YouTube

Just a couple of YouTube videos that I think are hilarious.

Laughing baby. This is the 10th most viewed video on YouTube all time.

Frozen Grand Central. People just stop moving on cue in the middle of Grand Central Station.

My First Citation

I hope this isn't too self-aggrandizing, but I got my first citation!

Ok, so I wasn't the first author on this paper, and it was something I did as an undergrad which has little-to-nothing to do with what I do now, but it's still exciting.

Funny Thing for a Statistician to say to Statisticians

In colloquium today, our speaker was hurrying through his presentation and in the process said:

"I don't want to bore you with the data."

Except we're statisticians; we're all about the data.

I will give him that what he really meant was that he had shown us his method but he didn't have time to show us how it applied to this dataset. Still, in my mind statistics is just math if there is no data. Off the top of my head I would say that data is probably the fundamental defining concept in statistics.

Presidential Hypothesis

My hypothesis is that if the presidential election was decided tomorrow based on the number of signs for each candidate along the road, Ron Paul would have a good shot.

To attempt to gather data for this hypothesis, Amy and I counted the number of signs for each candidate on our way in to work this morning.

Hillary Clinton: 4
Ron Paul: 2
Barack Obama: 1
John McCain: 0

Random sample? No way, so I still can't be sure that my hypothesis is false!

Crazy idea

Saturday, while Amy worked at the hospital, I worked on campus on a variety of things, one of which was a homework assignment that went terribly. Thus, I hatched a crazy idea that should really only work if you are an unmarried computer science undergrad, and even then they wouldn't do it like I planned.

Yesterday (Sunday), I took roughly a 4.5 hour nap while Amy was again working at the hospital. We went to bed at a decent hour, and after about 3 more hours of sleep, I got up. Amy was sweet enough to get up with me and drive me to school (we only have one car at the moment), so I arrived on campus somewhere around 3 a.m. I actually can't remember exactly; the chronology is a little muddled for me right now.

But here I am, six hours later, feeling pretty decent. The homework assignment that went so terribly Saturday? Well, it went about as bad for awhile, but I seem to have broken through.

By the way, I turned in one homework assignment Friday, so I'm down to five left. Today I'll turn one in, and Wednesday another.

Homework Countdown

6 more homework assignments this semester.

Two due next Friday.

Tired of Homework

The last possible thing I feel like doing right now is the homework sitting next to me on the desk. I'm really, really tired of homework. I've had graduate-level statistics homework for going on three academic years and I have had enough. I'm counting down the assignments and longing for the end of classes this semester which will signal a shift in my academic life: Little to no classwork and lots of research. Oh, the glory!

But alas, I have an assignment due Wednesday, and so somehow I must push through, face the estimating equations, and derive asymptotic distributions. Or at least try my best to derive the asymptotic distributions.

Which reminds me of something funny that happened in my nonlinear programming course. The professor was asking the class to identify a certain function he had drawn on the blackboard. Someone said, "It's not a concave function!" and most everyone laughed because it was obvious that this was indeed not a concave function. After the period was over, one of my classmates smirked to his buddies, "You know you have a bunch of geeks when someone says "It's not a concave function!" and everyone laughs." One of his friends then tried to claim that he hadn't laughed, but wasn't very convincing.