We Kid the Statisticians Because We Love Them

;)

Found on the roadside: @SpringerStats yellow book, beside empty vodka bottles & cigarette packs pic.twitter.com/R8LawGlA7W

— Noah Williams (@Bellmanequation) March 18, 2018

(Tip of the cap to Kerstin Nordstrom.)

New App: "Make Trump Tweets Eight Again"

This app is funny. It's admittedly somewhat rude, but it's also merited.

We made a browser extension that converts Trump’s Tweets into their rightful state: a child’s scribble. Download: https://t.co/pgL64CCJ00 pic.twitter.com/XQ30Fz6m9H

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) February 15, 2017

(Tip of the cap to Alain Barrat.)

XKCD on Team Chatting and the Future of IRC

I approve!

"MuxViz: A Tool for Multilayer Analysis and Visualization of Networks"

One of my papers, which was published as an "advance access" paper last October, finally has its assigned page numbers, so I'm blogging about it. It is software to visualize and do computations for multilayer networks. You can download the software, which was created using R, from this website.

Title: MuxViz: A Tool for Multilayer Analysis and Visualization of Networks

Authors: Manlio De Domenico, Mason A. Porter, and Alex Arenas

Abstract: Multilayer relationships among entities and information about entities must be accompanied by the means to analyse, visualize and obtain insights from such data. We present open-source software (muxViz) that contains a collection of algorithms for the analysis of multilayer networks, which are an important way to represent a large variety of complex systems throughout science and engineering. We demonstrate the ability of muxViz to analyse and interactively visualize multilayer data using empirical genetic, neuronal and transportation networks. Our software is available at https://github.com/manlius/muxViz.

Long Live the Billiard Simulator!

How exciting! It turns out that this bit of Matlab software --- a simulator for billiard systems along with a graphical user interface --- that my Georgia Tech student Steven Lansel wrote in 2003-04 as part of his undergraduate research project (with Leonid Bunimovich and me) and that my Caltech undergrad student Kris Kazlowski then updated somewhat in 2006 is still being used as a tool for teaching and producing nice graphics in 2013! That is just sweet! The last update of any kind to the software dates to December 2007. (That was an update to get things to work on the then-latest version of Matlab, although we also included code for a couple of new billiard tables from Kris's 2006 summer research project.) This is excellent!

Software Package 'R' Makes the New York Times

The statistical software package called 'R' has made the New York Times. Some of my students have used R before, but mostly I just think it's cool that a venue like the New York Times would have an article on this topic. (Note that the article is from 2009, which I managed not to realize at first.)

(Tip of the cap to Jimmy Lin.)

Sign of the Day

I just walked out of Dartington House and some random student walked up to me holding a sign that read "Will Work for Mathematica Advice".

Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me (and it wouldn't be very inconspicuous for me to come back with a camera in hand). I just wrote a post about this on Facebook and hope that somebody still in Dartington House takes a picture of this before it's too late.

Where is Stephen Wolfram when you need him?

(By the way, I told him: "Sorry. I don't use Mathematica.")

Why Not?

Go to the Matlab command line and type 'why'. Then do it several more times. (For bonus points, find a clever way to use this command as part of a loop or some other series of commands.) I wonder how long this Easter Egg has existed? I only just found out about it today. Maybe I'm easily amused, but (a) I think this is awesome and (b) there must be some clever thing that one can do with this. :)

(Tip of the cap to whoever posts things for Matlab on Facebook.)