Spoilt for Choice

Today was the third meeting for the Sustainability Champions. The Lilian Knowles champions met up in the Garrick (cafe) beforehand as we thought it would be a good idea to sort out what we need to be working on now. We haven't really done much since the quiz in Climate Change Awareness Week. It was just the three girls though (Flatmate 7, SC2 and myself)- the boy who annoyed me rather after the Environment forum, and another who'd been a Sustainability Champion right from the start but hadn't managed to get in touch with the rest of us till around Climate Change Awareness Week didn't show up or reply to my email. In the case of the latter, that might be partly my fault, as I took quite a while to get back to him with more details after my initial email telling him I'd write with more details soon, so he may have given up on us. I'm not sure what the situation is with the other guy- even whether he actually joined up to become a Sustainability Champion or not (he was only intending to become one at the Environment Forum); we had an email from him shortly before the quiz saying he couldn't help after all as he was busy cooking for his 30th birthday, but it wasn't clear from the email whether he was just saying he couldn't join in that time or whether he was resigning from the whole thing. He did come to the Garrick about half an hour into our meeting though, just to have lunch with some friends, so I think if he wanted to be involved (and got the email about the meeting) he would have said something? (He definitely saw us because he said hi in passing). I'm not that bothered either way- if he wants to be in I'll grit my teeth and learn valuable personal interaction skills in the process, while if he doesn't then I'll breathe a sigh of relief- but it would be nice to know which it is. (It may not be his fault- he may have thought he was informing us clearly and categorically that he didn't want to be involved with that email).

We put forward quite a lot of important must-do projects- a whole side of A4, to be exact. Splitting the work three ways though that's not too bad...

The meeting itself was maybe a bit more usefull than last time, but still not hugely helpfull. There were one or two points that we might be able to take inspiration from (or blatantly copy) though.
There was another test in Computational Statistics. I'd been pretty laid back about this one- it wasn't assessed and it was open-book (ie we were allowed to look at our notes), so though I'd remember every now and again over the weekend that there was a test coming up I didn't actually do any revision. This meant I was rather shaky on the bit about factors and linear regression, but I did all I could and then came back to those bits with the notes and made a stab at it. One of the questions was, if I (and another person I talked to about it afterwards) are not mistaken, basically exactly the same as one of the examples in the notes only stripped of context. So I just copied that out changing some variable names. As to how I did, we'll see tomorrow (hopefully).

I did some more work on the project after the class, with one other group member (the football one). The others were busy. We took a deep breath and started on the write-up. We managed to get the introduction and most of the first question done in just 3 hours, which is not too bad- there's only the end of that question plus one more to go, and of course some kind of ending. And fitting the functions in their proper places- we left that bit out. But I'm confident that it shouldn't take too much more work- which is good, considering it has to be in on Friday. We'll be able to do some more in the computer class tomorrow, apparently.

I went to People and Planet's showing of The Constant Gardener in the evening. I thought it was pretty good, though of course rather harrowing. I may be getting better at harrowing films though- I'm probably just gradually getting desensitized. People and Planet were showing it as part of a series of events leading up to World Aids Day on Friday. I don't know how many I'm going to be able to get to- I probably won't make the party/ celebrity items auction on the day itself, for example, as I expect to go home for the weekend that evening. But I'll go to what I can. Part of the problem with a place like LSE is there's so much going on you have to turn down about three things for every one you accept. For example, I was excited to see that the Film Society in conjunction with the Japan Society are showing Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story) on Tuesday of Week 10- I went to see it at the NFT in Final year, back when my Japanese vocabulary was very, very small indeed (which was ok as there were subtitles), and remembered it as being a good film, and thought 'Great, I'd love to see that again- and to see how much more I can understand now' (well, you never know), but then a minute or two later I remembered that that's the day of the Statistics and Risk and Stochastics Postgraduate Christmas party, which I've already signed up and paid £5 for. Still, better that problem than have nothing going on at all...