Author Archives: Ethan

Analyzing Word Frequencies with Clojure, Enlive and Incanter

I’ve long been interested in getting a better feel for Incanter, a statistical computing and graphical environment for Clojure. So gifted with the fleeting favors of my muse (otherwise known as free time), I thought I’d put together a small library — although it’s not quite a library, yet — for analyzing word-use patterns on blogs and webpages. To do [...]
Posted in Clojure, Computer Science, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

As it turns out is quite innocuous

What a strange title, you say! Well, this is true, but as it turns out, you are quite likely to have parsed it incorrectly (that is, unless you have just come from this post on Hacker News). In any case, there was a recent small flurry of activity regarding Paul Graham’s use of the rhetorical device [...]
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Gajure Now on Clojars

Gajure, my small genetic algorithm framework, is now up on Clojars. Hopefully, this should make it much more convenient to use in a real project. I also added Leiningen support, and if you use Clojure with any frequency, I’d recommend checking that out.
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Police Pursue and Capture a Barefoot Runner

I went running today. In and of itself, this is far from unusual, and indeed, I go running most days. Something else happened, however, a deep and dark and disturbing something. Today on my run I was detained by the police, forced to enter an officer’s vehicle, and “escorted” back to my  apartment. I was [...]
Posted in Barefoot Running, Writing | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

On Initiative

This past week, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about success. Now, perhaps this is a somewhat pedantic exercise, but it seems that if I would like to be successful (and I assure you, this is a valid premise), then I ought to better understand the term — what it means, what it implies, and [...]
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How I develop on OSX

It recently occurred to me that I’m dumb. I certainly don’t mean this in any pejorative sense (after all, that would be abrasive to the ego), but rather I would suggest it as regards a behavioral pattern that I tend to follow. Roughly, said pattern goes like this: Identify problem On the grounds of theoretical purity, construct needlessly complicated solution. Implement solution. For [...]
Posted in Apple, Rails, Ruby | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The Tweeting Narcissist

I’ve been playing a bit with the Sinatra web framework, and after some intermittent coding, I ended up with a toy project I’m calling the Narcissist Quotient. It may seem that I’m poking fun at of Twitter’s ego-centric bent, and perhaps this is true. It is equally possible, however, that my design is to satirize [...]
Posted in Computer Science, Ruby | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Clojure :pre and :post

Courtesy of Hacker News, this morning I stumbled upon a blog post mentioning :pre and :post assertions, a new feature in version 1.1 of Clojure. Given the rather messy nature of several functions in Gajure (my toy genetic algorithm framework), it seemed to me that I had an ideal opportunity to make use of this [...]
Posted in Clojure | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Slowly Programming in R

Recently, I coded up a cross validation function in R, and things were moving rather less quickly than I would have liked. (The purpose of c.v. is to assess how well one’s statistical analysis will generalize to an independent data set.)  Anyhow, I was implementing 10-fold cross validation, and with a dataset containing around 100,000 observations, my [...]
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National Novel Writing Month

In circumstances rather less than coincidental, a conspicuous absence of November posts coincided with my participation in NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month). Thus, throughout last month, I had a great — if difficult — time writing what might be described as a shallow antithesis to the next Great American Novel. Ever so sadly, fifty thousand words was not enough to contain the [...]
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