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: fun
Pledging My Time III
I’ve previously crunched times for local Half and Full Marathons here on quantixed. Last weekend was the Kenilworth Half Marathon (2018) over a new course. I thought I’d have a look at the distributions of times and paces of the runners. The times are available here. If the Time and Category for finishers are saved […]
Rip It Up: Grabbing movies from Twitter for use in ImageJ
Some great scientific data gets posted on Twitter. Sometimes I want to take a closer look and this post describes a strategy to do so. Edit: I received a request to take down the 3D volume images derived from the example dataset I used in this post. I’ve edited the post below so that is […]
Turn That Heartbeat Over Again: comparing wrist and chest-strap HRM
As a geek, the added bonus of exercise is the fun that you can have with the data you’ve generated. A recent conversation on Twitter about the accuracy of wrist-based HRMs got me thinking… how does a wrist-based HRM compare with a traditional chest-strap HRM? Conventional wisdom says that the chest-strap is more accurate, but […]
I’m not following you II: Twitter data and R
My activity on twitter revolves around four accounts. Practice note:@clathrin: science, cell biology, sometimes music and cycling/running@roylelab: lab news and announcements, part of @Warwick_CMCB@quantixed: programming, data, nerdery.Opinions my own etc — Steve Royle (@clathrin) May 4, 2018 I try to segregate what happens on each account, and there’s inevitably some overlap. But what about overlap […]
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 […]
Measured Steps: Garmin step adjustment algorithm
I recently got a new GPS running watch, a Garmin Fēnix 5. As well as tracking runs, cycling and swimming, it does “activity tracking” – number of steps taken in a day, sleep, and so on. The step goals are set to move automatically and I wondered how it worked. With a quick number crunch, […]
Inspiration Information: some book recommendations for kids
As with children’s toys and clothes, books aimed at children tend to be targeted in a gender-stereotyped way. This is a bit depressing. While books about princesses can be inspirational to young girls – if the protagonist decides to give it all up and have a career as a medic instead (the plot to Zog […]
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 […]