Taylor and myself have traditionally spent a fair bit of time outside of lectures and meetings going over material that we find interesting, confusing or useful. Often these topics would push one of us into delving more deeply into the literature or logic of the problem and then sharing the insight and answer with the […]
Category: Daily Dose
Home Workshop
Over the last couple days I’ve been working pretty hard trying to get a home workshop together, and I wanted to share the progress I’ve made. My house has an attached 1 car garage which also houses both the laundry area and the trash bins, so space is a bit tight. Let’s jump right in […]
Getting a new name: switching hosting services and much more
Today makes the beginning of a slow transition over to a new domain name: TKelly.org. Over the course of the past couple years, I’ve grown fond of the .me domain[1] and it has served my needs well. But as fate would have it, it’s time for a change. My hosting service, the company that manages the […]
Statistical Analysis for my Inverse Modeling
For the past week I’ve been working on a small but important facet of my inverse modeling research: a sensitivity analysis. Since some of the constraints placed on the model are estimated from measured quantities and not really nailed down, we need to be confident that a small change in the measurement wouldn’t make a […]
Which Witch is Which
This post is an elaboration of an iRKernel Notebook which can be found at http://misc.tkelly.org/Which_Witch.html. For a previous article on the iPython Notebook, see here. Every programming language comes pre-packaged with certain basic functions, or methods, that are considered standard. These generally include methods for sorting objects, conversions between basic types (e.g. integer $\leftrightarrow$ float […]
iPython Notebook
Even though Python is one of those skills I’d love to claim proficiency in, I haven’t worked on a real project in the language in quite some time. I’ve always felt more comfortable in statically-typed languages, like Java, where I know exactly how the data is structured[1]. When a friend sent me a NPZ model he’s […]
Photos of Photos
I’ve discovered a new technique in post-processing images that I feel holds a lot of promise when making prints that you want to be captivating and expressive. To save you from the details here are a few examples of the results. Since I am no artist I make no claims for the images except that I like […]
Patio Upgrade: Part 2
Ten days ago I wrote about my plans and progress in giving my backyard patio a facelift, Patio Upgrade Part 1, so today I wanted to show where we are at. Since last time I have been swamped in work (Mini Split Installation) and have scarcely even thought about the patio, much less done any work […]
Sunday Gardening
Continuing what now seems like a weekly tradition, I took care of some of the yardwork on my TODO list this morning. When at it, I decided to upgrade the plants off the front of my front porch since the four that were there are either dead or dying.
Making R your own: Scripting & Tweeting
Previously I have spoken on the merits of the R programming language (here) and alluded to its place in my research (here)[1], so today I thought it was about time to share how I approach using R in my research. R–just like any other tool–needs to be leveraged in such a way that the use […]
Progress with the Lawn
A couple months ago I mentioned that I was putting down grass seed (here and here), and now there is grass! I admit that it is, as always, a work in progress, but the yard is looking quite nice these days.
Designing a Pergola
Florida has a ton to offer, and so far Tallahassee has been treating me pretty well. The only complaint I have–and it certainly won’t surprise you–is about the bugs. Mosquitoes and flies are plentiful down here and make it a tad tricky to make full use of the great weather down here. One of the best […]
Patio Upgrade: Part 1
Update: The second part of this article can now be found at Patio Upgrade: Part 2. While thinking about the backyard today I realized that there’s been a project that I’ve wanted to do for a while yet it always seems to slip my mind when I have time for it. Before we get to […]
Weekend Project: Aluminum Foundry
This morning I found myself on Youtube killing time. While waiting for the temperature to pick up for a bike ride, I stumbled across this video by Grant Thompson. It single handedly changed my Sunday plans. In the video, Grant shows us a simple, DIY way to build a cheap and effective foundry. Melting aluminum cans down […]
Optimizing R Code in my Model
Recently I have been talking a fair bit about my inverse modeling work, so now that it’s summer I finally have time to clean up the code base. Now that the code is working fairly well and offers all of the main features that I can think of, the goal is to get it running […]
Quantifying Error
Being able to appropriately address uncertainty and error is fundamental to the pursuit of science. Without it, results and theory would never match up since theory usually involves a level of abstraction that permits simplification of the problem and observational results are never perfect and include all sorts of uncertainty. Recently I’ve been trying to […]
On cooking: or a polemic on over-analysis
Recently I was over at a friends apartment making dinner and I saw what a beautifully well-equipped kitchen she had. It got me thinking, or rather inspired, to take a moment and reflect on my own relationship with cooking. This reflection process got me to: deplore the lack of culinary skills in my generation, challenge […]
Golfing
Today was the first biannual Tsunami Invitational Golf Tournament which is to say that a group of oceanographers and meteorologists got together for a round of golf. The game was best ball and there were ten people including me. Everyone there was considerably older than I which actually worked out quite well since I really haven’t […]
Paper of Note: Re-designing Distance Functions and Distance-Based Applications for High Dimensional Data
While it may be argued–and successfully so–that this is an article pertaining to an esoteric subset of computer science that few people will ever find practically useful, you may actually find it quite intriguing. I’ve found the article quite eye-opening and I’m certainly no computer scientist. What this article does do, which I feel is critically […]
Saturday Gardening
Since the forecast looks like they’ll be plenty of rain in the near future, I figured that this morning would be a perfect time to fill in some bare spots in my garden out back. Continuing off of my plan from a couple months ago, I had hoped to find some low-maintenance, ornamental plants to […]
Climate Change
When I moved to Florida from Boston, I knew there were be a few cultural differences that I would have to work around. That goes without saying, and one of these differences surrounds the whole issue of climate change and anthropogenic carbon emissions. While I like to think that most people are pretty open minded […]
Working with HYCOM
So far this week I’ve been focusing my energies on getting the Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) up and running on my computer. For those of you who don’t know what HYCOM is a modeling platform sponsored by the National Ocean Partnership Program which includes–among others–FSU. Simply put, the HYCOM platform is a powerful ocean-atmospheric […]
Inverse Modeling of the CCE
For the last couple days I’ve been busy working on a presentation and write up for some of the modeling work I’ve been occupied with for the last couple weeks. While nothing crazy, the write-up did allow me to step back a bit from the model itself to see the bigger picture. Having perspective is […]
How Twitter Improved my Ecological Model
For a last couple weeks I’ve been working on a marine ecosystem model using a technique called Inverse Modeling[ref]I’ll be sure to do a writeup on what Inverse Modeling is and what makes it interesting in the future.[/ref]; and while there’s been lots of progress, I’m starting to get to the point where the model takes some […]
Small Upgrades
I’ve always been amazed at what a small change or minute improvement can do for the aesthetics of a scene. Something as simple as clean window or as matching sets of items can really a significant improvement, so it was with this mindset that I decided to take a trip to Lowes and upgrade a […]
A quick upgrade for the Jeep
It’s no secret that I’ve been heading down to Apalachicola National Forest every chance I get, and my jeep will attest that the roads down there are quite “rural”. Depending on how the preceding weather has been the roads will either greet us with clouds of dust or deep-rutted mud. There are ditches, rocks and washed […]
Kayaking the Sopchoppy River
Catalyzed by my successful visit to Lake Talquin yesterday (post), I decided to make a trek up the Sopchoppy river in the Apalachicola National Forest this morning. I had never really ventured into the park before and my only experience with it has been my cycling visits to the St Mark’s Rail Trail[ref]If you are […]
Kayaking in the Winter
Florida, I have to admit, is quite the place to live. Well, I might just be a tad biased considering that this winter is giving most of the country nothing but blizzards and freezing temperatures from coast to coast. Today I headed out from university early[ref]It is a Friday after all…[/ref] to make full use of […]
All about Vibration
I just finished reading a great, short article by Jan Heine in the January edition of Adventure Cyclist and thought I should share it. While most articles in a magazine about bike riding and touring would not be a great fit for the content here, this one is a bit different. Jan surveys the causes […]
Weekend Yardwork
Continuing my progress from a couple weeks ago (see here), I decided to turn my attention towards the backyard and start making a more inviting and useful space. The patio area–and most of the backyard–is pretty much a blank slate with lots of possibilities so I’m looking forward to see how it turns out. Giving the […]