Day 179

Made it through another day.  Woo!


This morning I woke up at 7:30 but refused to get up before 8.  So I didn't.  Then I lazily got ready for the day and went to the office.  I parked on the south side of campus because I was supposed to meet up with Bithia after class to explain statistics to her and her friend at a coffee house down in the Village.  That ended up not happening, but I'm getting ahead of myself.  I met Timbo in my office around 10 and we starting working on stats.  We had to repeat the same project that we did last week, but using three new distribution.  Our project last week involved us finding the moment generating function, the first four moments (mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis), the graphical representation (using R) for various parameters, and then determining whether the additive property held  for the gamma, beta, exponential, and chi square distributions.  This week we have to find all of the same things, but for the normal, Student's t, and F distributions.  I thought that normal was going to be the hardest, so I offered to do it (since Timbo got stuck with the beta distribution last week, which turns out to be a real killer).  So normal was pretty difficult, but I found all of the moments in about an hour (after the first hour of aimlessly doing making no progress).  But then I started working on the F distribution.  And it was just ugly.  And ever iteration of the process got literally exponentially worse.  We decided to both do this distribution to make sure our algebra was correct, but by the time we got to skewness we were absolutely getting demolished.  There were just so many parts of which we needed to keep track.  When we started to even think about finding kurtosis we decided to enlist the help of Mathematica.  It turns out that Mathematica has no interest in simplifying complicated algebra.  So you know.  Yay.  So we continued to solve it by hand.  I have no idea if we got the same answer on Mathworld or Wikipedia.  There was just too much algebra and too many moving parts.  So we left it as a factored fraction of nonsense.  By this time it was nearly 3 pm.  So he and I went to the Atrium to get some coffee before stats.  We both really needed it.  During coffee we just talked about life.  A little bit about our home life, various observations we've made while at grad school, things like that.  It was really good.  I enjoy talking with him.


After coffee we went to stats.  That went...alright.  We talked more about the normal distribution.  For a few minutes we discussed something about combining normal distributions?  I have no clue.  And then she started going into something about.... representing multiple normal distributions as a P x P matrix.  I honestly have no idea what was going on or what we were supposed to get out of it.  It was incredibly confusing.


When class was over Dustin and I went to the Actuarial Club meeting for free dinner and to vote on the officers for next year.  But really just for the pizza.  That got done very quickly, so he and I walked to my car to go move it.  Dr. Begum was giving a talk at 7 that he and Timbo and I wanted to go listen to, but we had time to kill so we moved my car closer to where the talk was being given.  Then we walked around the building for about ten minutes trying to find the room... but we eventually did.  And obviously the three of us sat in the very front row.


Her talk was on women in mathematics (specifically statistics).  There has been an ongoing lecture series about diversity in academia, so she gave a lecture on the low number of females in higher levels of mathematical study.  It was really interesting and I learned a decent amount.  Unfortunately, the entire time the only thing on my mind was how dry my hands were and how painful and itchy they had become.  So after the presentation I took Dustin back to his place, then I went to Wal-mart to get some hand lotion.  I wasn't sure what kind to get because there were so many.  But then one stuck out.  The marketing was so fantastic that they deserved my money.  I don't have that thought often, but this company had really done a good job in marketing their product.  The back reads: "Listen, it's about time you show a bit of a soft side.  Not an acoustic-guitar-vanilla-candle-burning side, but more of a Yes, my skin does feel as good as it smells and looks kind of side.  This Hemo moisturizer transforms your skin into a statement that says, sure I'm rugged, but I'm also refined.*  Directions: men don't need directions."  The asterisk at the bottom reads "We cannot be held accountable if this product makes you irresistible to others.  Use responsibly.  And often."  I thought this was hysterical, so I bought it.  Well done, Malibu.  Well done.


Ok.  I'm going to bed so that I can get up and plan my lesson for tomorrow!  Woo hoo!  Good night friends