Packing for a Cold Weather GORUCK HTL

One of the few things you can control when attempting a GORUCK HTL is your gear. Some of the items you’ll want are obvious and will be listed on the official event packing lists GORUCK provides, but if an HTL is one of your first GORUCK experiences1 and/or you haven’t done cold-weather events, this list might help you figure out what additional gear you’ll need. In November 2018, I successfully completed my first HTL during Veterans Day weekend in Indianapolis.

Picking the PLL Cities

The Premiere Lacrosse League (PLL) is attempting a new model for a professional team sport: a tour-based schedule with the entire six-team league playing in a different city each weekend. Paired with their NBC partnership, more people will get to see high-quality lacrosse than a city-based league like the MLL could attain. This week, the PLL announced a list of 30 cities that are in the running to be one of the 12 final sites for PLL games this summer.

Meta-cognition and data analysis

Learning how to perform various parts of a data analysis project - import, cleaning, visualizing, modeling - is hard. Learning how to bring those parts together in your day-to-day work is even more challenging. It’s hard because most analysis work is performed in isolation. We often see the results of great analysis work in blogs, articles, or presentations, sometimes even with source code, but seeing a final analysis product and it’s source code can obscure a lot of technique and thinking that went into the final product.

The Marble Game in R

The college football playoff selection process is broken. The current College Football Playoff (CFP) was created to address the shortcomings of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). Under the BCS system, a combination of polls and computer rankings were used to select two teams to play for the national championship. It seemed like a good idea, but controversial the results of the BCS system are well-documented. One of the most obvious flaws: several teams finished with an undefeated season and did not have a chance to play for a championship.

How long is your project?

Two years ago, we sold our house in Branford - a beautiful shoreline town just east of New Haven - and moved to Kentucky. Of all the things that we could miss about our life in Connecticut, like lobster rolls or getting Patriots games on broadcast channels, what we miss most is the tight-knit community in Branford. We couldn’t go to the grocery store or get an ice cream cone without chatting with a neighbor, a family from a lacrosse team I coached, or someone from our gym.