Free speakers and condoms

The day theoretically started off with a meeting of the people involved in the Sutherland protest, to work out the wording for a new petition (calling for a binding referendum of students, academics and staff on the appointment, or failing that his resignation/ non-acceptance of the position). I heroically dragged myself out of bed in time to make it in to college for 9 am, though my first lecture was at 10. But of all the people who said they'd be there yesterday when the emails were going round, only myself and the ex-Returning Officer actually turned up*, and we were both about 15 minutes late (but it wasn't that we missed them because of that, because I was actually on time to begin with, checked out the two rooms in the basement of St Clement's which had been suggested as meeting places, found no-one in either and went to the computer room on the same floor to check my email to establish whether a different place had been arranged, and noting that it hadn't, went on to send a few important emails of my own while keeping an eye on people coming and going so as to spot any of the Sutherland protest people if they turned up.)

Anyway, the Returning Officer was talking about giving it 10 minutes before going, and I had been thinking along similar lines, but then I decided to be proactive and suggested that we might get somewhere with it even in a meeting of two. Maybe it was even more productive that way- when you have five or ten people all trying to make suggestions about different bits and with different approaches- or five or ten people all avoiding being the one to actually say something- it's harder to get much done. We managed to push out a decent few sentences that summed up the basic idea, and though of course they still needed work, at least there was an original text for people to comment on and amend (though we couldn't be much of a part of that as we were both busy all today).

We were actually finished with about quarter of an hour to go before we both had to be places at 10. I went back to the computer room intending to add a few more comments to the functions for the group project. But once at the computer, it somehow seemed that a better use of my time would be to amend my leaflet to a non-sit-in context so that it could be used as an information handout at the stall with the petition if people thought that would be usefull. I managed to get it done in the time as well (well, ok, I was 5 minutes late for Computational Stats which like everything starts at 5 past the hour so technically I got it done in the time plus 10 minutes. But let's not nitpick).

We've finished covering new material in Computational Stats- today was handing back the test and going over the questions. I actually did pretty well- 34; I'm not quite sure what that's out of (haven't counted up the available marks), but the mean of the top 3 marks (being a stats course the lecturer gave out all sorts of details like the inter quartile range of the marks, for this and the last test (at the time)) was 32, and it came with the comment excellent so in relative terms that's got to count as an achievement to be proud of, if not necessarily in absolute terms. I accidentally saw someone else's mark was 6, and as the range was 28, I calculate that I got at least joint top. Still, complacency is dangerous. I made a silly slip where I was thinking before I started writing one of the functions that after doing a certain amount of calculation it would be necessary to multiply by a number m, but then I forgot to do it by the time I'd written the stuff that came before it. And I wrote that a function would plot one thing (call it x) against another (call it y) when actually it was the other way around- and that was stupid because I knew how x and y would be on the graph, but I temporarily forgot that when you say 'plot x against y' that means having the x value on the y axis and the y value on the x axis, which was why I wrote which one was plotted against which the wrong way round. The lecturer mentioned that a lot of people did that, but he assumed that they had misunderstood what the function did rather than forgotten what the English words meant (perhaps that assumption was justified in the majority of cases, I wouldn't know). And these were just the trivial things. It's important to remember that I had to leave out quite a few questions because I didn't know the answers, and some of the rest I wasn't too sure about.

Just to dwell on the glory a little longer though, I was proud that the lecturer wrote "nice!" next to the way I'd written the function for the last question.

On the way to the computer class, I picked up a copy of The Beaver. They didn't print any of my photos of Reclaim the Night- there wasn't an article about it; I'm not sure if that was because there wasn't room for it with so much more important stuff, or if it was that the Women's Officer had been ill and unable to go- maybe it was she who was supposed to write about it? After all, I didn't see any reporters for The Beaver there. Of course it was a little disappointing, but I hadn't just assumed it would be in there; I realised that the story or just the photo might not make it into the paper. So it wasn't an awfull shock. Hopefully they'll have some more assignments for me to do sometime and if I get to do enough of them sooner or later I should get published by pure statistics!

The rest of the day was pretty much Group Project. We were allowed to work on it in the computer class, and then transferred (there was a class using the room) to C120 to work on it some more, and even skipped Principles and Methods to put in more time on it (though one of us did go to most of the lecture and brought us back the handouts and the information that the lecturer had pretty much stuck to them).

The function we were having trouble with last time held out on us for four or five hours but in the end we beat it into submission, along with a few others that were working ok in the sense of giving results, but not in the sense of giving the right results. The problem with the first function turned out to be a really stupid mistake** that I can't believe we didn't see in four hours of staring at it checking every line for errors. We wasted so much time! Now what's left is pretty much a case of checking that we've used the right method for the questions, and if we haven't, hopefully we will be able to adapt it without writing totally new functions that will take a while to debug and lick into working order.

We took it in turns to break for lunch in the middle; I went off to get a sandwich in the Quad and got handed a S.H.A.G (Sexual Health and Guidance) Week bag as I was passing down Houghton St. I'd heard they were going to be giving them out and had meant to make a point of getting one, but had forgotten, and was taken by surprise, so when a bloke jumped out and offered me one, I said 'Oh, go on then' which sounds rather like I wouldn't have wanted one but had been persuaded (not necessarily a bad thing- one doesn't necessarily want to be too eager!). He sounded like he had been having trouble persuading people to take them- at any rate all the people giving them out seemed very pleased that I'd accepted. In addition to another copy of The Beaver (I later put it on the Beaver stands as I don't need two), and some info about STIs, there were some free condoms. Put together with the one I got in Fresher's Week, that now makes 4 free condoms and no-one to use them with (sniff!) Sadly, I am very very bad at getting as far as a first date with anyone***- I think I am lacking in certain skills like how to tell whether a guy is interested and how to show my own interest, since I don't believe the package I have to offer is inferior- though limited experience would suggest that past that point I do not have a problem. I'm not quite sure how to work on this, but I do need to improve as it would be a shame to let four freebies go to waste**** :-) Incidentally, if anyone has any tips on this, please do comment.

Originally I had planned to go out to dinner with two of my flatmates, L, and two of her flatmates/ friends. But they couldn't make it in the end, so my flatmates and I decided to cook together in halls. They made Chinese food and I made gyoza, which they'd wanted me to show them how to make for quite a while*****. It all turned out really well, and we even had jasmine green tea with it. After washing up (which actually didn't take that long), we had two more kinds of tea- the jasmine tea was my tea and my idea, but it brought out a desire in the others to share their own tea- powdered green tea (matcha) in the case of Flatmate 3 and a Whittards vanilla, honey and apricot powdered tea drink in the case of Flatmate 7. Whilst we drank, I got out my laptop and showed them some of my photos of Japan. I'd planned to stop when we got to the photos of my first trip to Tokyo (I have about 8,000 photos of the trip in all so showing them in one sitting was not really feasible), and though I was worried quite a bit before that point that I was boring them, I stuck out till there then suggested that maybe that was enough for one night. They agreed, but asked to see pictures of my house (in the UK). I didn't have many good ones (in the sense of showing what it's like), but I showed them what I had, and other stuff that caught their eye, before needing to dash to the loo (all that tea), telling them as I went that they were free to look at any photos they wanted as I didn't think there was anything they couldn't see. When I came back they were looking at photos of a trip to a small beach near Weston Super Mare with my family last spring, and we ended up looking at quite a few more before finally going to bed (including more of Japan, from much later in my stay, and the ones of me in a kimono (for the dance performance at the village culture festival)). So hopefully I didn't bore them too much after all!

Flatmate 3 gave me a set of computer speakers- I'd mentioned some weeks ago that it would be nice to watch a DVD together sometime only I didn't have decent quality speakers on my laptop (when I watch a film by myself I use headphones so it's not normally a problem). She didn't need them as she now had a Mac and apparently they were incompatible. I tried to offer her some money for them, but she said they only cost about £5 (she got them in Hong Kong, where she comes from), and anyway she'd got plenty of use out of them, and she wouldn't take anything. I stopped trying when Flatmate 7 pointed out that it was just like the scheme I want to set up in halls of a cardboard box in the common room for people to put anything in that they would only throw away but is good enough quality that someone else might want it, and for people to take out anything they like the look of. Still, it was very generous of her. I haven't tried them out yet, but they've got to be better than the ones I have back home.

*This sounds like I'm angry with them but actually I didn't mind that much

**In indexing some of our vectors we were using a[max(b)] (with different variable names for a and b, but I'll use those as it's simpler). This gives the value of a at the position whose number is whatever value b takes as a maximum. What we wanted, and what we thought that would give us, and couldn't see for hours and hours that it wouldn't, was the value of a at the position where b takes its maximum value- ie a[b==max(b)]. I can't believe we didn't spot that. And we were wondering why it only gave results for small values of one of the parameter (it was because in that case the maximum value of b was small, and less than the length of a, so there was actually a value of a at the position with that number, but for large values of the parameter max(b) was bigger than the length of a and there was no position of a with that number and so we just got NA

***Yes, yes, I know, gets top marks at computer programming but can't get a date, how sad. But if I had to choose only one of academic/intellectual and romantic ability, I'd choose academic, so I guess that's ok. In theory. Doesn't stop me wanting to have it all though (and why not).

****And it would stop the wishfull thinking when I get kept awake by the sounds of people in a nearby room enjoying themselves very very much- I'm not quite sure where it comes from (and it's not that often), but either someone is a very good lover or there is a very good actress of the Meg Ryan school around.

*****I found it slightly ironic that I, a European, was teaching two Asians how to make gyoza- of course, especially since it's a Japanese dish, there's no reason why they should know how, but it felt ever so slightly ridiculous!