I did not start writing this post until April because of Covid. Covid means much less being outside, so many fewer opportunities to see people. Mei Lin. We finally were able to order the Szechuan fried chicken from Daybird, Mei Lin’s casual new place. This is the Mei Lin of Top Chef who then opened […]
I recently had to learn gsutil, a Python package used to interact with Google Cloud Platform. Overall, I guess it was easy enough to learn, though there was one pain point. When I was in the GCP bucket containing the directories I wanted to download, I tried to download the directories directly using the graphical […]
Google may still claim not to do evil. They should also try not to be obtuse as well. I wanted to get the longitude and latitude of a few hundred cities, which is straightforward using ggmaps and Google’s geocoding API. (I tried Geonames but never received the new account confirmation e-mail. It did not go […]
Now that Twitter has released their Academic Research product, I thought I would jot down my initial thoughts. These observations are based on beta testing I was allowed to do in 2020 with the Search endpoint and reading documentation of the other endpoints. I have used Twitter’s API for about 7 years now. Most of […]
The fourth time is the charm, by which I mean I hope I see more celebrities than last year because the third time certainly was not the charm. Jade Chang. Jade Chang is the author of one of the favorite novels I read in 2018, Wangs vs. the World. Even better, I actually met her […]
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan. After reading this 505 page history, I hereby firmly resolve to not judge a book by its cover. Had I spent 10-15 minutes skimming chapters, I would have realized that this book is not in fact about “silk roads”, whatever that means to […]
I always tell my students not to use Excel for data analysis, which I think means never to use it. Confused eyes stare back at me, understandably since Microsoft is like oxygen: imagining life without it sounds deadly. So this post is going to document examples of where using Excel for data analysis has led […]
One of my hard drives is down to its final terabyte, of 8, so its time for me to compress some files. Since I have thousands of files on that drive, it would be inefficient to select them one by one. It turns out its easy to pass a bunch of files to gzip. I […]
My Twitter pipeline collects the tweets with R but processes them with Python, but tor the event data class I just taught at APSA (material available here), I wanted to keep all of the code in R. I therefore needed to replace my Python code with R code that would open text files containing raw […]
It’s quite common for me to have a figure that takes up an entire page. Latex always has trouble placing that page’s number: it usually puts it in the top right. I finally found a Stack Exchange answer that works for me: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/238469/page-numbering-on-bottom-center-on-full-page-figure. What’s also cool is that the overfull messages I would get may […]
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