Bit

Golf in Space

For what is considered a pastime, I don’t think golf could be anymore torturing.

Imagine any other sport when you played just a couple of times a year causally with your good friends—and while enjoying their company—that could lead to more existential crises.

You are guaranteed at least one on the front and back nine if you are so lucky as to be playing a full 18 holes.

So Rémi Gaillard, a French prankster, shows us what livening up—or taunting—a group of golfers as an astronaut during what is probably already a painful round for them. Spoiler the golfers must be in the midst of an existential crisis as I think their response is a bit outsized.

If you watch to the end of the video you will see Gaillard’s motto, “c’est en faisant n’import quoi qu’on devient n’import qui.”

This translates to “it's by doing whatever you want that you become whoever/whatever you want.”

Base Pair

Reproducibility

Just because you did your analysis once doesn’t mean you can reproduce your result…tomorrow, the next day…or weeks, months or years from now. This is a very real concern as new data flows in.

Further, programming language versions and packages used by them change. And don’t forget, the underlying operating system gets updated too.

Then you need to consider not just yourself. What about if someone else wants to reproduce your analysis if given the exact same dataset or use your approach on their own data?

These are questions that I’ve been asking myself recently, and I wanted to share the book I found recently, “Building reproducible analytical pipelines with R” by Bruno Rodrigues. His freely available book online shares how to use the basic principles of software engineering to help you write reproducible code.

I’ll share the first principle—“DRY WIT.”

Don’t repeat yourself. Write it down.

If you are a comedy lover like me, this acronym will be on the easier side to remember!

Thank you for reading and have a fulfilling weekend!

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