Happy Thanksgiving, America. =(
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
no-turkey day
Everybody needs to see this...it's hilarious in its extremity, but sort of sad in its proximity to the truth at the time time.
Happy Thanksgiving, America. =(
Happy Thanksgiving, America. =(
Sunday, November 16, 2008
sampling error
So I took the physics GRE the weekend before last. It went better than last year, but that's all I'm going to say for fear of jinxing myself. And so now begins the several weeks-long wait for my score.
But I had come across a physics student message board back when I was trying to find good studying resources, and was curious to see if there was any chatter about how people found the Nov. 8 physics GRE. Well, chatter there was. The board went in chronological order, so the first posts I read were all from just a few hours after people had taken the exam. The first one even went something like, "Nov. 8, 2008 was an easy test!"
F@#k!
As I continued to read down the first several posts, I began to fear I was really screwed. All these kids talking about having answered 80, 90 questions on the test. (For the uninitiated, the test is 170 minutes / 100 questions = 1.7 minutes per question. Not, a lot, of time.) But when I got about halfway down the first page of posts, someone said "hey, seeing a lot of indian names here, what do you think about these scores...", asking about his chances applying as an international student (presumably, to the States). I started looking back at the user names...there were a lot of Indian names, and furthermore, their post times showed that they had taken the test hours ahead of 9 am my time.
So I kept reading. Eventually the westerners chimed in. They didn't find it as easy; maybe answering 50, 60 questions. I answered 61, only guessing on 2 or 3. Maybe I played it a little too safe; if I had spent a little more time guessing and a little less time being absolutely sure of an answer, I might've been able to get up to 70 answered. But who knows if that would have helped any. (right answer = 1 pt, no answer = 0 pt, wrong answer = -1/4 pt to counteract random guessing.) At the end of the day, all I care about is beating out the other Americans...we know we're powerless to even approach the astronomical scores of the Asians.
(Sorry if that sounds awful red team vs. blue team of me...but why is being up in arms about dependence on foreign oil so en vogue, but our dependence on foreign intellectual capital is not? That's probably another rant for another day...)
And the other thing is, even after reading about the potentially more moderate scores, there still probably is a serious sampling error inherent in my taking this board to be a representative sample of all the scores from the Nov. 8 test. Of course it's going to be the students most interested in their scores, the more motivated ones, and likely the ones that did better on the test, that are going to post to this board.
Then I started thinking, it's kind of like this in relationships, too. My last relationship, I fell in love with a guy that I only interacted with (in person, I mean...we talked incessantly on the phone, ichat, etc) on his vacations from work. He'd visit me, or we'd meet in the middle; one time I flew out to his place for Thanksgiving, but even then he had some time off from work. (Well, the notion of him ever truly being on vacation from work borders on the laughable, but that isn't really essential to my point here...) My point is that we only interacted in person when he was not (wholly) consumed with his work life.
The flip side of all this, and what really stings, is that his decision to love me was not prone to such sampling error. When he would visit me in Burlington, I'd still be in classes and doing homework. Even when we weren't in Vermont, I was still often studying for a test or working on a paper. He saw me in my usual day-to-day mode, and saw a place for himself in that life. Which there was. Then I move out here to some strange land, only to discover that there is not really a place in his life for anyone right now. And historically, my bullshit detector (my character judgment function, what have you) has been remarkably accurate. But this one caught me unawares. In his defense, his self-delusion ran so deep, I think, that even he wasn't aware of it until too late.
And so I will comfort myself with this cold analysis of where I went wrong in trusting someone that did not deserve my trust.
Sorry for the broken-heart drivel, but I simply cannot let this be me:
My normal approach HAS to be useful here! It's all I've got!
But I had come across a physics student message board back when I was trying to find good studying resources, and was curious to see if there was any chatter about how people found the Nov. 8 physics GRE. Well, chatter there was. The board went in chronological order, so the first posts I read were all from just a few hours after people had taken the exam. The first one even went something like, "Nov. 8, 2008 was an easy test!"
F@#k!
As I continued to read down the first several posts, I began to fear I was really screwed. All these kids talking about having answered 80, 90 questions on the test. (For the uninitiated, the test is 170 minutes / 100 questions = 1.7 minutes per question. Not, a lot, of time.) But when I got about halfway down the first page of posts, someone said "hey, seeing a lot of indian names here, what do you think about these scores...", asking about his chances applying as an international student (presumably, to the States). I started looking back at the user names...there were a lot of Indian names, and furthermore, their post times showed that they had taken the test hours ahead of 9 am my time.
So I kept reading. Eventually the westerners chimed in. They didn't find it as easy; maybe answering 50, 60 questions. I answered 61, only guessing on 2 or 3. Maybe I played it a little too safe; if I had spent a little more time guessing and a little less time being absolutely sure of an answer, I might've been able to get up to 70 answered. But who knows if that would have helped any. (right answer = 1 pt, no answer = 0 pt, wrong answer = -1/4 pt to counteract random guessing.) At the end of the day, all I care about is beating out the other Americans...we know we're powerless to even approach the astronomical scores of the Asians.
(Sorry if that sounds awful red team vs. blue team of me...but why is being up in arms about dependence on foreign oil so en vogue, but our dependence on foreign intellectual capital is not? That's probably another rant for another day...)
And the other thing is, even after reading about the potentially more moderate scores, there still probably is a serious sampling error inherent in my taking this board to be a representative sample of all the scores from the Nov. 8 test. Of course it's going to be the students most interested in their scores, the more motivated ones, and likely the ones that did better on the test, that are going to post to this board.
Then I started thinking, it's kind of like this in relationships, too. My last relationship, I fell in love with a guy that I only interacted with (in person, I mean...we talked incessantly on the phone, ichat, etc) on his vacations from work. He'd visit me, or we'd meet in the middle; one time I flew out to his place for Thanksgiving, but even then he had some time off from work. (Well, the notion of him ever truly being on vacation from work borders on the laughable, but that isn't really essential to my point here...) My point is that we only interacted in person when he was not (wholly) consumed with his work life.
The flip side of all this, and what really stings, is that his decision to love me was not prone to such sampling error. When he would visit me in Burlington, I'd still be in classes and doing homework. Even when we weren't in Vermont, I was still often studying for a test or working on a paper. He saw me in my usual day-to-day mode, and saw a place for himself in that life. Which there was. Then I move out here to some strange land, only to discover that there is not really a place in his life for anyone right now. And historically, my bullshit detector (my character judgment function, what have you) has been remarkably accurate. But this one caught me unawares. In his defense, his self-delusion ran so deep, I think, that even he wasn't aware of it until too late.
And so I will comfort myself with this cold analysis of where I went wrong in trusting someone that did not deserve my trust.
Sorry for the broken-heart drivel, but I simply cannot let this be me:
My normal approach HAS to be useful here! It's all I've got!
little things
I just found the coolest new functionality in Firefox 3.
Did you know that if you have a bazillion tabs open in the same window (as I am wont to do), you can scroll through them using your mouse scroll button?! Just mouse over the row of tabs, and scroll off into the sunset.
This is almost as cool as the time I accidentally discovered you can preview documents in Leopard by highlighting them and hitting the space bar. It was like cave man discovering fire, "whoa! what just happened? what is this?!"
Did you know that if you have a bazillion tabs open in the same window (as I am wont to do), you can scroll through them using your mouse scroll button?! Just mouse over the row of tabs, and scroll off into the sunset.
This is almost as cool as the time I accidentally discovered you can preview documents in Leopard by highlighting them and hitting the space bar. It was like cave man discovering fire, "whoa! what just happened? what is this?!"
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
i feel like my secret heart has lost all it's stuffing
I'm (hopefully) taking the physics GRE on Saturday, so that this is me for not too much longer:
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