Mario < Statistics
Today I had planned on exploring North Austin a bit to learn the roads and sites (see: excuse to find the local Fry's).
But, instead I got distracted finishing "Stranger from a Strange Land" by Heinlein. Which you must read if you haven't (slightly used copy available for shipment). It is a great piece of science fiction that explores human nature, religion, humor and social structures. It is also the book in which the word "grok" is coined.
In any case this put me back by an hour.
With that finished I opened the garage and walked outside just in time to hear the neighbor say: "I think it is going to rain." And sure enough, checking the local weather showed a tropical storm heading right over Austin. I have heard stories of Austin hail blowing out the windshield of cars so I postponed my outing.
To kill time I played fetch with Sam, my roommate's boston terrier, and waited for the newly formed lakes to turn back into roads.
With the roads cleared I made my 4 minute journey to Fry's :-) with the intention of buying either a Nokia 770 or Nintendo DS Lite. But, after some soul searching I decided against it and headed off to find a bookstore.
I ended up in central Austin at the Barne's and Noble and browsed, read and had a $4 Starbucks Arnold Palmer. When it came to closing time I set my Linux books back and purchased two statistics books. Yes, I hated my statistics class last term, yes the material is a bit dry, but extracting data from large sets of numbers is kind of a big deal. Particularly interesting is "Benford's Law" which describes generally how digits are distributed in a set of data.
So to conclude:
- Read Stranger from a Strange Land
- Don't mess around with Texas storms
- Mario's got nothin' on statistics
