Shocking, but the longer I live here in Southern California, the more I'm convinced that I actually live here (and that it's not some elaborate dream I'm involved in or some very serious summer camp that I've decided to undertake as an adult). More evidence to this conclusion came this week when I finally broke down and made it a priority to procure a legitimate digital piano from the bowels of Craigslist. In addition the choir I joined as soon as I got here in mid-September performed their concert with full orchestra (C.P.E. Bach's Magnificat -- C.P.E., for short, just like "Ben" for "Benjamin," as our lively director put it). You can't be owning digital pianos and singing in choirs with full-on orchestras unless you actually live in the damn city.
In further evidence, today involved the acquisition of a whole lotta Californian documentation. Including (but not limited to) license plates for my car (though they expire before the current plates, grr), registration, a title, and some sad piece of paper that passes for a driver's license (they let me keep my Mass license, though it now has a hole through it, just like my heart). In good news, I managed to miss exactly six questions on the written driver's test I had to take, which is the maximum number of items you can miss and pass (perfection!).
Ah, yes. Also in other good news, the probabilistic linguistics class I'm in had a great little bit in the homework assignment that was due today. In the end I think I misinterpreted part of it, which, if true, actually makes the problem even better. Essentially we were to compute the power (i.e. the sensitivity to a true difference) for detecting the difference between two datasets pulled from two distributions with true underlying differences in mean and/or variance. Neat, right!?
In other news, tonight a friend of mine and I bailed on our typical Tuesday-night activity of volleyball (with the world- ... ok, UCSD-famous EARTHPIGS of the cognitive science department) and hiked up (hike = drive in SoCal) to Solana beach to see the Devil Makes Three, one of the only "cool" bands I purport to know anything about, play at a place called BellyUp, which was a great venue (though we nearly got knocked over by some overly zealous-turned-angry moshers). Band was awesome, as usual -- I saw them (once? twice) at Middle East (pretty sure twice) in Cambridge, which is a tiny venue and really great (typically leads to chatting with the band after, if you are so inclined), and once in Brooklyn back in the days of attempting to escape from Boston to NYC as often as possible (aka my second year of grad school). Either this crowd was a lot rowdier, or I'm just getting old.
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