Some of the towns with the oldest population in the state are located in the Adirondacks and Catskills. Those communities may ultimately see some of the highest numbers of death rates as part of the population due to Coronavirus. It really could hit Rural America hard as many of the healthier youth have moved away to the cities for work.
Data Source: US Census Bureau. S0101. Age and Gender. Population Over Age 75. http://data.census.gov/
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.
Pigs! Lately I’ve been watching or actually more like listening to YouTube videos while at work including North Country Off-Grid and jnull0 and Our Wyoming Life. I also sometimes listen to the NRA’s Cam Edwards 40 acres and a Fool podcast, where one of livestock he raises in tammaworth heritage hogs.
Growing up my neighbors raised hogs besides other livestock. Some of my friends from high school still have them. Pigs are kind of smelly, they root around in grain and food scraps that ferments when they rot. They can be rough on fences too and can tear up a landscape rooting around in the mud, seeking a good wallow to cool themselves out. Wild hogs, which have long escaped shooting preserves and farms can be incredibly destructive to farms and forest alike.
I’m not that much of a fan of store-bought bacon, especially after I let some bacon spoil and then try to cook it, but there are many cuts of pork that are incredibly delicious. Definitely need a strong fence, truck and a cage to move the hogs around, although I guess I would be better to shoot and process the animal on my own land. I’m not much of a meat cutter but I could learn, burying the guts on my own land so they rot away in a few years rather than sit in a landfill for a million years, compacted next to plastic bags and crushed television sets.
When I own my off grid cabin, my hope is to live as close to zero landfill as possible, putting waste to as high of use as possible.I don’t generate that much in food waste, keeping it out of the garbage keeps it drier so anything I end up ultimately burning out back will burn hotter and cleaner. Turning food scraps into feed and ultimately food is even better. Sure, I can and will compost but feed us a higher use. Likewise paper trash like shredded junk mail can be used for bedding, one more thing to keep out of landfills and out my burn pit, as most paper products don’t really burn that well, especially if they are wet.
Owning hogs might mean that I’m more strapped to my land, but when I’m at the point of having an off grid cabin I don’t think I’ll be as interested in traveling and camping, as I’ll have much of the same adventures on my land.
