Happy V-Day

Full disclosure, I didn't even realize today was Valentine's Day until I walked into the department office and saw a tray of "goodies". Though I have no reason to celebrate this day, I didn't pass up the opportunity for cookies!

Speaking of Valentines, I did get an e-card yesterday from a student. Now such things tend to make me a tad nervous as I never know if it's a sign of infatuation, a death threat, or something else altogether. Fortunately, this one turned out to be the latter. In fact, it was an econ-themed V-day card! How cool is that? Well probably not much, unless you're an economist.

Oh, speaking of Valentines again, the subject sort of came up in today's stats lecture. I was trying to explain, for the 487th time, the CORRECT way to interpret the results of a hypothesis test. Basically, you can REJECT or FAIL TO REJECT the null hypothesis (the baseline, status quo, ...). For some reason the students are really having trouble grasping the exact implication of the "fail to reject" option. Anyway, I was going over that again when I said something like, "Yeah, rejection -- an appropriate subject for Valentine's Day, at least for me." That got a good chuckle and then I told them, "No, I'm alone because I choose to be alone." After that, things pretty much went downhill. It took a while to get them back to the idea of hypothesis testing.

Anyway, those have been the highlights of my V-day so far. Oh, I remembered at least one book I omitted from my list yesterday. I think it was a quarter and it looked fairly interesting. I used to read A LOT of short stories, but the modern short story tends to disappoint me. Nothing really happens in today's short stories. Still, this collection looks like it might have potential. I don't know, though; those Iowa Workshop writers sometimes let me down.

Oh, another update on yesterday's book post. It looks as if I may have found a home for my new 1st edition copy of Sex & Sunsets. I am, though, going to make him post a comment on the blog before he gets the book. Hey, Caffeine Bro, you've been a blog mooch for too long!