Maiden Voyage

This is the first post. A mission statement, of sorts.
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Author

G. Jay Kerns

Published

August 23, 2011

Who

Me. I’m an associate professor of Statistics at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, USA. I’ve been using R for about 7 years, Emacs about 3 years, git about 1 year, and Org-Mode for less than a year.

What

I want this blog to be about statistics, plain and sample. No frills, no tomfoolery, just bare-boned statistics from beginning to end. Plus Emacs, ESS, Org-Mode, and R, but that goes without saying.

When

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, but had as of yet convinced myself that I didn’t have time for it. A sabbatical coupled with the renewed energy of a use R! conference can change things considerably.

How: Emacs + Org mode + Jekyll + Github = Blog + R!

After much fiddling and googling I have managed to figure out how to run a blog entirely through Emacs and Git. If you’d like to do the same I recommend reading here and here, with liberal doses of this and that. Ultimately, if you’d like to know how I do it then you can find the org-mode source code for this blog here and you can download the final result here (which still is source code but is as close to final as possible).

The bottom line: with this setup I can effortlessly do R code like this:

rnorm(10)
 [1] -1.26005550 -0.24153330 -0.26270810  0.11929914 -0.05094026 -0.54149791
 [7]  0.51524809 -0.90041545  0.52012774 -0.23936052

And can include plots like this:

x = rnorm(100) 
y = rnorm(100)
plot(y ~ x)

Figure 1: A plot to get things started.

all housed inside a simple, dynamic text file that I can edit with Emacs and can version-control with git. On top of all this, I get LaTeX formatting in HTML via MathJax. Life is good.

Reuse

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@online{jaykerns2011,
  author = {G. Jay Kerns},
  editor = {},
  title = {Maiden {Voyage}},
  date = {2011-08-23},
  url = {https://gjkerns.github.io/posts/2011-08-23-maiden},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
G. Jay Kerns. 2011. “Maiden Voyage.” August 23, 2011. https://gjkerns.github.io/posts/2011-08-23-maiden.