Archive for February, 2016

Accept that you can be stupid!

February 29th, 2016

I sometimes give a talk on basic research software engineering called ‘Is your research correct?’ (slides here). Near the beginning of this talk I refer to what I’ve modestly named ‘Croucher’s Law’

CROUCHER’S LAW
I CAN BE AN IDIOT AND WILL MAKE MISTAKES.

Croucher’s law has a corollary:

YOU ARE NO DIFFERENT!

The idea is that once you accept this aspect of yourself, you can start to adopt working practices to mitigate against it. In the context of programming, it includes things such as automation, version control, adopting testing and so on.

For me, this isn’t just a law for programming — it’s a law that can be applied to every aspect of life. Unlike my parents, for example, I automate the payment of my bills by using direct debit because I know I’ll eventually forget to pay something otherwise.

The genesis of Croucher’s law demonstrate’s its truth. While sat in a talk given by Jos Martin of The Mathworks, he suddenly stopped and said ‘Mike. We need to talk about Croucher’s law!’ before moving to his next slide which had the title ‘Martin’s Law’. It was very similar to ‘mine’ and it turns out that I had seen his talk years before and had subconsciously ripped him off!

The fact that I had forgotten this demonstrates to me that Croucher’s law is the stronger result :)

Other relevant posts from WalkingRandomly

2 comments

Animated heart using R

February 8th, 2016

While waiting for the rain to stop before heading home, I started messing around with the heart equation described in an old WalkingRandomly post. Playing code golf with myself, I worked to get the code tweetable. In Python:

In R:

I liked the look of the default plot in R so animated it by turning 200 into a parameter that ranged from 1 to 200. The result was this animation:

The code for the above isn’t quite tweetable:

options(warn=-1)
for(num in seq(1,200,1))
{
    filename = paste("rplot" ,sprintf("%03d", num),'.jpg',sep='')
    jpeg(filename)
    x=seq(-2,2,0.001)
    y=Re((sqrt(cos(x))*cos(num*x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01)
    plot(x,y,axes=FALSE,ann=FALSE)
    dev.off()
}

This produces a lot of .jpg files which I turned into the animated gif with ImageMagick:

convert -delay 12 -layers OptimizeTransparency -colors 8 -loop 0 *.jpg animated.gif
0 comments
TOP