 I am absolutely thrilled to hit what I consider a milestone of 1,000 subscribers. That 1,000 of you would get enough out of the material I'm posting here on YouTube to go ahead and subscribe just warms my heart and makes me so happy. I really do believe that this channel should be able to get 100,000 subscribers. Yeah, of course I have 99,000 more subscribers to go, but this is just the beginning. We're really just getting going. I thoroughly believe that everybody can benefit from the skills that I'm talking about. Perhaps we don't need the complicated tooling of R or knowing how to use a new make, but perhaps down the road we will get into spreadsheets and thinking about how we can analyze data using relatively simple tools like that. Earlier this week I was watching another YouTube station and I saw the host made this really pretty spreadsheet in Google Sheets. They then took the data and copied it and pasted it into a web app to calculate the correlation. Part of my heart died. I was like, you can use the Corel function to do that. So clearly there's so much work that we can still do to improve data literacy, the ability to visualize data, and really to draw information out of data that we're collecting about the world around us. Learning to analyze data is not something where you can merely take a workshop and poof, you're an expert in analyzing data. It requires a lot of practice, practice, practice, practice, and not just practice, but implementation. Asking questions about the world around you and then taking those ideas in implementing them to answer the questions that are important to you. That is the goal of Riffamonus. The Riffamonus program is based on the idea that we learn best when we learn incompletely, but we see it multiple times. And each time we see that concept, we get to dig deeper into the material, learning it more deeply, and also we learn the nuances of that concept. When you watch my videos, you should notice that I refuse to do three things. The first thing I refuse to do is to give you canned data sets. I give you real data, real data from my own research, and from things that are important to me. The second thing I refuse to do is to spoon-feed you one command per episode. This is not tutorials where I'm going to teach you how to use the geomalign function, and that's all you're going to learn about in this episode. Sure, we might hit, you know, a function really hard in that episode, but I'm going to show you that function in the context of a bunch of other functions to see how these things all tie together. Again, going back to that idea of the Riffamonus program, where we want to see things incompletely, but see it multiple times to build our proficiency. The third thing that I refuse to do is to show you perfectly edited code the first time. I show you raw code. I show you the errors as they come up. By now, you know that I am very prone to typos. Well, that's the way I program, and you know what? If you do too, that's perfectly fine. What's important is at the end, we get the right answer. Why do I call this the Riffamonus channel? Well, the idea of Riff comes from the idea of in music where there's a theme that is repeated throughout music. Have you watched the Hamilton musical? Hopefully, you have by now. It took me a few years to see it, but it is crystal clear that there are themes in that musical that are repeated over the course of the story. And each time it's repeated, it changes in meaning. Think about the counting series of one through 10 that that that that takes on many, many different flavors and messages over the course of the musical. The same is true with coding, right? That there is a chunk or a idiom that I use throughout analyses. And perhaps it changes a little bit what variables we use or how we use it or how we combine it with different things. But we take that code chunk and we riff on that over the course of a project. Well, that's also how we learn best. That's how I learned to program. And that I had a block of code to build a plot that was in a file. And every time I wanted to build a new figure, I would copy and paste that code chunk and modify it to do what I needed it to do. Every time I modified it, I learned something new about programming and about the R syntax to the point where I no longer need that R code, but I am copying and pasting other code to allow me to develop those ideas and the complexity of the analysis that I need to move forward. And by making my code reproducible, others are now able to also take my code and modify it for their own uses. If that's how we learn best, then why isn't that how we teach? Well, within this Riffamonus channel, you'll notice that is exactly how I teach. I have something here that will change you and will change the world. The ability to analyze data is critical to analyzing and solving many of the problems that face us today. Things from an ongoing pandemic, climate change, and anything else you can imagine. Thank you for watching and being part of the first thousand subscribers. I hope if you haven't already subscribed that you do go ahead and subscribe and that you're part of the next thousand, the next 10,000, and hopefully 100,000 subscribers in the future.