Entertaining thing-explaining with Randall Munroe

anne_milley — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 18:26:46 GMT

Popular xkcd comic creator and author, Randall Munroe, delivered a fantastic closing plenary, Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, at JMP Discovery Summit last month. Based on his very popular second book, Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, it was hugely entertaining, and we are sharing it as this month’s episode of our web series Analytically Speaking.

Because Randall’s talk was followed by the book signing for his newest book, many didn’t submit feedback on his talk in the JMP Discovery Summit app (probably so they could quickly get in line for the book). I took the comments submitted and used the new Text Explorer platform in JMP 13 to show you the very positive terms from the comments and how the powerful regex handles all those enthusiastic exclamation points!!!!

Below left, you see the most popular terms and phrases listed. And at right, you can see the regular expression editor with default tokenizing options highlighted in different colors under the Word Separator List. These settings can be further customized, but for this simple example, we see that Randall Munroe (using simple words) evoked very positive and enthusiastic comments. For more on text exploration, check out these previous posts.

The "Bang!!! cleaner" nicely handles a sequence of exclamation points for this text exploration.

During the book signing, Randall asked what JMP users do at their organizations. Upon hearing a few answers about some of the “complicated stuff“ JMP users do, he actually flipped to a place in his book where he “explained” what they did!

Many attendees were looking forward to Randall's talk and book signing, and had planned ahead by bringing copies of his other books to be autographed.

At the close of his talk, I tweeted, “Awesome keynote by Randall Munroe @ #jmpDiscoverySummit. His curiosity is contagious.” We hope you will tune in Oct. 12 for some entertaining thing-explaining! Or, you can watch the archive along with other episodes of Analytically Speaking.

Michelle Homes wrote: Looking forward to the webcast on t...

WP_Comment — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 09:13:28 GMT

Michelle Homes wrote:

Looking forward to the webcast on the 12th!

Anne Milley wrote: Thanks for commenting, Michelle--be pr...

anne_milley — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 09:13:31 GMT

Anne Milley wrote:

Thanks for commenting, Michelle--be prepared to laugh!

article Entertaining thing-explaining with Randall Munroe in JMP Blog

Entertaining thing-explaining with Randall Munroe

Michelle Homes wrote: Looking forward to the webcast on t...

Anne Milley wrote: Thanks for commenting, Michelle--be pr...