A tribute to Lucy D'Agostino McGowan's git commit emoji game
Do you know Lucy? She is a very talented biostatistics PhD candidate that I had the chance to e-meet thanks to R-Ladies. One maybe superficial reason to admire her, on top of her other achievements, is her emoji game in git commits. Looking at Lucy’s git history (find her on Github), one wants to start using version control because she makes it look fun!
In this post, I will download many git commit messages of Lucy’s from Github’s API via the gh package, and have a look at the emojis she uses the most frequently.
Radio edit: an improved scraping of and look at Radio Swiss classic program
Last week I published a post about scraping Radio Swiss Classic program. After that, Bob Rudis wrote an extremely useful post improving my code a lot and teaching me cool stuff. I don’t know why I forgot to add pauses between requests… Really bad behaviour! I will use his code today for re-scraping the data.
Why re-scrape the data? I mentioned broken links in my post. In fact, each time I hit a broken page, Radio Swiss Classic webmaster received an email. That person received a lot of emails because of me. They repaired the bug explaining these broken pages and contacted me because someone had turned me in (I feel super famous or spied on now), very kindly mentioning they had fixed all pages, and not holding any grudge against me. So let’s scrape everything again!
A classical analysis (Radio Swiss classic program)
I am not a classical music expert at all, but I happen to have friends who are, and am even married to someone who plays the cello (and the ukulele!). I appreciate listening to such music from time to time, in particular Baroque music. A friend made me discover Radio Swiss classic, an online radio playing classical music all day and all night long, with a quite nice variety, and very little speaking between pieces, with no ads (thank you, funders of the radio!). Besides, the voices telling me which piece has just been played are really soothing, so Radio Swiss classic is a good one in my opinion.
Today, instead of anxiously waiting for the results of the French presidential elections, I decided to download the program of the radio in the last years and have a quick look at it, since after all, the website says that the radio aims at relaxing people.
Sow the seeds, know the seeds
When you do simulations, for instance in R, e.g. drawing samples from a distribution, it’s best to set a random seed via the function set.seed in order to have reproducible results. The function has no default value. I think I mostly use set.seed(1). Last week I received an R script from a colleague in which he used a weird number in set.seed (maybe a phone number? or maybe he let his fingers type randomly?), which made me curious about the usual seed values. As in my blog post about initial commit messages I used the Github API via the gh package to get a very rough answer (an answer seedling from the question seed?).
Mapping waxwings annual migration without Twitter
Recently a reader left a comment on this blog mentioning his cool blog post in which he mapped the spread of a migratory bird using Twitter. His data source was the Waxwings UK account which reports sightings of Bohemian waxwings in the UK. I decided to try reproducing and extending his work using the rOpenSci spocc package that interfaces different sources of species occurrence data.