I’m back from Mexico and getting ready for the upcoming semester, which for me means shuffling through piles of dusty papers looking for hardcopies of my class notes because some jerkwad stole my USB memory stick/jump drive/flash drive from my backpack, presumably in one airport or another. Said wad also stole my ipod Shuffle, but since my USB drive housed every bit of work I’ve done in the past five years it’s far more valuable to me than any mp3 player. Not because it was exemplary work, of course, but because it saved me from having to do any reading or investigation as preparation for class lectures; even though I’ve long forgotten on what authority the information in my notes rests, I figure it must be accurate if I bothered to write it down.
In any event, in my search for notes I came across some notes that I took myself in a graduate class. They’re on a handout illustrating a problem in one of the statistics courses I had to take to fulfill my degree requirements (see below). For those of you who don’t know, I study politics, not statistics or economics or anything like that. You’ll notice that the problem concerns transportation choice in Australia, an issue to which generations of political scientists have devoted their careers, sort of like the search for dark matter among astrophysicists. We think we may be on the verge of explaining why some people in Melbourne take the bus, thus closing a chapter opened by the great founders of our discipline like Aristotle and Machiavelli.
This imminent breakthrough notwithstanding, sometimes I think a lot of political scientists spend way too much time on math problems and not enough on, you know, politics. These folks do some really sophisticated stuff, way beyond the quadratic equations I was able to do in high school. In fact, I don’t understand anything they’re going on about, and as the professor was discussing this particular logit (don’t ask me what that is) I was busily daydreaming the class period away. And you’ll see at the bottom that I had calculated the number of seconds in the class, which was many more than I thought I could live through. I really pity the past me who went through that.
Yikes! Do you have any backups of the stuff on the USB drive?
Lucky for me I found a backup of my classes. The biggest blow was the loss of my endnote bibliography and notes that I took. No doubt that cretin is using my notes for HIS dissertation.