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The thing no one told me about earthquakes: with them comes a delightful feeling of vertigo and nausea.
My apartment building feels like the deck of a large ship, right now, or at least how I imagine it would be. We’ve been having little tremors for about thirty minutes so far. Not the worst we’ve had since I’ve been here, but it’s certainly queasy-making. Grar!
The cat looks at me reproachfully, as if I am the responsible party.
I wrote tech support to find out why the google chrome browser is not supported for many functions of my school’s website. Chrome is closing in on firefox and its userbase seems to be increasing at an increasing rate. I didn’t want to be a dick about it, but not supporting the chrome browser seemed kind of odd to me. “Unfortunately, we don’t support the chrome browser because the chrome browser is not supported.”
Uh…huh.
I have figured out why there is no math so far in my statistics class! This program offers two statistics courses, one with a lower course number and one with a higher course number. The one with the higher course number (applied) is a prereq for the one with the lower course number. Somehow. And the one with the lower course number is the one with the math in it. At least this way I’ll have the ability to use SAS and various other statistical programs when I start the actual statistics course. I found Mathematica to be a big help when learning Calculus. Though I’ve already had a pretty in depth calc-based statistics course, I was taking it at the same time as real analysis and modern algebra, so it was definitely not a priority. I have to admit to myself that I basically just hastily learned algorithms in a rush the week before mid-terms and finals. So hopefully this time I can do it properly.
Another mystery solved: In every room in my apartment the ceiling has a single square panel. I got around to asking a friend what those were for. He said, “Ninjas.”
From This American Life #188:
It all began at Christmas two years ago, when my daughter was four-years-old. And it was the first time that she’d ever asked about what did this holiday mean? And so I explained to her that this was celebrating the birth of Jesus. And she wanted to know more about that. We went out and bought a kids’ bible and had these readings at night. She loved him. Wanted to know everything about Jesus.
So we read a lot about his birth and his teaching. And she would ask constantly what that phrase was. And I would explain to her that it was, “Do onto others as you would have them do unto you.” And we would talk about those old words and what that all meant.
And then one day we were driving past a big church and out front was an enormous crucifix.
She said, who’s that?
And I guess I’d never really told that part of the story. So I had to sort of, yeah, oh, that’s Jesus. I forgot to tell you the ending. Well, you know, he ran afoul of the Roman government. This message that he had was so radical and unnerving to the prevailing authorities of the time that they had to kill him. They came to the conclusion that he would have to die. That message was too troublesome.
It was about a month later, after that Christmas, we’d gone through the whole story of what Christmas meant. And it was mid-January, and her preschool celebrates the same holidays as the local schools. So Martin Luther King Day was off. I knocked off work that day and I decided we’d play and I’d take her out to lunch.
We were sitting in there, and right on the table where we happened to plop down, was the art section of the local newspaper. And there, big as life, was a huge drawing by a ten-year-old kid from the local schools of Martin Luther King.
She said, who’s that?
I said, well, as it happens that’s Martin Luther King. And he’s why you’re not in school today. So we’re celebrating his birthday, this is the day we celebrate his life.
She said, so who was he?
I said, he was a preacher.
And she looks up at me and goes, for Jesus?
And I said, yeah, actually he was. But there was another thing that he was really famous for. Which is that he had a message.
And you’re trying to say this to a four-year-old. This is the first time they ever hear anything. So you’re just very careful about how you phrase everything.
So I said, well, yeah, he was a preacher and he had a message.
She said, what was his message?
I said, well, he said that you should treat everybody the same no matter what they look like.
She thought about that for a minute. And she said, well that’s what Jesus said.
And I said, yeah, I guess it is. You know, I never thought of it that way, but yeah. And it is sort of like “Do onto others as you would have them do unto you.”
And she thought for a minute and looked up at me and said, did they kill him, too?
The statistics program I am part of requires an introductory statistics course. I have had statistics before, but it’s been a few years, so getting up to speed, and up to the standards of this institution seemed like a good idea. After all, it’s grad school.
I am nearly through the second chapter of the text, and I have yet to see a single equation or any mathematical notation at all. I knew going into the program that it was a bit light on theory, but so far what I have seen is sanitized of sigmas, not a superscript or subscript to be spied anywhere. This is the most introductory course, and it’s only the first few chapters, but it does require one to have had an undergrad stat course as a prereq. It also, in theory, requires real analysis, which perhaps raised my expectations unduly. Just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, I broke out my old statistics text, written by my professor in LaTex and provided as a PDF on his website.
By the fourth page, sigmas abound. I reckon this is a different kind of statistics, then. It looks like we spend several chapters on a few concepts that my old prof dispatched with a few pithy lines. This should be interesting! At least there are quite a few classes that deal with statistical programming and the like, which is what I am most interested anyway, but I suppose I must fight through this kind of thing to get to the good stuff.
I can’t recommend a VPN service enough, to Americans adrift outside the US. I route almost all of my traffic through mine these days, and it saves me all manner of nonsense and hassle. I am constantly surprised at how often it is nigh-impossible to access english language versions of websites — helpful web developers reroute me to the japanese version automatically, which is a nice, thoughtful feature. But it’s a PITA when their site is laid out in such a way (graphics instead of text, for instance, thus inaccessible to web-based translators) that getting back to the english version is non-trivial.
Other sites refuse to sell me things, because my IP is from Japan, or won’t let me view their content at all, and the VPN service deals with that nicely.
Grad school has begun. I’m still trying to figure out this online format, but hopefully I’ll know what I’m doing soon and not get behind the rest of the “class.”
I can find almost everything I need at Japanese supermarkets, but tonight I find myself really craving these excellent tacos I used to be able to get at this mexican place in Napa. I think they were pretty authentic, and there’s no way in hell I am getting anything like that unless I can manage to make my way back to the US sometime soon, which is unlikely.
If anyone who reads this happens to eat a delicious, delicious taco, won’t you think of me? Tacos are a luxury that must never go unappreciated.
I drive myself a bit crazy, wanting sweets. The sweets available at the nearest grocery store look stale and unappetizing. There are a number of french bakeries scattered around (I can read the menus!) but going on a several-mile hike to procure a slice of cake just doesn’t seem quite right.
So tonight I made a black forest cake. I wonder if there’s a name for this phenomenon: by the time you’ve finished making the whatever-it-is, you don’t actually want to eat it. I bet the germans have some kind of long mashed-together name for this, but for now I’ll settle for eating a slice of their cake, while feeling as though my face and arms are covered in a thin coating of cherry juice.
It’s been a long time since I have made pies from scratch, though I still bake non-pie-things occasionally. I don’t have a rolling pin, so pie crusts are a pain in the ass. It just seems like so much can go wrong! Cake and cookies and scones and shortbreads are much more forgiving, I think.
It’s thanksgiving here! I am doing my best to make some nice food with the ingredients I have to work with. I will leave the pies to Sagan.
I think at one point he opens a notebook that holds some of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica (around 1:33).