What I learned this week⌗

Software⌗

DuckDB has a bar function which draws a band whose width is proportional to (x - min) and equal to width characters when x = max.

You could also implement this in other DBMS with ratio_to_report() and repeat()… repeat I hadn’t heard about until this week.

There’s some other fun ones in Redshift like initcap() which capitalizes the first letter of each word.

Postgres has nice docs on Character Types

There is no performance difference among these three types, apart from increased storage space when using the blank-padded type, and a few extra CPU cycles to check the length when storing into a length-constrained column. While character(n) has performance advantages in some other database systems, there is no such advantage in PostgreSQL; in fact character(n) is usually the slowest of the three because of its additional storage costs. In most situations text or character varying should be used instead.

Business/Finance⌗

Age and Cognitive Skills.

First, average skills increase strongly into the forties before decreasing slightly in literacy and more strongly in numeracy. Second, skills decline at older ages only for those with below-average skill usage.

Math/Stats⌗

Travel⌗

We hosted two gatherings at our house in Tucson this week. On Thursday, I used the charcoal grill I got for Christmas for the first time, cooking two tri-tips and four new york strips. A few tips on charcoal grilling:

  • A chimney is critical to getting the coals lit, and you need to get a decent fire underneath the coals to really get them going

  • You can throw more coals on already lit coals if you need to, but this will come at the cost of more smoke/flames

  • Try to leave the lid on as MUCH as possible as the temperature drops significantly when it comes off.

  • Start off with more coals then you need and create hot/cold zones by pushing the coals to one side and moving them around as needed. Just use a meat thermometer to take the guess work out of “doneness”

On Saturday, I made a bourbon braised chuck roast using seven lbs of chuck. We were going to watch a movie outside, but it was really cold so we played games inside.

Other⌗

Reminds me of that famous tombstone inscription: “I told you I was sick!”

“It is easier to fool a man than to explain to him that he was fooled.”  (Mark Twain)

The Conversation was good R.I.P Gene Hackman