Power, glorious power!That’s what I think when I see the stream raging through the ravine in early spring. I’ve wanted to put a hydroelectric generator in there for ages. There is one problem, there isn’t really enough water flow for enough of the year to do anything. Actually, it’s either dry or frozen solid for […]
Hydroelectric Power for IOT devices (more fun than practical) Read More »
This winter was particularly harsh, with lots of young trees dying back or dying completely, even though they are supposedly hardy to much further north. This spring also saw a particularly powerful spring melt. And that, of course, is an erosion problem. The valley here is in a fragile balance. It has never quite adjusted
I was so excited to see the announcement of the M6 forecasting competition. For those who don’t know the M series of competitions (not to be confused with BMW cars) is a long running series of competitions for forecasting time series. It comes from the 1980’s, well predating the modern data science explosion. And this
All the Problems with the M6 Competition (and a few good things) Read More »
Note that a variation on this article may also be posted on the Nousot blog. Time series are a string of numbers varying across time. It could be the weather, sales of tissue paper, electricity demand of a region, or countless other things. There are plenty of useful things to do with this type of
Preprocessing for Time Series Read More »
I can see why Columbia, particularly Medellin, is a popular travel destination. Firstly, the weather is perfect all year round. It has a tag of the City of Eternal Spring, or perhaps more likely, eternal summer given that it is mostly 70 rarely leaving the 60-80 degree range. It is lush and fertile, with ample
Columbia: Cycling and Remote Work in Medellin Read More »
City of Bones is a rather niche, otherwise forgotten book from 1995 that has enjoyed some renewed interest as a result of the amazing Murderbot book series by the same author, Martha Wells. It is not to be confused with another book of the same name by a different author. It can be rather difficult
City of Bones: a quick review Read More »
Ranked Probability Score is an unusual error metric that was designed for meteorology but which has since more often been utilized for assessing models predicting football (soccer) matches. I was forced upon it because of it’s use in the M6 forecasting competition. The purpose of the ranked probability score is to give an accuracy metric
Ranked Probability Score in Python Read More »
Setting up a Python environment is often a pain. Even worse is that sometimes the environment, once it is finally built, is surprisingly slow because the underlying numeric libraries (BLAS, OneAPI, and so on) are improperly configured. This aims to be a fairly definitive guide to fixing those problems as of early 2022. How much
Tunisia is a difficult country to judge. On the one hand, it is the most interesting country I have been in for quite a while – away from Europe which was becoming routine (if pleasant). Tunisia is warm, inexpensive, not crowded, and has excellent history On the other hand, I got sick three times in
Tunisia Digital Nomad Review Read More »
2021 was a long, eventful year. Was it good or was it bad? I am not sure. Both, I think. The defining thing about 2021 for me was the sheer amount of travel I did. I was in Ukraine, home, then Savannah, Knoxville, Utah, home, and then Lithuania, Croatia, Tunisia and then home. These weren’t
