Today the New York Times published the striking figure of US unemployment claims in light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve always been a strong proponent distilling the essence of what I’m trying to convey in my research especially when I generate plots and ggplot allows me to do just that. When I run workshops I always mention how you can plot nearly anything with ggplot. Let’s see if we can put my claim to the test and recreate this incredible plot of the number of unemployment claims.

Avatar Flight of Passage is my favorite ride in all of Disney World, I remember waiting close to four hours to ride the ride in December 2017 and I would do it again in a heartbeat. This past December I was able to visit Disney World again and managed to get a hold of some fast passes for the ride which made the experience much better. While I was waiting in line for the ride I wondered what the optimal time to queue up for the ride and wanted to see if I could analyze wait time data.

Lizzo has had a meteoric rise of success with her album Cuz I Love you. I remember hearing “Truth Hurts” and being immediately hooked last summer when I served as a SROP mentor for undergraduate research students on campus. I decided to create an interesting blog post to analyze tweets with the #lizzo hashtag, do sentiment analysis on Cuz I Love you and even generate Lizzo lyrics by making our own Markov chain generator!

I remember back in undergrad when I visited my friends at Michigan State and they took me to the residential dining hall since they had a meal plan. The cafeteria had typical dorm food like salad bar, burgers, hot dogs, fries etc. Fortunately, the dining halls have improved drastically since then and now the undergraduate students have it great with so many options available to them. Eat at State A common theme in the lab is to ask one another what do you have for lunch today?

I’ve been using the iOS Sleep Cycle app to track my sleeping since late 2014 and have accumulated quite a bit of information about my sleeping habits. I wanted to see if I could do some exploratory data analysis and try out some different packages to clean up and visualize my data. The data from the app comes in a csv file and contains information like date, sleep quality, sleep duration, and more recently it can integrate with the pedometer so you can get the number of steps in a given day.

For Now… SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy this week and I remembered how Elon Musk noted that it would have twice the thrust of any rocket currently in existence. I was intrigued by this statement and decided to look further and compare the thrusts of other rockets of the past and rockets that are planned in the future. Falcon Heavy thrust will be 5.1M lbf at liftoff -- twice any rocket currently flying.

Welcome to my R tutorial series This is where I’ll be posting tutorials on how to use R and Rstudio to create some amazing graphics and visualizations. If you are completely new to R, don’t worry, I will post guides to explain how to start form scratch. This post assumes you have R and Rstudio installed and know how to install packages.