Hello world

I haven’t done it since I was twenty-something. Blogging, that is. But I guess now’s a good time to get back to it since a lot of other millennials seem to be getting pretty excited about blogs again as well (or at least they’ve started talking about blogging very nostalgically).

In truth, part of the reason I started this blog was to get an excuse to host a website on a virtual private server (VPS). A dedicated server would’ve been even better, but alas, they’re much more expensive. I’m actually looking forward to the light (I hope) sysadmin work and the related learning experiences that come with a server one has to maintain.

There’s something magical about having a server and related domain name of your own. The feeling is a bit similar to moving out of your parents’ place to your first apartment. In an age where content on the internet is more and more curated by black box algorithms and where an ever-growing part of the web is owned by silo-building mega-corporations, it feels like a small act of rebellion to spend time writing a blog on your own website. Digital capital might be accumulating at an alarming rate, but this corner of the internet is mine to share.

The will to escape alien algorithms was also one of the reasons what drew me to Bluesky. That place is awesome with lots of smart people from whom I’ve already learned so much. But writing long threads is not something that I enjoy doing. Yet another reason to start this blog.

On bluesky, I wrote that I need to start a blog to have a place to archive my #rstats shitposts. I was only half joking. That’s why this blog is built using Hugo and Quarto (the theme of this blog at the time of writing is the minimalistic XMin by Yihui Xie of knitr fame). I remember being really excited about literate programming back as an ecology undergraduate. Emacs org-mode was awesome, and I think I might have used knitr as well? Literate programming hasn’t found its way to my regular workflows though, mostly because I’ve felt that commenting your code is often “literate” enough. So I’m pretty excited about the possibility of including code and its outputs in these posts! For example, here’s a script I wrote for Valentine’s day on Bluesky, which I never saved anywhere except the figure’s alt-text.

## A scatterplot of a heart tilted 45° to the right with a regression line overlaid. The title says Happy Valentine's Day with p < 0.05
library(tidyverse)
library(extrafont) # You'll need to have the Karla font installed

## Sample from a heart curve
t <- seq(0,2*pi,length.out = 400)
x <- 16*sin(t)^3
y <- 13 * cos(t) - 5 * cos(2*t) - 2*cos(3*t) - cos(4*t)

dd <- matrix(c(x,y),ncol=2)

# Rotate 45 degrees
theta <- pi*-0.25
rotmat <- matrix(c(cos(theta),sin(theta),-sin(theta),cos(theta)), ncol = 2)
dd2 <- t(rotmat %*% t(dd))
colnames(dd2) <- c("x","y")
dd2 <- dd2 |> as_tibble()

# Publish or perish
p_heart <- dd2 |> 
  ggplot(aes(x,y)) +
  geom_point(size = 0.01) +
  stat_smooth(formula = y~x,method = "lm",
              color = "firebrick",
              fill = "hotpink") +
  coord_fixed() +
  theme_minimal(base_family = "Karla") +
  theme(panel.grid.minor = element_blank()) +
  labs(title = "Happy Valentine's Day",
       subtitle = "with p < 0.05",
       x = NULL, y = NULL)

p_heart

One cool thing about having a server is that I can run applications on it. I’m expecially looking forward to building and sharing surveydown surveys and other Shiny applications.

So, what will I blog about? I came up with the name for the blog (“A particular view”) in less than a minute in true 2000’s blog fashion. It’s the second definition for the English word survey (according to Wiktionary). My day job is at the Finnish Youth Research Society as a survey statistician, and blogging is a way for me to express my particular views about topics, so that seemed very fitting. I already have a PhD in physical geography, but I was recently approved to do a second PhD, this time in Social Sciences (and specifically, Youth Research) at the University of Tampere. According to the plan, I’ll be digging into gender gaps in values and identities, especially among youth. I’m pretty excited about the topics, and about being a student again, so I guess I’ll be writing about those things as well. Additionally, Bayesian statistics and causal inference are pretty close to my heart, so if I think I have anything worth sharing that’s somehow related, I will.

So, hello world. Welcome to my corner of the internet (or our corner, CC-BY). Send me a message on bluesky if you feel like it.

• Konsta