One Hundred Hours of Solitude

So John is gone
Class is over
I have one week of work left
I decided not to go to New York after Henry said he couldn't meet up with me in Chinatown.

The result? Peace and quiet for the first time in weeks.

Bliss.

My class is over, and the final was tough as nails. Ugly. Probably one of the hardest tests I've ever taken. Its less that the questions were insanely difficult, and more that even for 8 questions, there wasn't enough time. The entire class was working on it until the last minute, and I think everyone felt the same way I did:

"Good questions, prof, but I just needed a bit more time to thread my way through it."

He posted the answers to the bloodbath online, and as I suspected, I answered it about 60% correctly. I even flubbed the Bayes' Theorem question (a soft ball in theory, although the prof messed us all up by asking us to invert the damn thing), if only because I managed to trick myself into thinking that a particular shortcut was the answer.

Bayes' Theorem is cool, because it is often used to check how reliable medical tests are, among other applications. For example, even for the most accurate test, if the percentage of people who actually have a disease is really small (for example, Ebola or Type I Diabetes), then there's usually a 90% chance or greater that if you test positive for it, you don't actually have the disease. Scary, huh? Even tests that are 99% accurate can report a false positive with probabilities of 75% or greater. Confused on how this works? Check out the Wikipedia article.

So I'm predicting a B or a B+ in the class, given that although I only answered about 2/3 of the questions correctly, I am 99% sure I still did significantly better than everyone else. It was that kind of test.

On a slightly related note, I'm seriously considering auditing multivariate calculus again:

1.) My professor the first time around was terrible. Getting a second helping would allow me to take a second stab at getting something better than a B-.
2.) There were some things I never learned at all. My lack of a thorough grounding in infinite series is killing me. It keeps hurting me again and again.
For those of you not as geeky about math as I am, an infinite series is where you add a number or a function an infinite number of times.

Consider Zeno's Paradox (the Dichotomy one):

The ancient Greek Philosopher Zeno posed this question which mathematics could not properly answer for 3000 years, until the advent of calculus. Lets pretend you're standing in your living room, some distance from the wall. Walk halfway to the wall. Now, walk half way from where you are now to the wall again. And again. And again. The distance you can walk keeps getting smaller and smaller, but if you repeat this process precisely, then in theory, you can do this forever, never actually arriving at the other wall.

But obviously, we all know you can walk all the way to that wall. We do it all the time. So it is with infinite series. If we add 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32+........, then we need to be able to show that it actually equals the distance between our starting position and the wall.

Unfortunately, I've been having to teach myself how to do these kinds of methods. And its not exactly intuitively obvious. Infinite series goes from teaching you how to calculate Zeno's Paradox to this monstrosity. Believe it or not, Ladies and Gentlemen, this can be used to calculate the average of any old set of numbers. I've made a fool of myself for the past year or so, because every time my teachers talked about this method, I looked at them with polite disinterest. If I had learned this in high school (where Brandeis assumes you learn this, because apparently every high school but Finneytown teaches BC Calculus), I would have recognized immediately why it was such a beautiful piece of mathematics.

*Sigh* Oh well.

John's visit was fun. I showed him why Brookline is such a run down dump (just kidding Mom). Actually, I wanted John to go back and confirm to my parents that I was living in a very safe place. We chilled on Newbury Street, got into the MFA for free, and John bedazzled all with his knowledge of European Art. I was a bit humbled. I showed him the "Not for Tourists" version of Boston: Penguin Pizza, Felipe's, Coolidge Corner, and the Kosher Dunkin' Donuts near my place. On Sunday, we went to Marblehead to visit Marina at the beach and she showed us the Old Town of Marblehead.

After I saw John to Government Center on Monday and directed him towards the Airport, I ran over to the Spanish Consulate and grabbed my visa! Cha-ching. So I am now equipped and ready to bugalloo to Espana.

So that's the news for the week, hope everyone else is set. I'm going to go back to my bliss.