First post of the year, with a little review of recent readings or yet to read items:

• Notes on Category Theory with examples from basic mathematics, by Paolo Perrone. I keep an eye on Category Theory as well as Number Theory so this recent review published on arXiv caught my attention. This is a 180-page long monograph with several applications and exercises. It is also nicely typesetted (using TeX Gyre Pagella font, apparently). I just went through the document, but it’s clearly something to read this year. Likewise, there’s a nice review on (some) Fundamental Theorems in Mathematics which I’m keeping on hand for later, probably with A Modern Introduction to Online Learning.
• I heard recently about DuckDB. No idea if this is worth investigating any further, but the fact that it can be used to execute analytical SQL queries fast while embedded in another process makes it quite interesting if you want to build a strong statistical system using SQL backend and in-database analytics.
• There was nothing like an equalizer on macOS until eqMac2. The last version add support for Bluetooth and Airplay device, which means we could possibly stream movies or Twitch from the Mac directly to our TV monitor via an Apple TV (not tested).
• I recently came across Just Lisp Things, with nice blog posts on Common Lisp and, at the time of this writing, macros. On a related note, I found Dimitri Kowanikov’s article on Haskell build tools very interesting as it provides the most up to date review of the state of Haskell project management. The last thing I read on this topic was Alexis King’s opinionated guide to Haskell in 2018, so it looks like there hasn’t been much progress in this direction the last two years. Hoping the best for 2020.
• BBC Visual and Data Journalism cookbook for R graphics. Yet another R cookbook, this time with a focus on journalism and data visualization. Note that it relies on the bbplot package, which provides custom themes and layers for ggplot.
• Somehow I missed the release of Michael Betancourt’s new article on Probabilistic Computation. This is pure joy to read his articles, and and once again he has not failed to live up to his reputation for clear writing and nice illustrations.
• I believe Vega and Vega lite are really top notch libraries for interactive displays, provided you are willing to live with you web browser along your text editor. Here are two recent tutorials, written by Jan Aerts: Vega-Lite tutorial and Vega tutorial. With time I expect to find wrappers for several languages, other than Julia or R. I heard that it may even become available for clojurists at some point.
• Is Apple really transitioning to a Chromium-based web browser? This would be surprising, or maybe I should not be that surprised after all.

Blog rolling: The Eyeless Girls • A tutorial on t-SNE (2) • What can clang-format teach us about the human condition? • A new take on the birthday problem • Org Mode for Blogging