Teaching and Entertainment

Every “modern” teacher knows that teaching requires a non-zero amount of entertainment in order for attention to be held. Entertainment, on the other hand, requires no teaching for the viewer’s attention to be held, although it often results in a more moving experience for the consumer.
For the consumer, it is definitely worth their time to determine whether that thing which they are consuming is teaching, or entertainment, because today’s producers are really, really great at convincing you that you are being taught when you are really just being entertained.

Cleaning Up Your Messes

There is a camper’s philosophy that “one should should leave the area cleaner than the state in which it was found”.
That is a beautiful philosophy because it doesn’t matter who made the mess, as the fact remains that the mess must be cleaned up.
Unless legal action is required, perhaps it is not even worth asking the question “Who made the mess?” and instead utilizing all resources to clean up the mess.

Sometimes R segfaults with quartz

R plotting crashed a lot on OSX on my system: 

archey
R --version
brew --version

                 ###
               ####                   User: gcr
               ###                    Hostname: orion
       #######    #######             Distro: OS X 10.9.3
     ######################           Kernel: Darwin
    #####################             Uptime: 2 days
    ####################              Shell: /usr/local/bin/bash
    ####################              Terminal: dumb
    #####################             Packages: 78
     ######################           CPU: Intel Core i7-4960HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz
      ####################            Memory: 16 GB
        ################              Disk: 26%
         ####     #####
R version 3.1.1 (2014-07-10) -- "Sock it to Me"
Copyright (C) 2014 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.2.0 (64-bit)
R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under the terms of the
GNU General Public License versions 2 or 3.
For more information about these matters see
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
0.9.5

Almost every time that I would use the quartz device, ℝ would segfault.

After changing it to X11, there have not been any segfaults. Perhaps I misunderstood the relationship between how the Brew build interacts with quartz.

How to clean up environment bindings in knitr sub modules?

This post discusses the management of the environment while running different
parts of the code. The author’s desire is to:

  • Obtain a list of bindings before execution sub-module
  • Execute the code in the sub-module
  • Upon completion of the sub-mode code execution remove anything that was added
    to the environment

Can definitely understand the desire. The approach makes total sense.

Perhaps now is the time for me to learn more about packages and whether that would be
a good approach here. Even running everything inside of a local block could be
an option perhaps?