The purpose of this blog is simply to post this link to an article in The Economist. Click here to read the article “How soon will computers replace The Economist’s science writers?” At this point, I could stop writing because this article falls into the category of No Comment Needed, but that would be too […]
Tag: Detritus
Turkzilla Strikes
When good graphs go bad…. In case you need a justification for all the turkey you ate on Thanksgiving, this article from Economist magazine explains all while providing a great example of the use and abuse of statistics, in particular why extrapolation is risky business. And to those who may have consumed more turkey than […]
How I Got Started with Computers
This is not your typical tech story. I trace my life as a programmer back to ninth grade, not to a computer class or even a math class, but to English. In ninth grade, I was fortunate to have English with Miss Burke who, along with the standard Shakespeare and expository writing, slipped in material […]
2013 in review
I am certainly not one to decline when someone offers to write a blog entry for me. Here, courtesy of the stats monkeys at WordPress is the annual report for the AvocetSolutions.com blog: And here’s an excerpt: A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,600 times in 2013. […]
Susan’s Life Lesson No. 2
You have a right to ask for what you want. You may not get it, but you have a right to ask. My son took a summer job with the understanding that he would work 20 hours/week. This would allow him to enroll in summer school at the same time. At first everything went fine. […]
Roadside Wisdom
I’m not normally a fan of graffiti. But I have been quite taken with one particular instance of graffiti that appeared in my neighborhood a few months ago. Here it is: I don’t know who wrote this, but I like their way of taking something ordinary and injecting it simultaneously with humor and profundity. For […]
Big Data in the News
As a SAS programmer, the idea of Big Data is nothing new to me. Decades have passed since I first wrestled with the special challenges of making sense out of huge data sets. Some things have changed, of course. A million records doesn’t seem as remarkable now as it did 20 years ago, but the […]
The Promise of Living
In Memorium Robert D. Jensvold November 13, 1928 to March 10, 2011 During the few weeks when my father was sick, I discovered an instrumental version of Aaron Copland’s “The Tender Land Suite” and fell in love with one particular movement, playing it over and over and over…. I just learned that “The Tender Land” […]