Author: Luke Miller

• July 22, 2011

  BBQ controller, version 2

  I have recently started using an Arduino microcontroller setup to control the temperature in my electric BBQ smoker. It displays the air temperature and three meat temperatures on an LCD screen, while the temperatures can also be viewed over my home wireless network.
• July 7, 2011

  A simple ggplot2 scatterplot revisited

  Rick Wicklin contacted me with a helpful suggestion for improving the data presentation method outlined in my  previous post on using ggplot2 to visualize some data. In the previous post I had plotted up a highly correlated set of points, showing the correspondence between maximum daily body temperatures of model snails sitting with the foot…
• June 29, 2011

  A simple ggplot2 scatterplot

  Here’s a bit of code used to produce one of the figures in my recent paper dealing with modeling rocky intertidal snail body temperatures. This was my first foray into ggplot2, and it only involved a few hours of head-scratching. The plot is a comparison of 10 years of  daily maximum body temperatures of a…
• June 27, 2011

  Nahant coyote

  I ran across one of Nahant’s resident coyotes hanging out in the church parking lot on Sunday morning. Surprisingly, it was not eating a local Nahant child at the time, despite the stated fears of a subset of our community.
• June 23, 2011

  Digitizing data from old plots using ‘digitize’

  The June 2011 issue of The R Journal contains an article on the R package digitize (link to pdf) by Timothée Poisot. This might prove to be a handy tool if you occasionally find yourself needing to retrieve data points from figures in old articles for which you don’t have the raw data. There are…
• June 5, 2011

  Archived water and air temperatures for Nahant, MA

  I’ve added the archived temperature data for the Marine Science Center to my current conditions page: https://www.lukemiller.org/seawater/. The complete timeseries, with some large breaks when the monitoring computer was shut down, can be downloaded in this csv file: 2010-2012_MSC_temps.csv (5MB, right-click and save-as). There are three columns, with the timestamps in Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5,…
• May 9, 2011

  One minor detail for getting 64-bit R-2.13 running with Eclipse/StatET

  Upgrading from R-2.12 to R-2.13 was fairly painless, except for one minor hiccup in trying to get the 64-bit version running on my installation of Eclipse + StatET under Windows 7. The setup instructions are almost entirely the same as I have outlined previously (R 2.12.0 and Eclipse with StatET installation). But when you go…
• March 9, 2011

  Deploying barnacle settlement plates

  As the northeast slowly starts to shrug off the shackles of winter, the barnacles decide to start spawning their planktonic larvae that float around for a few days, looking for a place to settle. We use barnacles in experiments all the time, so we set out little granite tiles in the field in central Maine…
• March 1, 2011

  Extracting sea surface temperatures from NOAA’s OISSTv2

  Update, 2015-11-30 It appears that NOAA has gone through and upgraded all of the OISST files to the newer version of the NetCDF file format. As a result, the functions outlined in this post don’t work any longer. Instead, see the updated functions in my newer post, https://lukemiller.org/index.php/2014/11/extracting-noaa-sea-surface-temperatures-with-ncdf4/. The concepts are the same as described…
• February 28, 2011

  RStudio – another integrated development environment for R

  If you’re in the market for a very easy-to-setup integrated development environment for R, wander over to RStudio.org. They’ve just released a beta version of their freely-available front end for R that runs under Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (for R versions 2.11 and later). If you’re not familiar with the idea of an…