David Asboth

@davidasboth.com

3914 Followers 1195 Following

Data generalist, educator, author of The Well-Grounded Data Analyst (Manning, 2025). Co-host of the Half Stack Data Science podcast.

A scatter plot showing the average rating of books vs. the average rating of their film adaptations. Some books are labeled as the book being better than the film and vice versa.
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"
A train schedule showing stops called Manchester Piccadilly, Ashburys, Guide Bridge, Flowery Field, Newton for Hyde, Godley, Hattersley, Broadbottom, Dinting, Glossop, and Hadfield
A man with a beard and glasses standing in front of a display case that contains a giant land crab specimen
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.
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.
An image banner that says "The 500-word fiction challenge, August 15, nycmidnight.com"
A meme featuring Geordie LaForge. He rejects "how to actually do things like configure Jupyter" and points happily at "excessive amounts of linear algebra"
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 snapshot of the "ribbon" menu from MS Paint, including a Copilot option.
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"
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"
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"
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.
A diagram showing the squarest countries (Egypt with a squareness of 0.955) and the roundest (Sierra Leone, roundness 0.954)
A date picker where the hour, minute, and am/pm components are all scrolling interfaces rather than a text box or even a dropdown
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.
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
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.
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
The cover of the classic video game Rollercoaster Tycoon. The cover shows the title of the game with a red rollercoaster track looping around it.
A Windows update screen that just says "undoing changes made to your computer"
A poster for the film Troublemakers starring Bud Spencer and Terence Hill. The poster shows two cowboys walking side by side.
A cute, AI-generated image of a weasel
A disappointed Marco Rossi
A chart showing places people ordered BrewDog from. The chart shows one order placed via game console. The caption says "to the one person who recently placed their beer order via a games console: please make yourself known. We just want to talk"
A cover image for a "Become a Python expert" bundle, showing Javascript code instead of Python code
A confusing web form for entering your address, where the input labels are below the text boxes (they're traditionally above or to the side)
A picture of a Hungarian product, "bagged milk" - milk that can be bought in a bag