud of tweets using R
Another post using R and looking at Twitter data. As I was typing out a tweet, I had the feeling that my vocabulary is a bit limited. Papers I tweet about are either “great”, “awesome” or “interesting”. I wondered what my most frequently tweeted words are. Like the last post you can (probably) do what […]
The Second Arrangement
To validate our analyses, I’ve been using randomisation to show that the results we see would not arise due to chance. For example, the location of pixels in an image can be randomised and the analysis rerun to see if – for example – there is still colocalisation. A recent task meant randomising live cell […]
Adventures in Code V: making a map of Igor functions
I’ve generated a lot of code for IgorPro. Keeping track of it all has got easier since I started using GitHub – even so – I have found myself writing something only to discover that I had previously written the same thing. I was thinking that it would be good to make a list of […]
Adventures in Code IV: correcting filenames
A large amount of time doing data analysis is the process of cleaning, importing, reorganising and generally not actually analysing data but getting it ready to analyse. I’ve been trying to get over the idea to non-coders in the group that strict naming conventions (for example) are important and very helpful to the poor person who has […]
Adventures in Code III: the quantixed ImageJ Update site
We have some macros for ImageJ/FIJI for making figures and blind analysis which could be useful to others. I made an ImageJ Update Site so that the latest versions can be pushed out to the people in the lab, but this also gives the opportunity to share our code with the world. Feel free to […]