this week i

released many months of work: how to map complex sample survey data.

crossed one thousand commits on github, arbitrary.

watched the first ten episodes of 1975's saturday night live.  none topped the first: billy preston, andy kaufman's famous mighty mouse skit, and george carlin hosting.  richard pryor's lineup still relevant.

do you ever look at the crowds in old movies and wonder if they're dead yet?

woke up tuesday morning to chicken bones strewn all over the kitchen floor.  thought, "wow mbaye must have been really drunk last night."  wednesday early morning, opened the door to my room, and a scampering cat startled me as it dashed between the front bars of our open-air apartment.  chicken bones on the floor again.  oh.

elect boubacar the best name.  a lot going on here, but you have to pay attention..

only now noticed the bananas outside my window

just two dudes hanging out of focus

we both must have positively-charged hair

throwback from when the city was named dahorse

..so scenic.

will miss andrea.  she tagged along while i went to buy a coca cola today.  at the store fridge, she motions for some milk.  i show her juicebox #1, juicebox #2, then pull out the little carton.  i stand up to pay for everything, but she reaches for the milk, starts to whine.  i ask her to wait, she gets louder.  a few more asks, she doesn't stop, i put the milk back, howling now.  i (monster) pay for my coke and reach for her hand to walk home, not a chance.  tantrum blocking other customers from register.  i pick her up, she pounds my chest, the white man with screaming african toddler rubbernecking puts the gnarliest 495 collision to shame.  we're safely in our building, i put her down, walk away, she cries till i'm out of sight, follows me, sees me, resumes crying, repeat till she's back in the apartment.  naptime.  when she woke up, things were right as rain.  fuckin' kids.

went thataway.

12/11

this week i

estimated and then mapped small area affordable care act signupsesri e-mailed me to ask how i'd made that map.  a one-letter response.

completed after more than a year: instructions for the national longitudinal surveys.  until i convinced them to release these files, nobody could calculate a confidence interval.  not just sloppy, unacceptable.  millions over decades, and users weren't able to run a t-test.  all forgiven now.

took the kids to the jungle gym, seven in a cab..


..amazing how quiet and polite young children can be when there's dessert at stake.

worry that the american media mixes stenography and hyperbole.  assertive quantitative journalism is the only way.

watched the corner.  intractable, insane.

the veterans of creative suffering

i ain't about to give up dope, coke, and mr. goodbar all at once.

need reinforcements.  out of the good flossers.  malarone every 36 hours.  glasses won't screw in.  line of pixels busted..


..but that's the price.



12/4

this week i

updated our estimates of how many poor uninsured americans will be left out of obamacare.

consider sympathy for the devil a towering achievement.

brought home ice cream saturday night.  dished out five portions for ulisse, luzete, mbaye and fuck everything two for me then gave the rest of the tub to the family downstairs.  when a house without refrigeration receives a shipment of the cold gold you scoop first ask questions later.

equate linux terminal computing to driving stick, only moreso.

thank whoever was running the census bureau and the cdc in the early nineties.  they set open information precedents that have kicked the ass of almost every other country on earth.

recognize that the two-dimensional implementation of this algorithm could find the perfect gerrymander.

like how this house views the world.

rode around the peninsula then drank this ate that.


started statistical inference with my old professor.

this initial discovery has led to mountains of papers on so called mapping the brain and generalizations to harder areas such as trying to investigate the ways in which different areas of the brain try to communicate with each other using the same technology.  at one point, some investigators wanted to illustrate the ways in which people can obtain false positives in this area by in fact conducting a study not with a person in the scanner but by sticking a dead salmon into the scanner and performing a rote style analysis.  there are many interesting aspects to the way in which they conducted the study and many ways in which they highlight failings in performing lots of hypothesis tests without accounting for multiple comparisons.  in this case, if you do lots of hypothesis tests without accounting for multiple comparisons you in fact see activation in this dead salmon.  which of course as far as anyone could tell really doesn't have any sort of brain activation since it's a dead salmon.

11/27

this week i

published syntax to analyze the fbi's national incident-based reporting system, the daily show discusses its one flaw.

helped upgrade the foundation's most visited webpage.

just think levon helm is magical.  he was cool before it was cool to be cool.  by the way, music videos nowadays are g-rated pornography.  porn music could use the upgrade.

realized brazil borders france.  also that quasi-random probability next/last birthday survey methods are anti-twin.

run along open ocean for the first time this year.  rio: bay, hanoi: lake, tallinn: gulf, riga: canal, vilnius: river, london: wharf, dakar: ocean..

..first moonbounce-adjacent route too.

ordered pistachio, but maybe next time.

live in the flight path.

went out for dinner in big town, walked home in the evening breeze.


11/20

this week i

published instructions to research disabled americans.

consider time a boring inescapable rollercoaster.  thank heaven the other three dimensions have more to see.

suppose these cancel out.  but only because neither work.

live with mbaye too.  he's on his way to a baptism.  i'm on my way to not wearing pants quite so high.  mbaye snaps and points when he says hello.

went shopping, quickly learned why parents prefer crayons to highlighters.  andrea managed to annotate her dad's pillow within an hour of receipt.

watched my first soccer riot.



11/13

this week i

published instructions to work with the public libraries survey.

asked how to fatten a city map.  the answers aren't perfect but the community is.  like this premier explanation of a correlation coefficient.

learned the survey randomized response technique.  a population-only, anonymized way to ask sensitive questions.  just algebra.  your respondent needs to have a coin handy.  "did you ever have sex with a goat or is your birthday in june?"

cannot distinguish cold showers in this climate. bucket showers are all business, toilet paper is a waste of money.

improvised sandwiches..

..shopkeepers sell buttered bread wrapped in newspaper.  some asshole did the crossword puzzle around my loaf today.

live a spartan existence.  here's our neighborhood..

our street

our street at night

our street's best house

our street's my house

our open-air apartment.  they all are

our kitchen.  look dad, no fridge!

vh1 behind the music but for the previous photo

our hallway

my room, with new best friend lower left


my office, new best friend in foreground

..my afternoon sun.

cannot complain.

11/6

this week i

published this state of medicare advantage market movements.

live with my old friend ulisse, here's his daughter drinking water..

..hey luzete come get in the family photo.

 speak bissauan portuguese with luzete, english with ulisse, and two-year-old with andrea.

lose electricity a lot.  the power went out saturday night at eight.  i chipped in four dollars for some fried fish and spicy couscous.  we all tried to sleep on the roof for the breeze.  i brought my yoga mat and we played with andrea and dozed off.  i woke up soon scratching mosquito bites and went back down to the hot room.  i showered and worked and lost battery.  i tried to sleep and then showered and waited.  the power came on at three.  i wrote things down and watched half an episode of the roosevelts.  i haven't corrected this paragraph, so i must've fallen asleep after that.

confirm that bananas and coffee go well together.  plantains and mustard too.

attempted introduction to music production but i am a one-trick pony.  so questionnaire design for social surveys it is.

rescued a suitcase.

mistakenly ate vietnamese food in an air-conditioned restaurant a few blocks away. sticking to local dishes from now on.

burned all of my stackoverflow cash on a mapping projection fix and how to bind census bureau shapefiles.

walked to africa's westernmost point.

stay cool.

10/30