It has been a long time since I have read any fiction book. So, thought of reading one, on this weekend to take a break from stats, programming and the usual routine. It took me about 9 hours to read the entire book and I must say that there was not a single instance during those 9 hours that I felt like taking a break. So, the book has a smooth flow of prose with just enough characters that you don’t lose the story or get bored anywhere.

I have started using the development version of IPython from github and the experience has been extremely pleasant. Writing code and doing interactive data analysis has become so much more easier in iPython Notebook. Fernando Perez at Pycon 2012 says that, very soon, there will Sphinx support, debugging support and other parallel computing support that will be built in to IPython. Will eagerly await the production version of IPython notebook. However development in whatever form it is in, is good enough to experiment and do quick data analysis.

Austin Kleon’s book is essentially a blog post turned in to a book .The basic theme of the book is that in art as in other forms, you have to steal. The word steal has a negative connotation and hence the book differentiates between two kinds of thefts: Basically theft in this sense means that you are free from the burden of trying to be completely original. Most of the book is common sense stuff but how often do we really follow commonsense ?

There are a ton of relationships between various distributions. One typically understands them, remembers them based on the kind of stats work that one does. If one does a lot of Bayesian stuff, one tends to remember the conjugate priors and related distributions. If you are doing survival modeling, you tend to focus on specific distributions like weibull etc. If you are in to OR work, Erlang, gamma, beta distribution parameters are at your finger tips.

Via Lemire Over 20 years ago, back when I was in high school, I went on a sailboat trip. I was so impressed that I decided to own a sailboat one day. I realized that a sailboat was expensive, and I guess I thought that owning a boat would not only be cool, it would be a symbol of my success. How did it go? Today, not only do I now own two sailboats, I’m building a third one.