The Guardian newspaper has for a few years been running a data blog and has built up a massive repository of (often) well-curated datasets on a huge number of topics. They even have an indexed list of all data sets they've put together or reused in their articles.

It's a great repository of interesting data for exploratory analysis, and there's a low barrier to entry in terms of getting the data into a useful form. Here's an example using UK election polling data collected over the last thirty years.

In the R programming language, the random number generator (RNG) is seeded each session using the current time and process ID. Via the magic of the popular Mersenne Twister PRNG, the values stored in .Random.seed are used sequentially each time "randomness" is invoked in a function. This means, of course, that the same function run in different R sessions can produce varying results, and in the case of modelling a system sensitive to initial conditions the observed differences could be huge.

As a LaTeX fan I'm used to using Beamer for presentations, but the built-in themes are definitely starting to show their age --- and writing a custom .sty file looks like a nightmare --- so for a while I've been looking at trying out an HTML5 framework.