Blog

Yesterday I read for the first time Joan Didion’s essay “On self-respect” in her 1968 collection of essays “Slouching towards Bethlehem”. “On self-respect” originally appeared in Vogue in 1961. Here is the text of the essay, as it appeared in 1961. Among the more powerful lines from the essay are the following: “Nonetheless, character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.

Read More…

I recently learned about the R package, pkgdown, an R package that provides functions that make it easy to build a website from an R package on Github. I decided to build a site for my package qtl2pleio. The site is here. It features a documentation page for each function in the package. Using pkgdown is extremely easy. devtools::install_github("r-lib/pkgdown") library(pkgdown) build_site() pkgdown is used by more than 1300 packages, according to its README file.

Read More…

I recently applied for a peer review training program that the Genetics Society of America organizes. An advisor kindly agreed to write a recommendation for my application. In discussing the program application with him, he told me that most of what he knows about refereeing he learned from Don Knuth’s book, Mathematical Writing. I decided to find a copy of the book. The publisher, MAA, says that the book is out of print.

Read More…

While browsing the internet, I stumbled upon Rstudio’s new package blogdown. I read posts from Karl Broman and found the the book that the package author - Yihui Xie - freely shares. One tricky part of setting up the website involved the DNS settings. I bought the site fboehm.us through google domains. While the blogdown book provides instructions for DNS settings for other domain name providers, at the time I set up my site, they hadn’t written instructions for use with google domains.

Read More…