Each year my siblings choose names for a Christmas gift exchange. It is not unusual for a sibling to pick her own name, whereupon the name is replaced into the hat and a new name is drawn. In fact, that "glitch" in the drawing process was a motivation for me
Tag: christmas
'Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the world ... dot-matrix printers were humming as Santa's naughty/nice list was unfurled... Can you imagine what it must have been like years ago when Santa had to maintain his naughty/nice list by hand, with a feather quill pen?!? Or even these
In my previous post, I described how to implement an iterated function system (IFS) in the SAS/IML language to draw fractals. I used the famous Barnsley fern example to illustrate the technique. At the end of the article I issued a challenge: can you construct an IFS whose fractal attractor
While I'm waiting for the next "data intense" event to show up in the news (so I can blog some SAS graphs about it), I thought I'd share a few fun SAS graphs in the spirit of the holiday season! Please don't hold me to too high of graphical "best practices"
A few colleagues and I were exchanging short snippets of SAS code that create Christmas trees and other holiday items by using the SAS DATA step to arrange ASCII characters. For example, the following DATA step (contributed by Udo Sglavo) creates a Christmas tree with ornaments and lights: data _null_;
We watched our favorite holiday movie last weekend: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Most who know me would be surprised to read that I start sobbing at about the time that Mr. Gower buys George his—alas, unused—around-the-world suitcase and don’t stop until (spoiler alert!) Clarence gets his wings. One
On the twelfth day of Christmas, analytics gave to me… Twelfth graders passing, Eleven pipes for piping, Ten cards for keeping, Nine nurses nursing, Eight beers for tilting, Seven Days of Swimming, Six bets parlaying, FIIIIIIVE Lion Kings, Four fraud alerts, Three linchpins, Two perfect gloves, AND A TIGER WITH