ceiling fans and calculus

Managed to install a ceiling fan in my place. I'd hired a contractor to wire things for it, but had helped my mom put in two in her house and figured I could do it. I really should have waited for help (next time), but was a stubborn man and did it alone. The part where help would have been wise is where you lift the part with the motor off the hook it hangs on while you wire it and have to screw it to the part above. I foolishly went to the gym last night right before trying to install it, so my arms were tired. After fighting with the screws I decided to put it back on the hook and sleep on it. Thanks to Allison for encouraging this.

This morning I found a wire that had disconnected and fixed it. Turning the wall switches did nothing. Then I used the remote and it worked. Yay! Now I can save energy by keeping the place warmer. Someday I'll put one in the bedroom too. It's wired for it. Maybe that'd be a good father-son task when dad comes to visit.

I'm studying for my methods comp, which is two weeks from tomorrow (!). The notes for one of my classes said we should verify the derivative of this likelihood function with respect to pi and set it to zero (in the notes he skips the steps in between):

l = yln(pi) + (n-y)ln(1-pi)

I looked up various rules and worked through it. Forgot to apply the chain rule the first time. Amazing what difference leaving out a -1 can make. Anyhow, after struggling with it I eventually got to the correct pi = y/n.

I realize that I basically have two kinds of friends. The first type will read that say "what the hell are you talking about?" The second type will look at the function and be able to immediately work out in their head that it's y/n. It's weird to fall in the middle and be semi-lingual in math. Not like my friends in engineering, computers or math for whom it's their regular language, but something that I need to use sometimes, but not at the expense of a lot of other skills that are necessary to my work.

Anyhow, nice to actually get something done today.