"Mission Statement"

As is true of many people out there, I have had multiple less-than-successful forays into "blogging." The embarrassing part is that I don't even like the word "blog" - however, that is the word that has stuck, and so I will use it. But whatever it is called I've generally not been consistent about it - my posts are haphazard and generally pointless, even for me.

So why am I trying again? Simple - this time I'm going to actually write about my interests. That way, if nothing else, *I'll* enjoy coming back and reading it. And hey, if a few other folks stumble across it, that's great too.

What did I write about in the past, if not my interests? I'll let that mystery be for the time being, suffice it to say that my focus now is on two rather functional matters - statistics and computer programming. My goal will be not merely to express my opinion (which is inevitable but ultimately not terribly valuable), but rather to work through actual concepts and make falsifiable statements. There's no way to be right if there is no possibility of being wrong.

Anyway, this all sounds pretty high-minded, and maybe I should delete it and keep things simple. However the other aspect of this is I do want it to be conversational - it is a blog, after all. I apologize if my stream of consciousness is not to your liking though, and will get to the point.

I have a smattering of experience in a variety of programming languages - the only one I would consider myself relatively fluent in is R, but I have am learning more about others all the time. I have written Soy Statistics, a crude imitation of R using JavaScript. I intend to flesh it out using Google App Engine and Python.

Most of my writing here will be about this experience, and as I continue to learn and play with these tools I hope to post helpful tidbits here. Who knows, if people actually start reading this, maybe we can even have discussions about things. I'm not particularly expecting that though - as I said, my only goal is to write something I find interesting. I may end up being my only reader, but hey, at least then I won't be making the signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet worse than it is already.