Category: books

Learning Statistics

I’m starting to read a book on statistics, and this is from the beginning of the chapter on probability:

If you are reading this book as part of a course in statistics, then you are likely pursuing a degree in higher education. On the other hand, if you are reading this book simply out of enjoyment, then you are crazy. That is one thing we can be certain about.

I guess I’m crazy. Oh well. It’s a pretty good book so far, though I think I’m going to need more to really get going.

I started thinking about learning more about statistics and data analysis recently. It ties in a bit with my attempt to learn how to use Power BI. I have all the basics of Power BI down now, meaning that I can import data and make fancy-looking pie charts and bar graphs, and now I’m poking at the edges of more meaningful data analysis.

It’s kind of hard to figure out where to start with statistics and data analysis. I never took a course in statistics when I was in college, so I don’t really know much to begin with. I did read Larry Gonick’s Cartoon Guide to Statistics years ago, back in the 90s I think. I don’t really remember much about it; maybe I should reread it now.

The book I’m currently reading is meant as a college textbook (per the quote above), and isn’t really meant to stand alone. It purposely doesn’t talk about software tools at all; just the background concepts and a little math. I’m thinking about reading this book along with it, which includes some more practical stuff, using Excel as the tool of choice. (Both books are on Safari, so I can read them for free.)

Of course, as a programmer, I’d eventually like to get to a book that talks about statistics and uses a real programming language for the examples. So maybe Think Stats would be good; it uses Python, which I’ve used before (though I’m probably a bit rusty).

I see a lot of references to R when looking into data analysis and statistics. I know almost nothing about R, so maybe I should look at something like this book.

This is all sort of leading me into data science, which is apparently the sexiest job of the 21st century, according to Harvard Business Review. I’m not really looking for a new job, and definitely not a “sexy” one, but hey, it can’t hurt to learn a bit.

Kindle Paperwhite

I finally broke down and bought a Kindle Paperwhite this week. When I bought it, it was on sale for $40 off, for Prime members. (It looks like that deal has ended now.) The “regular” price on the Paperwhite is $120, but it’s frequently on sale for $100 or $90. This was, I think, the first time it’s been marked down to $80. There’s been some talk about whether or not this means that a new version of the Paperwhite is imminent, but the consensus seems to be probably not.

I actually bought the version with free cellular connectivity, which was $150, down from $190. My last two Kindles both had the cellular connectivity option, and it does come in handy often enough that it’s worth a few extra bucks for me.

I bought my last Kindle in 2011, so I was due for a new one. The old one still works, but there are enough new features in the Paperwhite, and it’s cheap enough, that upgrading made sense. I’ve though about getting a Paperwhite a few times in the past, but never quite talked myself into it. I guess the low price is what finally got me to plunk down some money on it.

So far, I like it, though I haven’t done any serious reading on it yet. The obvious feature of the Paperwhite that sets it apart from my old Kindle is the light. (I want to call it a backlight, but it’s not actually a backlight. Here’s an old NY Times graphic that shows how it actually works.) I’ve been using a clip-on light with my old Kindle, and that works, but it’s a little clunky and inconvenient. The light on the Paperwhite should be much better than that, but I won’t really know until I’ve used it for a bit. The general consensus is that it’s very good, and doesn’t mess with your eyes or your ability to fall asleep the way an iPad screen or laptop screen would. (There’s some interesting discussion on this topic at Quora.)

I was also curious about the Goodreads integration, and hopeful that it would be useful. Here’s a write-up from Engadget, from when they first added the Goodreads stuff in 2013, and something from the Goodreads blog from 2016, when they made some changes. I’ve been using Goodreads for the last couple of years, and I’ve got several hundred books in there, all tagged appropriately with both the standard tags (Want to Read, Currently Reading, etc.) and some custom tags (Kindle, library book, ebook, etc). Goodreads lets you view your books with multiple tags applied, so it’s easy for me to pull up a list of, for instance, unread Kindle books.

The Kindle/Goodreads integration is OK, and somewhat helpful, but not all it could be. First, it treats your “Want to Read” tag more like a wishlist than a queue. I only put stuff into Goodreads once I’ve actually bought the book, so my “Want to Read” list is basically my pile of unread books. (Currently at 255 books. Sigh.) Second, it doesn’t always recognize that you already own some Kindle books in your Goodreads account. I guess that’s due to me adding the wrong edition of the book or something like that. Third, it only lets you see (and work with) the standard tags and not your own custom ones. So there are enough little issues with the Goodreads integration to make it less useful than it could be.

Similar to Goodreads tags, you can now create Cloud Collections of your Kindle books, either directly on the device, or on Amazon’s web site. My previous Kindle supported collections, but they didn’t sync at all; they were just on the device. And they were hard enough to create that I didn’t really use them. It looks like the ability to manage collections from the web was added in 2016. I went through and created some collections on the web site last night and it was pretty easy. So now I have a collection of all the Harry Potter books, and one with all my Star Trek novels, and a few others like that. That should be helpful. I’d really like to be able to auto-create collections from my Goodreads tags, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to do that.

So now I’ve got some organization applied to my extensive list of Kindle ebooks, but not quite as much as I’d like. I think I’m still going to use Goodreads on the web, combined with some notes I keep in Evernote, to keep track of which books I’ve read and which I haven’t, and to figure out what I want to read next. And the Kindle itself will mostly serve as a reading device and not really for organization and discovery of books. (Which is pretty much the same way I use my current Kindle.)

I’m also thinking about how to handle ebooks that I didn’t buy from Amazon. I have a fair number of those, mostly from Humble Bundles, old public domain books, and free books given away by publishers. Some of those show in my cloud library, since I’d previously emailed them to my old Kindle. Those that I loaded onto the old Kindle via USB, though, don’t show up anywhere. So I don’t know if I want to copy them over to the new Kindle or punt on that and just copy them over when and if I decide to read them. (Probably the latter.) I may play around with Calibre a bit, and see if I can use that to organize my miscellaneous DRM-free ebooks, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the trouble.

So this has turned into a pretty long post that’s more about ebook organization than the Kindle itself, so I should probably quit here. After I’ve actually read a book or two on the new Paperwhite, I’ll post some thoughts on its usability as a reading device.

Harry Potter excitement

I’m starting to get pretty excited about going to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child this weekend. As I mentioned I would do in my last post, I reread the script book this past weekend. I had indeed forgotten the plot almost entirely, but it came back to me as I read through it. (I may have linked to this before, but here’s a good article on how to remember what you read.)

I don’t normally read Vogue, but here’s a good article from them on the play. While I was rereading the script, I was trying to imagine how they’d stage a lot of the stuff in it, and I’m really stumped as to how they’ll be able to do it all and not have it look really hokey. But I have faith; the play has gotten really good reviews (from the London run), so I assume it’ll be great.

Meanwhile, WonderCon will be going on this weekend and I’ll be missing out on some good panels. I had pretty much decided that I wanted to go to WonderCon this year, but then the Potter thing came up and I decided that was more important. I’m not regretting that decision, but I kind of wish I had a Time-Turner so I could go to both!

And, as long as I’m going to be in New York, I might also try to see Weird Al one more time, since he’s playing The Apollo on Friday. I didn’t think I’d be able to get tickets for it this late, but there are some available at reasonable prices right now. His Tarrytown show was great, and he has been mixing up his set list more than he usually does on this tour, so maybe it would be worthwhile to see him again.

We had a lot of snow yesterday, but I’m starting to feel like spring is here. (Please, please, let there be no more snow this weekend!)

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

I’m going to go see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in NYC in a few weeks, so I thought it might be fun to reread the script book. I read it when it first came out, back in 2016. And I’ve almost completely forgotten the plot, I’m embarrassed to say. I mean, I remember that there was a curse, and a child, I think. But not much more than that. So I could reread it, to refresh my memory, or I could skip it and go into the play not remembering anything, and be surprised.

I just realized that the version I have is the Special Rehearsal Edition, which is no longer available. There’s a new version, published in 2017, with the final script. (Or at least the script they were using at that time. Maybe they’re tweaking it again for the New York run.) So now I need to decide if I want to reread the version I already own, or spend $9 on the new version. I did a little research, and it sounds like there’s not much new in the final edition. So I might as well stick with the one I already own.

I’m really looking forward to the play. Here’s an article from the NY Times about the NYC production. It’s interesting, the scale of it, and the amount of money and effort that goes into something like this. Here’s hoping it does well.

2018 reading goals

I’ve been thinking about my habits around book-reading, and reading in general, lately, since it’s the start of a new year. As I mentioned in my New Year’s post, I completed my Goodreads challenge last year, reading over 100 books, though most of them were comic book collections. So far this year, I’ve completed 5 books: one audio drama, and four manga volumes. So I’m not patting myself on the back yet. I’m definitely on a manga kick right now, so this year’s reading may be pretty manga-heavy.

I just finished reading an old New Yorker article about a guy who was in prison for ten years, and used the time to read 1046 books. Not to be overly dramatic, but I feel a little like I’m in prison today; it’s so cold out that it’s really not a good idea to go outside for anything that’s not completely necessary. (So far, I’ve only left the apartment to take out my garbage, and that was pretty painful.) It’s a really fun article, one that I bookmarked a couple of years ago and just rediscovered via my attempt to clean up my bookmarks (see previous post), so that effort hasn’t been entirely pointless.

I also recently learned of the 52book subreddit, which is all about the idea of challenging yourself to read a book a week for the year. I can definitely do that, if comic books count. Otherwise, I think I’d have to be in prison or at least unemployed to manage a reasonably-long novel or non-fiction book a week.

I spent a little time organizing my audiobook “library” a bit more this weekend. I have several that I bought from Audible, several from Apple, a bunch from Humble Bundles, and some random ones I bought on CDs and ripped; I haven’t really been doing a great job of keeping track of them all. (In fact, I seem to have two copies of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere: one on CD and one from Audible.) I’d like to get a bit more into audiobooks and audio dramas this year, mostly due to issues with my tired old eyes making it hard for me to read at night.

I’m also trying to start up a meditation habit this year, so let’s see where any of this goes. It may all go out the window if it warms up and I can actually get out and do stuff outside again.

Star Trek novels and random web comics

I love Ty Templeton. I keep forgetting about his Bun Toons webcomic. (I should really set up an organized collection of webcomics in an RSS reader of some sort so I can read them regularly.)

Here’s a link to a recent Bun Toons that is “relevant to my interests” as the kids say. In particular, my interest in Star Trek novels, walking for exercise, and the inevitable slow decline into old age and decrepitude. I wish I had a thrift store near me with a good supply of Star Trek paperbacks. There used to be multiple used book stores here in Somerville, but they’re all gone. I had a nice walk this morning, but I only got as far as the bakery, and I came home with a granola muffin, so I think that cancels out the walk.

I’m currently reading the second Rise of the Federation novel, which is quite fun if you’re a huge Star Trek nerd who liked the Enterprise series. (If you’re not, though, I wouldn’t recommend it.) Once I’m through that series, I may go back to Ty’s post and look into some of the books he mentioned. I don’t think I’ve previously read any of them, and they do all look good!

Bleeding Cool has a good roundup of NYCC news stories up today. (And that’s how I got to Bun Toons, by the way.) I don’t recommend visiting BC without your ad-blocker set to maximum, but they do have links to a lot of the major DC & Marvel news from the con. The Beat has a lot of con coverage up now too, including an account of the Jack Kirby panel that I missed in favor of the Eisner one. (I really wish I could have gone to both of those!)

RIP Jerry Pournelle

I just noticed the news that Jerry Pournelle has passed away. I was a big fan of his old BYTE column. Since BYTE went away, I’ve been an occasional reader of his blog, where he continued the same kind of writing that he did for BYTE. (Plus a lot of random stuff that wouldn’t have made sense in BYTE, much of which was interesting.) I haven’t read too much of his SF, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read, and I’ve always meant to read more of it.

The kind of writing I do here on my blog, when I’m writing about computing, has definitely been influenced by the way Pournelle wrote, both in his BYTE column and his blog. (Just to be clear, while my writing style might be influenced by Pournelle’s, I’m not nearly as good a writer, of course.) I often write from what I might call the “power-user” point of view, writing about my own experiences using a particular software package or piece of hardware. I’m not writing a review or anything even vaguely formal. I’m just writing an account of my own experience, with the benefit of applying some useful perspective, hopefully, and an informed opinion, honed over many years of messing with computers.

I don’t see too much of that kind of writing on the web anymore. (And I don’t see it in magazines, since there aren’t any magazines left covering general computing the way BYTE did.) There are SF authors with great blogs, like John Scalzi and Charles Stross, and of course plenty of hardware/software/gadget blogs, but nobody quite like Jerry Pournelle.

Stuff I wanted to mention

There are a number of things I kind of wanted to mention on this blog, but that I probably don’t have enough to say about to warrant a full post. And they’re piling up in my brain, so I want to jot them all down, then maybe I can relax a bit.

First, today is the 80th birthday of Sergio Aragonés. I’m having a hard time accepting that he’s 80. I know he’s older than me, but the last time I saw him, I wouldn’t have guessed that he was over 60 yet, and that wasn’t that long ago. (OK, maybe it was five or ten years ago, but still…) Anyway, I have a bunch of his comics in my “to be read” pile right now, including a Groo mini-series, some of the Sergio Aragonés Funnies series, and a few issues of Bat Lash. I should really read some of those.

Next, I have started getting into Pere Ubu again for some reason. Probably because they have a new studio album coming out, so I must have seem something about that, which triggered me to start thinking about them again. I spent a little time tonight digging up my old Pere Ubu CDs are ripping them to MP3. I have five of their CDs, which is a decent sample of their output, but not nearly everything. (They’ve been around since the 70s.) Their web site is a lot of fun to browse through. It’s mostly text, not the usual graphics-heavy band site. The organization is somewhat idiosyncratic, but there’s a lot there.

And a couple of recent deaths: First, John Ashbery. I first read him back in college, as assigned reading for a creative writing class (I think). He’s one of the few poets I’ve read who has stuck with me. I’ve been thinking that I should read more poetry. And there’s certainly a lot of Ashbery poems out there that I haven’t read yet, so maybe I should start with some of those.

Second, Holger Czukay. I’m not sure where I first learned about him, but it was probably in a Matt Howarth comic book. I don’t actually own much (or any?) of his recorded output, as part of Can or elsewhere. I should fix that.

Labor Day

Things I did this weekend:

  1. Watched four bad movies, with RiffTrax commentary.
  2. Finished reading a very nerdy Star Trek novel.
  3. Read a few random comic books.
  4. Backed up my desktop PC with Macrium and my Mac with Carbon Copy Cloner.

And that’s really about it. I didn’t go anywhere, or do anything particularly productive or useful. I’d been running a number of vaguely interesting and variously ambitious plans through my head over the last few weeks, ranging from NYC museum visits to flying to Atlanta for Dragon Con, but I decided to punt and just relax. I made one half-hearted stab at watching a Pluralsight video, but I couldn’t get into it. I feel a little guilty about that, but at least I didn’t just give up completely and binge-watch NCIS all weekend. (That has happened. But not recently…) And I did manage to hit my Apple Watch activity goals every day, I think, so there’s that.

Terry Pratchett

From The Guardian:

The unfinished books of Sir Terry Pratchett have been destroyed by a steamroller, following the late fantasy novelist’s wishes. Pratchett’s hard drive was crushed by a vintage John Fowler & Co steamroller named Lord Jericho at the Great Dorset Steam Fair, ahead of the opening of a new exhibition about the author’s life and work.

I just finished reading Equal Rites, one of the earlier Discworld novels. I was a bit of a latecomer to Pratchett, having read Mort back in the late nineties, and a couple of other books here and there, but not really getting organized about it until maybe last year. I’ve now read the first four books, and will likely be continuing through them in (something resembling) the order in which they were published. There are enough of them that it’ll be years before I run out of Discworld books.