Hey folks, Wow, I really didn’t expect my overview of Positron to resonate with so many people last week on YouTube! I’ll work on coming up with another video showing Virtual Studio Code (VS Code) in action. As others have mentioned in the episode’s comments, I’m not really sure why Posit is building Positron instead of making things easier within VS Code for R users. To me the need for an IDE that allows people to use multiple programming languages is a red herring - VS Code does that...
12 days ago • 5 min read
Hey folks, I hope you’ve noticed that this newsletter and the YouTube channel have nearly caught up. At this point there’s a 10-day lag between when I post a newsletter describing a data visualization and when I post the recreation video. I could possibly push that to a 3-day lag, but I’d like people to have a chance to work through the code on their own before I give my solution. After having existential dread last week that I’d never find another good plot to share, it appears my cup...
19 days ago • 5 min read
Hey folks, I hope you all are doing well as we settle in to 2025. Here in southeastern Michigan winter has settled in. Our high temperatures have been below freezing for the past week and it looks like they will be for at least the next 10 days. Brrrr. Going outside reminds me to be grateful that our furnace works and that we’re able to keep it running. It’s easy to take that for granted. Perhaps this is what people had in mind when they made January, “National Poverty in America Awareness...
26 days ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, Happy 2025! I really hope that one of your resolutions for the coming year is to grow in confidence and skill using data analysis tools like R. Regardless, I’m honored that you continue to check out the content I describe here in the newsletter and on my YouTube channel. Thank you. Looking back on my 2024, I did a lot of thinking about how we learn, where I find inspirations, and how I teach. I have been fascinated by other YouTube channels that break down why songs are great, the...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hey folks, Instead of taking the week off of posting a newsletter, I thought I’d repurpose an essay I posted to my pretty stale personal site that I wrote 10 years ago. Last week I told you about my 9-year-old’s experience creating his own massive times table. This touches on the experiences of my then 9-year-old’s experiences. I’d love to hear what your “dinosaurs” are! To be perfectly frank, I think bioinformatics and the problems most of us are interested in are pretty abstract. Worse,...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
In case you missed it, I have nine kids ranging in age from 23 to 7 that my wife homeschools. They’re a riot. Each of them has to find a way to be different from all of the others. This makes for some real characters. Let me introduce you to Peter. This week, Peter, who is 11, has been working on a times table. You may remember these from when you were a kid. Say you want to know what 7 times 8 is (this was always my hardest “times” to remember). You take your finger down the rows to the...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Hey folks, I’m really enjoying sharing with you my 30,000 foot view of how I would go about making figures that I find in the “wild”. Following up on these emails with a couple of related YouTube videos has been a lot of fun for me. Of course if you find any figures you like, send them my way - I love seeing what interests you all. I was reminded recently though that not everyone feels enough confidence with their R and tidyverse skills to keep up. Sorry! Towards the bottom of this email I...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Hey folks, We’re still slogging our way through Thanksgiving leftovers. As time passes from last Thursday, there’s a fine line between setting a good example about not wasting food and setting a bad example by getting every food poisoning! Speaking of eating, our teeth are pretty important, don’t you think? In the US, Trump’s expected head for the Department of Health and Human Services has a number of interesting views about health. One example is that its a bad idea to spike our drinking...
2 months ago • 5 min read
Hey folks, Next week is Thanksgiving here in the US and I’ll skip sending you another newsletter. In exchange, you’ll get three videos on YouTube inspired by a newsletter post from October talking about a descending bar plot with a pattern in one of the bars. Before you thank me, you might want to check out today’s newsletter🤣! I’ve always enjoyed the old 538’s articles and appreciated the data centric point of view of its founder Nate Silver. He has a Substack newsletter, “Silver Bulletin”,...
2 months ago • 5 min read
