Top 50 ggplot2 Visualizations – The Master List (With Full R Code)
Technology
Will We Respect a Robot’s Authority? | NeuroLogica Blog
The robots are coming. Of course, they are already here, mostly in the manufacturing sector. Robots designed to function in the much softer and chaotic environment of a home, however, are still in their infancy (mainly toys and vacuum cleaners). Slowly but surely, however, robots are spreading out of the factory and into places where they interact with humans. As part of this process, researchers are studying how people socially react to robots, and how robot behavior can be tweaked to optimize this interaction.
We know from prior research that people react to non-living things as if they are real people (technically, as if they have agency) if they act as if they have a mind of their own. Our brains sort the world into agents and objects, and this categorization seems to entirely depend on how something moves. Further, emotion can be conveyed with minimalistic cues. This is why cartoons work, or ventriloquist dummies.
How Does Indexing Work | Tutorial by Chartio
Indexing is the way to get an unordered table into an order that will maximize the query’s efficiency while searching.
When a table is unindexed, the order of the rows will likely not be discernible by the query as optimized in any way, and your query will therefore have to search through the rows linearly. In other words, the queries will have to search through every row to find the rows matching the conditions. As you can imagine, this can take a long time. Looking through every single row is not very efficient.
Still choose not to have internet access at home 🖥
Still choose NOT to have internet access at home 🖥
Probably the biggest time suck is the internet, just browsing social media and random websites. Not only is it time consuming – it’s expensive with the $50 plus a month for the cable or FIOS service, to say nothing of the electricity consumed and the constant supply of gadgets like modems and routers that you use for a few years and throw in the garbage when they fail or become obsolete.
For years, a resisted even having a smartphone until they finally became inexpensive and it seemed like a growing necessity to have access to email for work. But nowadays it seems like you can virtually do everything on your smartphone – no computer needed.
Bandwidth caps keep increasing and with more powerful smartphone apps you don’t really need computers for much except for the most processing intensive things like GIS work. And heck, it seems like most new phones are including Hotspot capabilities and providers are allowing you to use part of your monthly bandwidth for hot spot allowing you to get your desktop computer online for basic, occasional use.
I just like having my internet access limited at home and not using my laptop, which uses far more electricity than my smartphone. When I need an occasional dataset or to do something best done on the computer, I can use the hotspot mode to briefly connect. And I can get connected wherever.
For bigger files and downloads, I can always swing by a public Wi-Fi network at a local library or other location. My office has WI-FI and that’s where I normally grab software updates, podcasts, YouTube videos that I download and so forth. I like how my internet access is controlled and limited to set time periods at the library or similar other locations.
Even when I own my own land, I really doubt I’ll ever have home internet. It seems like a lot of equipment to buy, services to subscribe to, electricity to consume and equipment to discard. I get that smart homes are very trendy these days but I don’t want to live a life where everything I do offline is monitored and sold for marketing purposes. My smartphone is really just enough.
My growing need for distraction 🙄
My growing need for distraction 🙄
With the craziness of the world and maybe my own anxiety, I often feel it necessary to head up to the wilderness for a few days, away from cell service. While I used to crave camping places where I could stay connected, especially on long winter nights, nowadays after a year of remote work, sometimes from camp, I have a much stronger craving to get away from it all.
Growing the Heap!
I am not that good with computers but I’m educated enough to know that YouTube videos that talk about the heap growing towards the stack are about a quarter century out of the date.
I can remember a time with Macintosh System 7 when you could set the amount of memory available to each program, which in turn would define how large the heap would be. Nowadays when you call malloc, the Memory Management Unit allocates heap space whereever there is free space of the requested size – the heap is no longer necessarily consecutive.
Memory management units are pretty smart with protected memory. If you are an ordinary process and you don’t have elevated permissions and try to read or write to a section of memory not associated with the process the memory management unit will raise an exception, deny the access and possibility the operating system will kill the process.
Now it is accurate that memory management units don’t provide for true garbage collection until a process exits and with many languages such as C or C++ things remain on the heap until they are manually deleted or the process ends. But that is done for reasons of speed and memory – if you have automatic garbage collection than you have to track when every pointer is destroyed.
I just wish beginner videos on dynamic memory allocation were more truthful. 🤥
I’ve been really struggling to master the R language
I’ve been really struggling to master the R language. While I’ve done a fair amount of reading about it and studying up watching YouTube – I find the principles simple to understand but sometimes the coding isn’t easy with all the werid operator symbols and function names.
ggplot2 for R clearly is the superior graphing utility compared to the somewhat broken implementation of ggplot2 on python as plotnine. There is matplotlib and the prettier version of it using Seaborn but clearly nothing beats ggplot2 on R. That said, I really think PANDAS is superior for data wrangling to dplyr and tidyverse on R – the R pipeline is fine but the way it is implemented is clumsy to type and its just not as fast or flexible as PANDAS.
It’s not difficult in Jupyter to chain PANDAS and R together although it can be messy to code in both languages. But I’m still learning and not really all that happy with the quality output of my graphs but they are getting better.