virtue and vice

So, keeping up with a blog is clearly not my forte. I am definitely going to make a concerted effort to stay more on track with this. The stupid thing is, I had tons of ideas for what I was going to make entries about, yet never actually did anything about it because I felt my thoughts weren't entirely fleshed out. The smart thing is, I did write down lots of notes about blog ideas so that I wouldn't forget about everything I'd come up with. The stupid thing is, I put these notes (along with a bunch of other important stuff for school) into my checked luggage over spring break. Which the airline proceeded to lose for EIGHT days. My bag was apparently sent to Birmingham, Alabama, because that's "close enough" to Burlington, Vermont. Thank you, Northwest. The smart thing is - well, not so much smart due to anything on my part so much as dumb luck - I finally got the suitcase back on Saturday (I wonder what portion of people never get their stuff back? Or how your odds of it being returned to you decrease with each passing day?). So I now have all my ideas back! But the stupid thing is, it's a little late for the kind of extended entry I was planning. So it'll have to wait. But I'll leave you with this interesting link that I found while researching some data for the take-home exam:

http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/

It's a collection of graphs made using R, and the diversity and complexity of some (or most) of them is astonishing. I never would have thought it possible to make figures like those with R. Odd how a program that appears so "simple" (as compared to even something like Excel) is so powerful given the right knowledge about how to use it.