Lack of grammar

Ah HA! I've started another blog! Por que? Since I have no classes in which I am required to write, I thought it would be good to continue to practice. This also follows on the fact that I apparently have not mastered English grammar or punctuation and that this would be an embarrassing (and terribly sad) thing to realize only in graduate school. So I will attempt here to produce grammatically correct paragraphs that progress thematically and, in the process, say something meaningful, which is much less likely.

I guess I will just gush a bit about how much I enjoy programming. The story begins with the final quarter of my last year at the University of Washington, which is occurring as we speak/read/write depending on when is now for you. This quarter I chose to take the CSE 142 introduction to programming course because I thought it would be a useful addition to my skills with GIS. This is because many GIS may be altered using a programming language, often Python . Why GIS? The ability to use GIS such as ArcGIS and GRASS is an important skill in archaeology since the steep learning curve of any GIS tends to scare away those who enter into the Anthropology major. However, with my strangely strong background in Math/Physics, at least in comparison, I have found myself drawn to these tools.

This background also pushed me towards quantitative courses at UW and it was there that I was introduced to R . R allows the user to combine different statistical tools available in the program into a function. One could use R to create a bootstrap distribution or other resampling tools from scratch. I enjoyed building these functions so much that I thought that knowing the underlying language of those functions would be just as useful. So, I began the course and am quite enjoying playing around with all the things I can do with my little java programs.

My only wish so far is that I could better evaluate redundancy/confusion in my programs. However, I assume that will come with time.