A Year with R

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A Year with R

A year ago I stumbled upon the R programming language, mostly by accident on YouTube. I wanted a better platform for making graphics and maps and was running up against a lot of limitations in Python with matplotlib. Matplotlib is powerful but it often requires a lot of explicit code to make elegant well thought out graphics.

R has proven to be a very worthwhile skill to learn. While I consider myself to be a fairly experienced Python programmer, R has proven a lot more valuable especially when it comes to making good basic, attractive maps in SVG files. Simply said, R defaults with ggplot just make sense and are attractive. The pipe mechanism in R based around maggitir is fantastic for complicated data wrangling in a single line of code. Pipes are a wonderful thing in Unix and they make a lot of sense for processing data.

R is a werid language to get the hang of at first. It’s not necessarily bad – it’s actually pretty awesome for manipulating data with pipes. But it is different with strange operators and syntax, based around 1 indexing rather than 0 indexing of most C derived languages like Python. But I’ve really gotten the hang of it by doing a lot of reading and watching videos on R and just digging through the commands, reading help files and even the raw R code on objects.

R really excels with automating GIS processes and being a one stop shop from extract, transform, load to render. Interestingly, outside of academia it seems like R doesn’t get the credit it deserves – especially with Census data and tidycensus its a one stop shop from obtaining data to manipulating it to rendering it on a map, often with just a single pipeline of code. It’s pretty neat.

I’m glad I taught myself R and it’s a technology I will probably continue to use daily for exploring my world.

Piseco-Powley Road, a series of maps

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This organized series of maps shows Piseco-Powley Road from Piseco/NY 10 to Stratford/Powley Road from Northeast (top) to Southwest (bottom). After completion of these maps, I noticed a typo, “Clockmiller Corners” should read “Clockmill Corners”. Edick Road, the dashed portion is an old woods road open to hiking and mountain biking in the summer, and is maintained for snowmobiles in the winter.

Mountains

Bugs were bad this afternoon

Montour Falls from the Mill Street Bridge

Residents say Love Canal chemicals continue to make them sick

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Forty years ago this week, President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a national health emergency when the small community near Niagara Falls, New York, learned that their homes and school were built on 22,000 tons of chemicals. Today, many residents in the area, which was deemed safe by authorities, claim to be facing health problems. Megan Thompson reports.