The folks over at is.R() brought along an “adorable Turkey”. I guess we’ll thank them for their gift – and pardon the Turkey. Personally I thank them for a bucket of hints and tricks I freely used and will continue to do so.

Tal brought us a great community of R bloggers. I thank him for the work he invested, and personally, I thank him for allowing me in.

I thank the readers, and the writers, and I thank the R team for giving us “the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge”. George Washington told us to so:

That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed, for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

(George Washington, on October 3, 1789)

The following produced the plot at the top:

library(gplots)
message <- "...the means\nwe have of\nacquiring\n"
message <- paste0(message, "and\ndiffusing\nuseful")
message <- paste0(message, "\nknowledge...")
textplot(message, “center”, “top”, col=”green”)

And here’s a way to get the Thanksgiving Date from R:

library(RcppBDT)
thanksgiving <- getNthDayOfWeek(fourth, Thu, Nov, 2012)

Happy Thanksgiving!