His hair is super cool. I think he thinks so too because he sits up front in every class. By ‘up front’ I mean between me and the teacher. Every day. No matter where I sit.
Archive for the ‘school’ Category
Monty Hall
Thursday, September 15th, 2011
I think that Las Vegas is based entirely on the fact that people don’t understand probability.
“I have a feeling that I’ll get 7′s again!”
That’s not actually how it works.
Say you’re on a game show. You get to pick one door out of three. One door has money behind it, the other two have men with squirt guns.
You pick a door. The chance of you picking the door with the money is easy, right? It’s 1/3. Three doors, one guess.
The game show host decides to fuck with you. She says that one of the other doors definitely has a dude with a squirt gun, and asks him to come on out.
Then she asks you if you want to stick with your original choice, or if you want to switch to the other door.
You’re down to two doors now, right? One with money and one with a squirt gun dude. You’ve already selected one.
Do you switch?
Intuitively, I would say no. Why would you switch? You picked a door, stick with it, yo! Gut instinct and a desire not to get squirted won’t lead you wrong!
Mathematically, yes. You switch.
Why? Because you started with a 1/3 chance. That means that you had two chances to pick the wrong door. Even though you know, after the first squirt gun fella reveals himself, that you didn’t pick that wrong door, it’s still more likely that you chose wrong. If you switch, you end up with a 2/3 chance of winning. If you don’t, you’re stuck with your original 1/3 chance.
I hope that one day you’ll use this.
And then you’ll send me ten percent of your winnings.
it’s amazing
Tuesday, September 13th, 2011
Teachers assistant.
Co-teacher.
The first – the thing I am officially called (and paid to be, for that matter).
The second – the thing I am called in front of the Prob Stats class that I TA for.
There were quite a few reasons for the slightly elevated title (it was a decision made by my boss, not me). The most pressing was that I will be teaching a couple of lectures a month while she’s out of town, and they’re more likely to respect me if I’m not called a TA.
The first of those lectures is next week.
These students, who seemed so young the first week, now seem sort of … scary. They’re smart and stuff.
They ask hard questions.
If I were a TA, I could say ‘sorry, I’m just a TA’.
Obviously, calling me a teacher was a terrible idea.
oh the level of genius
Tuesday, September 6th, 2011
My primary complaint – why on earth does this comic not have an RSS feed?
Seriously.
Why.
wrong wrong wrong
Thursday, September 1st, 2011
Yesterday.
Am I right?
Seriously. Not only did I write a poorly thought out blog post (I had a point but forgot it on the drive to school and typed something while in class just so I could hit publish), I also got a perfectly nice TA at Purdue in trouble for doing me a favor (not on purpose!) and made a pathetic showing of solving a problem on the board in Linear Vector Spaces. Like, my professor crossed it out and wrote ‘the works of Satan’ next to what I wrote down.*
Sometimes I do or say things and afterwards I think, man, if I had only thought about that before opening my mouth or taking that step, I would have seen the error of my ways. Then I mentally yell at myself – THINK, Emma, THINK.
There are days, though, that even if I had thought about it I would have done it anyway. The perfectly nice TA got in trouble for giving me permissions that only his prof should have been able to grant. The professor was going to give them to me, but the TA beat him to it – and I didn’t know that it was an issue, so I mentioned it to the prof. In retrospect, the best I could have done was talked less – I couldn’t have realized I shouldn’t say that specific thing. I certainly couldn’t have performed better at the board unless I’d gone back in time to the night before and studied matrix inversions – but I chatted to the class while I made my attempt and in retrospect that probably makes my failure more memorable.
Hmm. Maybe talking less overall is a good idea.
I should look into that.
* That is not a joke. He really really loves Dana Carvey’s Church Lady.