So, hot on the heels of my last post, I’m now applying another concept from a computing blog post to science. For many years I’ve been a fan of Joel Spolsky’s blog, and I’ve learnt a lot from it. One of his most interesting posts was called The Law of Leaky Abstractions. As with my […]
I listened to a very interesting episode of The Pod Delusion podcast today. In fact, all of the bits of the programme were interesting: from a discussion of faith schools from an athiest perspective, to a description of Tesco’s planning policies from a local council planning officer. However, the item on the programme that I […]
I’ve just gone through a bit of a ‘journey of discovery’ in R while trying to plot a grid of plots for one of the research projects I’m doing. I wanted to write a simple function which could produce this grid of plots from a CSV file, allowing me to easily view the trends of […]
Well, I’ve finally solved a problem that I’ve been struggling with for days. On Friday my VPN connection to the University of Southampton was working fine, and then on Saturday it wouldn’t work. At that point, I assumed it was a problem at the university and waited until this morning to contact their IT support […]
As part of my DunesGIS project I had a need to calculate ‘closeness statistics’ for objects in ArcGIS. By ‘closeness statistics’ I mean statistics giving information about how close the objects are to each other. I needed to do this to calculate how dune patterns change over time. The code below takes a shapefile as […]
No, this isn’t about thinking deeply while the wind is blowing, or philosophising about how the wind is there but we can’t see it – it’s about sand dunes. Now, you might think that sand dunes are quite boring things, just hills made out of sand that sit there and do nothing. That couldn’t be […]
I was chatting to someone the other day about the values in my life, and it led to a lot of thinking on my part. I decided to make two posts on my blog: one about my values in life generally, and one specifically about my academic values. I think that the values below define […]
I’ve recently starting scripting ArcGIS using Python as part of one of my academic projects (about which I’ll post more later) and needed to be able to snap points to polylines – that is, move points so that they lie on the nearest polyline. An example would help to explain this: In the image above, […]
Last night I went to see a production of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys at the Oxford Playhouse. It was a very good production, and very thought-provoking in many respects (particularly useful for the Theory of Knowledge course my Dad teaches). I wanted to pick up on a particular line which occurs when one of […]
It’s amazing what gets covered in lectures when you’re studying geography… Today in my GEOG2006: Quaternary Environmental Change we were learning about extinctions during the Holocene (last 10,000 years ish). In a slight aside from the topic, while talking about the Black Rat (rattus rattus) and the Brown Rat (rattus something elseus) our lecturer (Tony […]