Stats meeting and Indian food

Compared with the past few days, today was warm, luminous, and bright. Walking to the Manor Road building, Oxford looked like an entirely different place from the cold and drizzly expanse it has been for the better part of the last week. It’s the kind of day that in the midst of which you can’t help feeling more optimistic.

The stats meeting today went fairly well. It was too well attended to work as a cohesive whole and dividing it into smaller groups would have required more centralization than was likely to emerge from such an ad hoc assembly. Regardless, in an informal kind of way we managed to address a few of the issues that had been making me anxious. Hopefully, I will somehow be able to get hold of one of the textbooks before the exam takes place: the libraries I’ve found have all been stripped of their copies. The only thing I am really shaky about is the math behind logit regressions, though I am fairly sure we’re essentially meant to treat it as a black box operation.

Tomorrow, I am determined to rise early, infuse myself with coffee acquired with difficulty from a recalcitrant Starbucks staff this afternoon, and delve into all the inter-term break work I so admirably pledged to complete weeks ago.

Dinner with Louise this evening went well. I maintain that the vegetable Vindaloo at Kashmir on Cowley Road is one of the best examples of the variety I’ve encountered, though my deprivation from tasty ethnic food here makes me more likely to see any example in a good light. Hopefully, I will have the chance to see Louise again before her departure. Oxford shall be a poorer place for her absence, as of Friday.

• I got my Hilary Term battels pidged to me today: £964.08, even after all my refunded meals.
• The bulletin board on the wall behind my desk is now completely covered with photos, postcards, and miscellaneous reminders. It makes the room feel much richer.
• Does human cognition employ Bayesian reasoning? This article makes an interesting case for why it may.
• “Westfall” by Okkervil River is quite a good song. My thanks to Tristan for giving it to me initially.
• Oh, and Apple, I can’t believe you would be so stupid as to add a spyware-like feature to the newest version of iTunes. How stupid and disrespectful, and just when you are trying to get good press for new products. It’s fairly benign, so I am not really angry, but you really can’t claim to be a superior breed of company if you’re using the same kind of technology for which that lots of other companies are rightly in the doghouse. Turn it off.