I’ve been doing a lot of digital cleanup lately, which included cleaning out my bookmarks. It turns out I’ve got a collection of “screen saver” websites – sites you could just leave up and watch passively.
So I made a page for em here: https://brian.copeland.bz/screen-saver-websites/
I’ve deleted my Twitter account, which had my actual name. There’s a radio show host in California that’s also named Brian Copeland that was probably very upset I got @BrianCopeland earlier than him – he had to settle for @BrianCopie.
I’ve deleted my reddit account. I was /u/jhinra for 15 years, reddit was one of the first websites I really engaged with. I paid money immediately when they started the Reddit Gold program. I participated in Reddit Secret Santa, and was proud to call myself a redditor.
Both platforms brought me immense joy. I remember live-tweeting my jury duty in New York during grad school. I remember when my Power Point slide for Alicia teaching her coding went viral and was on the home page.
But more and more, I don’t want to participate in social media platforms that don’t care what I want. I don’t want suggested posts. I want to see stuff in reverse chronological order. I don’t want to make a political statement by actively participating on a platform.
I’m told there’s a phrase for this new phase of social media, enshittification. I feel it whole-heartedly.
I’m not sure where the internet is going, but I know I’ll be here, on my own website, without ads.
Hard seltzer is seltzer water with alcohol. It’s a malted beverage, created in a similar way to beer, so it’s not technically liquor.
And it’s huge.
This past Friday, I felt a “tasting” itch. I used to host tastings a lot. I’ve done tastings for:
It’s just so much fun! I think I first learned to like scotch whiskey by trying several samples in succession. Even the butter tasting showed that there’s dimensions to butter you might not normally notice.
Early in the summer, I had held a quickie tasting between Truly and White Claw, two of the biggest hard seltzer brands in the game. But two brands isn’t quite enough, so I hit a few liquor stores and found eight.
In alphabetical order, here are the eight candidates (Images courtesy of brands or totalwine.com).
We had six participants (well, seven, but one couple shared and ranked together). Each participant received a white 3oz plastic cup with a letter on it (in random order, participants were not aware of what brands were involved). One at a time, each participant received a cup, tasted it, then decided where the newest drink ranked among previous drinks served.
Other caveats:
There are a lot of ways to consolidate rankings, but here’s four, where 1 was considered the “best” and 8 was considered “worst”, so smaller scores are better:
It’s pretty clear the Bravazzi Hard Italian Soda won. It got two first picks, three second place picks, and the worst was two picks at third place. One participant mentioned that perhaps “Hard Italian Soda” is fundamentally different than a hard seltzer.
Smirnoff Seltzer scored the worst, but only because Bud Light Seltzer was saved by a single participant that loved it and ranked it first. So let’s call Bud Light Seltzer polarizing and dump on both brands.
Most interesting for me is that Truly beat out White Claw. In my previous head-to-head competition, White Claw won.
Data is available here, if you were one of the participants and curious what you personally picked.
Like all of you, I’ve been out walking the neighborhood significantly more than ever before. I’ve previously featured street art from NYC on this blog, feeling pretty jealous of all the art everywhere in that city.
Turns out, there’s plenty of it here. Here’s some of my favorites, just to give South Minneapolis a little bit more art cred.
I’m in love with this animated gif titled “Night Waves” courtesy of Reddit by /u /Kyro122 and wanted to share it.
You’ve heard of geocaching, right? Go to a location specified by GPS coordinates and find a hidden cache?
Mikal Hart created a box with a GPS inside that only opens when the box is at a set of GPS coordinates.
…a puzzle box that won’t open until it is taken to a certain location.
Quoted from http://arduiniana.org/projects/the-reverse-geo-cache-puzzle/
It’s such a cool idea, I really want to be the kind of person that makes something like this. I especially love the end of his writeup:
This little box is a novel way of combining a GPS, a servo, a button and a display. How many more marvelous combinations lurk out there, if only someone has the imagination to put them together the right way?
Quoted from http://arduiniana.org/projects/the-reverse-geo-cache-puzzle/
This one’s hard to explain unless you’re a programmer, so bear with me…
The first thing you learn when programming is how to print “Hello, world!”. Very shortly afterwards, they teach you to do something slightly more complicated, the “fizz buzz” problem, meant to teach children about division:
[Children] generally sit in a circle. The player designated to go first says the number “1”, and each player thenceforth counts one number in turn. However, any number divisible by three is replaced by the word fizz and any number divisible by five by the word buzz. Numbers divisible by 15 become fizz buzz. A player who hesitates or makes a mistake is eliminated from the game.
quoted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizz_buzz
It’s not meant to be hard, just a toy problem to program. The code you write should output something like:
1 2 fizz 4 buzz fizz 7 ...
Working in Corporate America™, you code differently. Clear, concise code doesn’t get you ahead: “scalable”, jargon-filled code does. You’re supposed to write code that can run on computers around the world and serve billions of users. If one’s code is too simple and straight forward, the bosses will think one’s work is too easy.
Enter one of my favorite coding projects: Fizz Buzz Enterprise Edition.
FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition is a no-nonsense implementation of FizzBuzz made by serious businessmen for serious business purposes.
Project description from Fizz Buzz Enterprise Edition
Normally, fizz buzz can be written in a few lines:
for number in range(1, 100):
if number % 3 == 0 and not number % 5 == 0:
print("fizz")
elif not number % 3 == 0 and number % 5 == 0:
print("buzz")
elif number % 3 == 0 and number % 5 == 0:
print("fizzbuzz")
else:
print(number)
Fizz Buzz Enterprise Edition (FBEE) spreads this same logic across dozens of files. It’s really a work of art.
Now, explaining a joke sorta kills it, but here’s a few bullet points to help you get the joke. FBEE:
Not being a java programmer, my eyes sorta glaze over reading it. But I really appreciate the effort put into it. It’s also an open source project, which means anyone can contribute. This leads to a ton of issues raised by the community, such as #429:
It is apparent that people are pirating FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition at an alarming rate, which the Accounting and Finance Team says is having a dramatic effect on our bottom line.
Issue #429 submitted by drelephant
We need to look into options to protect our investment and our IP. I suggest some kind of Enterprise license manager with a USB dongle and quarterly subscription model.
There’s a special place in my heart for a joke being taken as far as possible.
It’s a month into 2020 and I’m still clearing out my todo list. I don’t know about you, but I have a habit of bookmarking things I love with the intent of returning to them. But those bookmarks sit dormant and start to weigh me down with regret; why aren’t I doing cool stuff like this?!?
Because it’s a new decade, it’s time for a new approach. For the next several days, I’ll be blogging a few things I’ve stumbled across that inspire me. These are things I wish I had done myself, but it’s time to admit defeat and just admire the creativity of others.
First up is this amazing project where Kevindk9 saturates particle board wood in water, then uses a microwave oven transformer to burn beautiful patterns in said wood.
If you browse Kevindk9’s profile, it looks like he does a ton of cool stuff. Browse the gallery for some amazing close-ups of his work, then browse his profile for other crazy science-art. You won’t be disappointed.
So, what’d I do in 2019?
You’d almost guess I don’t like Minneapolis the way I traveled last year:
In August, Alicia and I celebrated ten years of marriage with a trip back to Las Vegas, the same city we were married in 2009.
Same city, but not the same place. We were married at the Wynn, which treated us great, but we thought it was time to explore the rest of Vegas. We stayed at the Aria for a full week, long enough for us to get bored of Vegas. Well, almost – it’s pretty sweet vacationing for a week.
Alicia is awesome and I’m lucky to have her.
With no effort on my part, I changed titles from “Data Scientist” to “AI Scientist”. Title inflation, yo.
…well, to be fair, I’m doing slightly more fancy stuff than before. In November, I gave a talk at Sisyphus Brewing about Natural Language Generation, part of a series of Data Science talks sponsored by Target. My coworkers have an every-other-week series of talks where we’re expected to speak about something we are interested in.
I’ve previously written about Natural Language Generation on this blog when I tried to recreate the Burger Hunter. I had been reading a lot about OpenAI‘s GPT-2, which was “so powerful, they couldn’t release it.” That certainly struck me as marketing hype, so I spent some time investigating it and created a presentation about it. No original research, but fun none-the-less.
I FINALLY transferred slides from my parents into a digital format. It had been on my todo list for years. Feels so good to have it done. Side benefit, it is so much fun to see photos of my parents from before I was born. Although it’s been awhile since I was a beard guy, there’s definitely a resemblance.
Without permission (sorry Dad), here’s a few of my favorites:
Okay, that’s not fair. Yes, there were way more slides of my father, but I should embarrass my mother too. Here’s my favorites of her (sorry Mom):
Here’s some other bullet points from 2019:
Not a bad year, eh? Previously, I’ve said my 28th year was my favorite, but I think 34 has taken the cake.
My buddy Carl was at Tableau Conference in New Orleans in October and noticed something strange:
Oct 23, 2018, 1:56 PM: The temperature of the water at the hydration station varies widely. One had the perfect sipping temp, but I forgot which one it was
He’s an old man at heart, so apparently this is what he is concerned about in New Orleans. He continued throughout the conference:
Oct 23, 2018, 2:33 PM: Update regarding current cup of water: a bit to cold
Oct 23, 2018, 2:40 PM: Current water: too warm
Oct 23, 2018, 3:14 PM: Current water: too cold. May mix it with the too warm water
Oct 23, 2018, 3:16 PM: Failure. Additional water also too cold
Oct 23, 2018, 3:22 PM: HUGE news… Current water: Just Right !!
Oct 24, 2018, 10:42 AM: Current water temp, quite pleasant
Oct 24, 2018, 10:58 AM: current water temp: just a touch too cold
Oct 24, 2018, 11:58 AM: Current water: waaay too cold
… you get the idea (as well as how hydrated Carl stays).
Anyway, these mission critical transmissions had a few problems:
So I got to work. Presenting, https://water.copeland.bz/, Carl’s Water as a Service!
It’s a python flask app with a sqlite3 database on the back end and the graph is powered by D3.js.
For Carl’s input, I wanted to to be as simple as possible. To update the world on the temperature of his water, Carl goes to a secret url and sees this page:
It’s mobile optimized, so he can bring it up on his phone, and it requires no authentication or reloading. Every time he hits a button, it’s instantly recorded and reflected on the home page.
You might notice the slider on the bottom. Carl had requested a slider (presumably to fine tune the temperature of his water), so I gave him a slider. He’s also not sure what the “Text Brian” button does, so that’s a plus.
If you’re super curious, you can see the code on my github repo, github.com/briancopelandbz/cwaas.
Cheers!
Edit 2020-10-05 : Previously, the website was http://cwaas.copeland.bz, but I’ve moved it to https://water.copeland.bz and updated the link above accordingly.