(Note to the usual crowd: sorry for the boring post. Halloween pix soon.)
In looking for helpful documentation on R, I was surprised by the unwelcoming tone of many of the resources ostensibly intended to help new R users. On one mailing list, for instance, I found a higher incidence of RTFM and STFW than I've ever seen before. Believe me, I wanted to RTFM. Unfortunately, the FM seems to be written in --I don't know, Klingon. Some language that uses an English sound system but is utterly unintelligible to me, some language spoken by a clever but apparently cruel race of beings who scorn the idea of intelligent life outside their demesnes.
To anyone who arrives here via Google, similarly battered by attempts to learn R, I suggest that you start with this friendly tutorial. If you want to copy a graphic from R to another program (like the Word document in which you are chronicling your maiden voyage), do it like this:
> png("file_name_here.png")
> plot(x1,x2) [or hist, or whatever else]
> dev.off()
I hope this saves you the many hours it took me to figure that one out. Oh, bummer, I was going to credit the web page where I finally found the magic sequence but I closed that tab and I have no hope of finding it in the moment. I am being instructed to hop off the computer so that Pete can watch Thomas the Tank Engine videos on YouTube.
Before I do: swimmermom asked me about my results at Freerice.com and I have gone back and forth about whether to reply because was it boasting to put that on the web? And maybe it is, but maybe an admission of weakness (see: the rest of this post) cancels out a boast. So I will say that I can get to level 50 pretty easily: the last time I was there, I missed 2 out of the first 47 words I was given. Then I stopped, because I wasn't sure about the word on the screen, and I have this compulsion about finishing at level 50, AND I have a statistics assignment that is (have I mentioned?) due tomorrow. So in sum: English vocabulary strong, Klingon vocabulary dismal.
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