Posts

There is a very old issue in ggplot2 about the ability to modify particular scales when using facet_wrap() or facet_grid(). I often have this problem when using lots of facets, as sometimes the labels overlap with eachother on some of the scales.

There is a lot of talk about the ggplot2 package and the pipe. Should it be used? Some approaches, like the ggpipe package, replace many ggplot2 functions, adding the plot as the first argument so they can be used with the pipe.

If you have ever worked with dates and times over a wide geographical area, you will know that timezone math is tedious but important. In the forthcoming update of the rclimateca package, the list of climate locations provided in the package will contain the UTC offsets for what Environment Canada calls “local standard time”.

It seems that the tools for writing papers in R/RStudio keep getting better and better, to the point where it is rare that I have something I need to do to write a paper that happens outside of RStudio.

In the past few months I’ve done some work on PHREEQC modeling in R, as well as a whole lot of XRF data work that required converting what seemed like an ungodly number of molecular concentrations (e.

The paleolimnological data I work with most days is voluminous and difficult to wrangle. There are a lot of cores, a lot of variables, and a lot of parameters thanks to the multi-element analysis of the X-Ray Fluorescence spectrometer we’ve used recently on our sediment samples.

The HYDAT database contains over 1 GB of hydrological observation data collected by Environment Canada. The database is freely available from the Environment Canada website, however extracting data can be difficult.

Almost six years ago, my honours thesis (Using paleolimnological methods to track late holocene environmental change at Long Lake, New Brunswick – Nova Scotia border region, Canada) and my friend Hilary’s master’s thesis were completed, but it was only this year that we finally got around to submitting the combined manuscript to FACETS, a new (ish) open access journal from Canadian Science Publishing.

The NatChem database from Environment Canada contains the best long-term atmospheric monitoring data that exists for Canada, similar to the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP) in the US. Unlike the NADP, the distribution format associated with NatChem data is a hideous export format that looks like it was used by SAS at one point.

Matt Hall from Agile Geoscience recently wrote a post on the problem of finding the shortest possible pangram (sentence containing all letters in the alphabet) using only mineral names. The post goes into the details on the set cover problem, of which assembling a pangram from a list of minerals is one example.