I got an email today notifying me that my Stunfisk strategy was voted the #3 strategy of Summer 2013 in the world of competitive Pokemon battling. This is really flattering, honestly. I’m just an amateur. I haven’t bought one of the games since the GBA era, and I only keep up to date thanks to Smogon and Pokemon Showdown. I’m including the entirety of my strategy after the break.

(Photo: David Richard, USA TODAY Sports)

The Cleveland Indians hit the postseason in 1920, 1948, 1954, 1995-99, 2001, and 2007¹. The Pittsburgh Pirates made it in 1901-03, 1909, 1925, 1927, 1960, 1970-72, 1974-75, 1979, and 1990-92². This October (#Buctober), both teams are in the MLB postseason, with records of 92-70 (Cleveland) and 94-68 (Pittsburgh), both records good for the #4 seed. This is the first time, in history, that these two teams have been in the playoffs at the same time, and also the first time that either team has gotten in with a wild card. It’s a great time to be a fan of these Lake Erie baseball teams.

The Pirates play the Reds tonight and the Indians play the Rays tomorrow night.

Good luck, Buccos, and Go Tribe!

We know that the distribution of the sum $Y = X_1 + X_2 + ... + X_n$ for n random uniform variables approximates a normal distribution as n gets larger. For right now, we’re referring to the discrete uniform distribution, and not the continuous one.

What is the distribution of Y mod b, for any base b?

I’m finalizing a future post I’m planning to post sometime this week. I had a crazy good discussion on r/statistics and have some stuff that I think is cool enough to talk about. Right now I’m waiting back on an email response from Cosma Shalizi about what he thinks. I’m really excited to post something about this because there’s practically no prior research available.

Or, if there is, my Google-fu wasn’t nearly good enough to find it.

Today in Roni’s class we talked about picking fights. I think you’re within your rights to tackle your problem any way you want, but it’s an important battle to “pick the right fight”.

As a current student pursuing a career in data science, it really gets on my nerves when people ask me “What is Big Data?”, or worse, talk about how I should get “into” it. The problem is that the size of the data is not what makes data interesting. As a statistician, as a researcher in machine learning, or just as a student, we are far more interested in figuring out what to do with the current data, than worrying about big it is.

In God we trust. Everybody else bring data.

I have pretty much no idea what business I have writing a blog. I have a terrible attention span to writing. I think it looks really tacky when a blog goes weeks or months in between posts. To make matters worse, I’m not super thrilled with my choice of domain (on the .us TLD), but there was a $3.99 sale at name.com and I felt like it was a decent price. It gives me a little bit of a playground to play in without shelling out a dozen bucks for a “real” .com website.

Getting Octopress set up was in and of itself an endeavor, but I’ll get the hang of it as time goes on. The host I’m using only lets me use static HTML files so Octopress was a very ideal system. It took maybe 16 hours to get the whole thing together. I had major issues with Ruby installation and raking files correctly. I’m pretty sure I still hate the command bundle install. I highly recommend those following in my footsteps to use yari.

One of the other things that attracted me to a blog was being able to publish code snippets in Markdown. Since I’ve gotten into using Markdown for my text files, I’ve started to enjoy just… writing Markdown. It’s kind of fun, and everything comes out looking so nice. Seth and I want to port our chapter’s bylaws to Markdown so they’re not mired in the bullshit .docx they’re languishing in now. Not to say we’ll be publishing LaTeX in fraternity bylaws, but the Office format bothers me. A lot.

Speak Softly, and carry Big Data.

As for the blog, I’m only here to talk about things that I’m really passionate about. Yes, a lot of that will come from my professional work. Expect lots of statistics, math, some physics, and tons of programming thrown in. But I’ll also be here to write about some of the stuff I get engaged with, and probably mention a lot of the Sigma Chi stuff I get involved in.

What else could be more important?