“From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend to read it.” —Groucho Marx

Source: The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, February 1, 2012

“I can love you because I want to feel less alone, or I can love you because I want you to feel less alone. But only the latter requires me to imagine a consciousness independent of my own, and equally real.” —Garth Risk Hallberg

Source: ‘Why Write Novels at All?’, The New York Times

“It was while I was at interview that I finally noticed that subjecting myself to the judgement of an institution which I fundamentally disagreed with was bizarre.” —Elly Nowell, commenting on the rejection letter she sent the University of Oxford

Source: Magdalen Oxford gets rejection letter from student, BBC News

“Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.” —Howard Stevenson

Source: What’s an entrepreneur? The best answer ever

If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. —blue_beetle

Source: Comment on the thread “User-driven discontent” on MetaFilter

> 1:5
[1] 1 2 3 4 5

Today I needed the elements printed one per line. After a bit of searching and hair-pulling, I stumbled upon the cat command:

> cat(1:5,sep="\n")
1
2
3
4
5

This is particularly useful when you need a line-by-line list of the variables in a data frame, which you can get with:

cat(names(dataframe),sep="\n")

To output the list directly to a file, use write instead of cat.

[T]hinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box.

Source: de Manzano Ö, Cervenka S, Karabanov A, Farde L, Ullén F (2010) Thinking Outside a Less Intact Box: Thalamic Dopamine D2 Receptor Densities Are Negatively Related to Psychometric Creativity in Healthy Individuals. PLoS ONE 5(5): e10670. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010670

If you’re interested, you can read the review here: “A Book Review: Please Touch!” And if you’re really interested, you can buy the book on Amazon!

When there’s no experimenting, there’s no progress. Stop experimenting and you go backward. —Thomas Edison

Source: “$5 million to encourage innovation in digital journalism“, Official Google Blog, October 26, 2010.

The people who successfully start independent businesses … do it because we have no real choice in the matter. The voice in our heads won’t shut up until we discover if we’re right, if we can do it, if we can make something happen. This is an art, our art, and to leave it bottled up is a crime.

This jibes with a recent article in The New York Times: ”Just manic enough: Seeking perfect entrepreneurs“.

Of course, another common reason may be a desire for control over one’s work environment.