I've been working on the railroad

The infrastructure is the fun part

On September 2, 1888, a 23-year old lieutenant in the British 21st Lancers mounted up to join in the last cavalry charge of the British Army. It was a short, intense action that lasted only a few minutes. His account in his book The River War would help propel the young man into parliament and eventual leadership of his country during World War II. His name was Winston Churchill, of course.

Before the exciting and decisive Battle of Omduram of which the charge played a part was possible it took two-years of construction of a military railroad to reach into the Sudan to provide the logistics that made it possible to maintain General Sir (later Lord) Kirshner’s army in the field.

I’ve been doing some track laying myself with my first four utility packages in Julia. RSetup.jl (eases setup for the RCall package to borrow functions from the large library of statistical functions in the R programming language), ACS.jl, to download US Census Bureau demographic data, GeoIDs.jl to maintain collections of county identifiers to use in my ongoing effort to restructure the United States into more stable units, and today Breakers.jl.

The problem frequently arises in mapping data is that it can be difficult to distinguish colors that are determined based on a continuous scale.

California and Texas clearly stand out but it get’s difficult to decide whether Washington and Michigan are the same size or no.

This can be tweaked somewhat to make differences show more clearly.

But a big perceptual problem comes from blowing past The Magic Number 7, Plus or Minus 2—the number of distinct objects it is possible for most people to keep in mind.

A solution is to lump the continuous variables into a manageable number of categories, or “bins.”

To derive the categories requires deciding where to draw the intervals, which is what my new package does.

I feel sort of like the kind of writer who, before setting down to compose The Great American Novel must first acquire some country property, clear a stand of timber, dress and saw the logs and erect a cabin to provide a suitable setting for the writing. Obviously, the construction is more interesting and fun than the writing.