Simulating and Visualising the Central Limit Theorem

Update: this post was discussed on Hacker News

I completed a Computer Science degree at uni, and bundled a lot of maths subjects in as electives: partial differential equations, vector calculus, discrete maths, linear algebra. For some reason however I always avoided statistics subjects. Maybe there’s a story to be told about a young person finding uncertainty uncomfortable, because twenty years later I find statistics, particularly the Bayesian flavour, really interesting.

BOM On Target: Assessing the Bureau's Forecast Accuracy

In this article we’re going to be taking a look at the forecast accuracy of Australia’s Bureau of Metorology (BOM), but before starting a quick preface.

I had trepidation writing this article, and it almost didn’t get off the ground. I’m not a meteorologist, and I’m also a data science dilettante. Wading into this particular field without foundational knowledge felt very arrogant, and to be frank I was worried I’d make a fool out of myself. But after having a chat with one of my great friends who has a Phd in meteorology, she assuaged some of my apprehensions, so here we are. Although there’s still plenty of room for foolishness!

Byte-size: An Ode to Web Scraping with R

Last week I needed to pull some data from a website. I was building out a data pipeline to generate the end-of-season awards for Little Athletics, but I ran into a problem. Like dependable friend, R came to the rescue with a simple, elegant solution. This post is a ‘byte-size’ ode to this dependable friend.

A Day in the Life: The Global BGP Table

Update: This article was discussed on Hackernews

Much has been written and a lot of analysis performed on the global BGP table over the years, a significant portion by the inimitable Geoff Huston. However this often focuses on is long term trends, like the growth of the routing table or the adoption of IPv6 , dealing with time frames of of months or years.

Cracking Open SCEP

Most of the posts on this site tend to be long form, a result of me finding it hard to leave stones unturned. This leads to big gaps between posts; in fact the the radio silence over the past nine months is because I’ve had two in draft form and haven’t been able to get them over the line.

Keeping Them Honest

Last month my car, a Toyota Kluger, was hit while parked in front of my house. Luckily no one was injured and while annoying, the person had insurance. The insurance company came back and determined that the car had been written off and I would be paid out the market value of the car. The question in my mind was ‘what is the market value?’ How could I keep the insurance company honest and make sure I wasn’t getting stiffed?

Telling a Spatial Story

My friend Jen is writing a thesis and recently reached out to me to see if I could help. She had an upcoming presentation up wanted to add some visualisation to it to better tell the story. I jumped at the opportunity as it was an opportunity to familiarise myself with an area I hadn’t previously explored: geospatial data.

A Brief Tour of Lebesgue Curves

Before we start a note: this post is a sidebar for another article I’m currently writing. There aren’t any grand conclusions or deep insights, it’s more exploratory.

Whilst writing an article on memory allocations, I needed a way to map a one-dimensional number (the memory location) on to two-dimensional space. By doing this I could visualise where in memory these allocation were occurring.

Free WiFi with Randomness

There’s a few different pictures making their way around social media showing a complicated definite integral, and asking guests to evaluate it to get the password for free WiFi. Here’s an example: