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.

wish list

A few people have asked what I want for my birthday. I've been adding a few items to my Amazon wish list, which I also put on my sidebar. So maybe that will give people a few ideas if they want to get me something. Mainly I'd be happy with a phone call, though.

New Pics Up

I have a couple new Picasa Web Albums, one of my day-to-day life in Salvador and one of my pictures from Brasilia.

Brasília

Access to the net has been very limited here. Have had to borrow computers from professors and obviously have not wanted to take very much of their time.

Had great conversations with people about my research. Took pictures of the city. I'll have lots to write when I get back.

I take the taxi to the airport in a little over an hour. If all goes well (fingers crossed) I'll have about 25 hours of flying and waiting in airports, 28 hours from the door of my guest apartment on campus to my condo in Carrboro. I think I may be tired.

home in a week!

Assuming my four flights (apx. 24 hours of travel) go well (fingers crossed) I should be home around this time a week from today. We had to write a composition about the difference between something in the U.S. and Brazil. I compared the streets (as in the physical streets). Maybe I'll translate it sometime.

Brazil (Week 5)

The weekdays were pretty routine. Tuesday afternoon we went to a museum of afro-Brazilian culture. It has a lot of items related to candomble. This included a lot of beautiful wood carvings of the orixás, but my pictures of them didn't turn out very good because they were big and dark and the light wasn't very good. Here is one of the better ones:



We visited the Jorge Amado foundation, which was interesting as well. I'd like to read some of his novels. They had a cafe with covers of his books from all over the world:



We had a four day weekend. Most of my group went out of town. I took it easy and tried to get some work done. I did a lot of reading, and finally finished Stuffed and Starved on Saturday. Friday I went to the mall with Mike and Tiffany (two grad students here helping my program director do his research), Joanna from my program and Mike and Tiffany's Canadian neighbors (everyone just calls them "The Canadians"). Came back to Mike and Tiffany's apartment and hung out for a while and crashed there (I'd told my host mom that I might do that).

Sunday morning I woke up with a cold which I'm still getting over. My host mom and I cooked some of my favorite dishes: honey mustard garlic chicken, three bean salad, and mashed potatoes. Mike and Tiffany came over for lunch. We had a really good time. Then I went back with them and Cindy, one of the Canadians, cut my hair. That's her job back home. It's nice to have it trimmed up and I won't look like a shaggy mess when I meet people in Brasilia.

more pics up

Again, I need to do more organizing and captioning. I'll add the link to the sidebar, too, so it'll be easy for people to check them out.

one week to Brasilia

In a week I'll be headed to Brasilia. Weird to think that my parents were teenagers when it was built. Also, something interesting about going from the original capital, one that existed long before European settlement in North America, to the current one.

10 year reunion

Today is the 10 year high school reunion for Whitefish High School, the school from which I graduated. When the date got set for during this trip my thought was "Woe is me, I'll be in a land of great music, great food, beautiful women and beautiful beaches." In October I'm attending the reunion for Leigh High School in San Jose, where I went to 9th and 10th grade.

A month ago I missed a family reunion celebrating my dad's 60th and my uncle Bryan's retirement, a much bigger deal for me than the reunion. I knew I needed to come here and work on my language skills for my career. In the grand scheme of things people give up it's not that big, but it caused me to reflect more broadly on the nature of opting for the academic life. I'm in NC because it's the place to be for what I want to do. I love it there, but I'm far away from family. When (if?) I get a job I'll have limited options as to where it is, so there's a good chance I'll be away from family again. The amount we in the U.S. move for work contrasts with a lot of places where people tend to live where they grew up (with the important exception of immigration...). In the U.S. it also seems to vary based on class an other social factors: certain groups of people move a lot for careers, others stay put.