In this post, I will attempt to briefly summarize the main points of the book An optimistic skeptic The chapter starts off by saying that there are indeed people in the world who become extremely popular, make tons of money, get all the press coverage, by providing a perfect explanation, after the fact. The author gives one such example of a public figure who rose to fame explaining events post-fact, Tom Friedman.

“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The book starts by explaining an example project that one can download from the author’s github account. The project files serve as an introduction to reproducible research. I guess it might make sense to download this project, try to follow the instructions and create the relevant files. By compiling the example project, one gets a sense of what one can accomplished by reading through the book. **Introducing Reproducible Research **The highlight of an RR document is that data, analysis and results are all in one document.

The author of the book titled Reproducible Research with R and RStudio - Second edition , Christopher Gandrud, has made the relevant code available on github. This code can be run to obtain a book that is identical to the one that is available in the stores(that is priced at $45). I have spent more than an hour trying to run the code as there are many prerequisite packages that need to be installed.

Compared to Western classical music, there is a dearth of literature in Hindustani classical music. Stephen Slavek, a disciple of Pt. Ravi Shankar writes in his book, “Sitar Technique in Nibaddha forms” : Musicians talk a lot about music but rarely write anything about it, and never attempt to transcribe a performance for the purpose of analysis. The reason is that music tradition is one of improvisation and retains its vitality by means of transient, ephemeral nature of the music that comprises it.