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Willow 1996 – 2008
Last week, Willow ended a brave struggle with bone cancer. She stayed active until the end, never failing to remind me when it was time to hit the trails for a walk or a swim any day I was home past 10...
View ArticleCarmine’s of Chapel Hill
It looks like my (mild) promotion of the term gluten freendly hasn’t caught on, but I have discovered another gluten freendly local restaurant. Carmine’s of Chapel Hill is a new Italian restaurant in...
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Running with Thieves?
After owning an iPhone for only two weeks, I’ve already lost my earphones. Searching for replacements, Google led me to bestofferbuy.com, which I know nothing about. At $3.50 and free shipping, I...
View ArticleTom Peters Apple Prediction
I used to follow Guy Kawasaki in the early Mac days, and I recently noticed he has a new book out. I haven’t seen it, but the announcement prompted me to check out some of his older books from my local...
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Charity Solicitations Visualized
Way back in 2006, I tallied my charity solicitations, and since then the situation has gotten comically worse. So over the past year, I’ve tried to keep all the solicitations I received from various...
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My year with Android via Nexus 5
A year ago, I was ready for a change. I was tired of my tiny iPhone screen and the off-contract cost of AT&T cell service, so I switched to a Google Nexus 5 with a nice screen and T-Mobile with...
View ArticleDays in a Month Formula
Curtis McEnroe posted a “tongue-in-cheek” derivation of a formula for the number of days in a month, ignoring leap years. His result, in JavaScript: function f(x) { return 28 + (x + Math.floor(x/8)) %...
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How old is that globe?
Bonnie gave me this old globe for my 50th birthday last year, hoping it was also about 50 years old. There’s no date on it, but the seller thought it was from the 1960s. It wasn’t until I saw this...
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2017 Highlights
Just to avoid the embarrassment of going a calendar year without a blog post, here is a summary of some of my 2017 highlights. It’s not that I’ve been silent, but I’ve mostly switched to microblogging...
View ArticleGoogle Code Jam 2019 Qualifying
This year’s Google Code Jam started yesterday with the 27-hour Qualifying Round. I managed to get all the problems correct for a score of 100/100 along with about 1000 of the 35,000+ participants. You...
View ArticleCode Jam 2019 Round 1A
I tried the 2.5-hour Round 1A Friday night and just missed the cut-off for advancing. The round started a few minutes late as the problems site was overloaded at first. When it did respond, I got the...
View ArticleCode Jam 2019 Round 1B/1C
After just missing advancing out of Google Code Jam Round 1A, I tried again in Round 1B and again in Round 1C, but with no success. I guess I haven’t adapted well to the new interactive problems. In...
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Crossword solving times
I’ve been doing crossword puzzles on my iPad over breakfast (usually oatmeal) for the past few years. I got a subscription to the weekly American Values Club crosswords and would also do some free...
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Bar-mekko chart study
The September edition of Andy Kirk’s Best of the Visualisation Web includes a Reuters Graphics article, India is running out of water, which explores India’s water sources. The main sources are...
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Relationship chord diagram study
I saw this “relationship chart” in a 10 Visualizations Every Data Scientist Should Know by Jorge Castañón and was intrigued. I’ve never found these diagrams very valuable, but I was eager to learn...
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Graphs tweeted in 2019
Here are 166 graphs I made and tweeted in 2019. There’s minimal commentary, and I copied them from my tweets rather than track down the originals, so not sure about the image quality. I omitted a few...
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Makeover Monday 2020/W1
It’s been a year since my last official MakeoverMonday entry. I’m finally realizing that most if the action is for Sunday, so maybe I’ll do more this year. Week 1 for 2020 looks simple but it’s...
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Exploring Insurance Pricing Data
One of first articles on the new investigative journalism site, The Markup, is about Allstate’s proposed changes to Maryland’s insurance premiums, supposed driven by an “advanced algorithm.” The...
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Dog Years, Human Years and DNA
A recent paper, “Quantitative Translation of Dog-to-Human Aging by Conserved Remodeling of the DNA Methylome” in the journal Cell Systems has been getting attention in the media for a finding a new...
View ArticleCode Jam 2019 Round 1A
I tried the 2.5-hour Round 1A Friday night and just missed the cut-off for advancing. The round started a few minutes late as the problems site was overloaded at first. When it did respond, I got the...
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