Cold, tired and hungry: Time Series Lecture 1

And indeed, Time series did prove to be fairly incomprehensible. Though promisingly it looked like, at least to understand this lecture, all I'd need to do would be to find out what covariance is and its properties, since the rest was mainly summation of series, which I've covered enough in my undergraduate degree, and which usually takes a bit of staring at and concentrated thought, but which rarely manages to hold out and continue to make no sense. However, that certainly doesn't mean that future lectures will be no harder...

The lecturer seems quite good, anyway, though he said he was going slowly today and in that case I'd hate to see fast. Admittedly though I was trying to copy all the notes down, and they will apparently be available online (indeed were already available only no-one realised) to print out and bring to class, so that will save a bit of time. I wish that wasn't the way he wanted to do it though: I find it very hard to take notes in in lectures if I'm not writing them- it's hard to make my mind read all the notation and understand what it means, especially when the lecturer's making points about it at the same time. Whereas if you're supposed to copy down the notes they generally just say what they're writing, and if they want to say anything else they stop writing to say it. Still, I shall force myself to focus!

What didn't help today, even though I was writing the notes down, was that I was cold, tired and hungry and it was a three hour lecture. I was cold because all the windows were open at the back- even with my jacket on I was chilly. I was tired because I haven't been getting to bed as early as I should have (as I think I mentioned). I was hungry because I'd forgotten to get stuff in for breakfast, and realising this last night at ten pm or something decided that I'd just have to get up earlier and go out and get something and bring it back. Of course when the time came I decided I'd much rather sleep longer, and get a cup of tea and a croissant or roll or something at one of the cafes at LSE- since I've been leaving an hour before I need to be in* but it only takes about half an hour to cycle, there would be time. I didn't have any cash on me, and I didn't expect that the cafes would take debit cards, but there's a cash machine in the main street of LSE and at 8.30 am I doubted there'd be a massive queue. Indeed there wasn't. But the machine wouldn't let my card go in- it just resisted. And it wasn't just me because the person behind me had no more luck. She told me there was another cash machine round the corner, but that turned out to be broken too. And lo and behold, the cafes didn't take debit cards.

I grabbed a much needed snack after the lecture (in the three hours they'd mended the machine), spent a bit longer than I should have reading the Beaver, LSE's student newspaper, and then did a bit of work in the library (more of the probability problems from yesterday). Then I met up with Ginger in Lincoln's Inn Fields, which I think is going to become a bit of a thing with us, and no doubt somewhere that will acquire nostalgic significance when we've both moved on to other places. We went to Pret a Manger, which was nice. Shockingly, it's actually no more expensive to eat than some of LSE's sandwich places.

Then I came back to halls to rendezvous with SC2 so we could go and see the halls manager, to check we had their approval for our projects, and ask about a few things. Though it was 2.30, he was actually out for lunch and we were told to come back in an hour.

This evening I shall probably go to a public talk by George Monbiot among others that a lot of the conservation oriented LSE societies are going to- there's a meeting place at LSE to all go together.

*just to be absolutely sure I won't be late, either because of traffic and other unforeseen things or due to leaving five minutes later than planned- both at UCL and when I was in Japan I was five to ten minutes late almost all the time and I wanted to be better here