R Quotes/Wisdom

This page is the complete output of the fortunes package, in a convenient hypertext format :)

library(fortunes)
dat <- read.fortunes()
for (i in seq_len(nrow(dat))) print(fortune(i))

## 
## Okay, let's stand up and be counted: who has been writing diamond graph code?
## Mine's 60 lines.
##    -- Barry Rowlingson (in a discussion about the patent for diamond graphs)
##       R-help (August 2003)
## 
## 
## Bug, undocumented behaviour, feature? I don't know. It all seems to work in
## 1.6.0, so everyone should downgrade now... :)
##    -- Barry Rowlingson
##       R-help (July 2003)
## 
## 
## I'm always thrilled when people discover what lexical scoping really means.
##    -- Robert Gentleman
##       Statistical Computing 2003, Reisensburg (June 2003)
## 
## 
## My institution has a particularly diabolical policy on intellectual property,
## especially on software.
##    -- Ross Ihaka
##       R-help (August 2003)
## 
## 
## If you imagine that this pen is Trellis, then Lattice is not this pen.
##    -- Paul Murrell (on the difference of Lattice (which eventually was called
##       grid) and Trellis)
##       DSC 2001, Wien (March 2001)
## 
## 
## It is good to look around at what is available, but one shouldn't miss what is
## under one's nose either.
##    -- Robert Gentleman
##       bioconductor (September 2003)
## 
## 
## What we have is nice, but we need something very different.
##    -- Robert Gentleman
##       Statistical Computing 2003, Reisensburg (June 2003)
## 
## 
## Readable, obvious, maintainable, 'portable' for some value of 'portable'...
##    -- Barry Rowlingson (suggesting some function)
##       R-help (September 2003)
## 
## 
## 'They' did write documentation that told you that Perl was needed, but 'they'
## can't read it for you.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley
##       R-help (February 2001)
## 
## 
## Overall, SAS is about 11 years behind R and S-Plus in statistical capabilities
## (last year it was about 10 years behind) in my estimation.
##    -- Frank Harrell (SAS User, 1969-1991)
##       R-help (September 2003)
## 
## 
## I want a budget.
##    -- Peter Dalgaard (in a talk about Tcl/Tk, meaning to say 'I want a button
##       widget')
##       gR 2003, Aalborg (September 2003)
## 
## 
## You can be maximally lazy, but still be efficient.
##    -- Kevin Murphy (describing the implementation of an algorithm)
##       gR 2003, Aalborg (September 2003)
## 
## 
## Andrew Thomas: ...and if something goes wrong here it is probably not WinBUGS
## since that has been running for more than 10 years...
## Peter Green (from the back): ... and it still hasn't converged!
##    -- Andrew Thomas and Peter Green (during the talk about 'BRugs')
##       gR 2003, Aalborg (September 2003)
## 
## 
## This is all documented in TFM. Those who WTFM don't want to have to WTFM again
## on the mailing list. RTFM.
##    -- Barry Rowlingson
##       R-help (October 2003)
## 
## 
## It really is hard to anticipate just how silly users can be.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley
##       R-devel (October 2003)
## 
## 
## So apparently you wish to report as a bug the fact that R 1.8.0 is different
## from R 1.4.0.
##    -- Douglas Bates
##       R-devel (October 2003)
## 
## 
## I plan to fix this - the report is just in case I forget or get hit by a bus.
##    -- Ross Ihaka (reporting a bug in persp)
##       R-help (October 2003)
## 
## 
## Thomas W. Blackwell: I just discovered to my surprise that I cannot define a
## function with an argument named 'break' or 'while'!
## Brian D. Ripley: No, they are reserved names. [...] Most programming languages
## have reserved words, so I am surprised you are surprised.
##    -- Thomas W. Blackwell and Brian D. Ripley
##       R-help (November 2003)
## 
## 
## R has changed quite a lot recently, and older preconceptions do need to be
## checked against current information.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley
##       R-help (November 2003)
## 
## 
## But a difference of a few minutes means that this is well under 20% of the
## total time unless your statistical analysis is very much speedier than mine.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley
##       R-devel (November 2003)
## 
## 
## I seem to recall that we were targetting 512k Macintoshes. In our dreams we
## might have seen 16Mb Sun.
##    -- Ross Ihaka (in reply to the question whether R&R thought when they
##       started out that they would see R using 16G memory on a dual Opteron
##       computer)
##       R-help (November 2003)
## 
## 
## I quit using SAS in 1991 because my productivity jumped at least 20% within one
## month of using S-Plus.
##    -- Frank Harrell
##       R-help (November 2003)
## 
## 
## When a Certain Guru rips strips off people (God knows he's done it to me often
## enough) on this list, there's a damned good reason for it.
##    -- Rolf Turner (in a discussion about whether a friendly mailing list with
##       more 'customer service' attitude than R-help was needed)
##       R-help (December 2003)
## 
## 
## Ah, so that's why my report of a bug in the RCheapViagra package didn't get
## through....
##    -- Barry Rowlingson (after Peter Dalgaard announced a new spam filter for
##       R-bugs)
##       R-devel (January 2004)
## 
## 
## Henrik Bengtsson: Is there a way to turn off the (annoying) beep that occurs
## when one calls the locator() command and clicks the mouse? [...]
## Brian D. Ripley: It's a feature of the windows() device. Windows is fond of
## beeping, and I just mute the sound.
##    -- Henrik Bengtsson and Brian D. Ripley
##       R-help (July 2001)
## 
## 
## Brian D. Ripley: Add to package utils in R-devel, after correction. I was
## surprised you had fallen into the 1:0 trap.
## Patrick Burns: I'm surprised too -- good catch.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley and Patrick Burns (after adding Patrick Burns' head() to
##       the utils package)
##       R-devel (January 2004)
## 
## 
## As to whether you can do a Lilliefors test for several groups, that depends
## entirely on your ability to understand what the underlying question would be
## (see Adams D 1979).
##    -- Knut M. Wittkowski
##       R-help (February 2004)
## 
## 
## Jim Gustafsson: I would like to put my SAS-code into R. Could I do that, if
## yes, how?
## Frank Harrell: Just reverse the procedure you use when you put R code into SAS.
## ;)
##    -- Jim Gustafsson and Frank Harrell
##       R-help (February 2004)
## 
## 
## Is this English or American (you know, the language referred to in the USA as
## 'English')? [...] As an English English speaker, my sense and my employer's
## dictionary both suggest doubling here.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (in a discussion whether it is 'subsetable' or
##       'subsettable')
##       R-devel (February 2004)
## 
## 
## As Brian says, there's nothing in the design that lets you do this, but then
## since you have the source there's nothing on the planet to stop you doing this.
## The design is not a law :)
##    -- Barry Rowlingson (answering the question whether the mouse position can
##       be determined without any click)
##       R-help (February 2004)
## 
## 
## Barry Rowlingson: Your grid above has 8*6 = 42 points.
## (That was a subtle Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy reference there, honest, and
## not a stupid dumb multiplication mistake on my part after working four 18-hour
## days on the trot...)
## Peter Dalgaard: [...] Don't panic, just throw yourself at the ground and miss.
##    -- Barry Rowlingson and Peter Dalgaard
##       R-help (March 2004)
## 
## 
## I have mentioned several times on this list that I'm in the process of
## developing a new and wonderful implementation of lme and I would prefer to
## continue working on that rather than modifying old-style code.
##    -- Douglas Bates
##       R-help (March 2004)
## 
## 
## Ivo Welch: Thanks. I will put in a suggestion that the docs refer to q() in
## 'see also' for 'stop'.
## Brian D. Ripley: I don't think anyone else is confusing 'exit' with 'stop',
## though. I hope you don't when driving ....
##    -- Ivo Welch and Brian D. Ripley
##       R-help (March 2004)
## 
## 
## Before we get too carried away with this thread could you all please consider
## how the sd function calculates its result? [...] I'll tell you, it takes the
## square root of the variance. How is the variance calculated for a numeric
## vector? First you calculate the mean *using floating point arithmetic* in which
## it is not necessarily true that N * k / N == k [...] Most of those tests [for
## numerical accuracy] end in a check using the all.equal function which checks if
## the relative difference is less than a threshold. That's about the best that
## you can do with floating point arithmetic.
## Here endeth the sermon.
##    -- Douglas Bates (after a discussion why sd(rep(0.001, 15)) is not
##       necessarily exactly 0)
##       R-help (March 2004)
## 
## 
## The keyboard is the standard Italian layout, which is missing the ~ (tilde)
## key. [...] Can anyone advice how to produce the ~ symbol, short of a copy/paste
## from MS Word?
##    -- Federico Calboli
##       R-help (March 2004)
## 
## 
## I'd like to prefix all these solutions with 'Here's how to do it, but don't
## actually do it you crazy fool'. It's on a par with redefining pi, or redefining
## '+'. And then redefining '<-'. These techniques have their proper place, and
## that would be in the currently non-existent obfuscated R contest.
## No, the R-ish (iRish?) way is to index vectors from 1. That's what the R gods
## intended!
##    -- Barry Rowlingson (in a discussion how vectors in R could be indexed
##       starting from 0)
##       R-help (March 2004)
## 
## 
## I think that it's generally a good idea not to resist the most natural way of
## programming in R.
##    -- John Fox
##       R-help (March 2004)
## 
## 
## For almost 40 years SAS has been the primary tool for statisticians worldwide
## and its easy-to-learn syntax, unsurpassed graphical system, powerful macro
## language and recent graphical user interfaces have made SAS the number one
## statistical software choice for both beginners and advanced users.
##    -- Rolf Poalis, Biostatistics Denmark (announcement of the SAS to R parser
##       sas2R)
##       R-help (April 1, 2004)
## 
## 
## Sorting is a wonderful topic! Especially because you can discuss different
## fundamental ideas like brute force, divide and conquer, and questions of
## efficiency, tradeoffs of space and time, etc.
##    -- Peter Wolf
##       R-help (April 2004)
## 
## 
## Douglas Bates: If you really want to be cautious you could use an octal
## representation like sep="\\007" to get a character that is very unlikely to
## occur in a factor level.
## Ed L. Cashin: I definitely want to be cautious. Instead of the bell character I
## think I'll use the field separator character, "\\034", just because this is the
## first time I've been able to use it for it's intended purpose! ;)
## Douglas Bates: Yes, but with "\\034" you don't get to make obscure James Bond
## references :-)
##    -- Douglas Bates and Ed L. Cashin
##       R-help (April 2004)
## 
## 
## Bret Collier: I hope this is not a uniformed question, but I am a little lost.
## Peter Dalgaard: Don't worry, they all look alike... ;-)
##    -- Bret Collier and Peter Dalgaard
##       R-help (April 2004)
## 
## 
## I was actually reading it with some curiosity as to how they managed to find 5
## locations that were close to everyone on R-help...
##    -- Peter Dalgaard (after XL Solutions announced courses 'R/Splus Programming
##       Techniques, @ 5 locations near you!')
##       R-help (April 2004)
## 
## 
## My preference goes with the numbering scheme attributed to a tribe on some
## island in the Pacific which consists of a 'factor' with four levels: 'one',
## 'two', 'three', and 'lots'. Hence, I'd go with 'lots of R users'.
##    -- Dirk Eddelbuettel (in a discussion about trying to estimate the number of
##       R users)
##       R-help (April 2004)
## 
## 
## The Huli of Papua New Guinea use '15' to mean a very large number and '15 times
## 15 samting (something)' to mean something close to infinity.
##    -- David Whiting (in a discussion about trying to estimate the number of R
##       users)
##       R-help (April 2004)
## 
## 
## It seems to me against the spirit of Open Source software to attempt to monitor
## distribution. We could ask R to 'call home' on first use (in the way e.g. pine
## does) but I suspect many users would find that objectionable.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (in a discussion about trying to estimate the number of R
##       users)
##       R-help (April 2004)
## 
## 
## Maybe you should contact Microsoft, and get them to modify their tools so they
## work on the R sources?
##    -- Duncan Murdoch (answering the question if there is a way compiling the R
##       sources using VisualC++)
##       R-help (April 2004)
## 
## 
## Seldom are prizes, credit, and gratitude given, else Brian would be drowning in
## them.
##    -- Anthony Rossini (about the merits of implementing software)
##       R-help (May 2004)
## 
## 
## Release 1.0.0
## (silence)
## Wow! Thank you! [...] If I am allowed to ask just one question today: How do
## you fit 48 hours of coding in an ordinary day? Any hints will be appreciated
## ... :-)
##    -- Detlef Steuer (on 2000-02-29)
##       R-help (February 2000)
## 
## 
## If you give people a linear model function you give them something dangerous.
##    -- John Fox
##       useR! 2004, Vienna (May 2004)
## 
## 
## To paraphrase provocatively, 'machine learning is statistics minus any checking
## of models and assumptions'.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (about the difference between machine learning and
##       statistics)
##       useR! 2004, Vienna (May 2004)
## 
## 
## The documentation level of R is already much higher than average for open
## source software and even than some commercial packages (esp. SPSS is notorious
## for its attitude of "You want to do one of these things. If you don't
## understand what the output means, click help and we'll pop up five lines of
## mumbo-jumbo that you're not going to understand either.")
##    -- Peter Dalgaard
##       R-help (April 2002)
## 
## 
## Can one be a good data analyst without being a half-good programmer? The short
## answer to that is, 'No.' The long answer to that is, 'No.'
##    -- Frank Harrell
##       1999 S-PLUS User Conference, New Orleans (October 1999)
## 
## 
## For the S system, which has forever altered the way people analyze, visualize,
## and manipulate data .... S is an elegant, widely accepted, and enduring
## software system, with conceptual integrity, thanks to the insight, taste, and
## effort of John Chambers.
##    -- Association for Computing Machinery
##       ACM/Software System Award citation (1998)
## 
## 
## Some of us feel that type III sum of squares and so-called ls-means are
## statistical nonsense which should have been left in SAS.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley
##       s-news (May 1999)
## 
## 
## I'm really curious to know why the "two types" of sum of squares are called
## "Type I" and "Type III"! This is a very common misconception, particularly
## among SAS users who have been fed this nonsense quite often for all their
## professional lives. Fortunately the reality is much simpler. There is, by any
## sensible reckoning, only ONE type of sum of squares, and it always represents
## an improvement sum of squares of the outer (or alternative) model over the
## inner (or null hypothesis) model. What the SAS highly dubious classification of
## sums of squares does is to encourage users to concentrate on the null
## hypothesis model and to forget about the alternative. This is always a very bad
## idea and not surprisingly it can lead to nonsensical tests, as in the test it
## provides for main effects "even in the presence of interactions", something
## which beggars definition, let alone belief.
##    -- Bill Venables
##       R-help (November 2000)
## 
## 
## I was profoundly disappointed when I saw that S-PLUS 4.5 now provides "Type
## III" sums of squares as a routine option for the summary method for aov
## objects. I note that it is not yet available for multistratum models, although
## this has all the hallmarks of an oversight (that is, a bug) rather than common
## sense seeing the light of day. When the decision was being taken of whether to
## include this feature, "because the FDA requires it" a few of my colleagues and
## I were consulted and our reply was unhesitatingly a clear and unequivocal "No",
## but it seems the FDA and SAS speak louder and we were clearly outvoted.
##    -- Bill Venables
##       'Exegeses on Linear Models' paper (May 2000)
## 
## 
## SAS seems to be to statistical computing what Microsoft is to personal
## computing.
##    -- Bill Venables
##       'Exegeses on Linear Models' paper (May 2000)
## 
## 
## Zhu Wang: I am trying to create a library which uses some Fortran source files
## [...]
## Douglas Bates: Someone named Martin Maechler will shortly be sending you email
## regarding the distinction between 'library' and 'package' :-)
##    -- Zhu Wang and Douglas Bates
##       R-help (May 2004)
## 
## 
## Let's not kid ourselves: the most widely used piece of software for statistics
## is Excel.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley ('Statistical Methods Need Software: A View of
##       Statistical Computing')
##       Opening lecture RSS 2002, Plymouth (September 2002)
## 
## 
## John Miller: How do I prevent google search to post my questions asked here??
## Martin Maechler: you don't: R-help is famous and celebrity can't be gotten rid
## off ;-)
##    -- John Miller and Martin Maechler
##       R-help (June 2004)
## 
## 
## I use R. My company benefits from it. My clients benefit from it.
## ...and I sleep just fine (when I do sleep)... :-)
##    -- Marc Schwartz, Medanalytics (about the 'costs' of free software)
##       R-help (June 2004)
## 
## 
## Please bear with a poor newbee, who might be doing everything backwards (I was
## brought up in pure math).
##    -- Thomas Poulsen
##       R-help (May 2004)
## 
## 
## 1st mail: One of the reasons that SAM is popular, is that it is popular (i.e.
## since everyone has heard of it, it makes reviewers happy). So, it would be nice
## to be able to point to publications in good journals so that reviewers will be
## comfortable. (I personally, am quite comfortable with SAM).
## 2nd mail: Oops, must have been a Freudian slip. Actually, I am not perfectly
## comfortable with SAM. But I am quite comfortable with limma.
##    -- Naomi Altman (answering the question whether anyone had published data
##       using limma for microarray analysis)
##       bioconductor (June 2004)
## 
## 
## However, if you want to do this at all efficiently for a data frame, start with
## my solution not Uwe's [...]
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (in a second reply to a question related to data frame
##       manipulations)
##       R-help (June 2004)
## 
## 
## /* some real insanity to keep Duncan sane */
##    -- Luke Tierney
##       in src/main/context.c (June 2001)
## 
## 
## Roger D. Peng: I don't think anyone actually believes that R is designed to
## make *everyone* happy. For me, R does about 99% of the things I need to do, but
## sadly, when I need to order a pizza, I still have to pick up the telephone.
## Douglas Bates: There are several chains of pizzerias in the U.S. that provide
## for Internet-based ordering (e.g. www.papajohnsonline.com) so, with the
## Internet modules in R, it's only a matter of time before you will have a
## pizza-ordering function available.
## Brian D. Ripley: Indeed, the GraphApp toolkit (used for the RGui interface
## under R for Windows, but Guido forgot to include it) provides one (for use in
## Sydney, Australia, we presume as that is where the GraphApp author hails from).
## Alternatively, a Padovian has no need of ordering pizzas with both home and
## neighbourhood restaurants ....
##    -- Roger D. Peng, Douglas Bates, and Brian D. Ripley
##       R-help (June 2004)
## 
## 
## Uwe Ligges: Please stop sending unsensible bug reports! Those have to be
## handled manually in the bug repository!
## Barry Rowlingson: Really? They seem to be being handled automatically and
## frighteningly well by the Uwe-bot at the moment. Congratulations, you've passed
## the Turing Test.
##    -- Uwe Ligges and Barry Rowlingson (after several nonsensical mails to
##       R-bugs)
##       R-devel (July 2004)
## 
## 
## Soon, they'll be speaking R on the subway.
##    -- Michael Rennie (giving 'Kudos to the R support team')
##       R-help (July 2004)
## 
## 
## Ted Harding: But you can also do these with 'any' and 'all', e.g. any(v==TRUE).
## Thomas Lumley: or any( (v==TRUE)==TRUE), or any( ((v==TRUE)==TRUE)==TRUE)...
## Or, perhaps, any(v). Lewis Carroll wrote a nice piece on this theme.
##    -- Ted Harding and Thomas Lumley (about implementing an 'or' of a logical
##       vector)
##       R-help (August 2004)
## 
## 
## Benjamin Lloyd-Hughes: Has anyone had any joy getting the rgdal package to
## compile under windows?
## Roger Bivand: The closest anyone has got so far is Hisaji Ono, who used MSYS
## (http://www.mingw.org/) to build PROJ.4 and GDAL (GDAL depends on PROJ.4,
## PROJ.4 needs a PATH to metadata files for projection and transformation), and
## then hand-pasted the paths to the GDAL headers and library into src/Makevars,
## running Rcmd INSTALL rgdal at the Windows command prompt as usual. All of this
## can be repeated, but is not portable, and does not suit the very valuable
## standard binary package build system for Windows. Roughly: [points 1 to 5 etc
## omitted]
## Barry Rowlingson: At some point the complexity of installing things like this
## for Windows will cross the complexity of installing Linux... (PS excepting
## live-Linux installs like Knoppix)
##    -- Benjamin Lloyd-Hughes, Roger Bivand, and Barry Rowlingson
##       R-help (August 2004)
## 
## 
## So good advice here is: Beware of good advice about this. (Of course, I may
## just be an outlier ...)
##    -- Berton Gunter (replying to the question what the best way to detect an
##       outlier is)
##       R-help (September 2004)
## 
## 
## Gabor Grothendieck: Congratulations to the R team and all involved for reaching
## the 2.0.0 milestone. The progress of R is truly astounding.
## Barry Rowlingson: A milestone is something that tells you how far it is to
## where you are going. With R-2.0.0, have we arrived?
## Peter Dalgaard: Depending on direction, milestones might only be telling you
## how far you've gone. And you may even be walking in circles around the
## target/origin...
##    -- Gabor Grothendieck, Barry Rowlingson, and Peter Dalgaard
##       R-help (October 2004)
## 
## 
## So it ***do not refuse*** to read the data. I do not expect some dwarf climbs
## out from your computer and says he will not read your data. Or is he?
## ?read.table gives you more details about how to read some data.
##    -- Petr Pikal (after a post that said read.table() refuses to read
##       unbalanced data)
##       R-help (October 2004)
## 
## 
## These road distances seem to be very non-Euclidean indeed (even non-metric). It
## seems to be 2282km from Athens to Milan if you go directly, but if you go via
## Rome it is only 1403km. I thought that World is non-Euclidean, but not that
## obviously.
##    -- Jari Oksanen (on the eurodist data)
##       R-help (October 2004)
## 
## 
## Eric Lecoutre: I don't want to die being idiot...
## Peter Dalgaard: With age, most of us come to realise that that is the only
## possible outcome.
##    -- Eric Lecoutre and Peter Dalgaard
##       R-help (October 2004)
## 
## 
## Morten Welinder: The result changes 70000 orders of magnitude right here. Ugh.
## This is affecting some erlang calculations of mine pretty badly.
## Peter Dalgaard: Make that 30400 orders of magnitude (natural logs y'know)... On
## something that's about 300000 orders of magnitude below 1, mind you! What the
## devil are you calculating? The probability that a random configuration of atoms
## would make up the known universe?
##    -- Morten Welinder and Peter Dalgaard (reporting a pgamma discontinuity)
##       R-devel (October 2004)
## 
## 
## Firstly, don't call your matrix 'matrix'. Would you call your dog 'dog'?
## Anyway, it might clash with the function 'matrix'.
##    -- Barry Rowlingson
##       R-help (October 2004)
## 
## 
## R is the lingua franca of statistical research. Work in all other languages
## should be discouraged.
##    -- Jan de Leeuw (as quoted by Matt Pocernich on R-help)
##       JSM 2003, San Francisco (August 2003)
## 
## 
## Amer Siddique: looking for some thoughts on incorporating R functionality to
## create histograms of data stored in an informix db. im gonna write the app in
## .Net and will use a managed provider to access the data. what R libs might I
## have to package in the assemblies? (sorry my Q is general as Ive only just
## looked at wanting this yet)
## Brian D. Ripley: Could you translate the question into English? My guess is
## that you are writing in a lower-cased version of some Microsoft internal
## language, but you don't even mention that this is for Windows (if it is).
##    -- Amer Siddique and Brian D. Ripley (on using R in .NET apps)
##       R-help (November 2004)
## 
## 
## Tony Plate: It is the prerogative of the members of R-core to decide whether to
## spend their time on improving documentation or improving the functionality (or
## merely having a life).
## Patrick Burns: I thought we had agreed that members of R-core are not allowed
## lives.
##    -- Tony Plate and Patrick Burns (in a thread about how to improve the
##       documentation of R functions)
##       R-devel (November 2004)
## 
## 
## Obviously I have not tested on an Alphabc...tuvwxyz system but it should work
## there.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (after fixing a problem discovered when compiling R 2.0.0
##       on Linux Alpha)
##       R-devel (October 2004)
## 
## 
## Lars Strand: Will R run under Windows Pocket PC?
## Brian D. Ripley: We don't know! There are no binary versions of R for that
## platform, but perhaps you could find a suitable compiler and manage to build
## the sources.
## Outside pure mathematics it is usually very hard to establish that something
## cannot be done (and it can be very hard in pure mathematics, too).
##    -- Lars Strand and Brian D. Ripley
##       R-help (November 2004)
## 
## 
## It [the effort of learning how to use R] is the price paid, just as the dollars
## or euros for a commercial package would be. For that price, I've learnt a great
## deal - and not only about R. And I shall remember it when I next have to find a
## heavyweight solution for a big problem presented by a small charitable client
## with an invisible budget. It's a huge, awe-inspiring package - easier to
## perceive as such because the power is not hidden beneath a cosmetic veneer.
##    -- Felix Grant (in an article about free statistics software)
##       Scientific Computing World (November 2004)
## 
## 
## There are companies whose yearly license fees to SAS total millions of dollars.
## Then those companies hire armies of SAS programmers to program an archaic macro
## language using old statistical methods to produce ugly tables and the worst
## graphics in the statistical software world.
##    -- Frank Harrell
##       R-help (November 2004)
## 
## 
## I believe functions should do what they say on the box (and the help page), and
## not what some user hopes they might do by mind-reading.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley
##       R-help (November 2004)
## 
## 
## Thomas Lumley: The algorithm in glm.fit, while not perfect, is a little smarter
## than a simple IRLS. It uses step-halving to back away from the edge, and when
## the parameter space is convex it has a reasonable chance of creeping along the
## boundary to the true MLE.
## Peter Dalgaard: Hmm. That wasn't my experience. I had a situation where there
## was like a (virtual) maximum outside the boundary, and the algorithm would
## basically stay on the path to that peak, banging its little head into the same
## point of the wall repeatedly, so to speak.
##    -- Thomas Lumley and Peter Dalgaard (about problems with constrained
##       optimzation in GLMs and "the little optimizer that couldn't")
##       R-help (November 2004)
## 
## 
## Getting flamed for asking dumb questions on a public mailing list is all part
## of growing up and being a man/woman.
##    -- Michael Watson (in a discussion on whether answers on R-help should be
##       more polite)
##       R-help (December 2004)
## 
## 
## You may have not been long enough on this list to see that some of the old-time
## gurus have reached a demigod like status. Demigods have all rights to be 'rude'
## (that's almost a definition of a demi-deity).
##    -- Jari Oksanen (in a discussion on whether answers on R-help should be more
##       polite)
##       R-help (December 2004)
## 
## 
## Suggesting a Usenet newsgroup is a generation thing. I think some of the
## younger users would prefer a Wiki or a Forum (these are words I've seen, but I
## wouldn't visit places like this, talking about my g-g-generation).
##    -- Jari Oksanen
##       R-help (December 2004)
## 
## 
## Our great-great grandchildren as yet unborn may read some of the stupid
## questions and/or answers that I and perhaps others give from time to time. I'd
## rather get flamed for saying something stupid in public on this list than to
## continue to provide substandard service to the people with whom I work because
## I perpetrated the same mistake in an environment in which no one questioned so
## effectively my errors.
##    -- Spencer Graves (in a discussion on whether answers on R-help should be
##       more polite)
##       R-help (December 2004)
## 
## 
## Robin Hankin: I'd say that without a tool like R you cannot learn statistics.
## David Whiting: I believe Fisher and a few others managed to get by without it.
## Peter Dalgaard: But think how far they could have got with R!
##    -- Robin Hankin, David Whiting, and Peter Dalgaard (on teaching/learning
##       statistics with R)
##       R-help (December 2004)
## 
## 
## If you don't go with R now, you will someday.
##    -- David Kane (on whether to use R or S-PLUS)
##       R-SIG-Finance (November 2004)
## 
## 
## Patrick Burns: In the old days with S-PLUS, the rule of thumb was that you
## needed 10 times as much memory as your dataset. [...] R (and current versions
## of S-PLUS) are more frugal than S-PLUS was back then.
## Ajay Shah: Hmm, so it'd be interesting to apply current prices of RAM and
## current prices of R, to work out the break-even point at which it's better to
## buy SAS! :-) Without making any calculations, I can't see how SAS can compete
## with the price of 4G of RAM.
##    -- Patrick Burns and Ajay Shah (on whether to use R, S-PLUS or SAS)
##       R-SIG-Finance (December 2004)
## 
## 
## I have never heard anyone (knowledgable or otherwise) claim that, in the
## absence of transition costs, SAS is better than R for equity modeling. If you
## come across any such claim, I would be happy to refute it.
##    -- David Kane
##       R-SIG-Finance (December 2004)
## 
## 
## Will Frank Harrell or someone else please explain to me a real application in
## which this is not fast enough?
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (announcing improved versions of read.table and
##       write.table)
##       R-devel (December 2004)
## 
## 
## Achim Zeileis: Other visualizations of departures from indepence include
## mosaicplots with shading or association plots. See mosaicplot() and assocplot()
## and the package vcd.
## Peter Dalgaard: I see that you've taken initive to abbriate statiscal
## concepts...
##    -- Achim Zeileis and Peter Dalgaard
##       R-help (January 2005)
## 
## 
## Also, that's what Martin Maechler told me and he wrote the code so I trust him
## on that. I figure that if you have to trust someone to be meticulous and
## precise then a German-speaking Swiss is a good choice.
##    -- Douglas Bates
##       R-help (January 2005)
## 
## 
## Paul Gilbert: [code comparing speed of apply(z,2,sum) vs. rep(1,10000)%*%z)]
## which seemed completely contrary to all my childhood teachings.
## Douglas Bates: Must have had an interesting childhood if you spent it learning
## about the speeds of various matrix multiplication techniques.
## Paul Gilbert: [...] why is apply so slow?
## Brian Ripley: 'so slow' sic: what are you going to do in the 7ms you saved?
##    -- Paul Gilbert, Douglas Bates, and Brian D. Ripley (discussing 'the
##       incredible lightness of crossprod')
##       R-devel (January 2005)
## 
## 
## Well, if I had written that, it would have been on purpose ...
##    -- Kurt Hornik (after Torsten Hothorn reported the 'typo' automa*g*ically in
##       ?NotYetImplemented)
##       R-devel (January 2005)
## 
## 
## I'm not sure I'd trust any computer recommendation from 1976, no matter how
## famous the authors are.
##    -- Peter Dalgaard (after Samuel Edward Kemp cited a recommendation about
##       nonlinear least squares computer programs from 'Box-Jenkins, 1976')
##       R-help (January 2005)
## 
## 
## Marc R. Feldesman: I'm trying to figure out what could have possibly changed
## [...] that make Brian Ripley's posts (in particular) not show up on my mail
## server [...]
## Peter Dalgaard: Did you remember to turn off the Oxford-sarcasm filter?
##    -- Marc R. Feldesman and Peter Dalgaard (Marc R. Feldesman having some
##       e-mail problems)
##       R-help (January 2005)
## 
## 
## Mingzhai Sun: When you use it [R], since it is written by so many authors, how
## do you know that the results are trustable?
## Bill Venables: The R engine [...] is pretty well uniformly excellent code but
## you have to take my word for that. Actually, you don't. The whole engine is
## open source so, if you wish, you can check every line of it. If people were out
## to push dodgy software, this is not the way they'd go about it.
##    -- Mingzhai Sun and Bill Venables
##       R-help (January 2004)
## 
## 
## Jesus and the rest of the R-help community: Thanks for your help.
##    -- Mike Saunders (after Jesus Frias answered his question about split-split
##       plots)
##       R-help (February 2005)
## 
## 
## Pavel Khomski: How can I specify the random part in the GLMM-call (of the lme4
## library) for compound matrices just in the the same way as they defined in the
## lme-Call (of the nlme library).
## Martin Maechler: ''twice in such a short paragraph -- yikes !!'' ... I'm
## getting convulsive...
##    -- Pavel Khomski and Martin Maechler
##       R-help (February 2005)
## 
## 
## A sufficiently trained statistician can read the vagaries of a Q-Q plot like a
## shaman can read a chicken's entrails, with a similar recourse to scientific
## principles. Interpreting Q-Q plots is more a visceral than an intellectual
## exercise. The uninitiated are often mystified by the process. Experience is the
## key here.
##    -- Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Murdoch University
##       StatsNotes
## 
## 
## If the answer is parse() you should usually rethink the question.
##    -- Thomas Lumley
##       R-help (February 2005)
## 
## 
## Just now I had an apparently insurmountable problem that's been bugging me for
## days, but phrasing my question in a form suitable for the R-help list enabled
## me to solve my own problem in two minutes flat.
## Thanks everyone.
##    -- Robin Hankin
##       R-help (March 2005)
## 
## 
## Actually, I see it as part of my job to inflict R on people who are perfectly
## happy to have never heard of it. Happiness doesn't equal proficient and
## efficient. In some cases the proficiency of a person serves a greater good than
## their momentary happiness.
##    -- Patrick Burns
##       R-help (April 2005)
## 
## 
## Evelyn Hall: I would like to know how (if) I can extract some of the
## information from the summary of my nlme.
## Simon Blomberg: This is R. There is no if. Only how.
##    -- Evelyn Hall and Simon 'Yoda' Blomberg
##       R-help (April 2005)
## 
## 
## Tradition among experienced S programmers has always been that loops (typically
## 'for' loops) are intrinsically inefficient: expressing computations without
## loops has provided a measure of entry into the inner circle of S programming.
##    -- John Chambers
##       Programming With Data, p. 173 (1998)
## 
## 
## You can't expect statistical procedures to rescue you from poor data.
##    -- Berton Gunter (on dealing with missing values in a cluster analysis)
##       R-help (April 2005)
## 
## 
## I think we can reject the null hypothesis of "Dirk can type" at all convential
## significance levels.
##    -- Dirk Eddelbuettel (after several users including himself had misspelled
##       Ubuntu as Umbutu or Ubunto)
##       R-help (April 2005)
## 
## 
## The problem, as always, is what the heck does one mean by 'outlier' in these
## contexts. Seems to be like pornography -- "I know it when I see it."
##    -- Berton Gunter (quoting Justice Potter Stewart in a discussion about tests
##       for outliers)
##       R-help (April 2005)
## 
## 
## [...] (damn... my shift key just broke as well...)
## bill venables.
##    -- Bill Venables (answering a message that lacked upper case letters)
##       R-help (April 2005)
## 
## 
## It is a mistake to assume that everything is known about even the common
## approximations used in statistical practice, and this area is still opening up.
##    -- Bill Venables (in a discussion about how fitted generalized linear mixed
##       models can be compared)
##       R-help (April 2005)
## 
## 
## We are teaching stuff like mathematics, statistics, statistical programming and
## so on, but we cannot teach each possible software product - we also don't teach
## how to analyze each possible dataset that might find its way to the
## statistician's desk, we just use the iris data and Anscombe's quartet. ;-)
##    -- Uwe Ligges (in a thread about whether universities have to teach students
##       how to use commercial software)
##       R-help (April 2005)
## 
## 
## Usually (but not always) doing tests of normality reflect a lack of
## understanding of the power of rank tests, and an assumption of high power for
## the tests (qq plots don't always help with that because of their subjectivity).
## When possible it's good to choose a robust method. Also, doing pre-testing for
## normality can affect the type I error of the overall analysis.
##    -- Frank Harrell
##       R-help (April 2005)
## 
## 
## As for elegance, R is refined, tasteful, and beautiful. When I grow up, I want
## to marry R.
##    -- Andy Bunn (in a discussion about whether R is simple, powerful and
##       elegant)
##       R-help (May 2005)
## 
## 
## Frank Harrell: Here is an easy approach that will yield results only slightly
## less valid than one actually using the response variable:
##   x <- data.frame(x1, x2, x3, x4, ..., other potential predictors)
##   x[ , sample(ncol(x))]
## Andy Liaw: Hmm... Shouldn't that be something like:
##   x[, sample(ncol(x), ceiling(ncol(x) * runif(1)))]
##    -- Frank Harrell and Andy Liaw (about alternative strategies for stepwise
##       regression and 'random parsimony')
##       R-help (May 2005)
## 
## 
## Rene M. Raupp: Does anybody know any work comparing R with other (charged)
## statistical software (like Minitab, SPSS, SAS)? [...] I have to show it's as
## good as the others.
## Kjetil Brinchmann Halvorsen: Sorry. That will be difficult. Couldn't it do to
## prove it is better?
##    -- Rene M. Raupp and Kjetil Brinchmann Halvorsen
##       R-help (May 2005)
## 
## 
## Sean Davis: It got me going quickly with S4 methods, which it seems to me are
## the way to go in most cases.
## Rolf Turner: If you want to simultaneously handcuff yourself, strap yourself
## into a strait jacket, and tie yourself in knots, and moreover write code which
## is incomprehensible to the human mind, then S4 methods are indeed the way to go.
##    -- Sean Davis and Rolf Turner (expressing different views about the benefits
##       of S4 classes)
##       R-help (May 2005)
## 
## 
## I wish to perform brain surgery this afternoon at 4pm and don't know where to
## start. My background is the history of great statistician sports legends but I
## am willing to learn. I know there are courses and numerous books on brain
## surgery but I don't have the time for those. Please direct me to the
## appropriate HowTos, and be on standby for solving any problem I may encounter
## while in the operating room. Some of you might ask for specifics of the case,
## but that would require my following the posting guide and spending even more
## time than I am already taking to write this note.
##    -- I. Ben Fooled (aka Frank Harrell)
##       R-help (April 1, 2005)
## 
## 
## You're overlooking something like line 800 of the documentation for xyplot.
## [...] It's probably in the R-FAQ as well, since my original feeling was that
## this behaviour was chosen in order to confuse people and see how many people
## read the FAQ... :)
##    -- Barry Rowlingson (about the fact that lattice objects have to be
##       print()ed)
##       R-help (May 2005)
## 
## 
## Rolf Turner: In the middle of a Saturday morning (in my Time Zone!) I send out
## a plea for help, and in just over 20 minutes my problem is solved!
## I don't think you get service like that anywhere else. This R-help list is
## BLOODY AMAZING!
## Spencer Graves: 'The sun never sets on the (former) British Empire.' Today, it
## never sets on R-Help.
##    -- Rolf Turner and Spencer Graves
##       R-help (May 2005)
## 
## 
## As a general rule (subject to numerous exceptions, caveats, etc.):
## 1) it is programming and debugging time that most impacts 'overall' program
## execution time;
## 2) this is most strongly impacted by code readability and size (the smaller the
## better);
## 3) both of which are enhanced by modular construction and reuseability, which
## argues for avoiding inline code and using separate functions.
## These days, I would argue that most of the time it is program clarity and
## correctness (they are related) that is the important issue, not execution speed.
##    -- Berton Gunter (in a discussion about parsing speed)
##       R-help (May 2005)
## 
## 
## I suggest that we redefine "+" to be a legal character in the name of an
## identifier. Sure, if you used to have "a+b" you'll have to rewrite it as
## "+(a,b)", but think of the benefits!
## You+can+write+out+long+sentences+and+use+them+as+variable+names!
##    -- Duncan Murdoch (in a discussion whether to use underscore, dot, or mixed
##       case in variable names)
##       R-help (May 2005)
## 
## 
## Oops. Was that what I was expecting?
##    -- Louise Matthews (during the practicals of 'Statistical Practice in
##       Epidemiology Using R')
##       SPE Course, Tartu (May 2005)
## 
## 
## Well, 'do as we say, not do as we do' applies, I think.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (answering a report on a small inconsistency in 'Writing
##       R Extensions' by David Firth)
##       R-devel (June 2005)
## 
## 
## See pages 45 and 46 of V&R's S PROGRAMMING for a definitive discussion of how
## to do this.
## (Confession: I treat anything that V&R say as definitive).
##    -- Berton Gunter (in reply to the question how to parse a '...' function
##       argument)
##       R-help (June 2005)
## 
## 
## A big computer, a complex algorithm and a long time does not equal science.
##    -- Robert Gentleman
##       SSC 2003, Halifax (June 2003)
## 
## 
## Uwe Ligges: I just told nonsense, stepclass() does not make sense with
## randomForest(), obviously ... (wonder why nobody shouted?).
## Douglas Bates: Oh, we're just so used to you talking nonsense that we don't
## bother to point it out any more :-)
##    -- Uwe Ligges and Douglas Bates
##       R-help (July 2005)
## 
## 
## The fact that some people murder doesn't mean we should copy them. And
## murdering data, though not as serious, should also be avoided.
##    -- Frank E. Harrell (answering a question on categorization of continuous
##       variables in survival modelling)
##       R-help (July 2005)
## 
## 
## The learning curve is steep - but then like many people, I'd like to be able to
## do sophisticated modelling with deep understanding and no effort :-)
##    -- Sean O'Riordain (in a thread about the helpfulness of documentation)
##       R-help (July 2005)
## 
## 
## Excellent, Berwin!
## Specifically the part about why the bug never really triggers wrong behavior.
## Your mail should be saved in 'The Annals of R' ...
##    -- Martin Maechler (after Berwin A Turlach reported a buglet in
##       'spline_eval')
##       R-devel (July 2005)
## 
## 
## You say yourself it wasn't reproducible. So it could have been anything that
## "crashed" your R, cosmic radiation, a bolt of lightning reversing a bit in your
## computer memory, ... :-)
##    -- Martin Maechler (replying to a bug report)
##       R-devel (July 2005)
## 
## 
## It was simple, but you know, it's always simple when you've done it.
##    -- Simone Gabbriellini (after solving a problem with a trick suggested on
##       the list)
##       R-help (August 2005)
## 
## 
## Trevor Hastie: It would be great to have a 'clickable' digest, where the topics
## list is a set of pointers, and clicking on a topic takes you to that entry.
## Jeff Gentry: I sincerely hope you don't mean that you wish HTML enabled content
## in the actual emails coming through the mailing list. People who send HTML in
## email text should be taken out back and shot :)
## Peter Dalgaard: Pretty much what my spam filter does... Well, it kills the
## message, not the sender, although the latter would be a more permanent solution.
##    -- Trevor Hastie, Jeff Gentry, and Peter Dalgaard
##       R-help (August 2005)
## 
## 
## If you aren't sure of the relative priority of two operators, use parentheses.
## 1:(nr-1) would work regardless of whether : or - had higher priority. Or, in
## extreme cases, read the documentation.
##    -- Duncan Murdoch
##       R-help (August 2005)
## 
## 
## It is wrong to blame ANY tool for our own shortcomings!
##    -- Robert Baer (about the perils of using PowerPoint)
##       R-help (September 2005)
## 
## 
## Jason Horn: Can anyone think of a way to create a pretty() sequence that
## excludes zero? Or a way to remove the zero from a sequence after using pretty()?
## Peter Dalgaard: The former is rather hard because zero is generally considered
## just about the prettiest number around...
##    -- Jason Horn and Peter Dalgaard
##       R-help (October 2005)
## 
## 
## Does anyone know someone working in this area in France who is not a JARP (Just
## Another R Person)?
##    -- Jan de Leeuw
##       JSS mailing list (October 2005)
## 
## 
## Contrary to popular belief the speed of R's interpreter is rarely the limiting
## factor to R's speed. People treating R like C is typically the limiting factor.
## You have vector operations, USE THEM.
##    -- Byron Ellis
##       R-help (October 2005)
## 
## 
## Mathematical conventions are just that, conventions. They differ by field of
## mathematics. Don't ask us why matrix rows are numbered down but graphs are
## numbered up the y axis, nor why x comes before y but row before column. But the
## matrix layout has always seemed illogical to me.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (answering a question why the layouts of print(x) and
##       image(x) are different)
##       R-help (August 2004)
## 
## 
## Byron Ellis: If we wanted to be truly radical we'd just accept that graphics
## devices and event loops are just special cases of the connection and merge the
## whole thing, thus more-or-less reinventing CLIM. :-)
## Anthony Rossini: Eventually, all programming languages grow up and become Lisp.
## (progress, progress, and more joyful progress on CLS).
## Byron Ellis: Untrue! They may also become Smalltalk :-)
##    -- Byron Ellis and Anthony Rossini
##       R-devel (December 2005)
## 
## 
## And the fear of getting Ripleyed on the mailing list also makes me think, read,
## and improve before submitting half baked questions to the list.
##    -- Eric Kort
##       R-help (January 2006)
## 
## 
## Ole F. Christensen: Brain, Thank you very much for your help.
## Peter Dalgaard: You seem to be using call-by-value semantics rather than
## call-by-name...
##    -- Ole F. Christensen and Peter Dalgaard (thanking *Brian* D. Ripley for
##       help)
##       R-devel (January 2006)
## 
## 
## Thomas Lumley: The precedence of ^ is higher than that of unary minus. It may
## be surprising, [...]
## Herve Pages: No, it's not surprising. At least to me... In the country where I
## grew up, I've been teached that -x^2 means -(x^2) not (-x)^2.
##    -- Thomas Lumley and Herve Pages (both explaining that operator precedence
##       is working perfectly well)
##       R-devel (January 2006)
## 
## 
## The wiki spamming is a serious problem, [...]. What does a logfile with IPs
## help? The spammers are strangers selling viagra. I don't want to find them :-)
##    -- Detlef Steuer (in a discussion on R wikis)
##       R-help (January 2006)
## 
## 
## Any doubts about R's big-league status should be put to rest, now that we have
## a Sudoku Puzzle Solver. Take that, SAS!
##    -- David Brahm (announcing the sudoku package)
##       R-packages (January 2006)
## 
## 
## This list is impressive. People are knowledgable, opinionated, ready to help
## and to flame you for asking elementary question or asking how to use type III
## SSQ. So, speak softly and carry a beagle. Seriously, sometimes it would be
## quicker just to give an answer, than to flame a poor soul.
##    -- Milos Zarkovic
##       R-help (January 2006)
## 
## 
## Lastly, by what we could call the 'Liaw-Baron principle', every question that
## can be asked has in fact already been asked.
##    -- Dirk Eddelbuettel (citing Andy Liaw's and Jonathan Baron's opinion on
##       unique questions on R-help)
##       R-help (January 2006)
## 
## 
## It's not a question of trying variations, rather of following instructions.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (about using 'Writing R Extensions')
##       R-help (January 2006)
## 
## 
## Michael Dewey: When I started I found the free documents useful but I made most
## progress when I bought MASS. I do realise that liking books is a bit last
## millennium.
## Thomas Lumley: Very late last millenium, though. "When I were young[er] we
## didn't have all these fancy yellow books."
##    -- Michael Dewey and Thomas Lumley (about different kinds of documentation
##       for R)
##       R-help (January 2006)
## 
## 
## Please do think hard before you tell other people what they 'should' do for you.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley
##       R-devel (January 2006)
## 
## 
## It might surprise many R-help posters, but R has manuals as well...
##    -- Uwe Ligges
##       R-help (January 2006)
## 
## 
## Tom Backer Johnsen: I have just started looking at R, and are getting more and
## more irritated at myself for not having done that before. However, one of the
## things I have not found in the documentation is some way of preparing output
## from R for convenient formatting into something like MS Word.
## Barry Rowlingson: Well whatever you do, don't start looking at LaTeX, because
## that will get you even more irritated at yourself for not having done it before.
##    -- Tom Backer Johnsen and Barry Rowlingson
##       R-help (February 2006)
## 
## 
## Michael Watson: Hopefully this one isn't in the manual or I am about to get
## shot :-S
## Peter Dalgaard: *Kapow*...
##    -- Michael Watson and Peter Dalgaard (question on axis())
##       R-help (February 2006)
## 
## 
## My solution when I run into mysteries like this is to put 'browser()' in the
## function just before or after the line of interest. The magnitude and direction
## of my stupidity usually become clear quickly.
##    -- Patrick Burns
##       R-help (February 2006)
## 
## 
## Similarly to Brian, I'm much more reluctant to help people who don't exist --
## who knows, maybe you're a computer program who has just passed the Turing test
## :-)
##    -- Martin Maechler (about postings with anonymous e-mail addresses and
##       without real names)
##       R-help (March 2006)
## 
## 
## There's probably some examples, but there are some examples of people using
##   solve(t(X) %*% W %*% X) %*% W %*% Y
## to compute regression coefficients, too.
##    -- Thomas Lumley (discussing usefulness of evaluation order in lapply)
##       R-help (March 2006)
## 
## 
## (3 times...rrrrgh...) and why do you think the mailing list is called
## R-*packages* ???????????
## Please do
##   for(i in 1:20) cat("It's a package!\n")
##    -- Martin Maechler (after a newly released *package* has been called
##       *library* three times in its announcement on R-packages)
##       R-help (March 2006)
## 
## 
## If we do that, I predict that the total amount of r-help time wasted on it will
## exceed the CPU time saved by orders of magnitude.
##    -- Duncan Murdoch (after a specialized function speeding up detection of NAs
##       was suggested for base R)
##       R-devel (April 2006)
## 
## 
## This has been discussed before in this list, and Ripley said "no, no!". I do it
## all the time, but only in secrecy.
##    -- Jari Oksanen (about replacing zero distances with tiny values for
##       isoMDS())
##       R-help (April 2006)
## 
## 
## 2-D pie charts are terrible. That makes 3-D pie charts terrible to the 3/2
## power.
##    -- Frank Harrell
##       R-help (April 2006)
## 
## 
## Yourexamplesmightactuallybereadableifyouusedyourspacebar.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (answering a question containing code without any spaces)
##       R-help (May 2006)
## 
## 
## It seems that you are facing a very serious fortune(122) problem.
##    -- Jean R. Lobry (in reply to a user that quickly needed help for his PhD
##       thesis, without properly checking the documentation)
##       R-help (May 2006)
## 
## 
## Duncan Murdoch: Others need to run under ESS.
## Francois Pinard: While this is a good things for Emacs lovers, the requirement
## is rather unwelcome for pagans! :-)
##    -- Duncan Murdoch and Francois Pinard (on the availability of command
##       completion)
##       R-help (May 2006)
## 
## 
## When talking about user friendliness of computer software I like the analogy of
## cars vs. busses: [...]
## Using this analogy programs like SPSS are busses, easy to use for the standard
## things, but very frustrating if you want to do something that is not already
## preprogrammed.
## R is a 4-wheel drive SUV (though environmentally friendly) with a bike on the
## back, a kayak on top, good walking and running shoes in the passenger seat, and
## mountain climbing and spelunking gear in the back. R can take you anywhere you
## want to go if you take time to learn how to use the equipment, but that is
## going to take longer than learning where the bus stops are in SPSS.
##    -- Greg Snow
##       R-help (May 2006)
## 
## 
## Oh, gosh, this is getting whimsical.
## R, I surmise, is a mutable tool that enables the user to do what they want.
## Knapped flint for the Stone Age statistical fool, plasma arc for the expert and
## learned savant.
## R is a friend to all manner of men. The perfect companion, the servant
## complete. It gently informeth the clueless and then, reveals the essence unto
## the esthete.
##    -- Jim Lemon (in a discussion about the usability of R)
##       R-help (May 2006)
## 
## 
## Statistical computing is not easy, so how could R be? Who has ever claimed it
## is? Any package that makes statistical computing appear to be easy is probably
## giving you wrong answers half the time, or is extremely limited in scope.
##    -- Duncan Murdoch (in a discussion about the usability of R)
##       R-help (May 2006)
## 
## 
## Jarek Tuszynski: At one company [...] I had to run all the licenses of all the
## software [...] through the legal department. When they read the GNU Public
## License (GPL) their only comment was: We have no idea what that license means.
## Do not touch any software using it.
## Rolf Turner: This is typical of lawyers' minds. If something is clear,
## rational, lucid, straightforward, unambigous, means what it says ... they can't
## understand it.
##    -- Jarek Tuszynski and Rolf Turner (in a discussion about the GPL and
##       'buying R')
##       R-help (May 2006)
## 
## 
## It is unusual for the actual data not to be available in real problems.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (in reply to a question how to fit a distribution if not
##       the data but only their histogram is available)
##       R-help (June 2006)
## 
## 
## Warning: Although abusing R was not proved to be addictive, it should be noted
## that it often leads to harder stuff.
##    -- Ivan Mizera (self-confessed abuseR)
##       useR! 2006, Vienna (June 2006)
## 
## 
## I wish <<- had never been invented, as it makes an esoteric and dangerous
## feature of the language *seem* normal and reasonable. If you want to dumb down
## R/S into a macro language, this is the operator for you.
##    -- Bill Venables
##       R-help (July 2001)
## 
## 
## John Kane: I have 120 columns in a data.frame. I have one value in a column
## named "blaw" that I want to change. How do I find the coordinates?
## Roger Koenker: It is the well-known wicked which problem: If you had
## (grammatically incorrectly) thought "... which I want to change" then you might
## have been led to type (in another window):
##   ?which
## and you would have seen the light. Maybe that() should be an alias for which()?
##    -- John Kane and Roger Koenker
##       R-help (August 2006)
## 
## 
## Gregor Gorjanc: But imagine how hard would it be to have two separate modes ...
## argh, probably a mess^2 or have I missed something obvious.
## Martin Maechler: Yes, exactly: "Mess ^ 2" -- and if you allow both 'drop' and
## 'na.rm' options, it's "Mess ^ 3" -- not something anyone really wants!
##    -- Gregor Gorjanc and Martin Maechler (in a discussion whether 'drop' should
##       be set in options(), possibly depending on different user vs. programmer
##       modes)
##       R-devel (September 2006)
## 
## 
## You need to prepare your students for the future, not the past.
##    -- Spencer Graves (making a case for using R in academia)
##       R-help (November 2006)
## 
## 
## Have you ever wanted to write a book, but not known where to start? Now is a
## very good time to jump in, because there is currently a very simple recipe for
## success: just put R in the title and you will have to beat the publishers off
## with a stick!
##    -- Paul Murrell
##       ASA Statistical Computing & Graphics Newsletter 17(2) (November 2006)
## 
## 
## This is at best a matter of opinion, and credentials do matter for opinions.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (in response to the claim that only 1.79e3 is printed
##       with three significant digits whereas 1790 is not)
##       R-help (December 2006)
## 
## 
## If you want to do an integer divide, you should only use integers to divide
## with.
##    -- Thierry Onkelinx ((not entirely correctly) in an answer to "understanding
##       integer divide (%/%)")
##       R-help (January 2007)
## 
## 
## Personally I have never regretted trying not to underestimate my own future
## stupidity.
##    -- Greg Snow (explaining why eval(parse(...)) is often suboptimal, answering
##       a question triggered by the infamous fortune(106))
##       R-help (January 2007)
## 
## 
## Brian Ripley: Where did you tell it [...]? (Nowhere: R is lacking a mind_read()
## function!)
## Peter Dalgaard: Please stop complaining about missing features. Patches will be
## considered.
## 
## Oh, it's you, Brian. Never mind then. You'll get to it, I'm sure. ;-)
##    -- Brian Ripley and Peter Dalgaard (answering why abline(lm(x~y)) would not
##       work)
##       R-help (January 2007)
## 
## 
## Just [use] MinGW like R [does], following the guides to the letter gets you
## there like marked stones across a marsh. Leaving the path usually gets you at
## best neck deep in the mire, alternatively just bubbles.
##    -- Roger Bivand (explaining what development environment should be used to
##       develop C on Windows (for R))
##       R-devel (January 2007)
## 
## 
## You must realize that R is written by experts in statistics and statistical
## computing who, despite popular opinion, do not believe that everything in SAS
## and SPSS is worth copying. Some things done in such packages, which trace their
## roots back to the days of punched cards and magnetic tape when fitting a single
## linear model may take several days because your first 5 attempts failed due to
## syntax errors in the JCL or the SAS code, still reflect the approach of "give
## me every possible statistic that could be calculated from this model, whether
## or not it makes sense". The approach taken in R is different. The underlying
## assumption is that the useR is thinking about the analysis while doing it.
##    -- Douglas Bates (in reply to the suggestion to include type III sums of
##       squares and lsmeans in base R to make it more similar to SAS or SPSS)
##       R-help (March 2007)
## 
## 
## I don't like to see the use of c() for its side effects. In this case Marc's
## as.vector seems to me to be self-explanatory, and that is a virtue in
## programming that is too often undervalued.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (on how to convert a matrix into a vector)
##       R-help (March 2007)
## 
## 
## I cannot remember if I have been using 14 or 14, I think it was 14 and I am not
## near the machine to check.
##    -- John Kane (confused about his SPSS version)
##       R-help (April 2007)
## 
## 
## Tony Plate: There looks to be a typo in the R-exts manual: [...]
## Peter Dalgaard: 'svn blame' tells me that this was Brian's addition in
## rev.35362 [...]
## Brian D. Ripley: I prefer 'svn praise' myself.
## Peter Dalgaard: Or 'svn annotate'. I think it depends on what I'm looking for,
## plus the risk that the author (perpetrator, contributor) might be me...
##    -- Tony Plate, Peter Dalgaard, and Brian D. Ripley (about a typo in the
##       documentation)
##       R-devel (April 2007)
## 
## 
## Corinna Schmitt: How can I divide the number 0.285 with 2. I need a function.
##   Result: 0.285 / 2 = 0.1425
## Gabor Csardi: Well, i think
##   half.of.0.285 <- function() {
##     0.1425
##   }
## would do the trick.
##    -- Corinna Schmitt and Gabor Csardi
##       R-help (April 2007)
## 
## 
## Perhaps one is the real forge and the other is a forgery? Or a forge-R-y? I'll
## get my coat...
##    -- Barry Rowlingson (on the question whether http://www.RForge.net/ or
##       http://R-Forge.R-project.org/ is the official forge server)
##       R-help (April 2007)
## 
## 
## It is all too easy for statistical thinking to be swamped by programming tasks.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley
##       DSC 2001, Wien (March 2001)
## 
## 
## R is being used for different purposes than the original interactive EDA
## environment.
##    -- Duncan Temple Lang
##       DSC 2007, Auckland (February 2007)
## 
## 
## RAM is cheap and thinking hurts.
##    -- Uwe Ligges (about memory requirements in R)
##       R-help (June 2007)
## 
## 
## All this becomes even more glaring if you take the unusal step of plotting the
## data.
##    -- Bill Venables (interpreting the results of an ANOVA analysis)
##       R-help (July 2007)
## 
## 
## What sort of editor would overlook this clear and demonstrable message leaping
## out from the data in favour of some arcane argument about "types of sums of
## squares"? Several answers come to mind: A power freak, a SAS afficianado, an
## idiot.
##    -- Bill Venables
##       R-help (July 2007)
## 
## 
## If you really want to assess uncertainty you need to take into account that the
## models are false and that several models may capture different aspects of the
## data and so be false in different ways.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley
##       R-help (July 2007)
## 
## 
## R will always be arcane to those who do not make a serious effort to learn it.
## It is **not** meant to be intuitive and easy for casual users to just plunge
## into. It is far too complex and powerful for that. But the rewards are great
## for serious data analysts who put in the effort.
##    -- Berton Gunter
##       R-help (August 2007)
## 
## 
## If anything, there should be a Law: Thou Shalt Not Even Think Of Producing A
## Graph That Looks Like Anything From A Spreadsheet.
##    -- Ted Harding (in a discussion about producing graphics)
##       R-help (August 2007)
## 
## 
## Friends don't let friends use Excel for statistics!
##    -- Jonathan D. Cryer (about problems with using Microsoft Excel for
##       statistics)
##       JSM 2001, Atlanta (August 2001)
## 
## 
## Anand Patil: Can this be fixed without requiring the user to do anything?
## Brian D. Ripley: The fix requires 'the user' to read the documentation.
##    -- Anand Patil and Brian D. Ripley (about some compiler problems under
##       Windows Vista)
##       R-help (September 2007)
## 
## 
## Bad English is the language of science.
##    -- Jan de Leeuw
##       JSS mailing list (February 2005)
## 
## 
## 3-D bar plots are an abomination. Just because Excel can do them doesn't mean
## you should.
## (Dismount pulpit).
##    -- Berton Gunter
##       R-help (October 2007)
## 
## 
## Actually the documentation of sunflowerplot is wrong in botanical sense.
## Sunflowers have composite flowers in capitula, and the things called 'petals'
## in documentation are ligulate, sterile ray-florets (each with vestigial petals
## which are not easily visible in sunflower, but in some other species you may
## see three (occasionally two) teeth).
##    -- Jari Oksanen
##       R-help (December 2007)
## 
## 
## Apparently mathematical impossibility is not an impediment to parameter
## estimation in such cases.
##    -- Douglas Bates (about the abilities of SAS PROC MIXED)
##       R-help (December 2007)
## 
## 
## memory problems (not me. my pc!)
##    -- Sara Mouro (subject line for an R-help request)
##       R-help (January 2008)
## 
## 
## Gustaf Rydevik: The author also has some thought-provoking opinions on R being
## no-good and that you should write everything in C.
## Paul Gilbert: People used to say assembler, that's progress.
##    -- Gustaf Rydevik and Paul Gilbert (in a discussion about an 'R is slow'
##       blog post)
##       R-help (January 2008)
## 
## 
## Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
## Leo Tolstoy
## 
## and every messy data is messy in its own way - it's easy to define the
## characteristics of a clean dataset (rows are observations, columns are
## variables, columns contain values of consistent types). If you start to look at
## real life data you'll see every way you can imagine data being messy (and many
## that you can't)!
##    -- Hadley Wickham (answering 'in what way messy data sets are messy')
##       R-help (January 2008)
## 
## 
## I strongly suggest you collaborate with a local statistician. I can think of no
## circumstance where multiple regression on "hundreds of thousands of variables"
## is anything more than a fancy random number generator.
##    -- Berton Gunter
##       R-help (February 2008)
## 
## 
## The "right" place to store information like this in Windows is in the registry,
## but we've been reluctant to use it, for various historical reasons. In fact, we
## were just told today that editing the registry is not allowed by software used
## by the US government. I think they'll be moving back to the abacus, if they
## want to stay with Windows.
##    -- Duncan Murdoch (about where to store some Windows GUI preferences)
##       R-devel (January 2008)
## 
## 
## I recently read the small print on the academic license our site has for SAS.
## You have to:
## 
##   1 inform SAS of any taught courses that use SAS,
##   2 inform SAS of any research projects using SAS,
##   3 allow SAS to refer to your institution as a SAS user,
##   4 allow SAS to review your taught courses,
##   5 ensure your courses are taught using qualified personnel,
##   6 give SAS your first-born male offspring.
## 
## I spoke to our site's licensing supremos and they say they've never heard of
## anyone complying with 1 or 2. Point 4 sounds like petty fiddling in our
## educational business, and point 5 left 'qualified' undefined. Point 6 doesn't
## bother me since I don't have kids.
##    -- Barry Rowlingson
##       R-help (February 2008)
## 
## 
## The "one size fits all" approach to data analysis - also known as "give me a
## quart and a half of statistics and just make sure that there is a p-value less
## than 5% somewhere in there" - doesn't fit well into the R system.
##    -- Douglas Bates
##       R-help (March 2008)
## 
## 
## In many cases a) often looks difficult, but on closer inspection turns out to
## be impossible.
##    -- Bill Venables (about calculating the negative log-likelihood from a
##       non-independence model)
##       R-help (April 2008)
## 
## 
## Basically R is reluctant to let you shoot yourself in the foot unless you are
## really determined to do so.
##    -- Bill Venables (about the warning hist() issues when being called with
##       unequal interval widths and freq=TRUE)
##       R-help (May 2008)
## 
## 
## Whoops! I read that e+24 as e-24, so scrub all that I said.
## (You'd think, that having seen Bill Venables make a similar error -- which he
## corrected in the follow-up posting to which I was replying -- I would've been
## more careful. Well, you'd think wrong. Actually it *was* e-24 when I posted;
## then the Gremlins got in and changed everything. :-) )
##    -- Rolf Turner (discussing that f.root from uniroot() is (not) almost zero)
##       R-help (May 2008)
## 
## 
## R may be the wrong tool for the job, but it's the wrong job.
##    -- Rolf Turner (about solving 100th degree polynomials)
##       R-help (May 2008)
## 
## 
## Kenn Konstabel: [...] There's more to this trend: SPSS and Statistica now
## advertise "R language support": [...]
## Charles C. Berry: If you can't beat R, join R.
## Marc Schwartz: "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." 
##    -- Kenn Konstabel, Charles C. Berry, and Marc Schwartz (about the RPro
##       release from REvolution)
##       R-help (August 2008)
## 
## 
## As for the question of the bug in `is', ... it depends what your definition of
## `is' is.
##    -- Douglas Bates (referring to Bill Clinton after a tortuous discussion of
##       the behavior of is(7, "integer"))
##       R-help (September 2008)
## 
## 
## Shan-Ho Chou: I got a question about eigenvector. I've tried input a symmetric
## matrix to both R (using eigen function) and Minitab, but the result is really
## different. Can anyone tell me what's wrong with that?
## Bill Venables: Simple. Minitab must be broken. Have you reported it to them?
##    -- Shan-Ho Chou and Bill Venables
##       R-help (July 2007)
## 
## 
## I still don't know what to do about the compromise between how statistics
## should be done and how journal editors seem to insist it should be done ...
##    -- Ben Bolker
##       R-sig-mixed-models (October 2008)
## 
## 
## Nothing exceeds like Excel.
##    -- Roger Koenker (in reply to a question why it takes so long to paste
##       19,000 lines of R code from Excel into R)
##       R-help (October 2008)
## 
## 
## Fabio Mulazzani: I need to obtain all the 9.somethingExp157 permutations that
## can be given from the numbers from 1 to 100.
## Ted Harding: To an adequate approximation there are 10^158 of them. Simply to
## obtain them all (at a rate of 10^10 per second, which is faster than the CPU
## frequency of most desktop computers) would take 10^148 seconds, or slightly
## longer than 3*(10^140) years. Current estimates of the age of the Universe are
## of the order of 1.5*(10^10) years, so the Universe will have to last about
## 2*(10^130) times as long as it has already existed, before the task could be
## finished. So: why do you want to do this?
##    -- Fabio Mulazzani and Ted Harding
##       R-help (November 2008)
## 
## 
## Cross posting is sociopathic.
##    -- Roger Koenker
##       R-help (November 2008)
## 
## 
## Some people familiar with R describe it as a supercharged version of
## Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software.
##    -- Ashlee Vance (in his article "Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power")
##       The New York Times (January 2009)
## 
## 
## I think [R] addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free,
## readily available code. [...] We have customers who build engines for aircraft.
## I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.
##    -- Anne H. Milley (director of technology product marketing at SAS, quoted
##       in Ashlee Vance's article "Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power")
##       The New York Times (January 2009)
## 
## 
## It's interesting that SAS Institute feels that non-peer-reviewed software with
## hidden implementations of analytic methods that cannot be reproduced by others
## should be trusted when building aircraft engines.
##    -- Frank Harrell (in response to the statement of the SAS director of
##       technology product marketing: "We have customers who build engines for
##       aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.")
##       R-help (January 2009)
## 
## 
## This sounds like you have discovered homeopathic properties in Sweave! It will
## be serious if input files remember errors even after they have been removed.
##    -- Duncan Murdoch (after a user reported that two supposedly identical Rnw
##       documents work and lead to an error, respectively)
##       R-help (January 2009)
## 
## 
## Many problems come as a result of users forgetting that they are smarter than
## the computer. I see 3 ways to remedy the problem:
## 1. Make computers that are as smart or smarter than people.
## 2. Make the programmers anticipate every way that someone may use a particular
## function and make them implement all of the functionality even if they don't
## think it is worth the time/effort since there is an easy work around for many
## of the less likely used features.
## 3. Don't expect the computer to guess correctly and tell it exactly what you
## want it to do.
##    -- Greg Snow (in response to the question why as.Date() would not parse
##       "13/1/2001" in 'the only reasonable way')
##       R-help (January 2009)
## 
## 
## One of the beauties of S and R is the syntax closeness to mathematical
## notation. Many of us know that Lisp has beauties that S can never have, but
## that's really in different beauty-space.
##    -- Martin Maechler
##       R-devel (February 2009)
## 
## 
## R is Open Source and so you can modify it to emulate the bugs in other
## software: that is not one of the aims of its developers so please don't expect
## us to do so for you.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (answering a request for a change to Excel-like non IEC
##       60559 standard conform rounding)
##       R-help (March 2009)
## 
## 
## The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure
## that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.
##    -- John W. Tukey (the first of six "basics" against statistician's hubrises)
##       in "Sunset Salvo", The American Statistician 40(1), 72-76 (February 1986)
## 
## 
## I must say I feel very uneasy about giving advice on how to use R as a
## pre-processor for something that is to be done in Excel, but we are a broad
## church here!
##    -- Bill Venables
##       R-help (March 2009)
## 
## 
## No matter how much progress is made by the developers of screen readers somehow
## PDF remains less than accessible. It's a bit like a failed relationship in
## which one partner tries to win the other back with expensive gifts.
##    -- Paul R. Stanley (in a discussion about text-to-speech processors for the
##       benefit of blind users of LaTeX)
##       texhax mailing list (March 2009)
## 
## 
## As the name says, studentizing is left as an easy student exercise.
## Destudentizing is more difficult and usually called professorizing.
##    -- Dieter Menne (in response to a question whether residuals from nls() are
##       studentized)
##       R-help (April 2009)
## 
## 
## Hmm. I don't ever use R-squared, so I didn't implement it.
##    -- Thomas Lumley (in reply to a question about how to compute R-squared
##       using biglm)
##       R-help (April 2009)
## 
## 
## The issue really comes down to the fact that the questions: "exactly normal?",
## and "normal enough?" are 2 very different questions (with the difference
## becoming greater with increased sample size) and while the first is the easier
## to answer, the second is generally the more useful one.
##    -- Greg Snow (answering a question about a "normality test" suitable for
##       large data)
##       R-help (April 2009)
## 
## 
## Trellis graphics are a bit like hash functions: you can be close to the target,
## but get a far-off result.
##    -- Dieter Menne (about problems with creating a suitable lattice panel
##       function)
##       R-help (August 2008)
## 
## 
## The only people who should use the assign function are those who fully
## understand why you should never use the assign function.
##    -- Greg Snow
##       R-help (July 2009)
## 
## 
## 4 bits are not enough for me!
##    -- Philippe Grosjean (after conference dinner incl. wine in a conversation
##       about the representation of data in the ff package)
##       useR! 2009, Rennes (July 2009)
## 
## 
## Kelvin Lam: My institute has been heavily dependent on SAS for the past while,
## and SAS is starting to charge us a very deep amount for license renewal. Since
## we are a non-profit organization that is definitely not sustainable. The team
## is brainstorming possibility of switching to R, at least gradually. I am
## talking about the entire institute with considerable number of analysts using
## SAS their entire career. There's a handful of us using R regularly. What kind
## of problems and challenges have you faced?
## Frank Harrell: One of your challenges will be that with the increased
## productivity of the team you will have time for more intellectually challenging
## problems. That frustrates some people.
##    -- Kelvin Lam and Frank Harrell
##       R-help (July 2009)
## 
## 
## Yes we CRAN!
##    -- Aurelien Latouche (suggestion for a T-shirt slogan)
##       private communication (July 2009)
## 
## 
## Dear Uwe, thank you very much for your unvaluable time and effort.
##    -- Javier Cano (thanking Uwe Ligges for solving a coding problem)
##       R-help (July 2009)
## 
## 
## If I were to be treated by a cure created by stepwise regression, I would
## prefer voodoo.
##    -- Dieter Menne (in a thread about regressions with many variables)
##       R-help (October 2009)
## 
## 
## If one doesn't understand the output of lm(), then one's knowledge of
## statistics is insufficient to warrant using lm().
##    -- Peter Ehlers
##       R-help (October 2009)
## 
## 
## If 'fools rush in where angels fear to tread', then Bayesians 'jump' in where
## frequentists fear to 'step'.
##    -- Charles C. Berry (about Bayesian model selection as an alternative to
##       stepwise regression)
##       R-help (November 2009)
## 
## 
## You are going to need a few more sessions for this therapy to be useful, we
## cannot read your computer's mind, just interpret what you tell us. I don't want
## to jump ahead, but can you tell us the childhood of your crashes, etc.
##    -- Romain Francois (in a 'psychotherapy' session trying to understand the
##       sources of a useR's problems)
##       R-help (November 2009)
## 
## 
## It currently works (because I can't figure out how to make it an error) but you
## really should not do it.
##    -- Hadley Wickham (discussing a user's ggplot experiences)
##       R-help (October 2009)
## 
## 
## There's an informal tradition that those announcements [about R releases]
## contain at least one mistake, but apparently I forgot this time, so users have
## to make up their own....
##    -- Peter Dalgaard (about an apparent non-bug report in his former R-announce
##       message)
##       R-help (December 2009)
## 
## 
## It appears to me that you do not understand even basic statistics. As a
## corollary to that impression I would suggest that giving you advice about the
## use of R for scientific investigation could be morally similar to giving you
## advice about how to do your own household wiring.
##    -- David Winsemius
##       R-help (November 2009)
## 
## 
## Kakali Das: Is there any certification courses available in statistics in India
## which can be done after completing M.Sc. in Statistics? I need to know some
## courses which will be a specialization and can be done in distance mode from
## India?
## Kjetil Brinchmann Halvorsen: A specialization course (maybe better named
## generalization course) suitable to everybody, very cheap, and of immense
## quality, is to participate in the mailing list R-help, and simply try to
## understand (and then respond usefully) to questions arising there.
##    -- Kakali Das and Kjetil Brinchmann Halvorsen
##       Yahoo! Statisticians_group (November 2009)
## 
## 
## In general, it's much easier to create output from a R object than create an R
## object from output.
##    -- Hadley Wickham
##       R-help (December 2009)
## 
## 
## As Obi-Wan Kenobi may have said in Star Wars: "Use the source, Luke!"
##    -- Barry Rowlingson (answering a question on the documentation of some
##       implementation details)
##       R-devel (January 2010)
## 
## 
## Finally, a word of wisdom from a long-ago engineering colleague: "Whenever I
## see an outlier, I'm never sure whether to throw it away or patent it."
##    -- Berton Gunter (on outlier identification)
##       R-help (December 2009)
## 
## 
## As one of the developers of the nls function I would like to state that the
## lack of automatic ANOVA, R^2 and adj. R^2 from nls is a feature, not a bug :-)
##    -- Douglas Bates (in reply to a request for automatic ANOVA of NLS models as
##       in Statistica)
##       R-help (August 2000)
## 
## 
## My best advice regarding R^2 statistics with nonlinear models is, as Nancy
## Reagan suggested, "Just say no.".
##    -- Douglas Bates
##       R-help (August 2000)
## 
## 
## I recently attended a Ph.D. prelim exam where the candidate had proposed
## research on various ways of defining an R^2 statistic in the original data
## scale from a linear model fit to data in a transformed scale determined by the
## Box-Cox method. There were seven different possible definitions for R^2, all of
## which, as acknowledged by the candidate and by the thesis advisor, were
## incorrect. The purpose of this path-breaking study is to determine in some way
## which of these seven possible incorrect definitions should be used. My
## suggestion that the obvious answer was "none of them" was regarded as somewhat
## heretical.
##    -- Douglas Bates
##       R-help (August 2000)
## 
## 
## [Listing original copyright holders in R packages is] especially useful if
## there are areas of doubt and uncertainty (eg code published on ftp sites before
## people worried about licenses), since it at least gives you rigidly defined
## areas of doubt and uncertainty.[5]
## [5] Adams D, (1978) Hitchhiker's Guide. BBC Radio.
##    -- Thomas Lumley (in a discussion about copyright vs. licenses)
##       R-devel (January 2010)
## 
## 
## The widespread use of spreadsheets or SPSS data sets or SAS data sets which
## encourage the "single table with a gargantuan number of columns, most of which
## are missing data in most cases" approach to organization of longitudinal data
## is regrettable.
##    -- Douglas Bates (in a discussion about software for hierarchical data sets)
##       R-help (February 2010)
## 
## 
## R is a complex program. If you can't work out how to find the documentation, I
## doubt you will be able to use R.
##    -- David Kirby (in response to a vague question on where to find
##       documentation for R)
##       R-help (February 2010)
## 
## 
## If your ultimate interest is in real scientific progress, I'd suggest that you
## ignore that sentence (and any conclusion drawn subsequent to it).
##    -- Andy Liaw (in response to a question on the meaning of the sentence:
##       'Independent variables whose correlation with the response variable was
##       not significant at 5% level were removed')
##       R-help (March 2010)
## 
## 
## I begin to think that R needs a _mis_fortunes package...
##    -- Stephen L.R. Ellison
##       R-help (March 2010)
## 
## 
## I think what we are seeking is the marginal variance-covariance matrix of the
## parameter estimators (marginal with respect to the random effects random
## variable, B), which would have the form of the inverse of the crossproduct of a
## (q+p) by p matrix composed of the vertical concatenation of - L^{-1}RZX RX^{-1}
## and RX^{-1}. (Note: You do *not* want to calculate the first term by inverting
## L, use solve(L, RZX, system = "L") - [...] don't even think about using
## solve(L) - don't!, don't!, don't! - have I made myself clear? - don't do that
## (and we all know that someone will do exactly that for a very large L and then
## send out messages about "R is SOOOOO SLOOOOW!!!!" :-) )
##    -- Douglas Bates
##       R-SIG-Mixed-Models (March 2010)
## 
## 
## Only with a very high signal to noise ratio (e.g., high true R^2) can torturing
## data lead to a confession to something other than what the analyst wants to
## hear.
##    -- Frank Harrell
##       R-help (April 2010)
## 
## 
## If you don't want informative help files, it's really not much work to make
## uninformative ones.
##    -- Duncan Murdoch (in response to a question how to install a package
##       without editing .Rd files appropriately before)
##       R-help (May 2010)
## 
## 
## Dave Lubbers: R 2.7.2 - the manual says configure, make, which is what I did.
## So I did read the manual and followed the directions. The manual is too terse
## to get me there.
## Duncan Murdoch: You used the wrong tense. In referring to R 2.7.2, only past
## tenses are grammatically correct. If you want to say the manual *is* too terse,
## then you need to install R 2.11.0.
##    -- Dave Lubbers and Duncan Murdoch (on where to find libRmath)
##       R-devel (May 2010)
## 
## 
## Soham: How to compute the p-value of a statistic generally?
## Berton Gunter: runif(1)
##    -- Soham and Berton Gunter
##       R-help (May 2010)
## 
## 
## Karl Ove Hufthammer: Why not use 'predict.loess' (i.e., 'predict' on a loess
## object) directly?
## Greg Snow: Because that would be simple, straightforward, and make sense, and
## not require knowledge about less obvious functions.
##    -- Karl Ove Hufthammer and Greg Snow
##       R-help (May 2010)
## 
## 
## This reminds me of a quote I saw once (I think it may have been in one of those
## Murphy's Laws calendars), my parahpase:
## 
## If you make someone think that they are thinking,
##       They will love you for it.
## If you make them actually think,
##       They will hate you for it.
## 
## This explains why people love pie charts and hate more effective graphs.
##    -- Greg Snow
##       R-help (December 2009)
## 
## 
## On average, any data manipulation that can be described in a sentence or two of
## English can be programmed in one line in R. If you find yourself writing a long
## 'for' loop to do something that sounds simple, take a step back and research if
## an existing combination of functions can easily handle your request.
##    -- Erik Iverson
##       R-help (June 2010)
## 
## 
## There are actual error messages, and until you show them, we can not help as
## the mind reading machine is currently off for repairs.
##    -- Dirk Eddelbuettel (after reports about errors with R CMD check)
##       R-help (July 2010)
## 
## 
## Knut Krueger: Is there any function available to combine those p values?
## Stephan Kolassa: ?"+"
##    -- Knut Krueger and Stephan Kolassa (about ways to combine p values from
##       different tests)
##       R-help (July 2010)
## 
## 
## So, with the item in the original query:
## 
##   if (x<-3) do_something;
## 
## if they wrote it as
## 
##   if (x<(-3)) do_something;
## 
## there would be no problem (and no doubt about what went with what). Of course
## in complicated expressions this could induce an episode of ocular lispopia, but
## apart from that it's safe!
##    -- Ted Harding (about potential confusion between assignment and comparisons
##       with negative numbers)
##       R-devel (August 2010)
## 
## 
## Spencer Graves: What do you think about adding a "No RTFM" policy to the R
## mailing lists?
## Michael Dewey: You raise an interesting point but the responses to your post
## remind us that people (and indeed whole cultures) are not all situated at the
## same point on the continuum of directness between "It's a cow, stupid" and
## "From this side it looks not unlike a cow".
##    -- Spencer Graves and Michael Dewey (reply after a long discussion of a
##       potential "No RTFM" policy)
##       R-help (August 2010)
## 
## 
## Dirk Eddelbuettel: Could it get any more un-scientific and un-empirical? Maybe
## we should debate whether it is faster on Thursdays than on Wednesdays too?
## Thomas Lumley: That's easy. It's faster on Wednesdays, because faculty meeting
## and seminar are on Thursday (so more faculty are on campus using the computers)
## and homework for the applied regression sequence is due on Friday (so more
## students are using the computers).
##    -- Dirk Eddelbuettel and Thomas Lumley (after a rather vague disucssion
##       which language is fastest for numerical computations)
##       R-help and private communication (September 2010)
## 
## 
## datayoda: Bing is my friend...I found the cumsum() function.
## Dirk Eddelbuettel: If bing is your friend, then rseek.org is bound to be your
## uncle.
##    -- datayoda and Dirk Eddelbuettel (after searching for a function that
##       computes cumulative sums)
##       stackoverflow.com (October 2010)
## 
## 
## This is one of those cases, in my opinion, where R's documentation drops you
## into a flat landscape, in the middle of nowhere, in a thick mist.
##    -- Ted Harding (helping a user confused about R's partial matching behavior)
##       R-help (November 2010)
## 
## 
## I used a heuristic... pulled from my posterior. That makes it Bayesian, right?
##    -- JD Long (in a not too serious chat about modeling strategies)
##       Stackoverflow (November 2010)
## 
## 
## If you can do with[out a] Makefile, do without a Makefile.
##    -- Dirk Eddelbuettel (in a discussion about the benefits of (not) changing
##       the compiler in R packages)
##       R-SIG-HPC (December 2010)
## 
## 
## We also have huge amounts of work going into calibration transfer, i.e. making
## quantitative predictive models work on a different instrument. This is always a
## whole lot of work, and for some fields of problems at the moment considered
## basically impossible even between two instruments of the same model and
## manufacturer.
##    -- Claudia Beleites (in a discussion about publication bias and scientific
##       validity)
##       R-help (January 2011)
## 
## 
## This reminds me of a famous FORTRAN code snippet:
## 
## 10 STOP
## STOP
## STOP
## ! IN CASE STILL SKIDDING
## GOTO 10
##    -- Carl Witthoft (in response to the question how to completely stop R
##       scripts after stop())
##       R-help (January 2011)
## 
## 
## There is a reason that the speedometer in your car doesn't just read "slow" and
## "fast".
##    -- Frank Harrell (warning about the use of cutoffs after logistic regression)
##       R-help (February 2011)
## 
## 
## The style for JSS now enforces (via Achimitization) the use of quotes.
##    -- Michael Friendly (on whether to quote or not to quote arguments like
##       library("Hmisc") or help("mean"))
##       R-help (March 2011)
## 
## 
## Although there is almost never a "No" in R, the best short answer is: "No".
##    -- Uwe Ligges (in response to the question whether R has a concept of "const
##       objects" as in C++ that avoid modification)
##       R-help (March 2011)
## 
## 
## Tested solutions offered when reproducible examples are provided.
##    -- David Winsemius (suggesting a potential solution to a vague problem
##       description)
##       R-help (April 2011)
## 
## 
## The good way to do it is to include the following comment at the beginning:
## # This is a holy Script, please edit it not
##    -- Kenn Konstabel (on "... how to protect R Script files from inadvertent
##       editing by users.")
##       R-help (April 2011)
## 
## 
## Sorry, but this is the R-help list.  The 'R Spam' list is over at /dev/null.
##    -- Dirk Eddelbuettel (after a poster misused the mailing list for
##       advertising)
##       R-help (April 2011)
## 
## 
## You might also consider a more informative subject line. "Help needed" is true
## for all questions (not answers) on R-help. Just think, why is this list called
## R-***help***?
##    -- Peter Ehlers (after answering a help request)
##       R-help (April 2011)
## 
## 
## I think this is kind of like asking "will your Land Rover make it up my
## driveway?", but I'll assume the question was asked in all seriousness.
##    -- Ista Zahn (in response to a request for replication of some data
##       preprocessing done in SAS)
##       R-help (April 2011)
## 
## 
## In those first years after Bell Labs it was always a struggle to maintain my
## access to S and Port -- actually even Unix was a problem. I recall the director
## of campus computing services telling me that Unix wasn't appropriate for
## educational institutions since it was "too flexible."
##    -- Roger Koenker (in a discussion about nlminb)
##       private communication (April 2011)
## 
## 
## Joshua Wiley: ... the advantages of formal classes seem worth at least not
## entirely dismissing.
## Jim Lemon: Hmmm, yeah, that's about the grammatical equivalent of S4 classes.
##    -- Joshua Wiley and Jim Lemon (in a discussion about the relative advantages
##       of S3 and S4 classes)
##       R-help (May 2011)
## 
## 
## For recursive objects, search for recursive objects.
##    -- Barry Rowlingson (in a thread about "Recursive objects" and how to search
##       for former discussions about the topic)
##       R-devel (May 2011)
## 
## 
## Most people pay infinitely more to Microsoft for Windows than they pay to R
## Core for R. I hope that's also the ratio of their complaints to Microsoft about
## this bug to their complaints to us about R.
##    -- Duncan Murdoch (after a report that the default R version associated with
##       .R files could not be changed in the standard Windows dialogs)
##       R-help (May 2011)
## 
## 
## The trouble with nonstandard evaluation is that it doesn't follow standard
## evaluation rules...
##    -- Peter Dalgaard (about nonstandard evaluation in the curve() function)
##       R-help (June 2011)
## 
## 
## Vaishali Sadaphal: I need to give my R code to my client to use. I would like
## to protect the logic/algorithms that have been coded in R. This means that I
## would not like anyone to be able to read the code.
## Duncan Murdoch: R is an open source project, so providing ways for you to do
## this is not one of our goals. [...] If you think your client will steal from
## you, then you should find another client.
##    -- Vaishali Sadaphal and Duncan Murdoch
##       R-help (July 2011)
## 
## 
## Well..... SAS is SAS, but R is FREE...
##    -- Abhishek Rathore (in a discussion about R vs. SAS)
##       LinkedIn Group Stat-Math Statistics (July 2011)
## 
## 
## It is becoming apparent that you do not know how to use the results from either
## system. The progress of science would be safer if you get some advice from a
## person that knows what they are doing.
##    -- David Winsemius (in response to a user that obtained different linear
##       regression results in R and SPSS and wanted to know which one to use)
##       R-help (July 2011)
## 
## 
## For quite a while, bug-for-bug compatibility with S-PLUS v 3.x was considered
## important to allow people to port their packages between systems.
##    -- Peter Dalgaard
##       R-help (February 2009)
## 
## 
## I've been reading Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical
## Models by Gelman and Hill. I'm getting acquainted with my new cartoon character
## friends Elmer (lmer) and Bugs, and at some point it may become clear what is
## going on. At the moment though, the whole thing seems a bit Looney Tunes.
##    -- Paul Miller
##       R-SIG-Mixed-Models (August 2011)
## 
## 
## Thank your for your entry in the Poorly Capitalized and Inadequately Searched
## Posting Contest. You will be advised of your ranking in due course.
##    -- David Winsemius (in response to an all-lower-case question on a simple
##       clustering task)
##       R-help (August 2011)
## 
## 
## Don't do as I say, do as Hadley does.
##    -- Barry Rowlingson (in a discussion about the workflow for writing R
##       packages, see also fortune(128))
##       R-devel (September 2011)
## 
## 
## R is wonderful, but it cannot work magic.
##    -- Rolf Turner (answering a request for automatic generation of 'data from a
##       known mean and 95% CI')
##       R-help (October 2011)
## 
## 
## If we told you all of R's secrets, we'd have to kill you.
##    -- Duncan Murdoch (answering a request for too detailed documentation)
##       R-help (October 2011)
## 
## 
## I know barely more than zero about R: until yesterday I didn't know how to
## spell it.
##    -- Pete Wilson
##       stackoverflow (October 2011)
## 
## 
## Kevin Wright: Doug already mentioned the limitations of open source
## optimization code. Open source has benefits, but simply being open doesn't
## necessarily mean better.
## 
## Joshua Wiley: Actually, a series of studies I have conducted including
## theoretical proofs and empirical evidence proves open source to be
## unequivocally better. If you are interested, you can pay me to use the
## assertion, but the supporting details are restricted so you must accept that my
## internal checks and quality control are sufficient and the findings are correct
## and accurate. Details follow.
## 
## License and Use of I. Ben Fooled's findings:
## 
## "Open source is unequivocally better" is $10 for personal use or $20 for each
## public use of the assertion. It is also possible to get a yearly license, but
## note that this does not include updates. Support is extra. If you wish to use
## the assertions on a multicore system, there is an additional $5 per core per
## assertion fee. A student version is available for pedagogical purposes only:
## "pn src s nqvcll bttr". If you need more than 20 letters, please upgrade to the
## full version.
## 
## This is the best thing since bread, but don't take my word for it. Here are
## some trite testimonials putatively from customers:
## 
## "Using I. Ben Fooled's assertion has really revolutionized my work. I love it.
## I use it every day" ~ Jane, Data Expert
## 
## "I lost 130 lbs on this system", 'wait, this isn't a weightloss testimonial?
## Sorry!' "My work is easily twice as efficient since I switched to I. Ben
## Fooled's product." ~ John, Entrepeneur
##    -- Kevin Wright and Joshua Wiley
##       R-SIG-Mixed-Models (October 2011)
## 
## 
## As with many tools in this domain, for effective use they require more
## knowledge than many of their users possess, and can be dangerous because they
## seem to "work".
##    -- John C. Nash (in the context of stochastic optimization)
##       R-help (December 2011)
## 
## 
## Unfortunately, this is one of those situations where as far as I can tell all
## of the real statisticians are out there playing with large data sets where the
## small-sample corrections are not so important and leaving the rest of us to
## figure it out for ourselves...
##    -- Ben Bolker (about the 'correct' degrees-of-freedom correction in Wald
##       statistics for GLMMs)
##       R-SIG-Mixed-Models (December 2011)
## 
## 
## David Winsemius: Any of your staff can view the (open) source code just as any
## other member of the human race.
## Uwe Ligges: I do not think the GPL excludes other species...
##    -- David Winsemius and Uwe Ligges (following a request for access to the R
##       sources)
##       R-help (December 2011)
## 
## 
## I think the amount of people on this list who understand your question is
## roughly zero.
##    -- Uwe Ligges (in response to a non-reproducible problem for which
##       additionally subject and body did not match well)
##       R-help (January 2012)
## 
## 
## It's not meant for sampling weights. It's meant for precision weights. How best
## to include sampling weights in mixed models is a research problem at the
## moment, but you can rely on getting the wrong answer if you just use the
## weights= argument.
##    -- Thomas Lumley (in reponse to a question about specifying sampling weights
##       in lme4)
##       R-help (January 2012)
## 
## 
## Perhaps same thing that will happen when those monks finish the Towers of Hanoi?
## 2 * 3^198
## [1] 5.902533e+94
##    -- David Winsemius (in reponse to a question about expand.grid(x1=1, x2=1:2,
##       x3=1:3, x4=1:3, x5=1:3, ..., x200=1:3))
##       R-help (January 2012)
## 
## 
## I'll go back to lurking in the daily R-Helps and not ask any more questions
## until I've read all the old R-help messages. I'm working on December 1998 right
## now and reading forward. Perhaps by next year I'll will have read all the old
## R-help postings and I'll dare ask another question then.
##    -- Earl F. Glynn
##       R-help (January 2012)
## 
## 
## Dirk Eddelbuettel: Devel is in the detail.
## Douglas Bates: Typo or profound insight?
##    -- Dirk Eddelbuettel and Douglas Bates
##       Rcpp-devel (February 2012)
## 
## 
## There seem to be three canons: R-Forge, Rforge, and for the Followers of
## Wickham, github. Four, if you count OmegaHat.
##    -- David Winsemius (in a discussion about the 'canonical' source code
##       management platform for R)
##       R-help (February 2012)
## 
## 
## The problem here is that the $ notation is a magical shortcut and like any
## other magic if used incorrectly is likely to do the programmatic equivalent of
## turning yourself into a toad.
##    -- Greg Snow (in response to a user that wanted to access a column whose
##       name is stored in y via x$y rather than x[[y]])
##       R-help (February 2012)
## 
## 
## Etienne B. Racine: I haven't seen any documentation about this behavior.
## Edzer Pebesma: Isn't the more important question whether you saw documentation
## that is in conflict with this behaviour?
## Tom Gottfried: Taking that to the extremes: undocumented software always works
## perfectly.
##    -- Etienne B. Racine, Edzer Pebesma, and Tom Gottfried
##       R-SIG-Geo (February 2012)
## 
## 
## That's a casual model, not a causal model - you can tell the difference by
## looking for the word "excel".
##    -- Hadley Wickham (commenting on an Excel chart showing student's SAT score
##       increases with family income, without considering further covariates)
##       http://twitter.com/#!/hadleywickham (February 2012)
## 
## 
## Careful now, or I'll get into a rant about how much you pay for ArcGIS and
## whether you are getting value for money if bugs become 'well-known'! Bugs in R
## tend to be either 'obscure' or 'fixed' :)
##    -- Barry Rowlingson (in response to a request for rgdal to work around a
##       well-known bug in ArcGIS)
##       R-SIG-Geo (March 2012)
## 
## 
## Igor Sosa Mayor: The problem is that it gives the result that I want.
## Sarah Goslee: That's a new sort of problem.
##    -- Igor Sosa Mayor and Sarah Goslee
##       R-help (March 2012)
## 
## 
## I'd have called them .Rob for the current .rds file format (single object), and
## .Ros for the current .rda file format (>1 objects). [actually I would have
## called them .Rob or .Robject, and .Rwk or .Rworkspace but then I noticed that
## if you had a .Rob you had to have a .Ros so as not to favour one or other of
## the project originators :)]
##    -- Barry Rowlingson (in a discussion about .rda and .rds formats)
##       R-help (April 2012)
## 
## 
## R is a strange, deeply flawed language that nevertheless has an enthusiastic
## and rapidly growing user base. What about R accounts for its popularity in its
## niche? What can language designers learn from R's success?
##    -- John Cook (Abstract of "Why and How People Use R")
##       Lang.NEXT 2012 (April 2012)
## 
## 
## Finally, as author of the code used to put CG in optim, I'll advise against its
## use. One of my least successful pieces of code. Rcgmin is better, but you
## really do need analytic derivatives to make it sing. For 5 parameters, use NM,
## or better the nmk from dfoptim package.
##    -- John C. Nash (in a discussion about optimization of a multinomial
##       log-likelihood)
##       R-help (May 2012)
## 
## 
## Some OSX users know that OSX is really Unix [...], others think that OSX is
## cooler Windows, and they have ontological problems with non-Apple phenomena and
## constructs.
##    -- Roger Bivand
##       R-SIG-Geo (May 2012)
## 
## 
## I see three drivers of problems with R.
## The first is that R is useful. [...]
## The second driver of problems with R is that it is both a programming language
## and an interactive language. There is a tension there that is unavoidable. [...]
## The third big driver of problems is that R is not software, it is a community.
##    -- Patrick Burns (Inferno-ish R)
##       CambR User Group Meeting, Cambridge (May 2012)
## 
## 
## As long as R stayed in Ross and Robert's computer lab, R could be perfectly
## clean and beautiful. [...]
## The moral of the story is that if you want to create a beautiful language, for
## god's sake don't make it useful.
##    -- Patrick Burns (Inferno-ish R)
##       CambR User Group Meeting, Cambridge (May 2012)
## 
## 
## If you think you can learn all of R, you are wrong. For the foreseeable future
## you will not even be able to keep up with the new additions.
##    -- Patrick Burns (Inferno-ish R)
##       CambR User Group Meeting, Cambridge (May 2012)
## 
## 
## The phrase "does not work" is not very helpful, it can mean quite a few things
## including:
## * Your computer exploded.
## * No explosion, but smoke is pouring out the back and microsoft's "NoSmoke"
## utility is not compatible with your power supply.
## * The computer stopped working.
## * The computer sits around on the couch all day eating chips and watching talk
## shows.
## * The computer has started picketing your house shouting catchy slogans and
## demanding better working conditions and an increase in memory.
## * Everything went dark and you cannot check the cables on the back of the
## computer because the lights are off due to the power outage.
## * R crashed, but the other programs are still working.
## * R gave an error message and stopped processing your code after running for a
## while.
## * R gave an error message without running any of your code (and is waiting for
## your next command).
## * R is still running your code and the time has exceeded your patience so you
## think it has hung.
## * R completed and returned a result, but also gave warnings.
## * R completed your command, but gave an incorrect answer.
## * R completed your command but the answer is different from what you expect
## (but is correct according to the documentation).
## 
## There are probably others. Running your code I think the answer is the last one.
##    -- Greg Snow
##       R-help (April 2012)
## 
## 
## Richard M. Heiberger: That will make it easier for the next person converting
## from windows to mac.
## Simon Urbanek: Well, it certainly doesn't make sense to introduce Windows
## idiosyncrasies to Mac - if you convert to Mac you will need to buy into the
## "just-works" philosophy. If you are trying to recreate your Windows
## environment, you have already failed and should go back :).
##    -- Richard M. Heiberger and Simon Urbanek (in a discussion about the
##       location of the R FAQ on different platforms)
##       R-SIG-Mac (July 2012)
## 
## 
## I think, therefore I R.
##    -- William B. King (in his R tutorials)
##       http://ww2.coastal.edu/kingw/statistics/R-tutorials/ (July 2010)
## 
## 
## Jeremy Koster: My students were looking at the estimated varying intercepts for
## each higher-level group (or the "BLUP's", as some people seem to call them).
## Douglas Bates: As Alan James once said, "these values are just like the BLUPs -
## Best Linear Unbiased Predictors - except that they aren't linear and they
## aren't unbiased and there is no clear sense in which they are "best", but other
## than that ..."
##    -- Jeremy Koster and Douglas Bates
##       R-SIG-Mixed-Models (July 2012)
## 
## 
## I wish there was a better way for me to learn this stuff than constantly being
## wrong in public.
##    -- Hadley Wickham (in a discussion about efficient expansion of vectors and
##       algorithmic complexity)
##       R-help (July 2012)
## 
## 
## Hans Ole Orka: I try to reproduce the SAS proc reg stepwise model selection
## procedure in R.
## Brian D. Ripley: But why? If you want 1950s statistical methods why not use a
## 1960s package? There are enough problems with stepwise selection (see e.g. the
## book by Frank Harrell and many postings here) even with a well-defined
## criterion like AIC, but that is better than an ad hoc algorithm, especially one
## based on forwards selection.
##    -- Hans Ole Orka and Brian D. Ripley
##       R-help (September 2007)
## 
## 
## The computational ease with which an abundance of parameters can be estimated
## should not be allowed to obscure the probable unwisdom of such estimation from
## limited data.
##    -- Arthur P. Dempster
##       in "Covariance selection", Biometrics 28 (1), 157-175 (March 1972)
## 
## 
## I thought RStudio was amazing, but RStudio with knitr is approximately
## `formatC(round(runif(1, 1e8, 1e9)), digits=10, big.mark=',')` times better than
## RStudio alone!
##    -- @Geneorama (comment on RStudio's new web publishing service)
##       RStudio blog (June 2012)
## 
## 
## Awkwardly worded questions will get much better answers if they are accompanied
## by some test data.
##    -- David Winsemius (in response to a poster's apology for an 'awkwardly
##       worded question')
##       R-help (September 2012)
## 
## 
## Liang Che: For example, if coefficient's p-value is less than 0.1 I want the
## stepwise to automatically drop that variable. Can the stepAIC be customized to
## do that? SAS seems to be able to customized stepwise function with p-value or
## cooks'd.
## David Winsemius: You might take some time to ponder the possibility that the
## fact that it's not easy in R might be useful information in its own right.
##    -- Liang Che and David Winsemius
##       R-help (September 2012)
## 
## 
## Josh O'Brien: Figuring out what was going on here obsessed me for several days,
## before I realized "Oh, duh. I should ask this on [Stackoverflow] and get some
## better minds working on this for me!"
## Brandon Bertelsen: I've learned to give up after 30 minutes. It's cheaper to
## pay people in checkmarks and upvotes :)
##    -- Josh O'Brien and Brandon Bertelsen (discussing a package's definition of
##       reorder.factor changing results)
##       Stackoverflow (October 2012)
## 
## 
## This should be FAQ 0.0. No other thing is asked as frequently as this. This is
## the FAQest of all FAQs, and a mother of all FAQs.
##    -- Jari Oksanen (answering yet another question related to FAQ 7.31)
##       R-help (February 2013)
## 
## 
## I've already got an apartment reserved for me in one of Pat Burns's "R Inferno"
## levels, and I don't want to descend even further.
##    -- Berton Gunter (commenting on his own somewhat off-topic comment)
##       R-help (February 2013)
## 
## 
## Running as administrator is like heroin... any problems it solves it replaces
## with worse problems.
##    -- Jeff Newmiller (about running R CMD check as administrator)
##       R-help (February 2013)
## 
## 
## I think the rule is that you can do anything as long as you don't complain. If
## you want to complain, you must follow the instructions.
##    -- Jari Oksanen (about not following the instructions when compiling R-devel)
##       R-devel (February 2013)
## 
## 
## I think that the formula language does allow expressions with '/' to represent
## nested factors but I can't check right now as there is a fire in the building
## where my office is located. I prefer to simply write nested factors as factor1
## + factor1:factor2.
##    -- Douglas Bates
##       R-SIG-Mixed-Models (February 2013)
## 
## 
## Bandwidth selection is an unresolved (and possibly unsolvable) problem in
## smoothing, so you're perfectly justified in trying/choosing an arbitrary value
## if it produces good pictures!
##    -- Adrian Baddeley (answering a user's question about the choice of
##       smoothing parameter when using the density.ppp() function from the
##       spatstat package)
##       private communication (March 2013)
## 
## 
## Rickyfox: Dang it how could I have missed this? Thx for the answer, I feel
## incredibly stupid now.
## Juba: Never underestimate the power of R to make you feel stupid.
##    -- Rickyfox and Juba (in an exchange over how ifelse() works)
##       stackoverflow.com (March 2013)
## 
## 
## If things are not readily available in R it is always good to pause and reflect
## if there might be a good reason.
##    -- Brian D. Ripley (about how to get t statistics for arima())
##       R-help (March 2013)
## 
## 
## Sooner or later most R beginners are bitten by this all too convenient
## shortcut. As an R newbie, think of R as your bank account: overuse of
## $-extraction can lead to undesirable consequences. It's best to acquire the
## '[[' and '[' habit early.
##    -- Peter Ehlers (about the use of $-extraction)
##       R-help (March 2013)
## 
## 
## Most optimization problems have more than one answer, and the "wrong" ones
## often seem to be easier to find.
##    -- John C. Nash (about nonlinear optimization problems)
##       R-help (April 2013)
## 
## 
## JPM Miao: Why can't R understand if(num!=NA)?
## Peter Dalgaard: Because comparison with an unknown value yields an unknown
## result.
## David Winsemius: Anything else would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
## We cannot have comparisons reducing entropy, now can we? Uncertainty cannot run
## uphill.
##    -- JPM Miao, Peter Dalgaard, and David Winsemius (on why is.na() is needed)
##       R-help (May 2013)
## 
## 
## In that flash of darkness he heard people saying - he was a failure - that R
## was beyond him.
##    -- Virginia Woolf
##       To The Lighthouse (May 1927)
## 
## 
## This is a bit like asking how should I tweak my sailboat so I can explore the
## ocean floor.
##    -- Roger Koenker (in response to a question about tweaking the quantreg
##       package to handle probit and heckit models)
##       R-help (May 2013)
## 
## 
## Justin: Is there a function that just does whatever I'm thinking (aka whatever
## my homework question is...)?
## Joshua Ulrich: That's the magic_pony function.
##    -- Justin and Joshua Ulrich
##       stackoverflow.com (June 2013)
## 
## 
## The job of computer output, in my view, is to be as informative as possible
## while keeping the output as terse as possible.
##    --  John Maindonald
##       R-SIG-Mixed-Models (June 2013)
## 
## 
## You need to get the hang of reading the online help. The information required
## is actually there in ?dotchart --- it's just tersely and obscurely expressed. A
## certain degree of optimism is required. You need to ***believe*** that the
## information is there; then ask yourself "What could they possibly mean by what
## they have written that would tell me what I need to know?".
##    -- Rolf Turner (on reading the help pages)
##       R-help (June 2013)
## 
## 
## But a spatial benchmark suite would be nice anyway.
## I've just benchmarked my time and I have 0s to do this.
##    -- Barry Rowlingson (on benchmarking spatial functionality and assessing
##       improvements with pqR)
##       R-SIG-Geo (June 2013)
## 
## 
## John Fox: I've never understood why it's legal to change the built-in global
## "constants" in R, including T and F. That just seems to me to set a trap for
## users. Why not treat these as reserved symbols, like TRUE, Inf, etc.?
## Rolf Turner: I rather enjoy being able to set pi <- 3.
##    -- John Fox and Rolf Turner
##       R-help (June 2013)
## 
## 
## I have it on good authority that a few of the statements in Bolker (2008) are
## out of date or slightly incorrect :-) .
##    -- Ben Bolker (in reply to a user that cited his 2008 practical guide to
##       generalized linear mixed models)
##       R-SIG-Mixed-Models (August 2013)
## 
## 
## Well, the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement :)
##    -- Soren Hojsgaard ( in reply to a suggestion to make pbkrtest and lme4 more
##       robust)
##       R-SIG-Mixed-Models (August 2013)
## 
## 
## I'm still confused about how to avoid the wrath of the CRAN-devel daemon, whose
## appetite for new morsels of developer flesh seems ever increasing and makes
## keeping even a stable package up-to-date a moving target.
##    -- Michael Friendly (about checking packages for CRAN)
##       R-devel (September 2013)
## 
## 
## Maybe I'll become a theoretician. Nobody expects you to maintain a theorem.
##    -- Doug Bates (about keeping both Matrix and RcppEigen in sync with CHOLMOD)
##       lme4-authors (September 2013)
## 
## 
## Bert Gunter: However, I do not understand the substitute(...()) idiom. Would
## you care to explain it? (No is an acceptable answer!).
## Bill Dunlap: I don't completely understand it either, I treat it as an idiom. I
## saw it on this list once.
##    -- Bert Gunter and Bill Dunlap (on how to recover object names when using
##       the ... argument in a function)
##       R-help (October 2013)
## 
## 
## The existence of a method is not a sufficient reason to use that method.
##    -- Jari Oksanen (about relative advantages of several multivariate analysis
##       methods)
##       R-SIG-Ecology (November 2013)
## 
## 
## I would heed the warnings and diagnostics. They are there for a reason. The
## Ostrich algorithm does not help you.
##    -- Dirk Eddelbuettel (in reply to a questioner who said he had not run R CMD
##       check because he suspected other problems would be found)
##       Stackoverflow (November 2013)
## 
## 
## Either I am misunderstanding your intent or you need another cup of coffee.
##    -- Rolf Turner (in response to a user who did not understand his advice)
##       R-help (November 2013)
## 
## 
## You seem to be falling prey to a common misconception that "R" is some
## monolithic tool, when in fact it is a herd of cats.
##    -- Jeff Newmiller (in response to a user who did not look for packages)
##       R-help (December 2013)
## 
## 
## Basically, you are calling .Internal from the command line. It is not designed
## to be called from there and only wizards know what happens if it is. (The set
## of wizards who might know whether it makes any sense at all does not include
## me!)
##    -- Peter Dalgaard
##       R-devel (May 2014)
## 
## 
## Jeff Newmiller's rhelp/ggplot strategy checklist:
## > Reproducibility == good (except for mixing in invalid code and failing to set
## RNG seed)
## > HTML email == bad
## > Missing subject == bad
## > Using matrices with ggplot == pushing a rope
## > Using for loops to build a ggplot == missing the point
## > Using wide-form data with ggplot == pushing a rope
##    -- Jeff Newmiller (in response to a somewhat involved ggplot2 question)
##       R-help (June 2014)
## 
## 
## Michael Mason: Thanks! That worked.
## Martin Maechler: Of course: As in about 99.99% of all cases where Bill Dunlap
## helps.
##    -- Michael Mason and Martin Maechler (after Bill Dunlap helped with a
##       plot.hclust problem)
##       R-help (November 2014)
## 
## 
## When in doubt, keep adding slashes until it works.
##    -- Joran Elias (on how to escape a backslash in R)
##       Stackoverflow (March 2015)
## 
## 
## .RData files (the ones with nothing before the period) are just traps for your
## future self, with no documentation. I avoid them like the plague.
##    -- Jeff Newmiller (in a discussion on whether to store certain defaults in
##       .Rprofile or .RData files)
##       R-help (March 2015)
## 
## 
## hist(rnorm(1e6), col = colors()[grep("grey", colors())], nclass = 108, main =
## "R's 108 Shades of Grey")
##    -- Fritz Scholz (proving R has more than 50 Shades of Grey)
##       private communication (March 2015)
## 
## 
## In real life, be very careful before denigrating a child to its mother or
## father... so calling a something a bug in R which is none, is evoking feelings
## among R's parents... ;-)
##    -- Martin Maechler (after a package author reported a bug in R that was
##       actually a bug in his own code)
##       R-devel (May 2015)
## 
## 
## Welcome to the wonderful world of heterogeneity (tau^2) estimators in
## meta-analysis. The question of which estimator to choose never fails to provide
## fun and entertainment for the entire family and I predict that it will do so
## for generations to come. Please quote me on that!
##    -- Wolfgang Viechtbauer (in response to a request for the appropriate
##       heterogeneity estimator)
##       R-SIG-Mixed-Models (May 2015)
## 
## 
## Rahul: Microsoft's being a part of this makes me worried about R's future. It's
## like a Michelin star restaurant becoming part of a McDonald's franchise chain.
## Andrew Gelman: I dunno, R's not quite a Michelin-starred restaurant. It's more
## like a food truck.
## Daniel Lakeland: I would say if R is like a food truck, it's a TARDIS food
## truck that's bigger on the inside and offers a vast array of multi-ethnic
## cuisine which, if not all entirely tasty, is at least A rated on sanitation.
##    -- Rahul, Andrew Gelman, and Daniel Lakeland (in a discussion about Excel
##       interfaces and Microsoft being part of the new R Consortium)
##       AndrewGelman.com (July 2015)
## 
## 
## The urge to imitate other statistical packages that rely on profusion of
## dummies should be resisted. R repression functions can handle factor variables.
##    -- David (Muphry) Winsemius (about factors in regressions...and the dangers
##       of drinking and deriding)
##       R-help (September 2015)
## 
## 
## It will be included in the next version of devtools - it's totally do-able, but
## no one has done it yet.
##    -- Hadley Wickham (about doing things)
##       R-help (February 2016)
## 
## 
## Barry Rowlingson: I've been unable to locate any version of S online. Does
## anyone have a copy, somewhere, rusting away on an old hard disk or slowly
## flaking off a tape? [...] Obviously this would be for archaeological purposes.
## John Chambers: [...] somehow "historical" would be less unnerving than
## "archeological".
## Barry Rowlingson: At least I didn't say palaeontological.
##    -- Barry Rowlingson and John Chambers (on the availability of the source
##       code for early versions of S)
##       R-devel (February 2016)
## 
## 
## Ooops, that was answering the question you actually asked. The one you meant to
## ask is answered by this part:
## The sort order for character vectors will depend on the collating sequence of
## the locale in use: see Comparison.
##    -- Peter Dalgaard (demonstrating his mind-reading skills when answering
##       questions about sorting characters)
##       R-help (March 2016)
## 
## 
## Note that there is a reasonable discussion in Writing R Extensions, but as
## always, you have to find it first.
##    -- Dirk Eddelbuettel (in a discussion about where to include data-generating
##       scripts in an R package)
##       R-pkg-devel (March 2016)
## 
## 
## They're just statistics. How could it hurt to look at them?
##    -- Duncan Murdoch (in a discussion about the merits and perils of p-values)
##       R-help (April 2016)
## 
## 
## I prefer _Melodramatic Analysis_.
##    -- Dirk Eddelbuettel (after Barry Rowlingson noticed 'Sentimental Analysis'
##       as a misspelled 'Sentiment Analysis' on datascience.stackexchange.com)
##       R chatroom on stackoverflow.com (April 2016)
## 
## 
## Weird. Over at ESS they discuss how to debug with %>% when I always thought
## that having %>% was the bug.
##    -- Dirk Eddelbuettel (about an ESS issue ticket discussion concerning
##       debugging when %>% is used)
##       R chatroom on stackoverflow.com (April 2016)
## 
## 
## The problem with attach is what it does, not how it does it. If you do the same
## thing attach does any other way, you've managed to create all the problems of
## attach without using attach. If I tell you chopping your finger off with a
## knife is bad, your question shouldn't be "Okay, knives are bad. How do I chop
## my finger off without a knife? Can I use scissors or is there a better way?"
##    -- Gregor (about alternatives to attach())
##       stackoverflow.com (May 2016)
## 
## 
## Teach a man to fish, and he'll use StackOverflow for a day. Give him a fish,
## and he'll use StackOverflow for a lifetime of free fish.
##    -- Joshua Ulrich (about pointing to R documentation on StackOverflow)
##       stackoverflow.com (May 2016)
## 
## 
## You should try things; R won't break.
##    -- Duncan Murdoch (encouraging a user to explore R's graphical capabilities)
##       R-help (May 2016)
## 
## 
## Please don't apply R like a magic answers box, because you can mislead others
## and cause harm.
##    -- Jeff Newmiller (about how much statistical knowledge is needed for using
##       R)
##       R-help (May 2016)
## 
## 
## Your example requires all choices of 1541 out of 3000, which I would expect to
## take somewhere near age-of-the-universe seconds to compute. The code uses a
## clever nested computation due to Gail et al which will cut that time down to
## infinity/10.
##    -- Terry Therneau (on an example with exact computations in coxph)
##       R-help (June 2016)
## 
## 
## Performance tweaks are more often bug sources than fixes.
##    -- Duncan Murdoch (on Martin Maechler's optimistic plan of porting
##       performance improvements from R's development version to R x.y.z (z >= 1)
##       patch releases)
##       R-core (June 2016)
## 
## 
## This is like asking, "My car doesn't work. Can anyone tell me what is wrong?"
##    -- Jeff Newmiller (in response to the generic question why "some packages do
##       not work" in R 3.2.5)
##       R-help (June 2016)
## 
## 
## If we put in a function into rstan that dropped chains, people would use it.
##    -- Ben Goodrich (about (not) discarding selected chains from a stanfit
##       object)
##       Stan-users (December 2016)