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  • Virginia

    I’ve been in Marion, VA now for over a week. Its been pretty nice. So far I’ve been up on White Top twice with the lovely presence of snow up there. I’ve been hiking up Dickey Knob for a decent view and up Molly’s Knob for a better view. I’m still exploring and getting to know the area. There’s tons of hiking, but the back roads can take a while to get there, so its not all as close as it looks. The nice part is the closeness of the Appalachian Trail. While the Mid-state Trail was close to home…

  • Small World

    Harvest Moon, originally uploaded by Matthew Singer. Beth, one of the photo club members and employee at the Prichard Art Gallery downtown, mentioned at our last meeting that a student was in town with the current exhibit at the gallery. He didn’t know anyone and was desperate to hang out with people his own age. So we got a group together last night and hung out around the town. I thought the visiting student was an art student, but it turns out he’s actually studying conservation biology and had spent some time working environmental education. And, he’s from Maine. Well…

  • Why you’re working from home, Part 2: A Shiny Model

    Immediately after I published my last post, I wasn’t content with the manner in which I conveyed the SIR model. Simply posting graphs from scenarios that I ran isn’t exciting. It’s passive, and it doesn’t actively demonstrate for the reader how social distancing does work to reduce infection rates. I wanted something interactive. Something that you, my readers, can play with. So I built the model in Shiny. Shiny is a tool for R that makes data visualization interactive. I had never used Shiny. But with a few hours of reading the introductory tutorial, I had my own custom application…

  • Happy March

    Wow, it’s March already. Yesterday, it began to snow. Let’s back up, all of last week, it snowed. We may have gotten a good combined foot of fresh, fluffy powder. We got a bit of a break over the weekend. Sunday it snowed a bit, but the accumulation wasn’t siginificant. But yesterday, it began to snow. In the course of the day, I probably blew 8 inches off the driveway, and the snow wouldn’t let up. This morning, I woke up to find that all my hard work of keeping the driveway clear was erased with potentially another 6-8 +…

  • Kittens

    I can hidez., originally uploaded by Matthew Singer. We’ve been in and out of the Altoona area to pack up belongings in preparation for the big move later this summer. We usually stay with Erin’s grandfather who lives on a farm off of Rt. 22 near Williamsburg. He has some “stray” cats that he feeds, but won’t get spayed or neutered, so every so often we find a litter of kittens. Two weeks ago, we were visiting and the kittens were out playing. I couldn’t resist a photo shoot. As cute as they are, we are not keeping any of…

  • The Prairie in Bloom

    With the school year over and nice weather upon us, I’ve had some free time to get out and explore the landscape beyond Williston. I’ve been out on the prairie twice to discover the array of early wildflowers in the grasslands. This is the time of year when I feel like I could actually enjoy this place. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last very long. It’s said that there are only two seasons on the northern plains – a very long winter, and a short summer. Spring and Fall exist, but only for a week. All year round, the wind can blow…