Fire Forty Six

More than 90% of the seafood consumed in Singapore is imported, with the remainder being supplied by fish farms like the floating kelongs off Pulau Ubin. Usually, we don’t give this much thought, given the abundant and steady supply flown, trucked and shipped in from all over the world.

But once in a while, a global pandemic happens and food supplies are disrupted. Then you start thinking about growing your own vegetables and buying locally-sourced seafood online. And that’s how we found Ah Hock Kelong’s online store on Shopee and ordered 3 kilograms of mussels.

Yes, penguins actually do have knees

Others

August 27, 2020July 13, 2022 Alvin Lee No comments

Something that the kids will love: Penguins have an oil gland near their butts, and they collect the oil with their beaks and spread it all over their feathers to make them waterproof. Ok, on second thoughts, maybe don’t tell them this fact. In case, you know…

If you don’t cut the cake into pieces and just eat the whole cake, then you only had one piece

Food

August 26, 2020June 17, 2022 Alvin Lee No comments

Right?

Picking up Python through Kaggle Learn

Learn

August 25, 2020January 22, 2024 Alvin Lee 1 comment

One unexpected benefit of joining Kaggle was the discovery of an introductory Python course on Kaggle Learn. It is free to use and consists of short tutorials and hands-on notebook exercises that highlight the key aspects of the language.

The course has a focus on data science applications and is targeted at those with some prior coding experience.

Using a shotgun approach for the Titanic competition

Learn

August 21, 2020January 22, 2024 Alvin Lee No comments

After completing Alexis Cook’s very useful Titanic Tutorial, I couldn’t help myself and spent a couple of days hacking around to try and improve my score without going through the usual data science workflow of EDA, feature engineering, model selection, hyperparameter tuning, train/test iterations.

I know it’s not the proper way of doing data science, but like I said, I just couldn’t help myself.

Getting started with the Titanic competition

Learn

August 17, 2020January 22, 2024 Alvin Lee 1 comment

The first port of call for all Kagglers is the “Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster” practice competition, where you get to use machine learning to create a model that predicts which passengers survived the Titanic shipwreck.

Joining Kaggle and taking the first step up the ladder

Learn

August 16, 2020January 22, 2024 Alvin Lee No comments

I was planning to sign-up for Kaggle further down in my data science learning journey, only after I had built up sufficient foundational knowledge and skills. However, I decided to take a quick look under the hood, and found that it was surprisingly easy to get started.

Installing Anaconda Individual Edition

Learn

August 13, 2020January 22, 2024 Alvin Lee 2 comments

One of the first tasks is to set up a programming environment on my personal laptop so that I can start coding as quickly as possible. For data science purposes, you can’t go wrong choosing the Anaconda Individual Edition.

It’s open source, free for individuals, has more than 20 million users worldwide and comes with all the key components and packages needed to get started in less than 30 minutes.

Nasi padang is our happy meal

Food

July 29, 2020July 13, 2022 Alvin Lee No comments

We discovered Butterscotch on foodpanda earlier this March when we were searching for new places to try, and since then we’ve made seven orders. Which works out to at least once a month, sometimes twice, and by now, we’ve tried almost all their dishes.

Studio Ghibli movies from 1984 to 1989

Others

July 13, 2020February 17, 2022 Alvin Lee No comments

It’s been more than a week since we started on our Studio Ghibli movie marathon and we’ve finished the five movies released in the 1980s. For each one, I’ve created a simple graphic using poster images by Studio Ghibli sourced from the internet, added the year released, director, film duration and wrote a synopsis in 5-7-5 haiku verse.