I already mentioned R for dummies a while ago on the ‘Og and never got around to read it from cover to back. Now that I am reduced to a dummy state with too much free time!, I can produce a full review of the book. R for dummies was written by two Belgian statistics […]
The current puzzle is as follows: Define the symmetric of an integer as the integer obtained by inverting the order of its digits, eg 4321 is the symmetric of 1234. What are the numbers for which the square is equal to the symmetric of the square of the symmetric? I first consulted stackexchange to find […]
In addition to its weekly mathematics puzzles, Le Monde is now publishing a series of vulgarisation books on mathematics, under the patronage of Cédric Villani. Jean-Michel Marin brought me two from the series, one on the golden number and one on Pythagoras’ theorem. (This is actually a translation of a series published by El Pais […]
The weekly Le Monde puzzle is (again) a permutation problem that can be rephrased as follows: Find where denotes the set of permutations on {0,…,10} and is defined modulo 11 [to turn {0,...,10} into a torus]. Same question for and for This is rather straightforward to code if one adopts a brute-force approach:: (where I […]
It's finally come to this - the last installment of the ground breaking, epic and superlative book review. Let's jump right into it! The last three chapters of the book, which I will briefly touch upon, deal with performance enhancement, which is an im...
‘No estaba muerto, andaba the parranda’† as the song says. Although rather than partying it mostly has been reading, taking pictures and trying to learn how to record sounds. Here there are some things I’ve come across lately. I can’t remember if I’ve recommended Matloff’s The Art of R Programming before; if I haven’t, go […]
We're almost done with the book review! I've received hundreds of fan mail imploring that I continue, so I will. After which, I'll put the book reviews on hold for a bit and continue with my journey down the API road. That journey will also explore som...
The last puzzle was as follows: Take a card stack with 32 cards and divide it into five non-empty piles. A move consists in doubling a pile size by taking card from a single and larger pile. Is it possible to recover the original stack by repeatedly using moves? Same question for 100 cards and five […]
An we're back! Today I'm going to briefly cover Graphics in R to the extent that it's mentioned in the book. Graphics are discussed in Chapter 12 of the book. The author rightly points out that R has several libraries with robust graphics mechanisms ab...
Over the last Sunday breakfast I went through Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data. The first two pages managed to put me in a prejudiced mood for the rest of the book. To wit: the author starts with some math bashing (like, no one ever bothers to tell us about the uses of [...]
