David Ranzolin

Earlier today I completed my first (sprint) triathlon. For me, it was 2 hours and 12 minutes of barbarism–a 1/2 mile swim, a 15 mile bike ride, and a three mile run to boot. I knew my time was poor; I struggled to wiggle out of my wet suit, was... [Read More]

I am a tidyverse enthusiast. The proof is in the pudding: of my six packages on GitHub, only one DESCRIPTION contains a non-tidyverse package (rcicero, tidyjson). I once contemplated rewriting these packages sans the tidyverse–for science, learning, growth, bragging rights, and character building–but I broke into a cold sweat once... [Read More]

The purpose of this post is to introduce ggtextparallels, a tool for cheap frugal biblical scholars who don’t want to pay for books and other proprietary software. Somewhere on the internet Hadley Wickham advises new R developers to find problems and then try and solve them. Within that framework, the... [Read More]

Hot take: the language “wars” are helpful. It’s surprising that the #rstats community, so attentive to the needs of beginners misses this. [Read More]

In Part I of this series, I showed how to get the Victorian masterpiece, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology by William Smith, LLD, ed. In Part II I’m going to explore it, but not in an archaic, linear fashion. It’s 2017–we can do better. [Read More]

One of my favorite episodes of Black Adder is “Ink and Incapability”. The plot is this: Samuel Johnson is soliciting patronage from Prince George for his new book, the first ever English dictionary. But due to Black Adder’s petty jealousy, Johnson’s dictionary is instead burned through a hilarous turn of... [Read More]