Read Online at Open Oregon State (Open-Access & Free!) Or order a copy from Amazon or OSU Press. (Scribble in the margins!) This Open-Access textbook was a collaboration with Open Oregon State and OSU Press. It aims to provide life scientists and students the skills necessary for research in a data-rich world. The text covers accessing and using remote servers via the command-line, writing programs and pipelines for data analysis, and provides useful vocabulary for interdisciplinary work.

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I’ve been teaching an evening class at the Oregon State University Craft Center in “3D modeling and printing.” I don’t know a ton about this topic, to be honest. But I know a little more than I did a year ago, and it was hard-earned knowledge. Why not share it? At OSU it seems like I can’t walk out the door without bumping into a 3d printer (and students and faculty get access to them), but I found very little in-person information about how to do basic 3d design.

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I’m (usually) a fan of the R programming language, though in a few ways it lacks features computer scientists expect. For example, R lacks many data structures provided by high-level languages, such as trees, queues, and stacks. This is somewhat complicated by R’s functional nature–R programmers expect data structures to be “persistent,” such that previous versions of the structure are available even after insertions or deletions. Fortunately, data structures in purely-functional languages (generally not R) is a topic of past and ongoing research, spurred initially by Chris Okasaki’s excellent Purely Functional Data Structures.

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These were made between 2012 and 2015, some at a studio in Marquette, MI, and some at the Notre Dame Glass Club.

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I took some engagement photos for a friend, thought they turned out nice enough to share.

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There’s a pretty cool app called Codea, which is a programming IDE similar processing.org, but in Lua, on the iPad. Lua supports first-class functions, so I played around with designing a parameterized L-System which builds sentences as lists of closures.

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I don’t know what made me think it would be a good idea to lug my heavy camera up to the top of South Sister to see the sunrise, but the photos at least turned out ok. Many thanks to Nathan Brown for organizing the trip.

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Climate change is likely to have profound impacts on ecological systems, but in some important cases we’re still a long way from understanding exactly what those impacts might be. For instance, it has been posited that under warming, species in the northern hemisphere will be enhanced at their northern range edge (where presumably species are fitness-limited, and hence range-limited, by the cooler temperatures). Rather, recent research indicates that individual populations of some species may be locally adapted to their climatic environment, such that even these peripheral populations may decline with warming as they have developed an equilibrium with their environment.

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