Not afraid to use Python 🐍

Not afraid to use Python 🐍

I use R for a lot of projects as it has superior libraries for working with Census data, maps and spatial data. Tigris makes it easy to call and process all kinds of census lines.

But sometimes projects are best done in Python. I recently had a project where I needed run a regular expression to extract text from a PDF and put it in an excel file. Python was easy to do it in a few lines of code while I think it would have been harder to do in R.

I don’t really buy into all this doctoraire about you should use the same tool for every project. Use what makes sense, what you are best at, what executes quickly and produces the best results. 

Drawing A Line From McCarthyism To January 6th

Drawing A Line From McCarthyism To January 6th 9/9/22

by WAMU 88.5

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/144923413

Episode: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/dovetail.prxu.org/2106/635ef423-9de8-4d79-8862-5b4b6c9ee2f7/On_My_Mind_090822_SEG_A.mp3

David Corn is a veteran reporter at Mother Jones Magazine who has watched the evolution of politics in Washington for decades. In a new book he argues the extremism that led to January 6th goes back at least 70 years to Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his high profile hunt for alleged Communists inside the State Department, the White House, the Treasury, and even the US Army. Corn outlines a series of deliberate choices by the Republican Party between the 1950s and today that he says nurtured and exploited fear and loathing, and capitalized on misinformation and political paranoia until it became a central tenet of the party. He joins Diane on On My Mind to discuss “American Psychosis.”