Statistics, R, Graphics and Fun

Here is my personal list of rules of thumb for people who want to meet some R gurus (quickly) in the R help mailing list (R-help@R-project.org):

• If you want to meet Dr Bill Venables, just say something about Type III Sum of Squares (better if you also mention the “unbeatable” SAS);
• If you want to meet Prof Douglas Bates, say something about LSMEANS (of course, with SAS) and P-values for the fixed effects in lmer() (or wait in the mixed-models group r-sig-mixed-models@r-project.org — he often shows up there);
• If you want to meet Prof Frank Harrell Jr, say SAS is unbeatable (or efficient, golden-standard, high-quality graphics, whatever);
• If you want to meet Dr Martin Mächler, say something like “I need help on a library called ***” (it is said that he would show up in 5 mins upon such mistakes, but I feel he is tired of correcting people who don’t know the difference between a “package” and a “library” now);
• If you want to meet Prof Brian Ripley (the-professor-on-whom-the-sun-never-sets), well, I guess you can say anything, because he is so devoted to the mailing list that you can see him a.e., but you have to be careful enough not to be “Ripleyed”;

I’ve been reading the mailing list for about 2 years, so I may not know enough about all the gurus. Let me know if I missed anyone. The above list is not given for serious purpose, and my real point is I learned a lot from their advice and arguments.

Today Romain Francois posted an interesting topic in the R-help list, and you can read his blog post for more details: celebrating R commit #50000. 50000 is certainly not a small number; we do owe R core members a big “thank you” for their great efforts in this fantastic statistical language in the 13 years. When I saw Romain’s data, I suddenly remembered a question I asked to one of Prof Ripley’s student a couple of years ago: does Prof Ripley ever sleep? And he answered “No!”. No wonder we can see Prof Ripley so frequently in the R-help/devel mailing list. If you have stayed on R-help list for enough long time, you’ll surely know several facts, e.g. Martin Maechler will arrive in less than 3 minutes if you dare call an R package “library”, and you will get “Ripleyed” if you are not careful enough in posting your R code.

> library(fortunes)
> fortune("Ripleyed")

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)