one fit punishment

i don't believe in capital punishment, but here's an idea for mass murderers: a strong circular wire cage about 3 meters in diameter in the center of a room into which all the relatives and friends of victims may enter 16 hours a day.

what you can do

a few years ago i gave a talk on climate change at Georgetown U. and a young student asked me what she could do for the environment. I replied:

1. it doesn't much matter what you do, individual efforts make almost no difference,
2. but probably the most impact you can have would be to kill yourself and yourself so deep that your rotting body won't emit greenhouse gasses,
3. finally, i can only tell you what i did today: biked to the bus stop, took the bus to the Metro then the subway downtown, walked a mile to the campus. that's an existential answer.

needless to say, in light of answer #2, i wasn't invited back to this Jesuit university again...

My Review of R in a Nutshell

Originally submitted at O'Reilly

R is rapidly becoming the standard for developing statistical software, and R in a Nutshell provides a quick and practical way to learn this increasingly popular open source language and environment. You'll not only learn how to program in R, but also how to find the right user-contributed R...

R in a Nutshell

a good place to start

By Lee De Cola from Reston, VA USA on 7/1/2012

 

4out of 5

Pros: Well-written, Easy to understand, Helpful examples, Accurate, Concise

Best Uses: Refreshing your skills, Novice, Learning new tricks, Teaching yourself R, Intermediate

Describe Yourself: University teacher

i'm using the book to refresh my R skills, tho i've used the program for about a decade now. i've also recommended it to my Virginia Tech students.

the examples are well structured from simple to complicated.

but sometimes the author likes to show off: introducing custom packages on p. 43 is way ahead of most readers.

QUESTION: is the code available anywhere?

(legalese)

lying brevity

what's with 500-page books that call themselves 'handbooks' and '... in a Nutshell'?