Turkey Data 2019 Update

 Posted on November 30, 2019  |  Mike Ching

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone and I have new data from this year’s 16 lb bird to add to the last time I updated this post. An unexpected update problem was that the googlesheets package has been updated to googlesheets4 with new methods. I was able to figure out how to use the methods in blogdown and it opened a browser tab for me to authenticate. However it did so every time, so when I went to knit the actual HTML page, it hung, probably because I was not able to authenticate via the browser. [Read More]
cooking  turkey 

Prime Ages

 Posted on November 29, 2019  |  Mike Ching

This past year our family members were 43, 43, 13, and 11 years old, which are all prime numbers. I wondered if there was or will be any other year where this will happen. There was probably a real math way to figure this out, but it was easier just to brute force calculate each year. I took out the obvious years (where we are even ages), so starting when our daughter was born, I calculated how old each of us was or will be. [Read More]
birthdays 

Cross Country Results

 Posted on November 3, 2019  |  Mike Ching

The Hawaii high school cross country championship was held this weekend. At first, only the live time and place results were displayed, and there were no team scores calculated. That made me want to figure out how to get team scores out of the live results. Doing this also let me figure out some hypotheticals like what if the teams from division 1 and division 2 were combined in one race. [Read More]
sports  running 

Frog Bog Metrics

 Posted on April 22, 2019  |  Mike Ching

The school carnival was a couple weekends ago, and I volunteered at a game called Frog Bog. Players use a hammer to hit a lever that launches a frog at a rotating set of lily pads. You score by getting a frog in the lily pad. Players get four frogs per turn. I thought it might be nice to know the probability of success to help understand how to distribute prizes. [Read More]
games 

Fantasy Baseball Prediction Ensemble Model

 Posted on April 10, 2019  |  Mike Ching

It’s fantasy baseball season again, and it was time for my kids to do their draft with my friend’s kids. None of them know anything about baseball players except for the very top stars (Mookie Betts, Mike Trout), so they rely a lot on analyst predictions. Of course, one person’s predictions are not always that great, so inspired by Nate Silver, I set out to build a combination of several models to see if I could get a more accurate outcome. [Read More]
baseball  fantasy  sports 

Effects of Mangrove Clearance on Water Quality at He'eia Fishpond

 Posted on March 15, 2019  |  Mike Ching

My daughter started doing a science project on the ecology of the Heeia fishpond. She collected a bunch of data, but since she’s only a 5th grader, I thought she might need some help with the analysis. The premise is that the fishpond has been overgrown by invasive mangrove plants. The organization that runs the fishpond has been clearing back the mangroves. This helps to restore the water in the pond. [Read More]
observation  ecology 

Tenderfoot Paces

 Posted on February 16, 2019  |  Mike Ching

I had to organize the Tenderfoot scouts in my troop to learn some orienteering. The first step was to calculate how long their paces are. We went to the track and measured their pace count per 100 meters at least twice per scout. I wondered what the distribution looked like. I used dplyr method to group and summarize the data. It’s a little overkill but it does make it super easy. [Read More]
scouting 

Astronaut Fluid Shift Experiment

 Posted on August 25, 2018  |  Mike Ching

Today I ran an experiment with the students in my daughter’s First Lego League team. It was meant to demonstrate how fluid shifts in space. The kids measured their leg circumference at 3 different spots after standing for 10 minutes. They lay with their legs propped up in the air for 10 more minutes and then re-measured the circumference. The inspiration for this activity came from the NASA website. [Read More]
experiment 

Fluid Management for Running

 Posted on June 23, 2018  |  Mike Ching

Update: 8/25/2018 I’ve been having a hard time with my long runs now that the weather is getting hot. I went on one in particular that was particularly tough. I was nauseous and felt hot afterwards for a long time. I probably had heat exhaustion. The next morning when I weighed myself I was about 5 lbs less than I thought I should be. This got me thinking that maybe I was also very dehydrated, even though I had taken water breaks at several water stops along the way. [Read More]
running  exercise