Keep on Fighting to Death!

Well, this site is available at last: www.yihui.name

But it seems that I don't have enough time to look after it currently. I'm 2 bz...

M$ never understands art design? Why the new version is so disgusting and inconvenient...

"Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?"

Al Boliska

Sometimes thinking is not that pleasant:

"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you."

Don Marquis

What I hate most about the internet is the spam email, so I pay much attention to how to write my email address in the public web pages. Of course we cannot write it directly, because it'll be easily searched out by those spam-makers and the consequence will be terrible.

Therefore, sometimes I write xieyihui (a) gmail.com, sometimes xieyihui AT gmail.com, or xieyihui # gmail.com, but what I like most is x@y with x=xieyihui & y=gmail.com

Happy times will perish, and so will hard times.

But there's still too much work to do :-(

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By the way, yesterday I registered a domain name for myself: www.yihui.name (or just simply yihui.name). I plan to build a genuine personal website during this summer holiday and drop all my other websites such as blogs or spaces. I never have a sense of safety (or satisfaction) when using services which do not really belong to myself. Now you may visit http://blog.yihui.name for this MSN space, but the homepage is not available currently.

The weather in Beijing is strange today... This morning I was waken up by the abnormal hot weather and found myself all of a muck of sweat, so I just took a bath before I went out.

Look at the clouds now:

The lamps were on at noon!

Terrible...

My R code for illustration:

x = 5 * sin(seq(0, pi, length = 90)) + rnorm(90)
plot(x, main = "Illustration of Moving Block Bootstrap (MBB)")
for (idx in 1:(length(x) - 30 + 1)) {
    rect(idx, min(x[idx:(idx + 30 - 1)]), idx + 30 - 1, max(x[idx:(idx + 
        30 - 1)]), border = "gray")
    Sys.sleep(0.5)
}
bt = sample(1:(length(x) - 30 + 1), 3, rep = T)
for (b in bt) {
    rect(b, min(x[b:(b + 30 - 1)]), b + 30 - 1, max(x[b:(b + 
        30 - 1)]), col = "yellow")
    points(b:(b + 30 - 1), x[b:(b + 30 - 1)], col = "blue", pch = 19)
}

Website: http://www.texmacs.org

GNU is really a toooooo great project!

I love this head, though I don't know what on earth is this animal... (a goat or a bull?)

This evening I spent several hours on the study of T_EX_MACS, and there were many surprising features. Actually I just wanted to make some transparencies for a presentation next week, but PowerPoint^® is too ugly for me, especially when we use mathematical formulae (the quality is hard to endure!). In contrast, T_EX/L^AT_EX is much better, but it's a little bit inconvenient, so at last I chose T_EX_MACS. (This is what I made in T_EX_MACS)

One day, I had a dream that I was attending an exam. When I woke up, I found my dream had come true (I was really attending an exam).

This joke is dedicated to poor Sleepy. Good luck!

In our life, dream is always important. So...

Just go to bed now.

I believe there are two kinds of people who are most likely to be confused: those who have extremely vague goals and those who have extremely clear goals. This is not a paradox at all. Unfortunately, I find I seem to belong to the second type.

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This evening when I was chatting with Dr. CHEN, he told me that he found himself still confused by some problems in regression analysis and it was the same with Dr. LI. Frankly speaking, I'm not amazed at all, because I'm clear that it is the same with me, too. Students in the major of statistics always look down upon the method of regression, but I can affirm that few of us have completely mastered the knowledge in the area of regression (even linear regression!).

Perhaps you are from the Bayesian family... (although there's no such a "family" in statistics)

A Bayesian and a Frequentist were to be executed. The judge asked them what were their last wishes. The Bayesian replied that he would like to give the Frequentist one more lecture. The judge granted the Bayesian's wish and then turned to the Frequentist for his last wish. The Frequentist quickly responded that he wished to hear the lecture again and again and again and again...

--From GARY C. RAMSEYER'S FIRST INTERNET GALLERY OF STATISTICS JOKES

OK, jokes for statisticians are enough now; tomorrow I'll stop the quotations.

Statistics is, to some degree, the science of repeated experiments. Of course, lies are difficult to be repeated, so we'd better be honest:

Three roommates slept through their midterm statistics exam on Monday morning. Since they had returned together by car from the same hometown late Sunday evening, they decided on a great little falsehood. The three met with the instructor Monday afternoon and told him that an ill-timed flat tire had delayed their arrival until noon.The instructor, while somewhat skeptical, agreed to give them a makeup exam on Tuesday.

When they arrived the instructor issued them the same makeup exam and ushered each to a different classroom. The first student sat down and noticed immediately the instructions indicated that the exam would be divided into Parts I and II weighted 10% and 90% respectively. Thinking nothing of this disparity, he proceeded to answer the questions in Part I. These he found rather easy and moved confidently to Part II on the next page. Suddenly his eyes grew large and his face paled. Part II consisted of one short and pointed question...

"Which tire was it?"

--From GARY C. RAMSEYER'S FIRST INTERNET GALLERY OF STATISTICS JOKES

By the way, today I found that googlepages was set free again and I'm so happy for this good news.

"It is proven that the celebration of birthdays is healthy. Statistics show that those people who celebrate the most birthdays become the oldest."

--From GARY C. RAMSEYER'S FIRST INTERNET GALLERY OF STATISTICS JOKES

Some people may be astonished by such foolish inferences, but this is just what we do sometimes. And here's another less humorous joke:

THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF STATISTICS:

Albert Einstein died, and found himself on the train to heaven. In his car, there were four men sitting on separate benches. He walked up to the first who said, "Hello! My name is Bob, and I have an IQ of 186." Einstein smiled brilliantly, and said "Ah-hah! We shall discuss quantum physics together!"

The second man greeted him with "Hello, sir. My name is Edward, and my IQ is 150." Einstein smiled, replying "Excellent! We shall discuss mathematics together."

Moving on, Einstein shook hands with the third man, who said, "Hello; my name is William, and my IQ is 119." Smiling again, Einstein replied "Very good! We shall talk together about European history."

The last man looked up glumly as Einstein approached, and said "Hi, my name's Chuck, and my IQ's only 87." Einstein replied sadly "I see -- we shall have to discuss statistics."

Today I happened to encounter a rule for classifying statisticians:

Did you know that there are three kinds of statisticians -- those that can count and those that can't.

There are two kinds of people in the world: the first kind is people who belong to these two kinds, while the second kind is people who do not.

Above is just one of the classification methods. Confused?

Here is another rule of classification: there are 10 kinds of people in the world -- one kind is people who know the binary system, while the other kind is people who do not.

This rule is much more difficult to understand than the first one.

A peculiar day but eventually a happy day :-) I should appreciate Ms. Sleepy for your efforts over this long long time.

I have to admit that I'm far from smart or clever, and I believe perhaps more torture will come along with being smarter because I'm not yet the smartest. I always require nothing too much. I never regard myself as a somebody and dream to be a real somebody, but instead I'm just a commonplace nobody dreaming to be somebody.

It's cruel, again. Really.

My poor supper turned out to be a fried steamed bun (mantou) and a cup of yoghourt, because the food in the dining hall was tooooo disgusting.

Dear RUC, do you let live or not let live?! (hai rang bu rang ren huo a?)

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Today I suddenly found that the plum blossom was quite similar to Brownian motion @___@!!! Just take a look at this graph (it is in fact a trace for the Brownian motion on the 2-D plane):

Below is the source R code (slightly modified):

op = par(mar = c(0.5, 0.5, 3, 0.5))
n = 1000
x = apply(d <- matrix(rnorm(2 * n), ncol = 2), 2, 
    cumsum)
cl = terrain.colors(n)[rank(apply(d, 1, mean))]
plot(x, type = "n", ann = F, axes = F)
title("PLUM BLOSSOM")
mtext("--Made in R by Yihui", side = 3, adj = 1)
box()
for (i in 2:n) {
    points(x[i, 1], x[i, 2], col = cl[i])
    lines(c(x[i - 1, 1], x[i, 1]), c(x[i - 1, 2], x[i, 2]), col = cl[i])
    Sys.sleep(0.01)
}
par(op)