Florence Nightingale’s “rose charts” (and others) in ggplot2

It’s been a while. I hope you are all well. Shall we make some charts?

Mapping the Vikings using R

The commute to my workplace is 90 minutes each way. Podcasts are my friend. I’m a long-time listener of In Our Time and enjoyed the recent episode about The Danelaw.

Melvyn and I hail from the same part of the world, and I learned as a child that many of the local place names there were derived from Old Norse or Danish. Notably: places ending in -by denote a farmstead, settlement or village; those ending in -thwaite mean a clearing or meadow.

So how local are those names? Time for some quick and dirty maps using R.

XML parsing made easy: is that podcast getting longer?

Sometime in 2009, I began listening to a science podcast titled This Week in Virology, or TWiV for short. I thought it was pretty good and listened regularly up until sometime in 2016, when it seemed that most episodes were approaching two hours in duration. I listen to several podcasts when commuting to/from work, which takes up about 10 hours of my week, so I found it hard to justify two hours for one podcast, no matter how good.

Were the episodes really getting longer over time? Let’s find out using R.

Nodalpoint: now in glorious stereophonic audio

Nodalpoint Conversations is, in Greg’s words, “Nodalpoint rebooted as a podcast”. Long-time readers will remember Nodalpoint, a bioinformatics community where many of us first came together.

In the “pilot” episode, Greg and I chat (via Skype between Leiden and Sydney) about all things bioinformatics. It was a new experience for me and one which I greatly enjoyed, despite being somewhat unsettled by the sound of my own recorded voice.

Check out Episode 1 of Nodalpoint Conversations. It’s as close to proof of my existence as you’ll get. Then follow nodalconv on Twitter.