Learning animals in Mandarin Chinese
My favorite topic in learning Mandarin is animal names because I’m amused by the compound words. I also tried translating some country names.
2024
Wicklow Way 7-day hike details
I like multi-day hikes where I don’t have to camp or carry much. The Wicklow Way in Ireland is one of those, and I want to share the details of my experience
Historical analysis of FIRE strategies
On r/FIRE, there are common questions about ‘Is $X enough to retire?’. I analyzed some historical inflation and SPY return data to get a sense of how often different retirement strategies succeed.
3 month sabbatical in China
In the spirit of trip reports in r/travelchina, I wrote down some notes from my recent 3-month, mostly-solo trip along the east coast and northwest of China.
2023
Google Sheet template for net worth tracking
A lot of nerds have spreadsheets to track the details of their financials. I, of course, am proud of the custom-made columns in my own.
Black Mirror episode ranking analysis
Several websites have ranked all of the episodes in Seasons 1-6 of Black Mirror. I aggregated them into a spreadsheet along with my own ratings, and produced some figures and tables, including aggregate rankings and the most underrated and overrated skits.
I Think You Should Leave Skit Ranking: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Multiple websites have ranked the best skits in “I Think You Should Leave.” I aggregated them into a spreadsheet along with my own ratings, and produced some figures and tables, including aggregate rankings and the most underrated and overrated skits.
My top 10 favorite board games
Board Game Barrage’s top 50 games of all time podcast inspired me to define my own top board game list.
2022
Fruit picking in the East Bay
Many streets in Oakland and Berkeley are lined with fruit trees. I made a map of them and a flow chart to formally decide if it’s OK to pick the fruit from a tree.
Hofstede’s 6 culture dimensions - Streamlit
A recent Freakonomics episode described Hofstede’s framework of 6 culture dimensions. I made a web app to visualize the culture dimensions by country and compare them to a personal set of preferences.
Metro door opening durations - Cross-city comparison
Riding the metro in Mexico City, I immediately noticed how briefly their doors open at the stops. So I collected some data to compare this more quantitatively with the metro I take at home, BART.
Mexico City to Teotihuacan Pyramids by bus
Like many visitors to Mexico City, I visited the Teotihuacan Pyramids. Doing that by bus was a bit confusing, so I wanted to provide some more information to hopefully help people doing this trip in the future.
2021
Misleading title of British Medical Journal article
The title of a BMJ article indicates that the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine has 52% efficacy. I rant here about how the statistical analysis does not match the intuitive interpretation of efficacy after the first dose, and how this leads to inaccurate downstream citations.
5 ideas that most impact my life perspective
They are: 1. Numeric misinformation. 2. Determinism. 3. Street epistemology. 4. Stoicism. 5. Financial independence
My digital mind
I’ve developed a system using Google Keep and Drive to help me more effectively think through ideas and organize my research into different topics.
2020
p-hacking: The board game
I designed a board game inspired by the under-rated problem that data analysis is often not objective.
2020 ballot resources - San Francisco
It’s effortful and time-consuming to research everything we vote for on a ballot, so I’ve aggregated some resources to be more informed on the contents of the San Francisco ballot
My 10 favorite YouTube channels
YouTube is one of the things that makes me feel incredibly lucky to grow up in the 21st century. As long as I have a good internet connection, I can learn and discover so many interesting new things from passionate creators. Here is a list and descriptions of my favorites.
Income inequality in USA, visualized
I had heard that “income inequality is getting worse,” but I never really had a quantified perspective of it. Therefore, I downloaded some data from the Census and visualized it here
2019
My personal data from 10 apps
I requested, processed, analyzed, and visualized data from Spotify, Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, LinkedIn, Uber, Venmo, Bank of America, and Tinder.
Analysis of 10,000+ fact checks on Politifact
Politifact is a handy nonprofit organization that rates the truth value of political statements, mostly by American politicians. For this post, I scraped the results of their fact checking since their inception in 2007 and visualized some trends across time, space, and the political spectrum.
5 Pros and 5 Cons of Insight Data Science Fellowship
During my time as a data science fellow at Insight, I took note of both the great and not-so-great aspects of the program. I wanted to provide a more nuanced perspective of the program than what is currently on the internet.
2018
Estimating the prevalence of code sharing in scientific research
I scraped over 100,000 full-text articles from the Pub Med API to estimate how common code sharing is across different journals.
Analysis of Insight Data Science Fellows
Insight Data Science is a popular fellowship for PhDs going into data analytics. I wanted to get a better sense of where fellows came from and ended up, so I scraped some data from the Insight website and analyzed it.
List of summer and postdoctoral fellowships in data science
There are many data science fellowships available after graduate school, so I organized details about the ones I have found as a potentially useful resource for myself and others.
2017
How to make a scavenger hunt gift
Personalized scavenger hunts are fun, they make good gifts, and they can actually be made pretty quickly. Here’s some advice on how to make one, as well as a full example.
Retirement calculator: Interactive visualization using Bokeh
After debating with a friend about how much/little we need to save in order to retire comfortably, I made an interactive visualization that shows how much money you will earn off interest as a function of your savings over time.
Delays of US domestic flights: trends and predictability
Using data collected by the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, we analyzed the relationships between basic properties of a flight (e.g. time of day, airline) and how much they were delayed. We also trained a classifier to predict if a flight would be delayed.
Brain Oscillations and the importance of waveform shape
We believe that the waveform shape of brain rhythms should be analyzed to extract more biological information from neural recordings.
Free supercomputing for research: A tutorial on using Python on the Open Science Grid
The Open Science Grid is a free supercomputing resource for academics. This step-by-step tutorial will allow any researcher to begin running their Python-based analysis using high-throughput computing for free.
2016
Poster popularity at SfN 2016: Comparing across states and countries
I analyzed the geographic distribution of poster viewership for posters presented at the SfN 2016 annual meeting. Posters from some states (Minnesota) and countries (Netherlands) are more popular than others. But not significantly.
Poster popularity at SfN 2016: Cognition and systems are hot. Development is not.
At the annual neuroscience conference, I collected data to quantify the popularity of thousands of presented posters. As a first analysis, I related poster popularities to 8 of the major themes in neuroscience.
Lucha Libre Taco Shop: Official burrito review
Twenty-eight people applied burritology to asses their experiences eating burritos at the famous Lucha Libre Taco Shop in San Diego.
Olympics 2016: Normalizing results by sport
The United States is dominating in the Olympic medal count, but maybe that’s because of the disproportionate number of medals in swimming. What would the results look like if the number of medals was even for all sports?
Which country is winning the 2016 Olympic games?: A Tableau Visualization
Interactive visualization to set weights to each medal category to visualize performance across the globe. Playing around with data visualization in Tableau Public using the Rio Summer 2016 Olympic medals dataset.
Extracting time series data from a published figure
Rather than extreme zooming on small figure panels, using simple image processing, we can extract an estimate of signals plotted in papers.
100 Burritos in San Diego: 10-dimensional rating system
A group of San Diegans quantified over 100 burrito experiences by decomposing their meal into 10 dimensions. This post describes the data and has some preliminary analysis.
Phase-amplitude coupling: hidden in noise
Phase-amplitude coupling is a common analysis on neural oscillations. But in order to obtain meaningful results, we need to first preprocess the signal.
Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) tutorial
Rhythmic signal analysis can be improved with a transform our of the time domain. While Fourier techniques are traditionally applied, EMD offers an alternative approach to frequency analysis.
2015
Our forgotten memories are still in our heads
My take on a recent neuroscience study in which researchers could stimulate the brain to evoke a forgotten memory
Is an undergraduate 4.0 GPA worth the effort?
A different perspective on how much having a perfect undergrad GPA really matters.
Searching for San Diego’s finest burrito
My first attempt at reviewing carne asada burritos across the city.
Formal proof that Farey Sequences yield Ford Circles
Inspired by a recent Numberphile episode, I explore why exactly Farey sequences will produce the Ford Circles fractal.
Game theory to guess closest random number
A search for the optimal strategy to win in a competitive number guessing game
Median estimation is superior to random number generation in guessing game
A response to a recent Numberphile video which proposed a strategy for guessing random numbers. This new strategy is optimal.
Memory replay probably isn’t the answer to explaining memory consolidation
My naive thoughts on the popular phenomena in neuroscience, memory replay