Caution: this post is for nerds only. I watched this numberphile video last night and was fascinated by the point pattern that was created in it. I thought I would quickly program my own version to recreate it and then look at patterns made by more points. I didn’t realise until afterwards that there is actually a web version of the program used in the video here. It is a bit limited though so my code was still worthwhile.

Towards the end of 2015, I started distance running. I thought it’d be fun to look at the frequency of my runs over the course of 2016. Most of my runs were recorded with a GPS watch. I log my cycling data using Rubitrack, so I just added my running data to this. This software is great but to do any serious number crunching, other software is needed.

This is part-tip, part-adventures in code. I found out recently that it is possible to comment out multiple lines of code in Igor and thought I’d put this tip up here.

I don’t often write about music at quantixed but I recently caught Survivor’s “Eye of The Tiger” on the radio and thought it deserved a quick post. Surely everyone knows this song: a kind of catchall motivational tune.

A couple of recent projects have meant that I had to get to grips more seriously with R and with MATLAB . Regular readers will know that I am a die-hard IgorPro user. Trying to tackle a new IDE is a frustrating experience, as anyone who has tried to speak a foreign language will know. The speed with which you can do stuff (or get your point across) is very slow.

Statistical hypothesis testing , commonly referred to as “statistics”, is a topic of consternation among cell biologists. This is a short practical guide I put together for my lab. Hopefully it will be useful to others. Note that statistical hypothesis testing is a huge topic and one post cannot hope to cover everything that you need to know.

I needed to generate a uniform random distribution of points inside a circle and, later, a sphere. This is part of a bigger project, but the code to do this is kind of interesting. There were no solutions available for IgorPro, but stackexchange had plenty of examples in python and mathematica. There are many ways to do this.

Top Trumps is a card game for children. The mind can wander when playing such games with kids… typically, I start thinking: what is the best strategy for this game? But also, as the game drags on: what is the quickest way to lose? Since Top Trumps is based on numerical values with simple outcomes, it seemed straightforward to analyse the cards and to simulate different scenarios to look at these questions.

I’ve previously written about analysing my iTunes library and about generating Smart Playlists in iTunes. This post takes things a bit further by generating a “perfect playlist” outside of iTunes… it is exclusively for nerds . How can you put together a perfect playlist? What are your favourite songs? How can you tell what they are?

I was searching for the excitation and emission spectra for mNeonGreen. I was able to find an image, but no values for the spectra.