https://rethinking.rbind.io/ Recent content on R(e)Thinking Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sun, 16 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2020/08/16/hockeystick-download-and-visualize-essential-climate-change-data/ Sun, 16 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2020/08/16/hockeystick-download-and-visualize-essential-climate-change-data/ New hockeystick package on github The goal of hockeystick is to make essential Climate Change datasets easily available to non-climate experts. hockeystick users can download the latest raw data from authoritative sources as well as view it via pre-defined ggplot2 charts. Datasets include atmospheric CO2, instrumental and ice-core temperature records, sea levels, and Arctic/Antarctic sea-ice. Additional visualizations using this data will be added over time. The choice of data is based on Professor Stefan Rahmstorf’s presentation on The 5 Most Important Data Sets of Climate Science. https://rethinking.rbind.io/2020/03/29/riddler-classic-re-rolling-a-die/ Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2020/03/29/riddler-classic-re-rolling-a-die/ Pulling gloves out of boxes 🧤 and rolling (and re-rolling) dice 🎲 for #ThisWeeksRiddler. Stay safe, and happy solving!https://t.co/8ntY4fd7tn — Zach Wissner-Gross (@xaqwg) March 27, 2020 Rolling (and Re-Rolling) a Die: In this week’s FiveThirtyEight Riddler Classic we start with a fair six-sided die and roll it six times, recording the results of each roll. We write these numbers on the six faces of another fair die. Next, we roll this second die six times and take those six numbers and write them on the faces of yet another die, continuing this process of generating a new die from the previous one. https://rethinking.rbind.io/2019/12/07/riddler-classic-how-fast-can-you-skip-to-your-favorite-song/ Sat, 07 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2019/12/07/riddler-classic-how-fast-can-you-skip-to-your-favorite-song/ How Fast Can You Skip to Your Favorite Song? In this week’s FiveThirtyEight Riddler Classic we are asked for the optimal strategy to play song number 42 on your 100-song playlist, starting from a random position, with only “next song”, and “random song” buttons. Also, on average how many clicks will you need to get to that song? Proposed Solution We set r between 0 and 0.5 as the breakpoint above which we use the “next” button. https://rethinking.rbind.io/2019/11/17/riddler-classic-how-low-can-you-roll/ Sun, 17 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2019/11/17/riddler-classic-how-low-can-you-roll/ #ThisWeeksRiddler Express was inspired by @Cshearer41. And for last week’s solution, Dingo’s Kidneys??? End your week right with two new puzzles.https://t.co/LRJLEnKqY9 — Zach Wissner-Gross (@xaqwg) November 15, 2019 What’s the average score of the game? In this week’s FiveThirtyEight Riddler Classic we are asked to calculate the average of series of scores, based on rolls of classic D&D style 10-sided die. The twist is that your score is the value of the die divided by 10, and you keep rolling the die over and over until you roll a zero. https://rethinking.rbind.io/2019/08/23/riddler-express-counterfeit-bills/ Fri, 23 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2019/08/23/riddler-express-counterfeit-bills/ Can you fool the bank with your counterfeit bills? In this week’s FiveThirtyEight Riddler Express you are a counter How many fake notes should you add to the $2,500 in order to maximize the expected value of your bank account? How much free money are you likely to make from your strategy? The odds of getting caught We ignore for a moment to gain some intuition about the problem the issue of rounding up to the nearest whole. https://rethinking.rbind.io/2019/05/31/riddler-express-loteria/ Fri, 31 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2019/05/31/riddler-express-loteria/ Will you end up with an empty lotería grid? After a hiatus I’m taking up this week’s FiveThirtyEight Riddler Express which harkens back to a game I played as a child. Each player receives a four-by-four grid of images and a caller randomly draws a card from a deck containing 54 possible images. If a player has that image on their grid, they mark it off and the game ends when one of the players fills their entire card and screams “¡Lotería! https://rethinking.rbind.io/2019/02/02/riddler-classic-the-three-deck-monte/ Sat, 02 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2019/02/02/riddler-classic-the-three-deck-monte/ Should You Take the Three Deck Monte Bet? This week’s FiveThirtyEight Riddler Classic is about whether you should play “Three Deck Monte” on a street corner. You pick one of three decks offered with all cards visible, and your opponent then picks one of the two others. After shuffling each deck you compete in a game similar to War. You each turn over cards one at a time, the one with a higher card wins that turn, and the first to win five turns wins the game. https://rethinking.rbind.io/2019/01/21/140-years/ Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2019/01/21/140-years/ Background to this post: rstudio::conf 2019 I had the wonderful opportunity to attend RStudio’s annual conference in Austin, Texas last week, supported by a generous grant from RStudio. While I can’t possibly write about all of the incredible people I met and the excellent presentations I saw, I’d like to share some of what I learned through a pair of blog posts, the first one focused on the new time-series infrastructure “tidyverts” of tidy R packages for time series analysis. https://rethinking.rbind.io/2018/12/22/the-riddler-santa-needs-some-help-with-math/ Sat, 22 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2018/12/22/the-riddler-santa-needs-some-help-with-math/ In the last Riddler of the year I attempt to solve both the Express and Classic Riddlers! Please see below the Express for the solution to the Classic. Riddler Express: How Long Will it Take Santa to Place his Reindeer? We need to find out how long it will take Santa to place his reindeer in the correct sled positions, if he proceeds at random. It takes a minute to harness a reindeer, and a reindeer will grunt to indicate it’s in the right position. https://rethinking.rbind.io/2018/11/18/riddler-express-the-chess-match-problem/ Sun, 18 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2018/11/18/riddler-express-the-chess-match-problem/ The Problem This week’s Riddler Express was more involved than I anticipated. The World Chess Championship is underway. We need to find the odds that the better player wins a 12-game match, given: One of the players is better than his opponent to the degree that he wins 20% of all games, loses 15%, and 65% of games are drawn. Wins are worth 1 point, draws 0.5 for each player, and losses 0 points. https://rethinking.rbind.io/2018/11/16/the-top-five-climate-charts-using-ggplot2/ Fri, 16 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2018/11/16/the-top-five-climate-charts-using-ggplot2/ What is this post about? The urgent need to address climate change implies that we should all act to communicate and confront this existential risk. However, the enormous amount of climate data can be daunting for non-experts such as myself to navigate. What data should we be looking at? Where can I find them? In 2008 Professor Stefan Rahmstorf presented what he considered The 5 Most Important Data Sets of Climate Science. https://rethinking.rbind.io/2018/11/03/riddler-classic-how-far-would-you-go-to-rig-a-coin-flip/ Sat, 03 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2018/11/03/riddler-classic-how-far-would-you-go-to-rig-a-coin-flip/ An Election Probability Riddler Classic, Just in Time for November 6 This week’s FiveThirtyEight Riddler Classic was about winning elections, fair and square, or by any means necessary… In this case, it’s Programmers versus Theorists, and elections are decided by flipping coins for each of one hundred Senate seats. As an analyst for Riddler Nation’s wildly successful data-driven political blog, OneHundred, these are the questions we are confronted with today: https://rethinking.rbind.io/2018/09/08/riddler-classic-football-cards/ Sat, 08 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2018/09/08/riddler-classic-football-cards/ Another Riddler Classic Simulation + Animation This week’s FiveThirtyEight Riddler Classic presented another opportunity to simulate repeated sampling and visualize the results. In this instance we needed to find the average number of unique 10-card samples needed to form a set of 100 unique cards. The first resulting chart below shows the distribution of the results of each sim using a density plot. I tried to add a bit of statistical rigor by calculating the standard error of the mean number of samples. https://rethinking.rbind.io/2018/08/05/riddler-classic-the-perfect-doodle-puzzle/ Sun, 05 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2018/08/05/riddler-classic-the-perfect-doodle-puzzle/ Apologia It’s been quite a while since my last post and I regret that. I’ve been rather busy, mainly with this. Now that’s succesfully out of the way I have a little more time to write a few words and post a little R code here. Despite the lack of blogging, I always seem to find the time for a little FiveThirtyEight Riddler puzzle. I was thrilled when a few weeks ago Riddler editor Oliver Roeder thought my simulation of dystopic row house collapse times was beautiful. https://rethinking.rbind.io/2018/04/14/riddler-express-arithmetic-anarchists-attack/ Sat, 14 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://rethinking.rbind.io/2018/04/14/riddler-express-arithmetic-anarchists-attack/ On the April 6, 2018 FiveThirtyEight Riddler Express The Riddler is the excellent math and logic puzzle weekly by Oliver Roeder. Puzzles are posted every friday, together with the solutions to the previous week’s puzzles. I occasionally submit proposed solutions, using R whenever possible. Yesterday Ollie was kind enough to give me a shout out for the ggplot chart that I provided together with my solution to the previous week’s Riddler Express.