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Intro

Posted in misc
"And while I'm traveling I hear so many words. Languages barriers broken, now we've found the key. And if you want this world of yours to turn around you, and you can see exactly what to do — don't tell me! I'm just a singer in a rock and roll band"
-John Lodge , singer in a rock and roll band and experimentation aficionado


Intro to the intro

Howdy! This is my first post, so pardon the exposition (the first post of a blog is the purest form of masturbation). I'm going to go light on my background: you can see my website for that.

The main reason for starting this blog up is to explore data, economics, music, and this world around us! It's also a place to share myself and my interests with other passionate folks!

Tertiarily, a few other reasons are:

  • Have a place to put random projects:
  • Encourage me to put my repos on Github
  • I've never built a blog before
  • Every other data scientist seems to have one

What to expect

For reference, I've included a list of important "gotcha"s you may encounter while reading:

  1. Stock photos. Lots of stock photos.
  2. I'm gonna be wrong sometimes. Let me know when I am!
  3. Use the categories section. There are gonna be lots of different stuff.
  4. I'm gonna ramble occasionally.
  5. Posts will have zero regularity
  6. Feel free to email me at any time!
  7. Sit back and enjoy. (Or stand, I'm not your boss).
Adorable

The name

Tilting at windmills doesn't really inspire confidence, unless perhaps you expect Sancho to do the talking. So why the name?

One: Myself

I'm not a "classically trained" data scientist, though I'm not sure what that would mean anyway. My foot in the door was econ and math (my original title of Hidalgo for those of you following the analogy). I didn't take a single computer science class until I got out of undergrad. But after a few years doing research at the NY Fed, I experienced my own fever brought on from my immersion in the literature and decided to to try this hip new "data science" thing. After all, econometrics was always one of my biggest interests.

And so I created my own title of Don and began attacking my share of windmills. And who is my Sancho? Maybe the metaphor breaks down here, but I like to think to think my "Sancho" is just the set of things that ground me: experts I meet, classes I take, and the times I fail. And much like Quixote, I'm driven by by my own choleric enthusiasm.

And eventually I spent enough time stumbling through projects, leveraging econometrics, and taking gap-filling grad classes to make it to the starting line of this data science thing.

Two: The field

Much like the knights of yore, the field of data science is highly romanticized. It's a field with allures of self-driving cars, intelligent machines, and the promise to revolutionize the world around us. It's also a field advancing so fast that the usual tactic is to simply throw spaghetti at the wall until a piece sticks.

I'll caveat here that of course there is a rigorous sect of researchers working through the math and sharpening the cutting edge. And of course there's group of highly trained professionals working towards problems in the private sector. But with the democratization of the field, the common application of methods often lack this understanding in a sort of "Jurassic Park" effect: not understanding the power of the technology. Attacking problems they don't understand with tools they don't know how to use. This is not necessarily bad, and is in fact a huge part of the learning process (one must handle the clay statues before ascending to the sun). But it's an interesting trait of the field right now.

Three: The temptation

Simply put, I'm a huge fan of witty satire, whether it be Don Quixote, The Stolen White Elephant, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or simply Margaritaville. So it was a chance for an homage to one of the best pieces around.

Tyler Bodine-Smith: Native Coloradan. Data scientist. Guitarist. Backpacker. Animal lover. Half-way decent at Rocket League.