I’m off to Vegas for a bit in November and, as I’ll be riding a bit, I thought I’d check and see what the weather will be like. One of my favorite weather resources is the Weather Underground site. I’m a paying member, all of $10 a year to get rid of the ads. For me, with all the travel, it’s a deal.
One of the best features is the historical data feature allowing one to research a location through time. Today I did Las Vegas for the month of November.
But before we go there, today I attended an O’Reilly Media webcast on data analysis…
It’s over now, of course, but it was a good one. Essentially it was a look at how to work with data if you are not a statistician. I’m not, though I play one at work every so often. Michael Milton, the presenter, wrote Head First Data Analysis: A learner’s guide to big numbers, statistics, and good decisions
I learned a lot, but was most interested in learning more about the R language or, The R Project for Statistical Computing. It’s one of the tools that Michael showed in his webcast, specifically using for historgram analysis.
Las Vegas, weather, histograms…perfect.
I went and got five years worth of November temperature data and tried to do something with it in R. In just a couple of minutes I had this histogram of the November max temperatures.
It’s pretty crude – you can do a lot better with practice – but it got the point across pretty quickly. Rather than looking at 150 points (30 days x 5 years), I can see at a glance that I probably won’t need thermal underwear biking but a jacket and sweats might be a good thing to have for this warm weather boy.
But wait a minute. High temperatures are one this…what about low? What about low and high? Can do…
Well that’s about it for now.
Aloha!