Isaac Baumann

Keri Kelly playing toccata and fugue in F major

A choir singing in a church

A group of musicians playing recorders of various sizes

The same group of musicians, some of whom are holding up their recorders to show off the different recorder varieties

The Bach Project Choir - including my lovely wife - preceded by the Regent Recorders

A large chorus, half of which can’t be seen, performing in a church with a pipe organ in the background.

A man playing a violin

The Madison Community Chorus performing Jesu Joy of Man’s Desire with organ and violin accompaniment, then Robert Eversman performing two of my favorite pieces, the allemande and gigue from partita #2

Bach Around The Clock Visit the post for more.

bachclock.org

A man playing harpsichord in a church

The 2026 Bach Around the Clock event just kicked off. One of my favorite Madison events since moving here. Excitingly, a very harpsichord-heavy program this year.

The thing they don’t tell you about your 30s is that it’s when all your untreated high school cross country injuries randomly come back to haunt you

Unsure if this is useful for any UIC folks re: new document accessibility requirements for theses but sharing just in case it is

Feel free to join—I’ll be discussing the Open Source Program Office ecosystem and presenting survey results that we deployed in a reproducible way using Quarto and MyST Markdown.

Data Science Research Bazaar. Meaning in the Metrics: Communicating Research Insights. March and April, Discovery Building, UW–Madison.

Calling all data enthusiasts! The Data Science Research Bazaar @uwmadison.bsky.social is set for 3/19, with more events throughout the spring. Students, faculty, staff and community members all are welcome! Register by 3/12 to secure your spot. bazaar.datascience.wisc.edu #UWResearchBazaar

*taking a big sip of tea and checking the news* ah, well, nevertheless

I should probably do something about my WBD 401(k) shouldn’t I

Checking for equality within some tolerance

`%==%` <- function(x, y, tol = .Machine$double.eps^0.5) abs(x - y) < tol

(Story resolution: the reason was basically always because of licensing issues or old distribution agreements)

When I was at D+ people would occasionally email Bob Chapek to ask why old shows/movies weren’t on the platform. He (or his team) would actually read them and reach out to the scheduling department, who’d basically have to drop anything they were working on to find out why.

*I’ve

ugh

I’m definitely gotten a Yuengling at the Sbarro’s once. Not proud of it.

This is my flux capacitor

Bilbo holding the ring, asking why he shouldn’t eat lunch at 10:30 AM

View of Navy Pier in Chicago from William E. Dever Crib in Lake Michigan east of North Avenue. // Image captured at: 2026-02-16 00:00:01 UTC (about 7 min. prior to this post) // Image sourced from: glerl.noaa.gov/metdata/chi/ // Current Temp in Chicago: 49.01 F | 9.45 C // Precip: clear sky // Wind: N at 5.279 mph | 8.49 kph // Humidity: 65%

Current* conditions near Chicago, IL:

A beige field descending into a treeline under a blue sky

A snowy trail in a wooded area. Some green grasses are peeking out from underneath the snow.

It’s finally warm enough for a decent hike - the Ice Age Trail outside of Cross Plains

Just wanted to say this is a fantastic linter and thanks a lot for making this. It’s been in my daily workflow for a while now.

If you squint, the mapping should look roughly like a lookup table between the numeric value and the Likert encoding. One of the novel features of recode_values() is that it has an alternate interface that allows you to make this lookup table more explicit. Using a tribble(), we can extract out the lookup table into its own standalone data frame. lookup <- tribble( ~from , ~to , 1 , "Strongly disagree" , 2 , "Disagree" , 3 , "Neutral" , 4 , "Agree" , 5 , "Strongly agree" , ) We can then utilize the alternative from and to arguments of recode_values() rather than supplying formulas to specify how the values should be recoded: likert |> mutate(category = recode_values(score, from = lookup$from, to = lookup$to)) #> # A tibble: 9 × 2 #> score category #> <dbl> <chr> #> 1 1 Strongly disagree #> 2 2 Disagree #> 3 3 Neutral #> 4 4 Agree #> 5 5 Strongly agree #> 6 2 Disagree #> 7 3 Neutral #> 8 1 Strongly disagree #> 9 4 Agree

Lookup tables!

Speed skates on a frozen surface

A frozen lake with people skating on it

Third winter in Madison and somehow this is my first time ever pond skating

The 3rd edition cover of Applied Econometric Time Series by Enders, which is a very 1950s style cover with halves of green circles on a beige background

This is genuinely one of the best textbook covers

Does this mean Babcock dairy store can finally stop calling the ice cream “Mnookie dough”

Wildly cold wind chills across Wisconsin. Feels more like northern Canada.

These colors mean cold!

This is the coldest Wisconet day, when it comes to widespread low wind chills.

-40s all the way to the Illinois border and a few wind chills in the -50s!

Current conditions at Chicago, Chicago Midway Airport: -7°F (-22°C) Wind chill: -30°F (-34°C)

Current conditions at Madison, Dane County Regional-Truax Field: -18°F (-28°C) Wind chill: -38°F (-39°C)

Going to be a long day

Sometimes when I’m suffering from a little bit of imposter syndrome I think about this guy and it makes me feel better

Making a pot of tea to prepare for my ritual reading of Letter from Birmingham Jail

(Reposting with better link)

www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets...

When I’m secretary of education there will be at least twice as many linear algebra courses in schools as there are calculus classes. Day one. Sixth graders will have a unit on the singular value decomposition or states don’t get block grants.