In my last post, I wrote about how I built a dashboard to keep tabs on COVID-19 in the US. In this post, I want to argue against the use of such a custom dashboard for that purpose. The title of this page, “against dashboards?”, obeys Betteridge’s law of headlines, which states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the... Read more 31 Aug 2020 - 5 minute read
This past May, I wrote about the overwhelming COVID-19 outbreak in New York and the correlation between population-weighted density and positive cases/deaths. In that post, custom plots gave the most insight into the situation. But as an experienced coder yet newcomer to the data science scene, I was most excited about the interactive maps.... Read more 13 Jul 2020 - 11 minute read
The plague known as COVID-19, or “the coronavirus” (seemingly to obscure the fact that it’s another SARS), is in the news continuously these days as it spreads throughout the world wreaking havoc on individuals and societies. For technical people, it’s tempting to try to jump in and find a way to save the day. That is not what we will be doing... Read more 17 May 2020 - 5 minute read
When I was ten years old, my grandmother gifted me a computer, and it was the most influential present of my life. This was 1995. We’re talking about a 25 MHz 486, presumably at least several megs of RAM. MS-DOS six point something and Windows 3.1. It was just enough to play DOOM, but not enough to eventually play Quake (the 486 was missing ... Read more 25 Jan 2020 - 6 minute read