"The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers." (Richard Hamming)

"The reason we model and analyze systems is to gain insight." (C. Nelson Dorny)

At the beginning of April, with the COVID-19 outbreak upending much of life as we previously knew it, I was casually following the case count numbers …

I presented at Utah Code Camp 2015 on machine learning with the Google Prediction API. IPython notebooks are available on GitHub, or they can be viewed directly with the IPython Notebook Viewer here:

• Converting Raw Input Files
• Machine Learning with Google Prediction API
• Taylor Swift Prediction with scikit-learn
• Taylor Swift …

I presented on machine learning and prediction to the Big Data Utah meetings as part of StartSLC 2015. Check out the the slides!

I competed in this year's edition of the Utah Data Competition, a local data science competition. The semiconductor yield prediction problem seemed simple enough on the surface, but it ultimately proved to be quite challenging. I attempted several modeling approaches but eventually converged on two that received most of my …

A little over a hundred years ago, some bright people thought it might be really useful for someone in New York to talk to someone in San Fransisco by telephone. They eventually succeeded in completing the first voice test of the system in 1914, and the first "official" transcontinental long …

After updating to IPython 2.0, I decided to get rmagic working on a Windows 8.1 install. These instructions should probably work with IPyhon 1.X, too, although I have not tried.

R on Windows

Behind the scenes, rmagic assumes that a working version of R is available on …

What began as a simple exercise in turning on the irrigation water to the yard culminated in an hour of yak shaving in which I actually measured the performance of my sprinklers. The well-meaning people at my City Hall had sent out an informative flyer earlier in the week with …

It was a dark day around our house several months ago when it was announced that no new Car Talk episodes would be recorded. The show has been part of my week for nearly 20 years. Like all great shows that are eventually put out to pasture, we can still …

Here's a quick IPython notebook gist about FFTs in Python. Ironically, most tutorials don't describe how to scale and format the FFT output so that sinusoidal amplitudes are correctly displayed. Sometimes that's important. If you don't have IPython installed, the notebook can be viewed using the awesome IPython Notebook Viewer …

So maybe diamonds aren't the rarest gemstone, but I couldn't very well title the post "A Find Rarer Than Tanzanite" and expect anyone to understand the idiom.

I found a professional athlete who could actually serve as a role model for youth! Check out this great article about A.C …