Statistics, R, Graphics and Fun

I have to admit that the previous post on Christmas is actually not much fun. Today I received another pResent from Yixuan which is more interesting:

Life should be fun. I saw a post in R-help list saying Merry Christmas to other useRs, and I followed up by some R code which can produce a naive animation like this:

Here is the code to generate the above Flash animation with shining Christmas:

library(animation)
saveSWF({
    n = length(speed <- runif(angle <- runif(x <- strsplit("MERRY CHRISTMAS",
        "")[[1]], 0, 360), 0, 15))
    for (j in 1:300) {
        angle = angle + speed
        plot.new()
        plot.window(c(1, n), c(0, 1))
        for (i in 1:n) text(i, 0.5, x[i], srt = angle[i], cex = runif(1,
            1, 4), col = sample(colors(), 1))
        text(n, 0, "Yihui @ 2009-12-24 (http://yihui.name)",
            adj = c(1, 0), col = "white", cex = 0.8)
    }
}, interval = 0.04, dev = "pdf", outdir = getwd(), para = list(mar = rep(0,
    4), bg = "black"), width = 8, height = 1)
## in animation package (>=1.1-0), see demo('Xmas')

There are other animation formats in the R package animation:

1. use saveMovie() to get a GIF animation (need ImageMagick)
2. ani.start() and ani.stop() can produce an HTML page with the animation in it
3. saveLatex() can embed an animation into a PDF document

Linlin Yan posted a cool (hot?) simulation of burning fire with R in the COS forum yesterday, which was indeed a warm welcome. I’m not sure whether our forum members will be scared by the “fire” under the title “Welcome to COS Forum”. The fire was mainly created by the function image() with carefully designed rows and columns in heated colors heat.colors(). Here is one of the pictures generated from his code: