David Asboth
LightNews LightNews
davidasboth.com
David Asboth
@davidasboth.com
3.8K followers 1.1K following 1K posts
Data generalist, educator, author of The Well-Grounded Data Analyst (Manning, 2025). Co-host of the Half Stack Data Science podcast.
Posts Replies Media Videos
davidasboth.com
I think Randall Munroe made this just for you!
A chart showing "number of cuts" versus "number of measurements" with phrases like "serial killer", "surveyor", "really bad carpenter", "good carpenter", "good carpenter" and "surgeon" occupying different points. The chart is titled "Measure Twice, Cut Once - Carpentry proverb"
October 5, 2025 at 5:27 PM
davidasboth.com
Only in the UK could you have stops with these names.
A train schedule showing stops called Manchester Piccadilly, Ashburys, Guide Bridge, Flowery Field, Newton for Hyde, Godley, Hattersley, Broadbottom, Dinting, Glossop, and Hadfield
September 19, 2025 at 7:10 PM
davidasboth.com
I'm at PyCon UK today in Manchester!

I'll be speaking later about dynamic code generation and execution in Python.

Here is a crab I found on the way to the venue. 🦀

Anyone I know attending?

#databs #datasky
A man with a beard and glasses standing in front of a display case that contains a giant land crab specimen
September 19, 2025 at 9:30 AM
davidasboth.com
I don't normally do book reviews on social media but I really enjoyed Why Can't I Just Enjoy Things? by @pierrenovellie.bsky.social. A personal, thoughtful, well-researched, and often hilarious perspective on autism. I learned a lot from it and you will too! #booksky
A book cover of Why Can't I Just Enjoy Things by Pierre Novellie. A man with brown hair and a beard is holding a cupcake with a face and a single candle.
September 15, 2025 at 12:18 PM
davidasboth.com
Obligatory: xkcd.com/481/
xkcd webcomic that goes as follows [Black Hat approaches Danish typing at a computer.] Black Hat: What are you writing? Danish: Virus. Black Hat: What's it do? Danish: When someone tries to post a YouTube comment, it first reads it aloud back to them. Soon, everywhere: [Cueball is commenting on YouTube with a laptop.] type type type [Youtube comment is read back.] Cueball: ...I'm a moron. [Cueball leaves desk and partially closes his laptop.] [Cueball is seen sitting on steps, depressed.] [Cueball puts his head in his hands.] Cueball: I... I didn't know.
August 8, 2025 at 3:16 PM
davidasboth.com
I like writing and want to do more so I'll be taking a little writing challenge later this year.

Join me in the @nycmidnight.bsky.social 500-word Fiction Challenge on August 15th!

Learn more at nycmidnight.com/500
An image banner that says "The 500-word fiction challenge, August 15, nycmidnight.com"
June 21, 2025 at 5:18 PM
davidasboth.com
Data science courses be like

#databs #datasky
A meme featuring Geordie LaForge. He rejects "how to actually do things like configure Jupyter" and points happily at "excessive amounts of linear algebra"
June 16, 2025 at 6:19 PM
davidasboth.com
Hats off to anyone attempting Viz Buzz, it's really tricky to recreate a plot in just 40 minutes! Especially if you waste lots of minutes on basic data cleaning...

Here's my version and the original.

I popped the whole thing on YouTube as well: www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8sE...

#databs #datasky
A line chart showing temperature over time, labelled "Dayton's Weather in 2014". It is an attempt to recreate an existing data visualization in 40 minutes for the Viz Buzz competition A line chart showing temperature over time, labelled "Dayton's Weather in 2014". It is the original data visualization that I attempted to recreate in 40 minutes for the Viz Buzz competition
June 15, 2025 at 3:22 PM
davidasboth.com
It's over everyone. Copilot has come to MS Paint.
A snapshot of the "ribbon" menu from MS Paint, including a Copilot option.
May 1, 2025 at 11:13 AM
davidasboth.com
"Organisations like Freelance".

Never change, LinkedIn.
A LinkedIn message that says "Hi David, Just wanted to connect as your profile is very interesting and I tend to work with organisations like Freelance, specifically people in your position. Look forward to connecting"
April 28, 2025 at 1:36 PM
davidasboth.com
Very pleased to announce my new book, coming out in 1912!

#dataBS #datasky
An image of a spoof O'Reilly book cover titled "Surviving the Titanic: The only dataset you'll ever need" by D. Asboth. There's a picture of a parakeet. The top text says "From the real-world data series"
April 1, 2025 at 11:10 AM
davidasboth.com
On the one hand, I hate the fact that Meta has (probably) trained its models on my work. They'll benefit from that, I won't. I'm privileged that I can withstand this. The whole thing is a mess.

On the other hand... look, my work's been pirated! Weird that it's an older early access version.
A screenshot of The Atlantic's search where authors can search whether their work is available in LibGen, and has therefore probably been used to train Meta's AI models. The screenshot shows the search term "david asboth" returns one book: "solve any data analysis problem MEAP v08"
March 20, 2025 at 3:53 PM
davidasboth.com
Since it's #NeurodiversityCelebrationWeek, good morning to everyone except Cixin Liu for writing this in Death's End.

So much wrong with how autism is portrayed here I don't even know where to start.
An extract from the novel Death's End by Cixin Liu: The head of the Black Hole Project was 高 Way. Cao Bin had worked with him for a few years. He could not hide his complex feelings about the man as he described him to Cheng Xin. "The man suffered from severe autism—no, I'm not talking about some kind of lonely genius choosing to isolate himself, but a real mental condition. He was extremely closed off and had trouble communicating with anyone, and he had never even touched a woman. His extraordinary professional success would only be possible in this age, but despite his accomplishments, most of his supervisors and colleagues thought of him as merely a high-powered intelligence battery. He was tortured by his illness and tried to change himself, and in this, he was different from other geniuses. "Starting from, oh, I think the eighth year of the Broadcast Era, he dedicated himself to the theoretical study of lowering the speed of light. Over time, I think he began to develop a strange identification between the speed of light and his own personality—if he could change the speed of light, then it was the same as changing himself.
March 18, 2025 at 12:04 PM
davidasboth.com
TIL Sierra Leone is the roundest country 🇸🇱 (and Egypt is the squarest one 🇪🇬).

I don't know how to explain that this is exactly the kind of data project I *love*.

bigthink.com/strange-maps...
A diagram showing the squarest countries (Egypt with a squareness of 0.955) and the roundest (Sierra Leone, roundness 0.954)
March 14, 2025 at 10:44 AM
davidasboth.com
I like Squadcast, it's a perfectly good tool for recording our podcast, but it has the worst date picker I've ever seen. It annoys me whenever I have to use it.
A date picker where the hour, minute, and am/pm components are all scrolling interfaces rather than a text box or even a dropdown
March 2, 2025 at 3:29 PM
davidasboth.com
Maybe I'm late to the party, but did we really need to add AI to Notepad? Really??
A screenshot of Notepad, containing the text "Hello, World!". There is a dropdown visible with the following options: rewrite, make shorter, make longer, change tone, and change format. These are AI features within the Notepad application.
February 24, 2025 at 1:44 PM
davidasboth.com
Should you write a technical book?

(Trying this again, hopefully with sound this time if the Bluesky gremlins will allow it)

#dataBS #datasky
February 16, 2025 at 7:58 PM
davidasboth.com
Another walking video with some answers to the question: should you write a technical book?

#databs #datasky
February 16, 2025 at 3:08 PM
davidasboth.com
Recorded another video on my walk earlier. Might do more of these! I've been thinking about what my niche might be.

#dataBS #datasky
February 6, 2025 at 12:44 PM
davidasboth.com
TIL: did you know Python's enumerate method takes another argument, "start"?
Code to print strings from a Python list using `enumerate`, starting at 1. The entire code is: engines = ["Thomas", "Edward", "Henry", "Gordon"] for idx, engine in enumerate(engines, start=1): print(f"{idx}: {engine}") And the output is: 1: Thomas 2: Edward 3: Henry 4: Gordon
February 5, 2025 at 7:11 PM
davidasboth.com
2/ The bot gets the data using SPARQL (a query language you can use to query Wikidata) and assumes that in any football match, there's exactly one home team and one away team.

Here's a screenshot of this game as it's stored on Wikidata.
A screenshot of data from Wikidata, showing that both the Hungary men's national football team and the San Marino men's national football team were both the home and away teams in a football match. This has caused data errors.
January 29, 2025 at 9:51 AM
davidasboth.com
Obligatory:

(xkcd.com/481/)
January 27, 2025 at 5:10 PM
davidasboth.com
I'm out walking and had some thoughts about data and fun stuff and mental health that I wanted to share.

#dataBS
January 22, 2025 at 1:23 PM
davidasboth.com
Seriously, THIS is the UI to do that?!?
A row of data from Goodreads. It shows the name of the book (in this case Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) with the option to edit the "Date read", but the UI controls make you select year, month, and day as separate dropdowns with no defaults
December 31, 2024 at 4:06 PM
davidasboth.com
The floral LEGO sets are awesome, I got my wife this one a few years back!
December 27, 2024 at 8:01 AM