Explosive Logorrhea

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised with the class last week. We didn't have anyone try to derail the lesson with a lot of crybaby crap. I did see that the prof had posted a note to the website that said several people had asked him to stop posting RAR files and stick to plain old ZIP files. Didn't even hear any complaining over math. The class was still a little slow in answering some questions but not too bad overall. I'm starting to get my hopes up little by little. It still makes me nervous. I'm also waiting for a noticeable portion of the class to just flame out. This week will only be the third class so it's still a little early for the flame-outs yet. Next week, though, our first big homework assignment is due so that might finish off a few. Still, I was surprised with them last week.

Leroy: What the hell is wrong with you?
Kyle: Uh, what?
Leroy: You leave my ass bottled up for four days and the one day you bring me out I get covered in better than an inch of snow.
Kyle: Yeah, sorry about that. They said it was only 20% chance. Thought we'd be OK.
Leroy: Uh-huh. Why you got to make me white?
Kyle: I ... I didn't. It's just snow.
Leory: Shit man, you tryin' to change a proud black car into a another chilly white bitch.
Kyle: Why's it always got to be about color with you people?
Leroy: WHAT DID YOU SAY?
Kyle: I just mean that -
Leroy: NO, NO, NO - WHAT. DID. YOU. SAY?
Kyle: (sigh). Why's it always about color with you people?
Leroy: ... You. People.
Kyle: I didn't mean anything -
Leroy: You never "mean anything." But you don't think before you speak, do you?
Kyle: Wait - you're a freakin' car! The black is just a coat of paint!
Leroy: AND THE INTERIOR!
Kyle: OK, a coat of paint a few yards of fabric.
Leroy: Man, you just don't get. My people were repressed.
Kyle: What people? You don't have people. You aren't even people!
Leroy: Who are you to say what experiences are valid?
Kyle: Just ... Look, we made it home fine.
Leroy: Except for that part when you were pulling into your street, damned near had me completely sideways, and almost took out that mailbox.
Kyle: Except for that part, yes.
Leroy: And you goosed it a little much pulling in to the driveway.
Kyle: Hey - let's focus on the safe part, OK?
Leroy: Whatever Meatsack.

So I peeked ahead at the lesson for tomorrow night's class. The prof puts the slides online, along with the homework, ahead of the class. I flipped through them and - miracle of miracles - there's actual math! Sure, not a lot of it. And it's really just the one equation / idea for the whole set and probably for the whole class. And I learned about it in high school, went over it in college, and have used it more than once after college. But still ... math! The part that really impressed me is that he used proper mathematical notation. It had all the little parentheses and lines (like P(A|B)). Lord help me but I'm starting to have hope. The class may be kind of interesting. Of course, now that say that I'm sure there will be 59 out of 60 people whining about it being too hard in class tomorrow and I'll still want to claw my eyes out or something. I got no problem with anyone who needs to ask questions to understand the material - I just don't want to hear whining about it. From what I understand the class I'm taking now is a weed out class to get rid of the people who don't really want to invest the effort. I generally find those classes to have more whining.

The other thing that threw me for a loop is that I downloaded the lesson slides with examples as a single zip file but the new homework set was a rar file. First, the prof seemed a bit thrown by anything on the computer that is not Excel and here he busts out with a RAR archive. Second, I'm wondering how many people in class are going to flip over it. You don't see a lot of RAR files (OK, OK, you see very few "completely legal" RAR files.). Most of the people are going to be able to figure it out without difficulty but there's going to be one or two that are going to have to cause some grief. Maybe I'm being too cynical about it and it'll all work out fine. But it's Monday and my faith in humanity is at the weekly low (Yeah, I know there's a little snow on the ground but the lane is clear and you don't need to drive 35 mph for ten miles in the right lane blocking off people trying to enter, D-bag.).

I'm also amazed by the "notices" I get in my shiny new college mail. These messages are all from on-campus organizations. When I signed up for the account, I did check the box that said it was OK for them to mail that stuff to me. I was curious how a large state school did those sorts of things. Near as I can tell, they let anybody set up a group and send out emails. The downside is that there's a lot of jackass groups out there. No, thank you, I don't need to learn about how to deal with stress using transcendental mediation. No, thank you, I don't want to join the jui jitsu club or the martial arts club. And I believe I'll pass on the many many many fine offers to participate in stage one clinical trials or the sociology experiments about how parents raise their teenage kids. Maybe I'll sign up for a psych experiment if an interesting one comes along. Man, I'd totally blow their stats. I'd be the one point waaaaaay out to the right (or left) when the plotted it. They call that "Kyle's Island." I live there.

I completed my first "homework" assignment today. The assignment was to read pages three through 28 and 33 through 63. Otherwise known as "Chapters 1 & 2". But the prof couldn't say "Chapters 1 & 2". Had to spell out the page numbers. The only thing in between those chapters (pages 29-32) were the problems for chapter one and the blank intro page for chapter two. Does the prof think enough people in the class are too stupid to realize "read chapters one and two" means to read the sections marked as such? Has this been a problem in the past?

When it was over, I remembered a ton of things about why stats books annoy me. For example, in chapter one there should have been a subsection clearly labeled as "Nobody Uses the Fucking Mode". Seriously. When you're in grade school learning about basic statistical things you always learn mean, median, and mode. Mean - that's useful. Add all the numbers then divide by the number of elements. Median - also useful. The element that has as many elements less than as greater than it and if you have an even number of elements you average the middle two. But then you come to the mode. The element which occurs most frequently in the set. Huh. You know, after a degree in math and ten years or so as professional engineer and reading a ton of technical articles - well, I've never seen a good case for using the mode. In fact, I've actually heard the argument that the only reason to put it in somewhere is to show off that you still remember what the hell the mode is. No serious scientist, mathematician, or engineer uses it. So you put it in the textbook with the caveat that "Nobody Uses the Fucking Mode."

Then I got to read about graphs. Sometimes you need to use a pie chart. Sometimes it's a bar chart. Oh, and now let's spend eight pages showing you how to make a chart in Excel. Just in case you forgot how to copy / paste here's a section on that too! Holy crap it was awful. Then the book went into batshit crazy graphs. I looked them over and tried to understand what they were trying to say. Then I sat there for a few minutes trying to think of when the hell those types of graphs would be useful. Sure, you could throw one out there just because you wanted a graph but it wouldn't be what I'd call useful. Then I got mad about it. Hell, if someone brought that graph to me I'd be tempted to just smack the shit out of them. Graphs are supposed to give a good feel for the data at a glance. Any graph you have to puzzle out is worse than useless.

Also, two whole chapters (or, uh, 57 pages, I guess) and not one freaking mention of a . Not even "bell curve" or "normal distribution". Didn't even draw the picture. Talked about means and standard deviations and the fucking mode - but no bell curve. I'm glad I only had to read two chapters in one sitting because any more and I'd be writing a two hundred page missive to the author explaining in some details about how he's got his head up his ass (I figure five to ten pages covering things like "why formulas should actually be in the book" and "plot a bell curve" followed by 195 pages of "Nobody Uses The Fucking Mode.").

The first night of class was ... well, it's been awhile since I was in school so I don't remember it being quite like that. Of course, everyone there had been out of college for at least a couple of years so maybe that is an important variable. We had kids who weren't more than two years out of college and who'd never left Iowa. We had a guy who had a PhD in Electrical Engineering from India. We had a pediatric cardiologist (he said he's been in this program for a long time but he had three teen-aged girls at home so it was probably as much an excuse to get out of the house as anything). We had an anesthesiologist. We had people from Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, India, and ... Idaho. OK, maybe that list didn't end strong. There's a good 50 or 60 people in the class.

We spent the first 45 minutes or so of a three hours going around the room introducing ourselves like the first day of summer camp. I hate that shit. And with 60 people, it takes some time to go around the room. When we finally got done with that, the prof talked for a bit more explaining how the final scores are tabulated before taking a break. Ten percent of the final score is class participation. Well I figured I get me a couple of points first thing then just ride out the rest of the session.

After the break, we started on the "real" portion of the class. An hour in before we got around to doing anything useful. The class is basically "Stats for Business Majors". Yeah, it has some other formal name but that's the class in a nutshell. For the last fifteen years or better I've felt like I was running a marathon with respect to learning technical details. Then I had this class last night and it felt like I'd ran straight into waist-high quicksand. "Slow pitch" doesn't begin to cover it. More like I totally forgot that some people actually need to learn this stuff.

The prof had hinted that we might get done early what with it being the first night and all. As he's working through his slides, he's asking questions of the class. He waits around until someone answers. I don't know if he'd lead people by the nose into the answers or not. What I do know is that the class dragged out while the whole room sat there with the deer-in-the-headlights look. I hated to be "that guy" in class that "knows" all the answers. But dammit I wanted to get the hell home and this stuff was bloody simple. I ended up shouting out answers just to keep the class moving. He'd ask a question, I'd sit there, the whole class was silent, I'd look around to see if anyone had their hand up, I'd take a second look around, then I'd roll my eyes, maybe I'd sigh a bit, then I'd just say the answer. I mean, it's not like I didn't wait plenty of time for someone else to dive in. I know, from the first-day-at-summer-camp crap, that there were at least two or three other people who had math degrees in there. But everyone just sat there like a bump on a frog's ass.

When I got home, Sue asked how it went. I said it was a three hour class with ten minutes of content - and nine of that was things like office hours, phone numbers, and grade distribution. It being the first class I can see taking it slow. I can't see why the prof seemed like he was just trying to figure out how to kill time.

I'm actually still looking forward to the class. Maybe next week we'll, uh, actually do math in the math class. Maybe.

Today ended up being too damned long. Oh sure, I only put in 8 hours. But for every minute I was there I really just wanted to go home. Normally that's just one of those things you work through. I did have a little bit of trouble during my morning meeting. As in "the meeting I run where we go over the tasks for the week." It's kind of important that I fake enough energy to get through that one. Don't know how motivated the guys would be if the meeting leader opens with "Yeah... fuck it. Let's split." Then walks out.

Being as I'm a huge math nerd, I found the article about how Voting Democrat Causes Cancer. A little publicly available data, some basic statistics, and some poorly applied reasoning and BOOM you've got yourself a correlation between blue states and cancer deaths. Something around 30% higher due to voting (D). Of course, the point of the article is that that line of reasoning is flawed and stupid.

Classes start tomorrow for me so there won't be any Tuesday night (or Wednesday morning, depending) blogs for the next 12 weeks. I mean, I suppose there could be, theoretically, but there won't be.

For the last week or so the furnace has been making more noise than usual. Up until a week ago or so, you'd never even know the furnace was on other than the fact that the temperature is holding constant. Silent as a whisper. But last week it started kicking up an awful racket every time it would turn on. We replaced the filter and that made no difference (We weren't really expecting it to but the filter was due for a change). We checked the vents to the outside and the drains and so forth. Everything looked fine.

Friday night Sue had a bout of insomnia and got up before 4:00 am. The furnace had apparently really started knocking so she shut it off. I was up shortly thereafter and, in a half-awake not really understanding what's going on state, said she should turn the fireplace on so it wouldn't get cold. Now, the house is well insulated and does not loose heat. But being as I'm clinically retarded for the first ten minutes or so after I wake up, I was seriously concerned that the temperature would drop so low that we would freeze to death in our sleep and they would not find our bodies for days. Nevermind the fact that we have blankets and the house was at 72 degrees and would need to fall scores of degrees before we were in danger. Being as the overnight low was about 30 there was little danger of that. But, you know, clinically retarded.

I got up Saturday morning and called the furnace guy after breakfast. They technically do 24/7 support but after I was awake enough to think I realized that calling the guy out in the middle of the night wasn't necessary and waited for their normal hours. When I was talking to the lady at the call center she asked for name, address, and phone number. It seems, however, that I was not quite awake enough because I totally forgot my own phone number. Totally blanked on it. Couldn't have remembered it if I had a gun to my head. So I lied. I was all like "Uh, yeah, the phone number is 363-8 ... 2 ... 5 ... eleven - No! I mean, four."

While all that was going on, I was walking into the bedroom to look up my own home phone number on my cell and feeling retarded. The call center lady says that she'll page the guy and he'll call back and set up the actual visit time. I said "OK then, I'll just look for his phone call." (I was starting to get a little nervous about the phone number thing because it seems that was really freakin' important) "Actually, what number did I give you?" She read it back to me. I said "Oh I'm sorry, I was thinking. That's my work number. Still early for me, ha ha. Let me give you my home number." The number I gave her was not my work number. Wasn't even close to my work number. However, I had to tell her that so that I didn't have to say "Look, remember the phone number question a minute ago? Yeah, I had to make one up because I forgot my own damned phone number. ... Yes I know first graders can manage that much. ... Well, I didn't realize you'd actually be using it. I thought, you know, the real furnace guy would answer and we'd take care of this. Didn't realize this was a hollaback service department." The "work number" thing made me seem only slightly less retarded.

The guy showed up a couple hours later and had the whole thing fixed in under ten minutes. I described the problem over the phone, gave him the model number, and he said he'd stop by the shop to pick a up a part that he suspected I might need. Sure enough, that was the part and he was gone in no time. Sue said she felt kind of bad to have a guy come fix the furnace and it only takes him five minutes. I said there's an old joke in engineering about that: A guy retires after fifty years. Six months out the company calls him back and he says he really doesn't want to do it but will if they agree to his consulting fee. He goes to the plant, hears the description, walks out to the floor, and draws an "X" in chalk on a part of a giant machine. The old engineer says to replace that part and everything will be fine. Sure enough, that fixed. The old engineers sends them a bill for $50,000. The payment department refuses to pay knowing he was only there for a few minutes and all he did was draw a chalk "X" so they tell him to send an itemized bill. The old engineer sends back a single piece of paper that says "Chalk 'X': $1 ; Knowing where to draw chalk 'X': $49,999." I didn't pay the furnace guy to do a five minute job - I paid him because he knew which five minute job it was going to take.