That’s right, it was more than a year ago that I started posting weekly updates about my life in the fast lane. But things have slowed down recently as I prepare to depart Boston, and I expect things to go from 0 to 900 in about 4 seconds once I arrive in Berkeley. For these reasons, I’m going to stop posting regularly on here for now. I’m sure that this will come as a shock to a lot of people (OK fine, just one person… sorry, Gaga!), but I’ll take some questions to clear up any confusion.

• How’s work going these days? Great! 15 days left, and there’s no shortage of things for me to be finishing up. My main project now involves writing up a draft of a paper that covers the genome-wide association studies I’ve been working on during 2010, but there are some other, smaller projects that I’m wrapping up as well. And a paper that I coauthored based on last summer’s work was recently accepted with revisions and resubmitted, so that’s cool.
• Are you glad you took a year off between undergrad and grad school? Absolutely. I’ve matured so much in the past year, both emotionally and intellectually. I had the time to step back from the microcosms of individual statistics classes and appreciate the big picture, which has energized me for my upcoming studies and research. I’m almost positive that working for a year made a stronger grad school applicant, and I think that the things I’ve learned this year (technical skills as well as stuff like how statisticians fit into a team effort and what working as a number cruncher in industry is like) will come in handy as well. Plus, the money that I earned will definitely come in handy when the glamour of being a poor grad student wears off.
• Did you read any good books this year? I did, actually. Books that I flagged as “GREAT!” over the past year include The Alchemist, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, Born to Run, Good Calories Bad Calories, Youth in Revolt, The Lady Tasting Tea, Cat’s Cradle, Ender’s Game, and Pride and Prejudice. Honorable mentions include the Harry Potters, some Edward Tufte books, Getting Things Done, and Angela’s Ashes.
• What are you doing for the next month or so? For the next three weeks, mostly wrapping things up at work. Then the fun starts! My first Red Sox game in ~20 years on July 17th, followed by the arrival of Ackermen Daddy and Nate on the 18th. The three of us will be spending about a week hiking and exploring up in New Hampshire, and it’s going to be a blast. When I return, I’ll have a few days to sell what I can, then pack up the rest and ship it across the country. And on July 31, at 7 AM, I depart the East Coast in style: a one-way ticket to San Francisco, California.

• You’re going to be so far away! How will I get Hoxie updates? I think I’m going to be moving towards the “quarterly email” model of information dissemination, so if you’re interested in occasional updates, leave a comment on this post with your email address or email me and I’ll be happy to include you.
• Will there be new blog posts here in the future? Considering how much I enjoy dominating the Google results for “hoxie ackerman”, I certainly won’t be taking this website down. I might even make posts occasionally, if important things happen in my life. And in the mean time, I’m thinking of uploading cell phone pics documenting my Berkeley adventures. Could be fun; would certainly be less time-consuming than text.
• Will you miss me? Dearly. But we’ll talk soon. And in the mean time, enjoy your summer and thanks for reading!

“How many make it through the first year?” asked Ender. “All who want to,” said Graff.

- Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card

It’s amazing how much of what you notice depends on what you’re thinking about.

PS. I want to.

And in my spare time, I’ve been reading a few good books. Still in the realm of statistics are Bayesian Data Analysis (BDA) and Statistics in a Nutshell (SiaN). Though I never took a class on Bayesian statistics, I purchased BDA for a PhD-level biostatistics class that I took during my senior year. I didn’t end up using it much, but I’ve always been intrigued by the Bayesian framework (and I enjoy reading Professor Gelman’s blog), so I’m spending some time every day outlining it and doing the examples/problems. It seems like Bayesian methods can be extremely powerful alternatives to their frequentist complements and are definitely useful to have in your statistical bag of tricks. The latter is just a review book that I picked up in an attempt to get my brain thinking about the big topics before I head out to Berkeley. The Lady Tasting Tea, which I was a couple of months ago, was an amazing overview of the titans and history of the field of statistics, and I’m hoping that SiaN will provide a slightly more technical overview of things soon to come.

And unrelated to statistics, though not unrelated to my life ambitions, is The Fountainhead. That’s right: I’ve decided to become an architect and dye my hair orange. No, not quite. But after being introduced to Howard Roark and company a couple of years ago, I try to reread this book every 6-12 months. I’m not sure that I agree with all of Ayn Rand’s philosophies, but whenever I put the book down, I feel empowered to be the best I can possibly be, to throw myself into my work, and to push forward while trying to please nobody but myself. There’s something to be said for that. Love it or hate it, it’s definitely worth a read.

A few thoughts I’ve been having about programming lately:

- Writing code, especially solving little problems like these, is a lot of fun!

- I once watched an MIT Open Courseware data structures class introductory lecture, and one of the first things that the professor was, “To get good at programming, you can either do it for 10 years or you can take a data structure class and then do it for 1 year.” For about January-March, I was working through an introductory Python book, which exposed me to some new data structures and programming ideas. Applying some of those ideas to my R programming made me a much better programmer almost overnight. It was great.

- J appears to be an insanely powerful language with an equally insane learning curve. Consider, for example, the Hailstone Sequence task on Rosetta Code. My solution in R is pretty straightforward… even if you don’t know R, it’s pretty easy to just read along and assume that the syntax is correct. Now consider the J function that does the same thing:

hailseq=: -:`(1 3&p.)@.(2&|) ^:(1 ~: ]) ^:a:"0

Crazy. I saw this when I was doing Project Euler problems, too. Note to self: learn J. But only after improving your Python skills, learning C, and beefing up your scripting skills.

- Most of what I’ve been doing for this past year has been programming, not statistics. But programming and statistics are different activities. Therefore, I expect a pretty serious transitionary period away from writing code and towards doing theoretical statistics problem sets. (I don’t expect to write very much code at all next year, although my R skills will definitely come in handy when I need to.)

On a related note, I subscribe to Scott Adams’ (author of Dilbert) blog, and he made an interesting observation that really rang true with me in a recent post:

During one period of my life I wrote a number of computer programs that involved intense manipulation of objects in my mind, for hours each day. I discovered that it was difficult to be social at night when my mind had been manipulating object during the day. It felt as if I were deep inside a cave and yelling to the people who stood at the cave opening. It seemed as if the practice of programming interfered with, or exhausted, the part of my brain that handles social skills.

That metaphor, of standing deep inside of a cave and yelling to the people standing at the entrance, so accurately captures the way that I feel sometimes after a long day of being totally in the programming zone. Any other programmers experience a similar phenomenon?

Fast forward to today, and both of these computers still work beautiful. The iMac is a family computer in Fort Lauderdale, and my Macbook functions as both laptop and desktop via an external monitor, Apple keyboard, Logitech mouse, and some speakers. However, my Berkeley fellowship provides $1200 for technology, so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about new computers.

One part of me sees no reason to get off the Apple train. Apple builds functional, beautiful products that last for as long as you take care of them. No viruses, no spyware, no blue screen of death. The best operating system ever written. The software is great, and I know my keyboard shortcuts like woah. Even though neither computer is under warranty at this point, I’d still feel better about taking a computer to an Apple Store than to anywhere else. Basically, Apple has served me flawlessly for the last 5 years, exceeding my every expectation and making computing a joy.

That said, another side of me was considering making the switch to Ubuntu or some other user-friendly Unix distro. (OSX == gateway drug?) Why abandon Apple? Because I just don’t need all of the computer that comes with a Mac these days. Here’s a basic list of the applications I need in a computer:

• UNIX-based operating system
• Web browser
• Email client
• Text editor
• LaTeX
• R
• Basic music and video players

Aside from a few more miscellaneous applications (application launcher, project manager, document repository, timer/stopwatch), that’s about it. I don’t edit photos/music/video and I don’t do serious number-crunching or modeling (leave that to the clusters!). No games either. And it doesn’t take a new Macbook Pro to do this stuff. I could buy a $500 laptop, install Ubuntu, and all of this would work beautifully*.

*Eventually, of course. While it sounds like Ubuntu is making great strides towards the level of usability that you get with a Mac, I don’t think they’re far enough along to convince me to make the switch. Time is going to be my greatest asset once I get out to Berkeley, and I can’t afford to spend 3 hours reading forums about how to get wireless internet working. And 8 hours to get my hard drives converted from Mac format to Unix format and my data copied over. And 2 hours to…

There are also so many great little applications that have been written for the Mac environment that I know and love. I’m sure that there are Unix equivalents that do almost the same thing almost as well, but why bother if I don’t have to? Big applications would be missed too, Time Machine for example. Creating a backup image of my harddrive is literally as easy as plugging in an external USB hard drive. And when I get my new Mac, I can plug in my backup drive and boot/restore my old computer to my new machine with a click of a button. Sweet.

So while it would be fun to embrace the free software movement and possibly good to loosen Apple’s grip on my world a little bit, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen in the next iteration. Besides, I have two great Macs already. And if it ain’t broke, I’m not going to fix it. Is there some angle that I’m not considering here?