I really don’t get the Conservative Party’s opposition to making it easier to vote

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I really don’t get the Conservative Party’s opposition to making it easier to vote. Shouldn’t it be easy as possible to vote — as voting for individual is a pretty low value activity for any one individual.

Voting after all feels good, but probably doesn’t have much of an impact on your life, as one vote doesn’t change much at all except in the most exceptional cases, and even then, it’s mostly randomness that defines the winner. If you make it too difficult to vote, then why bother?

I know look forward to having the ballot mailed to me before each election, so I can just drop off the completed ballot at my convenience, as any polling or early vote site.

Why Learn R Programming Language?

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Why Learn R Programming Language?

R is weird, if you are coming from other programming languages, especially those that come out of the C tradition — which is the most common base for languages — be it Perl, Python, Basic or any of C languages. Some of the operators are weird, the function names non-obvious, the arrays start with 1 rather 0.

Some of the functions are cumbersome to type too — the dpylr pipe as %>% can be annoying to type repeatably — which is why RStudio contains shortcuts to speed programming. Likewise, the same can be said about the <- assignment operator, which also is obnoxious to type compared to what most other languages use.

But what makes great R pretty awesome is it is an actually quite compact language for creating graphs, charts and even maps due to the pipe mechanism and many very powerful, well designed libraries. The libraries are also easy to explore and understand — you can call R functions without parameters and if they aren’t compiled C code, will output the code that makes up the function.

Matplotlib is powerful in Python, but it really isn’t as fast and easy to use ggplot2 and the grammar of geometry. Matplotlib does many things good, but it’s a lot more fiddly and the labeling functions don’t work all that well without writing a bunch of your own code. There is plotnine for Python which attempts to bring the best of ggplot2 to Python, but I find a lot of the best functions in R are missing. So it kind of sucks.

Anti Virus Rant

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I don’t understand what the purpose of anti-virus software is or why you should have to buy it. Shouldn’t an operating system be secure and provide automatic upgrades, so you don’t need external software just to ensure your computer is secure ?

Then again in 2016, I don’t know why anybody would use anything but Ubuntu Linux on their computer. It takes care of the all upgrades itself and you never have to pay for add ons. The software is quite well developed at this point and unless you have special technical needs, there isn’t much of anything that can’t be done using.