Finished reading: The 51st State Votes by Justin Ling is a good overview of what happened in Canada’s recent, strange election campaign 📚
🏃♂️ Well, there’s a week that hasn’t gone to plan. Try again next week!
Toronto election data
As with any analytical project, we invested significant time in obtaining and integrating data for our neighbourhood-level modeling. The Toronto Open Data portal provides detailed election results for the 2003, 2006, and 2010 elections, which is a great resource. But, they are saved as Excel files with a separate worksheet for each ward. This is not an ideal format for working with R.
We’ve taken the Excel files for the mayoral-race results and converted them into a data package for R called toVotes. This package includes the votes received by ward and area for each mayoral candidate in each of the last three elections.
If you’re interested in analyzing Toronto’s elections, we hope you find this package useful. We’re also happy to take suggestions (or code contributions) on the GitHub page.
Finished reading: The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman is great fun: humour, adventure, and imagination, as a thief tries to rescue a queen 📚
🏃♂️ I’ve done this route dozens of times, but always counter clockwise. This was the first time clockwise and it is interesting how different the route seems when going in the opposite direction.
Finished reading: I’ll confess that I skipped through parts of Foreign Bodies by Simon Schama. I appreciated the message of the book that vaccination has always been controversial and only diligent science with careful public health communication have been persuasive. I just found the details of the book too overwhelming: so many names, dates, and locations to keep track of, which I wasn’t up for 📚
🎵 Bite Down by Ribbon Skirt is solid indie rock
Finished reading: City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer is an imaginative, richly detailed, and difficult book to read. I appreciated the world building and overall strangeness, but the lack of plot and central characters made for a challenging read 📚
🚴 After very little riding over the past two months, nice to be back on the bike again. Starting up a new season of training
🔗 Analog Office - Lumpers vs Splitters: How Many Paper Notebooks Do You Use at One Time?
Do you go with One Notebook to Rule Them All? Everything goes in there? Or do you have lots of different notebooks, each dedicated to very specific purposes?
Although I’m currently a lumper, I’ve been thinking of splitting out a daily journal notebook from my usual Field Notes that currently holds everything. The page size of the Field Notes can be a constraining with longer entries.
(Hat tip: Robert Breen)
The Strava integration with DayOne is pretty good. I usually manually add content on my activities into DayOne and this certainly helps simplify that.
The integration pulls in your title, notes, and any media, along with a map of the activity. I like that it also integrates with the iOS Journaling Suggestions.
The stats view is rather plain, but I appreciate that given the diversity of potential metrics, this is difficult to display in any other way, certainly for an experimental DayOne Labs feature.
🇨🇦 This is going to be a good read. These Sutherland Quarterly books have all been interesting.
We’ve reached the end of a glorious vacation. Always great to take some time off to recuperate and reflect. Back to the office tomorrow
🏃♂️ I’d planned for a longer run, but allergies kept me up too long last night
Finished reading: I really enjoyed Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. A clever and poignant story. Not sure why it took me so long to get around to reading it 📚
Finished reading: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe is a fascinating and disturbing book about The Troubles in Ireland with interesting questions about political violence and accountability 📚
Finished reading: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz is a delight 📚
A subtle enjoyment of being at a cottage is exposure to the weather. At home and the office it is too easy to not be affected. Whereas here we feel the heat, the wind, and the rain.
George has become a cottage dog
Finished reading: Superbloom by Nicholas Carr is a fascinating, alarming, and important book about how communication technology and social media are shaping society, mostly for the worse 📚