January, 2019 | Mattia's blog

Intro for the first Stoic event in Cambridge

This is a transcription of my introductory speech for the first Stoic meeting of the Cambridge Stoa

Introduction

So, we are going to divide the meeting in the following parts:

I want to explain to you, who am I; why I decide to create this meet-up; I want to give a short intro an what is Stoicism and what it means to me and possible to you.
I want to hear from you, what is your experience with Stoicism? Do you know it? Who of you ever heard about Stoicism?
Here with me I have many books, I thought we can start by discussing one of the main topics of the Stoicism, the duality of control, reading from Epictetus. If you want to discuss a specific topic, we can discuss it, or better we can discuss next time.

Why this meeting?

For what concern me. I encountered Stoicism for the first time, like many in school, but in more recent time, it started appearing in my podcasts then in and some videos on you tube. I wandered what was all that fuss about and, in the last year started or so I start having an increasing interest in stoicism.

I started reading the books, Donald Robertson, Pigliucci, etc. I also went to a Stoic conference in London, the “Stoicon”.

There three-hundred people gather to discuss and listen about stoicism. There again I met people from the Stoic Fellowship, an international organization that promote the spread of Stoicism. I have joined them and decide to start and seek people with this interest.

Labelled plot in ggplot2

ggplot2 is an amazing tool for plotting in R. One of the latest feature I found out it is the possibility to label the plot automatically. Let’s check it out:

data <- data.frame(class=c('A','B','C'), 
                   value=c(50, 30, 20))

g <- ggplot2::ggplot(data = data,
                ggplot2::aes(x = class,
                             y = value)
                ) +
  ggplot2::geom_bar(stat = "identity", 
                    fill=c(2:4)
                    ) +
  ggplot2::geom_label(ggplot2::aes(label=(value)), 
                      vjust=-0.2, 
                      size=5) +
  ggplot2::theme_classic()

ggplot2::ggsave('labelled_plot.pdf', plot=g, device = 'pdf')

This would be the result:

Very easy and fast!

First Cambridge Stoics event

At the beginning of the year I have decide to create a meet-up event in Cambridge open for who is interested in the philosophy of Stoicisms.

Philosophy can be seen as dull and useless for the average man. However, Stoicism is nothing like that, it’s practical teaching and methods to coping mechanisms are aimed especially to who live a stress-full and chaotic life and Stoicism is becoming an important part of my life.

Therefore I personally invite everyone who is interested in coming at the coffee area of the Waterman Pub in Cambridge at the 19:00. For all infos and signing-up follow this link: https://www.meetup.com/The-Cambridge-Stoics/events/257821976/

How to use R to create Latex documents

At work I have been asked to create a R code that could automatic generate a Latex document.

This was great! Latex was the first language that I learnt and it has a special place in my nerd heart.

It is nice to see that is possible to work with R for Latex and create a PDF document that can change in relation to the input given to the code.

All the code is present in my GitHub repository: https://github.com/MattiaCinelli/fromRtoLatex

How to do tables in Latex

Here reported the code for a simple table in $latex \LaTeX$:

\begin{table}[h]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
\hline Rows  &amp;amp;amp; Columns 1 &amp;amp;amp;amp; Column 2} \\
\hline Row 1 &amp;amp;amp;amp; Value 1,1 &amp;amp;amp;amp; Value 2,1 \\
\hline Row 2 &amp;amp;amp;amp; Value 1,2 &amp;amp;amp;amp; Value 2,2 \\
\hline Row 3 &amp;amp;amp;amp; Value 1,3 &amp;amp;amp;amp; Value 2,3 \\
\hline Row 4 &amp;amp;amp;amp; Value 1,4 &amp;amp;amp;amp; Value 2,4 \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\caption[Short title for contains]{Description of table content}
\label{label_of_choice}
\end{center}
\end{table}

We the command \begin{tabular} we position the table within the the float environment table at which we add the position between [] (h, t, b, etc).

bar-plots using ggplot2

The package ggplot2 is one of the most powerful resource for plot making available in R.

Although, it has with quite a learning curve, that could be intimidating, it is definitely worth the effort.

In here I want to show a couple of the first bar plot I ever made with the ggplot2 package: