International Talk Like A Pirate Day Q: What has 8 legs, 8 arms and 8 eyes? A: 8 pirates. Avast, ye scurvy scum! Today be September 19, the International Talk Like A Pirate Day. While it’s a silly “holiday”, it’s a great chance to ... [Read more...]

Springtime and cherry blossoms It is spring, and the flowers bloom. One tree in particular symbolises this: the Japanese cherry (sakura) tree. Every year, millions of Japanese enjoy hanami, jointly watching the cherry blossoms, philosophising abo... [Read more...]

A year in review And yet again, it’s that time of the year when one eats too much and gets in a reflective mood! 2016 is nearly over, and us bloggers here at opiateforthemass.es thought it would be nice to argue endlessly which R package was th... [Read more...]

Hackathons are not alike Recently, a number of this blog’s authors were at a data hackathon, the strangest one we’ve been to so far. It was more of a startup pitch gathering, complete with pitch training and whatnot. I was repeatedly asked by... [Read more...]

Hackathons are not alike Recently, a number of this blog’s authors were at a data hackathon, the strangest one we’ve been to so far. It was more of a startup pitch gathering, complete with pitch training and whatnot. I was repeatedly asked by other participants “so, how do ... [Read more...]

IP address conversion At work I recently had to match data on IP addresses and some fuzzy timestamp matching – a mess, to say the least. But before I could even tackle that problem, one dataset had the IPs stored as a character (e.g. 10.0.0.0),... [Read more...]

IP address conversion At work I recently had to match data on IP addresses and some fuzzy timestamp matching – a mess, to say the least. But before I could even tackle that problem, one dataset had the IPs stored as a character (e.g. 10.0.0.0), while the other dataset had the ... [Read more...]

Temperatures Personally, I thrive in cooler weather. In fact, any temperature above 20°C is summer for me, and anything above 25°C is hot. Most people don’t understand me, but I prefer cold over warm. Fact: if it’s cold, you can put on another piece of clothing until you’... [Read more...]

Temperatures Personally, I thrive in cooler weather. In fact, any temperature above 20°C is summer for me, and anything above 25°C is hot. Most people don’t understand me, but I prefer cold over warm. Fact: if it’s cold, you can put on anot... [Read more...]

A year in review It’s the time of the year again where one eats too much, and gets in a reflective mood! 2015 is nearly over, and us bloggers here at opiateforthemass.es thought it would be nice to argue endlessly which R package was the best/neatest/most fun/... [Read more...]

A year in review It’s the time of the year again where one eats too much, and gets in a reflective mood! 2015 is nearly over, and us bloggers here at opiateforthemass.es thought it would be nice to argue endlessly which R package was the best/n... [Read more...]

James Bond: Do you expect me to talk? Auric Goldfinger: No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die! James Bond I’m a big James Bond fan, so naturally I went to watch the new Bond movie Spectre which – spoiler alert! – is pretty bad. It also got me to reminice ... [Read more...]

James Bond: Do you expect me to talk? Auric Goldfinger: No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die! James Bond I’m a big James Bond fan, so naturally I went to watch the new Bond movie Spectre which – spoiler alert! – is pretty bad. It also got... [Read more...]

Yesterday Hadley’s functional programming package purrr was published to CRAN. It is designed to bring convenient functional programming paradigma and add another data manipulation framework for R. “Where dplyr focusses on data frames, purrr focusses on vectors” – Hadley Wickham in a blogpost The core of the package consists of ... [Read more...]

Yesterday Hadley’s functional programming package purrr was published to CRAN. It is designed to bring convenient functional programming paradigma and add another data manipulation framework to R. “Where dplyr focusses on data frames, purr... [Read more...]

The xkcd survey If you’ve never heard of xkcd, it’s “[a] webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language” created by Randall Munroe. Also, if you’ve never heard of xkcd, be prepared for losing at least a day’s worth of productivity r... [Read more...]

The xkcd survey If you’ve never heard of xkcd, it’s “[a] webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language” created by Randall Munroe. Also, if you’ve never heard of xkcd, be prepared for losing at least a day’s worth of productivity reading the comics and the excellent ... [Read more...]

Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly a great tool for presenting your code or even reporting, but everytime I use it for explorative, interactive data science, I keep switching to other tools quite quickly and wonder why I am still even trying t... [Read more...]

Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly a great tool for presenting your code or even reporting, but everytime I use it for explorative, interactive data science, I keep switching to other tools quite quickly and wonder why I am still even trying to use it. I just mostly ... [Read more...]

As an experienced dplyr user since almost day one, I thought I knew every aspect of it. But when my new colleague, who is learning dplyr from scratch, asked me to explain the peeling of group layers with summarise, I was like, what? Turns out this... [Read more...]