Despite not enjoying this year the optimal environment of CiRM, we are still making good progress on the revision (or the R vision) of Bayesian Core. In the past two days, we went over Chapters 1 (Introduction), 2 (Normal Models), 5 (Capture-Recapture Experiments), and 6 (Mixture Models), with Chapters 3 (Regression), 4 (Generalised Linear Models) and 9 (Image Analysis) being close to completion. While having a “last”go at the R tutorial part of Chapter 1, I came across this paragraph

One of the most frustrating features of R is that the graphical device is not refreshed while a program is executed in the main window. This implies that, if you switch from one terminal to another or if the screen saver starts, the whole or parts of the graph currently on the graphical device will not be visible until the completion of the program. Conversely, refreshing very large graphs will delay the activation of the prompt >.

that I very gladly deleted, as the current 2.11.1 version of R does no longer suffer from this painful freeze in the graphics (at least on my Kubuntu 10.10 version).

Actually, I do not think I mentioned it in a previous post: our new edition will be called Bayesian Essentials with R. Both to distinguish it from Bayesian Core (as it should be published in the Use R! series) and because it appeared (thanks to colleagues and readers) that core did not sound very appealing to English-speaking audiences looking for a statistics book…