About

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Welcome to my personal homepage. On this website I share some materials that shall not be forgotten. It reflects three of my main interests: DataScience, Dharma, and Epistemology, besides others. The first is related to my work as an independent researcher, passionate about scientific computing in medical statistics and experimental psychology. The second, Dharma, is the result of integrating my lifelong meditative practice. And epistemology refers to systems-thinking, musings based on and rooted in transmissions I received in cybernetics. – If you have comments or questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

You will probably see a lot of technical information coming out in the beginning as this site develops. But I intend to publish more materials as I get things working and the scope expands.

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This web appearance lives at the domain ctrl-r.de. If you link to this URL on your own pages please let me know. I might consider to refer back to yours’ if it fits with the aims of this project.

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…paraphrasing the ballad “Love Street” by Jim Morrison:

I see you live on R Street
There’s this store where the creatures meet
I wonder what they do in there?
Summer Sunday and a year
I guess I like it fine, so far

So, do I actually live on R-street? Read on:

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CTRL-R stands for the often used key combination for reverse-searching in the command history of the Linux console by pressing the control- and the r-key simultaneously (sometimes also denoted ^R, or C-r)¹. I like to think of R standing for retrieve or recall.

But R is also the letter of my favorite programming language! R is the name of a very powerful statistical language and environment². I have been using it for almost 20 years and it gives me a lot of joy in accomplishing many tasks in my data science job. Even increasingly so, every day I am still learning so many new things that it seems inexhaustible. The speed of new developments is astonishing!

So CTRL-R refers to the retrieval of previously used command structures on my computer, as well as the mastery of the R programming language.

On a more philosophical note, CTRL-R may stand for remembering, a mindful application to whatever I do. But R may also stand for repetition through which I familiarize myself with practices that seem worthwhile to implement. I’d like to exert some control over my distractions, not so much to curb them as to become more aware in every moment of this precious life.

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“A cyber yogin’s memory aid” is an attempt to capture in a descriptive title of what you can find here. “cyber” refers to cybernetics, originally an academic discipline of thinking about self-organizing systems, that quickly runs deeper into a meditation on the paradoxes of the mind and recursive structures. Its “second order” extension³ becomes existential practice of looking at life itself. This explains my motive of “putting it all together” into a comprehensive view, thus yoga. The yogin’s aim is the instantaneous realisation of the self-perfecting natural state, however elusive it may seem.

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This website does not collect any personally identifiable information from its users. Of course, an ip address may temporarily appear in access logs of the hoster with whom I have a Data Processing Agreement (DPA). If you have complaints or comments you can send me a message – in which case I receive and temporarely store the intentionally transmitted information as long as needed solely for the purpose of communication. For analytics a self-hosted privacy friendly goatcounter is used, which does not require a separate GDPR consent notice.