I mean, people might start to believe that if you keep repeating that phrase in describing yourself to others.
I have different ideas then might be popular in society, like the worship of polyvinyl chloride, a material I despise on so many levels. I just despise the lawns of suburbia, the smart televisions, the marble countertops, the green veneer of electric cars and solar panels on the roofs of McMansions. I don’t want to live life the normal way, with the 2 1/2 kids attending a good school.
Is it a tougher row to hoe? Yes. But not wanting such things doesn’t officially make you mentally ill, because mental illness is defined in the context of being non-functional in society, rather then simply rejecting tacky societal norms.
I like to describe myself as a data scientist at least on the blog. I think it’s an accurate term to describe what I do professionally and as a hobbyist – I put together data, tease insights out of it, use it to create outputs from the data. I link names and addresses together from various government records, clean addresses and data, do spatial calculations and render things as Excel files, CSV files, and database updates.
A data scientist is not a programmer or a database administrator. He or she doesn’t fix computers. If anything, I break them sometimes by pushing them a bit too hard. But instead, I work to get insights out of data, take one form of data and then transform it. You might say a bit portion of my work – outside of data cleaning both manually and automated – is extract, transform and load. Often I’ll pull data out of the db2 database, work on it and join it in R and then upload it using a different program that was custom written for my needs.
Sometimes I wish I was a computer programmer by training – everything I know was learned mostly by reading and practical use outside of a few classes I took twenty years ago in college on Data Structures and Statistics. But I’m not needing it in sense I don’t write lengthy C/C++ programs, nor do I worry about user facing interfaces. Instead, I just extract value of data using common tools like SQL, R and some Bash and Python scripts. While I use some AWK, I don’t nearly as much as my predecessor did. AWK is good for simple things, but it doesn’t hold a candle to modern Python and R.
Data science is an interesting field, and one that is surprisingly accessible with relatively easy to use and powerful tools like R and Python. And it’s actually a lot of fun, as you’re not getting into the weeds of computer programming, memory allocation and the alike. A lot of things are relatively simple and clever scripts, and teasing out value of what’s out there but may not obvious until you join the data together.
It was only in 2021, when I really got interested in Python after a friend suggested I give it a second look for doing data processing for GIS. I also got tired of the sometimes clumsy and slow processing in QGIS, and while I had used some Python to automate things in QGIS, I became quite interested in PANDAS and Python for working with data. I got every book I could get my hands on about writing Python code, with a particular focus on data science. Later that year, actually Labor Day, I stumbled upon the R programming language and tidyverse and ggplot – and with it’s strong graphics capacity and ability to quickly process geospatial data I was hooked.
Since then I’ve been using R Studio every day. It’s not to say that I don’t occasionally use Python or other languages, or mapping tools like QGIS. But R has such a rich universe of data manipulation tools, it is so powerful and quick for processing data, manipulating spatial data and querying and exporting Census data. R Studio is the tool I use the most at work and for the blog and many other purposes. And it was all something I taught myself all just at first by watching a few Youtube videos while laying in a hammock, drinking a beer at the Perkins Clearing Conservation Easement in Adirondacks.
Maybe it was just dumb luck that the Data Services position opened up when the former director retired and I was a good fit for it. But I really love being able to clean, process and manipulate data every day using powerful tools and generating new insights that are powering government forward.
“This cute and realistic bunny robot toy is perfect for Easter.“
That’s what the advertising seen on my blog and other websites like New York Times wants to let me know about. It’s a cheap, likely Chinese-made with slave labor, robot toy controlled by an inexpensive microcontrollers and DC brushed motors designed to give a child a few hours of joy before quickly tossed into a garbage can, crushed and hauled to the local garbage heap on the outskirts of town. Found based on scam advertising sites you can pay upwards of $60 for a toy that can be found on AliExpress for about $4.50 in bulk.
Many parents might think this is a wonderful gift compared to giving a live rabbit to a child. At least in popular press, it is reported that animal shelters are flooded with unwanted pet rabbits after the Easter holiday. The press also reports extensively on how children and their parents are burdened to feed, water, and empty manure out of the rabbit’s cage for years after the gift of a live rabbit, as if it’s their moral obligation to keep the pet alive.
This is a prime example of what is wrong with society today.
The truth is domestic rabbits are prolific breeders, they are not endangered species. They are easily dispatched by dislocation of the neck or a blow to skull. They provide quality meat that is extremely low fat and nutritious and are easy to gut and dress. The carcass can be fed to chickens or pigs or buried and quickly will rot away, providing valuable nutrition to the soil. Compared to being a lump of toxic chemicals and plastic, it will not harm the environment while providing a meal.
But instead, too people have this cute, radical animals rights notion about livestock and nature that they would rather buy a polluting plastic rabbit robot then something they can kill and cook.
I made the tragic mistake of clicking on an article about the next generation of Schizophrenia drugs designed to help people with serious mental illness overcome their delusions and paranoia without many of the traditional side-effects of Schizophrenia drugs – namely the withdrawal from daily life and uncontrolled body movements.
Now I’m being followed around the internet with ads with creepy faces on toasters and refrigerators saying, “Know the Sneaky Signs of Schizophrenia”. The rather colorful and cute ads remind me of a psychedelic album cover from the late 1960s. You know the kind of artwork you might enjoy when you are pretty darn stoned and looking for something to be tuned into.
The irony of it all is such targeted advertising is not only creepy and plays in one’s own paranoia, it actually is in many ways a realization of the modern suburbanite’s home, full of internet connected appliances, constantly beaming information over the internet, some that you consent to and find useful but much of which can be used for nefarious or even surveillance purposes by hackers or government agents if they actually found you to be of something of interest.
I don’t have Internet at home but I have been to plenty of homes where people have Amazon Echos and “smart” televisions and refrigerators with large displays that smile at you and try to be friendly in appearance, even if they are data collecting machines, mostly for innocent purposes like telling you when your toast is done on your cellphone, that and selling your data and marketing to you. I mean, the schizophrenic aren’t exactly wrong about whereAmerica is going these days in your typical suburban home.
Going to be a nice spring day today, opened some of my windows and of course riding in. I have ridden in all day this week.
Figure I’ll have meetings today so best to ride in as it’s the easiest way to get between Menands and downtown. Plus the ride is pretty enjoyable on a mild day like today, with temperatures heading up to the sixties later. If I ride home this evening, then I will have ridden in all day five days this week, and with that longer ride on Monday, it will have been more then 100 miles. Funny how 8 3/4 mile commute one way adds up quickly.
Made a big pot of beans and rice this morning. Lots of carbs lately, although I guess the squash ain’t carbs. Still have lots of whole-wheat bread I made in the stove, some squash left and I froze some of the beans. Banana-oatmeal-carrot pancakes this morning. I forget how much sweetness bananas add to pancakes without needing any fake sugar or syrup. And I just like carrots in all forms, especially added to pancakes as they add more fiber.
Another kind of bad weekend, with rain expected for the second half of the weekend, and probably cloudy and windy on Saturday. Probably another day at home weekend, though it will be mild on Saturday. Maybe a trip out to Pine Bush on my bike might be fun to ride trail. I could ride over there. Or maybe just out to Voorheesville on the rail trail. I’m undecided!
Plus the ride is pretty enjoyable on a mild day like today, with temperatures heading up to the sixties later. If I ride home this evening, then I will have ridden in all day five days this week, and with that longer ride on Monday, it will have been more then 100 miles. Funny how 8 3/4 mile commute one way adds up quickly. 
Lots of carbs lately, although I guess the squash ain’t carbs. Still have lots of whole-wheat bread I made in the stove, some squash left and I froze some of the beans. Banana-oatmeal-carrot pancakes this morning. 
I forget how much sweetness bananas add to pancakes without needing any fake sugar or syrup. And I just like carrots in all forms, 
especially added to pancakes as they add more fiber. 
with rain expected for the second half of the weekend, and probably cloudy and windy on Saturday. Probably another day at home weekend, though it will be mild on Saturday. 
Maybe a trip out to Pine Bush on my bike might be fun to ride trail. I could ride over there. Or maybe just out to Voorheesville on the rail trail. I’m undecided!