Oh man, again.

Channel 9 (The OKC channel, but it's on my cable package) was talking about how "the roads look like they've melted clean but they will refreeze into BLACK ICE overnight" and that a number of colleges have cancelled classes for tomorrow.

Guess what? So has mine. (I went and checked the webpage.)

This is when I begin to realize how much I enjoy my work and miss it when I'm kept from it. Yesterday I was all "Yay! Reading time!" and today I was all "Yay, sewing time!" and now I'm all, "Wait...I don't go back to work yet tomorrow?"

I think I will do more reading tomorrow, and also knit some. I don't know.

As I said on my Twitter stream, I fear I will be acting out scenes from "The Shining" with my amigurumi before long. I claim to be antisocial but too much time away from "real" people and I get a little twitchy. (I may try going down to the Green Spray - they are just a few short blocks from me - tomorrow, if they're open. Just to get out into the world of people. Also I am running a bit short on milk. I've been drinking tea (straight, black, no milk) and the coconut water I have on hand to conserve milk, but I'm down to 1/2 gallon* and if I can't get out to the grocery soon I'll be having to mix it from powder or something)

(*Yes, I really can put away a half gallon of milk in a couple days. It's one of the relatively few things I get cravings for)

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I did finish four more sets of quilt blocks today. (A set is eight blocks, so these represent 32 more blocks on the quilt. And I sewed together more strips but did not sub-cut them into the pieces needed for four-patches.



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I guess I never sat down and did the "proof" of the Shannon-Weaver method; with a lot of those things I am willing to accept that if the intelligent mathematicians have concluded they work, then they work. Also, so many people in my field use it that if I want to compare my data to previous data, I use the techniques the previous authors use, even if imperfect.

(Actually - and I was only half-joking here - I've told my students that, "For a while, there was sort of a cottage-industry among mathematical ecologists to declare every existing measure of diversity INVALID and then propose your own, new method and tell people why they should use it, and that's how you got a publication")

And yeah, I guess the Big Sigma is intimidating to people who haven't been steeped in statistics for more than twenty years like I have. (That thought scares me a little - I actually took my first stats class that involved calculation in 1989, so that's more than 20 years).

I'd like a t-shirt or a sweatshirt with a Big Sigma on it, so I could look more intimidating to the students* (Except most of them would think it was some kind of sorority thing. And I was proudly GDI when I was in college, so that wouldn't work for me)

(*Then again, I may be intimidating enough as it is. I remember a friend of mine in grad school telling me, shortly before I graduated, that one of the fellows in another lab had sort of fancied me but never asked me out because I 'intimidated' him.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to how that could be true.

I felt somewhat sad about that because I'm the kind of person who will give a chap at least one chance, provided he's not twenty years my junior or a rageaholic or one of those guys who tries to cop a feel and then gets all hurt and huffy and claims he wasn't when you call him on it... I will say I would have been sadder if he was a chap I particularly fancied but he really wasn't. I mean, there was nothing WRONG with him, I just didn't have an immediate attraction...)