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This project is exactly the kind of thing most of my projects seem to turn into*, though much more competently implemented.

It's an automation bot for Tinder. It builds an average face out of a set of liked/disliked faces, then makes choices about newly provided Tinder profiles based on eigenfaces made using the average face. After that point, it's a chatbot: it carries on conversations with the users behind matching profiles, continuing the conversation if it gets positive responses.

But does it work? That is, does it accomplish the same goal as having a human operator? According to its creator:
What do girls think of the bot? I've gone on at least 10 dates with the help of the bot and I've shown my partners the bot in its entirety. One date literally didn't believe me and thought I was pulling her leg. Another person thought it was really cool and wanted the full tour. All were in agreement that it is not creepy, though some felt it was borderline. Kind of nice considering it's not something you'd come across everyday.
The obvious question here is how well it works for other people.

* I'm not trying to automate dating, but I am trying to automate tedious processes among systems with emergent properties.

A multitude of R plot examples

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You don't have to do it all by hand anymore. Note: I don't work with this kind of data.

Here's what happens more often than it should when I sit down to make some figures:

  1. I start with R and remember seeing an example similar to what I'm trying to make
  2. Searching for the example leads me back to the helpful but limited ggplot2 docs or a Stackoverflow question
  3. I piece together what I need from what I've found, knowing all the while that a better example was out there somewhere

This kind of thing drives me crazy, so here's a short list of places where decent R graph examples can be found. Hopefully these sites help others find what they need. One caveat: just because R can spit out a particular figure doesn't mean that figure is appropriate or represents the data well. Your mileage may vary, etc.

  • R Graph Catalog. Intended to complement a guidebook, this set of examples covers a wide variety of presentations and audiences. It filters graph types based on whether they're recommended or not (but hey, you can still use the examples). All code is included right on the site and on Github.
  • Quick-R Graphs. This site covers the basics and includes some useful figures like a plotting symbol chart.  
  • Cookbook for R Graphs. Another book accompaniment.
  • Plotly R Library. Here's where things start to get exotic. Plotly isn't R specific but supposedly plays nice with ggplot2. It could be worth using for interactive charts.
  • Gvis cookbook. A ggplot2 alternative. It also allows for interactive graphs.
  • Wikibooks R Programming Graphics. A few more examples, including some in 3D (those should probably be avoided, honestly).
  • R-bloggers. Not a list of examples as much as a source for examples, especially those of the bleeding-edge kind.

If you're getting tired of finding example graphs, there's also GrapheR, a GUI for producing R graphics.

Edit: wanted to add a postscript about some hacky ways to make ggplot2 display patterns.

Edit 2: I found one more resource in the ZevRoss ggplot2 cheatsheet. It's primary a guide to themes in plots, one of the more fiddly aspects of plotting in R.

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The Wikipedia-based poetry project is working differently now. I've taught it to combine Markov chain results with raw bits of related WP pages. As a result, I'm getting farther away from a purely generative model and closer to one reflecting human writing. It still has some distance to cover. Here's a recent example:
he was
arrested at his home
in bloomington, minnesota. the
eastern half
he once entertained the possibility that any
could pass 32nd state on may 11, 1858, created from the
braddock takes
maggie with him after that moved to the term article is also used loosely by some
to include the determiner some. use of the prize
is not used at
present. the hurricanes' aim to
she also included the policy
of isolationism; the
historian manfred the worst wreck in the prussian minister of
war also used loosely
by
some to include the determiner
It's always going to sound like an encycopedia, but eventually it will sound like a self-aware encyclopedia wracked with dread.
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Following a comment from Scott on the last entry here, I looked into making a Wikipedia-based poetry generator. Scraping random WP pages isn't too difficult but the wikipedia Python library makes this project almost trivial. There's another library called Pywikibot - I may have to try that one next.

In the meantime, I have a script for producing short poems from a set of Wikipedia entries. It's only as good as the entries it's retrieved so far. I'd like to turn this into more of a machine learning project such that acceptable output can be distinguished from messy nonsense, but for now it's just a text corpus and a set of Markov chains.

Written language has the benefit of looking like nonsense to the human eye when we can't make sense of it, unlike, say, a protein sequence. It would be nice to leverage that advantage.

In the meantime, this is what I get:

Callinicos, 1989). His daughter Princess Catherine
Clair Township - west Israel Township,
In November 
Interment in Blue
Smith died suddenly
Richard Powell Sharkey, Helen Derr's 
In January 2010, Obadeyi went
They have also been recorded
3 was purely due to 
He even
As soon as look at you,
The reservoir was the second