Recent content on Lagging Indicators
Croissant Club has been live for about 3 weeks now. It is a personal review blog for croissants. Huge traffic to it, obviously. Over the past few years I have developed an appreciation for croissants, and I thought this would be a simple funny project to look back on in a few years if I keep up with it. Backfilling the data has been a bit irritating, but luckily I’ve only had this idea for a…
The Nespresso Vertuo Next we had would when initially turned on, immediately blink orange and not stop if you pressed it, sometimes it would switch to blinking orange twice, then pausing, over and over the application would various show and error that the machine was unlocked, or ready to brew never was the mobile application useful A couple tips that I struggled with from watching videos (and I…
Signing up for an online, at-home test from Pearson VUE also means accepting their Facial Comparison Policy. 1 Pearson VUE may use facial images collected during the testing process to develop, upgrade, and improve our online proctoring application in the event that automated facial comparison processes are determined to have resulted in a matching failure. In these cases, facial images will be…
I needed to identify and tag duplicate news articles from a Google Alerts RSS feed which filters the news through keywords while working on topic modeling of news coverage on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program since summer 2024. I also want to in the future group these on the surfaced SNAP News site I put together for these articles. After reading it for around a year, I consider…
A slow pace, to be sure, but I have been adding to a dashboard of SNAP Performance Indicators over the past year, based on the SNAP data I’ve been cleaning and compiling over the past 2 years, and built with the Observable Framework library. You can view the dashboard here . No extremely tricky visualizations, but that is because I have found that these datasets that are simple tables by…
Recently on YouTube I searched “population apportionment” to find that many of the recommended videos across different channels looked the same and appeared to be AI-generated, heavily automated, and extremely low effort. Of the 18 Recently Uploaded videos for the search, 10 of theme were all from this same “family” of channels: 2 to 3 minute, political-themed questions…
With the Flashforge Adventurer 5m, my first 3D print is the Enclosure kit project. What follows are just a quick few notes from trying to figure this all out. After exploring some of the comments around the enclosure online, I decided to follow the DIY Minimal Enclosure from @design8studio , so thank you to them. I did forget to print the updated riser panels that is now linked on that project,…
If you visited a .gov website during the 2025 government shutdown, you may have noticed alert banners on the top of the page that indicate a suspension or interruption of normal operations for the agency. Some agencies vary from the standard, however, and instead use this opportunity to deliver a political message. From a cursory analysis, of the 248 shutdown banners I could find from about 1,150…
In September 2025, the Trump administration said it will no longer release the Household Food Security Reports. The USDA also put relevant employees on indefinite leave . This post provides context to the published press release based on the USDA’s own 2025 Information Collection Request renewal for the Food Security Supplement to the Current Population Survey, hosted on Reginfo.gov . 1…
At our wedding, each table was named after a country we had either visited or had some relation to, as a personal touch instead of classic table numbers. To complement this, I built a small static website deployed on GitHub pages to learn more about the country with Claude Sonnet 4 through Github Copilot. Each table had small printed cards with QR codes linking to the webpage that attendees could…
I’d like to take a popular class for 3d printing at the library, but I can’t get a spot. The ideal LLM assistant could check for class availability and sign me up, without me monitoring the page constantly. Unfortunately we are not there yet. Increasingly complicated attempts to sign up MLK Labs in DC offers apparently highly desirable 3d printing classes. These are posted 30 days out…
If you sort a list of Texas counties by county name, the counties will not be in order by county number. Texas Center for Healthcare Statistics Every county in the United States has a FIPS code. These standards codes are usful for mapping and joining additional datasets. Texas state agencies do not bother with these FIPS codes. Instead, each state agency publishes data using their own county…
The Trump Administration has a famously loose approach to data visualizations. If the data doesn’t match up with what you want, grab a marker and draw over the visualization until it does. Source: New York Times article showing hand-drawn modifications to official NOAA weather map The USDA released an announcement, USDA Invests Up To $1 Billion to Combat Avian Flu and Reduce Egg Prices ,…
This is the obligatory moved blog from one framework to a different framework article. Wordpress.com asked me for $78 for a two year subscription. However, I dislike the mobile app and the text editing experience online. I also had difficulties editing any part of the website with the in-browser tools. Originally, I signed up because I wanted my focus to be on writing, rather than on coding, a…
Close to 2 years ago, I had an idea for a mobile application that allowed users to store, submit, and manage tax reimbursements in foreign countries. For 2 years ago, I on and off worked on this idea and had a functioning version on my phone - and for nearly all that time, I never felt like the application was ready to release to potential users - and it doesn’t look like I’ll ever get…
The National Review in July published a short opinion piece in July ‘24 entitled How Congress Can Fix Food Stamps . Sam Adolphsen, the author, argues that the cost of SNAP benefits is too high. He comments that “about 17.6 million food-stamp recipients are able-bodied adults, and about two-thirds don’t work,” which leads him to list a series of Republican-led, state-level…
I re-deployed 8 Red Squares , a site that allows you to play through the 8 Queens Puzzle on different sized boards. Future enhancements I’d like to add are Timer (for each segment), and total running time until the users solves n=8. Better mobile support (board size 9 and 10 don’t handle small screens well). Foundational solutions checklist, e.g., if a user wants to find all possible…
I recently bought the Kensington Slimblade Trackball to replace the Logitech MX Master mouse that I have been using for the last year. This is the first time that I’ve used a trackball. A couple of thoughts worth noting that are either omitted from or in conflict with other reviews: The device is too large for me. It takes up almost an entire mousepad, and it is wide enough to force frequent…
What follows are a few takeaways from a recent app launch, where I had some successes and some things I had to fix. I also maintain dashboards for a wide set of clients on a different project that will be overhauled soon, and would like to apply these learnings during the redesign. The three guiding business questions for initial design are: How are we getting users? What our users are finding…
Site is accessible here , and the accompanying GitHub repository can be accessed through that site as well. It is based on a Google Alerts RSS feed, built every ~6 hours with Jekyll and GitHub Actions. Monthly commentary will be included on that site in the future. Immediate next steps are to add in more news aggregators as sources, to try and get articles that are missed. I would like to…
Note a slightly different format to topic, rather than state-based. Snap Interview Waivers in some places expiring Expiration of Waiver of Interview Requirements for SNAP Benefits in Mississippi Beltrami County SNAP interview waiver ends April 30 I would be very curious to see any study performed exploring differences in program administration and case outcomes between while the waiver was in…
pd.crosstab is one of those built-in functions in the Pandas API that I forget about routinely. I instinctively reached for df.groupby('x')['y'].count().unstack() , but when I wanted to normalize the values, it takes more and more steps to get where I wanted. This was a nice straightforward overview of the pd.crosstab function. To document for myself, below, create a sample correlated DataFrame…
Here is Microsoft’s documentation page on the topic . The only reason I am documenting this is because the Azure Resource Explorer failed to load consistently across devices for me. Some tutorials I found, like this one , seem to be outdated and the outbound IP addresses weren’t listed in any Properties menu in the Function App in the Azure Portal. The Azure CLI method was what worked…
a) improve communication skills by forcing myself to formalize an opinion. Feedback from anonymous readers may either point out an error I made while translating what I think to a written document or a flaw in the argument itself. Of course, I need to be willing to be wrong, and reminding myself that I am excited about learning is an powerful way to cope with finding errors in my work. Writing…
These are some thoughts about using a Wacom Intuos Wireless Pen and Tablet to complement a mouse and keyboard over the past few weeks. I made this purchase in an effort to decrease forearm and finger pain from overuse working at a desk. Previously, I’ve been using the Logitech MX Master 3 For Business mouse, and I was hoping that switching to a pen and tablet would limit some of the forearm…
These were my answers to the application essay questions for UChicago’s MSCAPP program back from the 2018 round. Only piece of advice - make sure you know what skills or knowledge you want to get out of any MS program - which means work for a bit prior to attending. Why is a combined program between policy and computer science a good match for your career goals? (max 300 words) With a M.S.…
Context Student and supporting organizations wrote a letter to the USDA recommending that the SNAP application interview requirement be removed , with the accompanying press release here . A news article that summarizes the entire P.R. push for this is accessible here through Fortune magazine . Why We Should Rethink the SNAP Interview Requirement: A Former Caseworker’s Perspective is an op-ed from…
Summary: many warnings about EBT payment scams and theft, alongside a proposal to improve security state bills (and national) continue to propose work requirements and refuse additional SNAP funding for the summer upcoming Farm Bill renewal is stalled by SNAP discussions and funding National Jobs and Opportunities for SNAP Act of 2023 proposed by Senator John Kennedy in the U.S. Senate. The…
Written by Larry Gonick & Woollcott Smith Note: This is based on the “Revised and Updated Edition”. Cover page of The Cartoon Guide to Statistics Deriving, and learning when to apply, statistical formulas is always going to be difficult. It turns out that including cartoons does not make it any easier. I would put statistics writing into three general categories: teaching statistical…
Written by Darrell Huff and illustrated by Irving Geis. Originally published in 1954. In a sentence : a quick, worthwhile general knowledge read that explains how people misuse statistics through familiar and useful examples (that could use an update). I’ll face up to the serious purpose that I like to think lurks just beneath the surface of this book: explaining how to look a phony statistic in…
The following is a curated list of news articles by U.S. state and nationally that discussed SNAP benefits in February 2024. National Letter from Secretary Vilsack to Governors on SNAP Performance and Operations Poor performance on the SNAP efficiency measures meant 44 states got letters from the USDA expecting improvements. Congressional leaders agree on ag funding as Vilsack talks about SNAP…
Microsoft Teams provides an integration with Microsoft Viva, which schedules daily check-ins to record your perception of your mental state. Once a day, at 4pm, I get a notification that asks me to select one of five emojis that reflects how I feel. Clearly, the last few weeks have not been particularly excellent, but I’m not sure what the value of this type of check-in or chart provides. We…
I recently went on a weekend trip, where I counted each time that I interacted with a person who was a citizen of the country I was visiting. I did not include any interactions with individuals at the airport prior to landing at the destination, nor once I reached the airport to return. Non-verbal interactions were not considered, e.g., making room for someone on the sidewalk, or gesturing for a…
I started to post SNAP performance indicators from the USDA in machine-readable format, aggregating and cleaning the data from the many PDF tables. This repository includes quick-access to cleaned, FIPS-linked CSV long-format tables of yearly state reported indicators for Application Processing Timeliness , Program Error Rates , and Case and Procedural Error Rates (coming soon). USDA Descriptions…
I took about 70 classes over a one-year unlimited class subscription with Babbel Live for Spanish from mid-2022 to 2023. My level was beginner to low intermediate over the course of the year, and I only took classes in the A1, A2, and B1 range. Prior to the classes, I was working with Anki flashcards and Duolingo lessons. What follows are some thoughts I had wrote down while taking the courses.…
If you’ve got the framework installed, and just want to deploy the static pages, skip to below . Note - my first time doing this, but it works. You can always deploy directly to Observable. Observable Framework is not supported on Windows , according to an issue in their GitHub. (Update Mar 2024: Observable Framework is now supported on Windows). To use it, you need to use WSL. If you want…
The choices to make origami sunflowers are few. I adapted the simple Lotus Blossom design from Origami-Instructions.com with an additional small square of brown paper, allowing for a very simple sunflower design that holds up against other designs that have more complicated multi-sheet folding, are hexagon-based, or require glue. Instructions With the Blintz base, place a sheet of brown paper…
Some people are very into keyboards. They build them, they buy many of them, they review them. They know a lot about the software and hardware, and can describe the pros and cons of each component. When they look for a keyboard, they can use their prior experience to decide what features they care about, and can identify potential issues. I am not one of these people. But given recent wrist and…
- Whenever I do analyses I am nervous about being wrong, but using Excel’s autofill function to impute data would have definitely been on my “this is not correct to do,” at the very least. - Nice example of a personal project . Contained, clear output, and interesting to the person doing it + delightful to play with and generate maps as a person who has no use for it. It’s…
227 vehicles have passed by us in the last hour. We are parked on the side of the road, in a car that is leaking oil. At least the hood has stopped smoking. Our two friends left in a taxi to Taluca, the closest town, to see a mechanic and have a grua tow us either to the town, or back all the way to Mexico City. We had gone to the park to see the monarch butterflies before they begin their…
For the first time, in my many years of eating lentils, I found a small stone in my lentils while I was eating the curry. It was slightly smaller than a single lentil. On the bag of the lentils, and in every online recipe describing how to cook lentils, the following warning exists: be sure to rinse your lentils prior to cooking to remove any rocks or debris as modern cleaning equipment cannot.…
- A series of YouTube videos on how “practical effects” in movies are highlighted by directors, actors, and viewers, but actually are building blocks to extremely realistic computer generated visual effects. I didn’t even realize much of what he showed was technically possible: it makes sense that performing a stunt in real life can give VFX artists valuable information about how…
In the past six months I’ve started to have finger, wrist, and forearm pain. I previously was using the Logitech Mx Mouse and keyboard for business. But due to the pronation of my wrists I wasn’t able to type at all without experience severe pain that would continue through the evening. so recently I’ve been using the Windows voice axis. To try and perform as much typing and as…
about