All the plots and schemes

I've been having interesting dreams the last couple of nights. For example, one was a ceramics-related stress dream, where I was trying to pick up my newly fired pieces, but most of them weren't ready and the one that was ready was a blue ant with incredibly spindly legs that kept breaking off in my hands. I suspect this has to do with general packing anxiety. In another one, someone made an elaborately detailed memento quilt for annikusrex which for some reason had a square with a picture of me on it, surrounded by a recreation of some sort of purple embroidered pansies which I had supposedly made and given to her. It was like meta-art.

I did manage to organize and box up the canning jars last night, though. We have a ton of pint-sized jars. They're on the large side for jam. Maybe I'll manage to can a ton of salsa sometime soon. scrottie loves a salsa that's available here, made from guajillo chile peppers, so if we wind up having room for a big garden I might try and grow some. I'll also be interested to see what the Troy farmer's market has to offer up in New York. We shall see.

I also did a bit of bike maintenance, and realized that I have FINALLY reached the stage where I fix and replace things on the Jolly Roger before they are completely worn out. I'm now replacing things when they're 90% worn out instead, heh.

At work, lots of ant projects in the hopper, still. On Friday my advisor was laughing about how I'm probably going to be better-known for this work with the seed-harvester ants, in spite of everything I've done with the leafcutters. All I could do was shrug and say, "Gotta diversify your portfolio." In the long term, it would be cool to extend a lot of the ideas from the seed-harvester system over to the leafcutters, but the leafcutters are more complicated and have required more background work. I'm patient.

It was kind of inevitable [stats; R]

Recently I've had to start using the Tidyverse. I resisted for a while, but everything its adherents have said are true: if you do a lot of data munging, it's set up very well to help streamline things so you can focus on other, more vexing data analysis questions (i.e. the analyses themselves, rather than figuring out how to get data into the correct structure for the analysis). I'd been using the 'plyr' and 'reshape' for forever, and they worked, but still. Thank goodness for the good people who recognized an unmet need and worked to fill it.

Now I have a feeling that markdown's going to be next, mostly because it's super-tedious to type and re-type tables. And it's also super-tedious to futz with things in Microsoft products.

It's mostly a question of when to learn it.

Link Soup: Mostly on economics and the environment

First, a pair of articles from the NYT about interesting turns of events:

Personally, I'm pleased to see what's happening within one faction of the Democratic Party. I have been frustrated for a long time by the free-market economics side of the party. Think back, for example, to the Occupy movement, which started during the Obama administration.

Along with that, I appreciated this article about how Portugal is doing, following its decision to cast aside austerity. To me it speaks of the importance of continuing to consider economic policies from a behavioral standpoint (even if we still aren't sure about many of the fundamental findings within the field of Psychology).

Next: Negative reviews can be challenging to write well. But here's an excoriating review of Steven Pinker's latest book. I personally lack the intellectual tools one would need to successfully critique this book, but am grateful for this extensive counterpoint, which covers a ton of historical and philosophical issues. Also, this subject area is tied to the above NYT articles. Just saying.

Much more randomly, someone I follow on the Tweet-machine recently posted about building a head-mounted lidar array to help people see the world like a dolphin via vibrations sent through the jaw. The author feels this was an extremely wacky project, and maybe it is. But on the other hand, I love the creativity of it.

Meanwhile, an internet friend recently shared a story about an all-female crew that just won the 750-mile Race to Alaska by using a sailboat equipped with back-up bicycling-pedaled power. I'd love to traverse the Inside Passage via some form of human-powered watercraft someday - who knows when, but it's a dream.

Finally, the Root Simple blog brought me to this article, about individual responsibility vs. systemic social change when pushing for more sustainable lifestyles. One of the points made within the article is about how technological advances have not generated net energy savings - if anything, people these days use even MORE energy, not less. [As I sit and type this on a huge external computer monitor hooked up to my laptop]. I mean, I don't know how to reverse this, but I do appreciate the insightful commentary on the subject.