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 […]
Category: fun
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 […]
I’m not following you: Twitter data and R
I wondered how many of the people that I follow on Twitter do not follow me back. A quick way to look at this is with R. OK, a really quick way is to give a 3rd party application access rights to your account to do this for you, but a) that isn’t safe, b) […]
Realm of Chaos
Caution: this post is for nerds only. I watched this numberphile video last night and was fascinated by the point pattern that was created in it. I thought I would quickly program my own version to recreate it and then look at patterns made by more points. I didn’t realise until afterwards that there is actually […]
Bateman Writes: 1994
BBC 6Music recently went back in time to 1994. This made me wonder what albums released that year were my favourites. As previously described on this blog, I have this information readily available. So I quickly crunched the numbers. I focused on full-length albums and, using play density (sum of all plays divided by number of […]
Elevation: accuracy of a Garmin Edge 800 GPS device
I use a Garmin 800 GPS device to log my cycling activity. including my commutes. Since I have now built up nearly 4 years of cycling the same route, I had a good dataset to look at how accurate the device is. I wrote some code to import all of the rides tagged with commute […]
Colours Running Out: Analysis of 2016 running
Towards the end of 2015, I started distance running. I thought it’d be fun to look at the frequency of my runs over the course of 2016. Most of my runs were recorded with a GPS watch. I log my cycling data using Rubitrack, so I just added my running data to this. This software is great but […]
Weak Superhero: how to win and lose at Marvel Top Trumps
Top Trumps is a card game for children. The mind can wander when playing such games with kids… typically, I start thinking: what is the best strategy for this game? But also, as the game drags on: what is the quickest way to lose? Since Top Trumps is based on numerical values with simple outcomes, it seemed […]