Problem Set #1

I know you probably weren't expecting this to turn into isomorphisms, but here's a fun and exciting set of statistics problems for you to solve. Start off with the following assumptions:
  • The city of Copenhagen can be divided into three bar-hopping zones: Amager, the city center, and everywhere else.
  • In the city center, one-tenth of the bars are gay bars. Outside the city center, only one bar in twenty is a gay bar.
  • Amager has no bars to speak of, because Amager blows.
  • Bars outside the city center have decently cheap beer 2/3 of the time; bars in the city center have cheap beer only 1/3 of the time.
  • Bars outside the city center have decent music 10% of the time; bars in the city center have decent music 20% of the time.
When I go out at night, I randomly choose a starting location, either in the city center, or outside of it. 80% of the time, the starting location is in the city center. I tried starting out on Amager once, but vowed never to do it again. Then I wander aimlessly, going into every bar I see until I find one that has both cheap beer and tolerable music. If I start out in the city center, I never leave, but if I start anywhere else I will walk to the city center with probability 0.1n, where n is the number of bars I've already tried that night.
  1. On average, how many bars will I visit each night I go out?
  2. So far I've found four bars I like. Two of them are gay bars, two of them aren't, and all four of them are located within the city center. Given that in any non-gay bar there is a 25% chance of dodgy old (or young, but usually old) men making me ick out, and that gay bars definitely do not offer cheaper beer, what can be said about the quality of music in the average downtown gay bar?
yami · 18:55 · 30 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Ineffable

It seems like all the

It seems like all the decent late-night spots in Copenhagen are gay bars. I'm not quite sure why this is. Intuitively, the only real difference is the change in meat-market expectations, but that shouldn't influence the volume or genre of music or the presence of backgammon or fish tanks or any of the things that made last night's random basement cafe a warm and comfortable place to be. And last night was not the only night my quest for a happy drinking place has ended up in a gay bar. Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon, or is it just me/here?
yami · 18:02 · 30 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Ineffable

Rescheduling

My four-day weekend has returned! I thought it was gone, sacrificed to some nebulous concept of "geodynamics lecture" but today it came back in full force - we moved class to Tuesdays. Hello, £9 flights to London. This is good.

On the other hand, during coffee break the professor figured out that Jane and I were from Caltech, and for some reason thought this meant he should look at us whenever he said the word "easy". This is bad - I very nearly burst out laughing, for one thing. This is my first real run-in with the fearsome teeth of Tech's academic reputation, and no one ever told me that it would be embarassing to come from a Prestigious School. Maybe it would have been better if I'd had more sleep and less caffeine beforehand.

Of course I haven't been getting much sleep lately: recent events have transformed the highly anticipated period of falling asleep - which takes me at least a half hour most nights and is usually a time of fuzzy daydreams - into a much less happy time of melancholy reflection. So I've been staying up late doodling around. I'd almost forgotten what it feels like when I'm sleep deprived - I'm zanier, more outgoing, more likely to make cheeky remarks and also more likely to laugh at them even if they're not funny. I'm a bit stupider generally, and I think my ability to think social-type thoughts and write them down properly takes a particularly hard knocking, but at the same time my internal censors go on a bit of a vacation and I write more things down. By sheer chance, some of them always remain interesting in the light of day. Meanwhile, running around on three hours of sleep and a bottle of cola, I feel much more like myself and also completely invincible.
yami · 23:41 · 28 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Personal, Diary

good morning.

Well, yes, hello. My stomach's in a bit of a knot right now, but otherwise things are usual and I'm taking my shock and bewilderment in small doses, separated by me very intensely doing mundane things like talking back to the news and thinking about laundry, and sad in the background.

Grief is funny. I've been lucky, and haven't experienced very much of it at all in my life, and can't recognize the patterns of my own mind slowly filling in the void. Today I'm able to think in complete sentences again, with capital letters, with semicolons and finely tuned shades of em-dash and en-dash being appropriate indicators of my baffled pauses. Yesterday I felt like some damn avant garde poet, wanting to spread words all over the page like fingerpaint, because none of them were connected to the others and yet they all were.

Yeah. Anyway. If you're sick of wallowing in my angst, try this. You'll like it. Also, have some fun with the blog twinning project, if you're into that sort of thing.
yami · 14:03 · 27 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Links, Diary

oh fuck

[entry deleted for being far too raw and personal. summary, a friend of mine was found hanging from the ceiling. we weren't very close, but it still sucks being the only one on this continent who knew him.]
yami · 22:59 · 26 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary

Modern-Day Vikings

Lately, I've been putting my bus time to good use by imagining that all the Danes around me are Vikings like their distant forefathers, just waiting for the perfect opportunity to rape and pillage the northern coasts of Europe once more. I can vividly picture this furry-browed man sitting across from me in a smoky banquet hall, quaffing rancid beer from a bronze drinking horn and contentedly surveying the results of a lifetime of conquest. Or those two children up front, running in the dirt and playing warrior with sticks. For the most part, though, the images are silly - that spectacled businessman in a helmet and mail? He wouldn't even make it as a herdsman! Denmark has clearly been softened by 800 years of Christianity, and few of her citizens are fit for anything more glorious than the role of the spindly poet in stock historical fantasy. Which is a good thing really, because if you spend too long picturing all your neighbors as bloodthirsty savages, you begin to get a little antisocial.
yami · 20:33 · 26 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Ineffable

I’ve given in

Okay, I've given in (to what, I don't know, but I've certainly given in to something) and gotten one of those silly little bloghop rating thingamawhatsits.

Rate Me on BlogHop.com!
the best pretty good okay pretty bad the worst
help?

It's also down in the bottom left, without the silly pictures and things. Whee.
yami · 19:43 · 25 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Meta

Whenever I look at the

Whenever I look at the polls, I always start to wonder how I can completely miss such a large segment of the population. I realize of course that my contact with the American streetslug is rather limited here in Copenhagen, and that my friends and family form a small and liberal sample of public opinion - but if Gallup is to be believed, there are over 100 million people in the U.S. who want Arabs to carry around special identification papers. Bwah? I haven't met any of these people. Where are they?

I'm going to go look under my bed to make sure there aren't any monsters.
yami · 15:55 · 25 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: USian Politics

nonsense words

Lightningstrike inspiration. I can become more popular by making fun of other bloggers! So for my first post in this newly discovered popularity contest, I will make fun of bloggers who make fun of other bloggers, and then I shall make fun of bloggers who make fun of bloggers for making fun of other bloggers. You are all encouraged to spread the meme, and make fun of bloggers who make fun of bloggers for making fun of bloggers who make fun of other bloggers, and so on.

I've noticed a particularly irritating thing about bloggers who make fun of other bloggers. They all have a character flaw that is related to their eagerness to talk, and their subsequent skittishness towards real and meaningful action outside blogland. However, it goes deeper than that; the flaw is also connected to their excessive use of Metafilter and other trendy discussion sites, and their juvenile, cliquish behaviors such as joining web rings and making fun of other bloggers. It allows them to adopt fashionable political views at a moment's notice, without ever defending them as adeptly as I defend my own ideas. It is the gaping hole in one's psyche that can drive a person to use 10-point Verdana and ugly tinted photography. It is the reason behind the many sexual and romantic failures of bloggers who make fun of other bloggers, and because I wish to show off my impressive command of the English language I will make up a new word for it: stylenze.

What's even worse than a stylenzic blogger, though, is a pretentiously anti-stylenze stance. Anti-stylenzic bloggers have simply replaced the stylenzic ideal with their own, equally ugly aesthetic, and they form cliques that differ from stylenzic cliques only in their levels of bitterness and cynicism, where they complain about other bloggers who complain about other bloggers. In short, they are hypocrites, and I recommend that they remove the plank from their own blogs before examining the splinter in others. I, however, only gently prod other bloggers to notice problems which I have already corrected in my own writing.

---

[ungh... falling asleep...can't write satire... unnnngg... *snark*... *zot*]
yami · 1:49 · 25 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Crap

Juggling Cabbages

I have an informal mental list of things I shouldn't juggle, including sharp things, burning things, billiard balls, and now also cabbages. Cabbages are too large and dense to easily start juggling without assistance, and if you've never done any sort of two-person juggling before, trying to pass four heads of cabbage in the main walkway of a kitchen before cooking supper usually ends quickly with a loud noise and some tenderized cabbage. On the bright side, there's nothing like cooking four heads of dropped cabbage to induce some silly camaraderie.

Gratuitous use of the word "cabbage" aside, this weekend was almost exactly what I needed - a small group of people, many of who were new and interesting, and a quiet retreat setting kind of like when I would run outside to my grandparents' greenhouse-cum-guesthouse as a kid and paint things. I learned which mushroom smells like pale purple, and which ones will induce nausea and hallucinations. I also drank way too much gammel dansk (any gammel dansk is too much, really) ate an absurd quantity of pickled herring, and only narrowly avoided falling into the dark rye shadow of rugbrød. Traditional Danish food is definitely something that needs to be taken in small quantities and diluted with lots of bland things, unless of course you're talking about dessert.
yami · 13:50 · 24 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary