Kenneth Benoit’s Home Page

This is very close to what we do in statistical sciences!

Success through simulation

And this from the Matrix Reloaded (the best scene and dialogue of the film by far):

Merovingian: You see, there is only one constant, one universal, it is the only real truth: causality. Action. Reaction. Cause and effect.

Morpheus: Everything begins with choice.

Merovingian: No. Wrong. Choice is an illusion, created between those with power, and those without. Look there, at that woman. My God, just look at her. Affecting everyone around her, so obvious, so bourgeois, so boring. But wait… Watch – you see, I have sent her dessert, a very special dessert. I wrote it myself. It starts so simply, each line of the program creating a new effect, just like poetry. First, a rush… heat… her heart flutters. You can see it, Neo, yes? She does not understand why – is it the wine? No. What is it then, what is the reason? And soon it does not matter, soon the why and the reason are gone, and all that matters is the feeling itself. This is the nature of the universe. We struggle against it, we fight to deny it, but it is of course pretense, it is a lie. Beneath our poised appearance, the truth is we are completely out of control. Causality. There is no escape from it, we are forever slaves to it. Our only hope, our only peace is to understand it, to understand the `why.’ `Why’ is what separates us from them, you from me. `Why’ is the only real social power, without it you are powerless.

I run R behind a firewall, and found it tricky to set the proxy settings for R so that I could directly install packages, access outside data using load(url()), etc. The solution lies in the http_proxy environment variable. Here is how to set it up:

Create a text file called .Rprofile in your home directory (on Mac OSX, this is ~ or /Users/myuser/). This text file should have the following line in it:

Sys.setenv(http_proxy=”http://username:password@tcdproxy.tcd.ie:8080″)

substituting your own username, password, and proxy server and port settings of course.

It seems that running this from R before you need it does not work, since I have heard reports that it only works if you run it as the first command in R when you start a new R session. By setting this up in your ~/.Rprofile you avoid having to retype it each time you start R, as well as making sure that this command is run at startup.