Evolving notes, images and sounds by Luis Apiolaza

Year: 2018

From character to numeric pedigrees

In quantitative genetic analyses we often use a pedigree to represent the relatedness between individuals, so this is accounted in the analyses, because the observations are not independent of each other. Often this pedigree contains alphanumeric labels, and most software can cope with that.

Sometimes, though, we want to use numeric identities because we would like to make the data available to third parties (other researchers, publication), and there is commercial sensitivity about them. Or just want to use a piece of software that can’t deal with character identities.

Continue reading

Being data curious: the strange case of lamb consumption in NZ

There is a lot of talk about the skills needed for working in Statistics/Data Science, with the discussion often focusing on theoretical understanding, programming languages, exploratory data analysis, and visualization. There are many good blog posts dealing with how you get data, process it with your favorite language and then creating some good-looking plots. However, in my opinion, one important skill is curiosity; more specifically being data curious.

Often times being data curious doesn’t require statistics or coding, but just searching for and looking at graphs. A quick example comes from Mike Dickinson’s tweet: “This is extraordinary: within a decade, NZers basically stopped eating lamb. 160 years of tradition scrapped almost overnight.” Continue reading

Why not film?

“Why don’t you try film?”, he asked.

“I can’t afford the time and expense required to work with film”, I muttered. Perhaps a truer statement would be that, right now, is not a high-enough prioritary to allocate the time and resources to go for film.

My connection with film started in 1980. I got shooting using a Pentax MX, with a fantastic 50mm f1.4 which I still use, and I learnt to process and print in my high school’s darkroom. A group of us and an enthusiastic teacher put together that insanely hot, bare bones room.

Changing film was like getting a new sensor for a digital camera. Light sensitivity, contrast, grain (sensor noise), etc could be drastically different when using black and white. Response to colour could completely change the mood of a shot. However, one was stuck with this alternate sensor for the length of the roll (often 24 or 36 shots).

But let’s face it, modern cameras are technological marvels, produce crazy sharp images, just a bit… aseptic. And here comes the film nostalgy, which is channelled via film emulation: putting the sensor I had in mind behind that aseptic image.

I do not use film emulation while taking pictures, but I imagine a type of film while shooting. In my head, the picture that I see/feel is black and white low/medium/high contrast, or a gritty underexposed portrait, or a cool colour negative, or even a vivid slide film. Some time later I will take the cold digital phone picture and use RNI Films (one of the multiple companies that make reasonable film emulations) and obtain a photo which looks like what I had in mind. Most of my photos these days use film emulation. PS 2023-04-17 16:50 NZST: I’m now using Rawtherapee to process many of my photos, relying on its emulation filters.

This process is not perfect, but it works and I can express myself in a meaningful way. Hard to ask much more from a piece of software.

Note: Image The crane, iPhone + RNI Films (2017-12-10)

Italo Calvino’s humanity

This year requires an extra dose of new perspective, to make the most of time, to bring the best of people.

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dreams or the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.

Italo Calvino in Six Memos For The Next Millennium

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