Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

And so 2nd year continues… and thankfully, it seems to be much less stressful than this time last year – obviously there’s a smaller jump from 1st year to 2nd year than from school to university.

Main event of the week: I went with Charlotte to see Frank Turner at the O2 Academy in Oxford!  It was a brilliant night – just as good as the main act was the starting supporting act, a truly random man calling himself Beans on Toast – it’s really fun when you find someone who can mix comedy with song so effectively.  Everything was a bit squashed, but it was obvious that no-one minded.

I’ve started teaching myself PHP / MySQL: since I already know HTML and CSS fairly well, I thought JavaScript would be the best way to go next – but I decided I’d have me some server-side scripting first.  Then I can try adding on some JavaScript once I have a few working PHP projects.  And why am I doing this?  Well, it couldn’t be anything to do with the computing department at Oxford teaching all theoretical modules, and none that actually have any application, could it?  (In fairness, having done one year of computer science, I’m definitely in a better position to teach myself programming than before.)

This weekend my dad and brother came over to Oxford for a visit.  They arrived on Saturday, we had some lunch in Burger King (oops), then showed them around Keble and the Natural History Museum.  In the evening-time we went to Ask for dinner, then went to see UP in Disney Digital 3D, despite having seen it in 2D just a day earlier… On Sunday they came to Keble for Sunday dinner, and then they left on Monday morning, much too early for me to get up and see them off… (10am…)

And so starts another year at Keble.  While Freshers Week is designed to help the new 1st year settle in and meet people, I’ve found that the week actually lends itself much more to returning students that to new ones in terms of making friends – last year, I was introduced to so many people that, by the end of the week, I could scarcely name more than a handful of people.  But this year, since I already know a heck of a lot of people, it’s been great catching up with old friends, and meeting new ones too.  And I can actually remember names.  Well, mostly.

So, events so far this term.  Posh Fish, McDonalds, Dominos and G&Ds have all already been visited, and they haven’t lessened in quality (apart from the fact that Posh Fish gave me a comparably smaller portion of chips when I visited, but I’m treating that as an isolated and hopefully rare incident).  I went to my first foam party, which was a bit messy to say the least, but it was really quite fun – it did look like everyone was going to drown in foam at one point, but thankfully everyone survived and my clothes look none the worse for wear, excluding my shoes.  Damn, I need some new shoes.  I also helped administer the freshers’ quiz in the Keble bar, saw some amazing a capella, and generally had a nice time.

My new room, 3510, is on the top floor of the Liddon quad.  It has a great view over Liddon, which is a good thing in some ways, but a bad thing when I think forward to the amount of distractions there will be when I’m revising for my exams in Trinity Term.  This year I get an en suite bathroom, a shower that actually works properly, and a normal sized sink – my sink from last term was so small that even cleaning a cup in it proved a challenge sometimes.  I’m currently in the progress of room decoration, which includes buying all kinds of posters and shiz.  Also, after buying a fridge from another student at the end of last year, I arrived in Keble this week only to discover that my room, having been recently refurbished, already came with a fridge, but I was able to sell it on rather quickly.  On the subject of fridges and the beverages contained therein, I’m going to try and make a resolution not to buy lots of Coke / other fizzy drinks at Sainsburys this year – my big belly will thank me for it!  I’ve also joined the Keble gym, feeble as it is, although it means that I may be more motivated to exercise when the weather outside is dreadful.

Work-wise, this term I’m only doing two modules – Algebra and (Complex) Analysis.  I dropped OOP (Object Orientated Programming), as did all of the other Maths&CompSci joint students, for the simple fact that it is a stupid subject which should not be taught or ever have existed.  So this term should be a little less busy in terms of work, and more busy in terms of FUN!  I have a new Analysis tutor this term, Dr Curnock, who was my LAII lecturer last year.  So hopefully that will work out… well.

I did have to suffer through a collection on Friday morning though, and I’m not sure that Jan will be best pleased about my result, oops.  Re-Freshers Fair was great, it’s basically Freshers Fair, but for returning students, I signed up to a few things, and am prepared to be bombarded with emails soon enough.  They’re already flooding in…

Apart from that, the week has seen the accommodation manager be annoyed at the entire block because some person left some doors open, no housekeeping (which means no bin being emptied, it’s overflowing twice over now I think), I had my first delicious, and very greasy, brunch of the term, and spent some very special family time with my new college “wife” and children.  Oh, and apparently I’ve been signed up to do ballroom dancing or something?  Who knew.

According to Ron Burgandy, “that doesn’t make sense”.

However, a deeper analysis reveals that it does, in fact, make sense, and furthermore that these are quite good odds for a cologne.

First, we look at what we know: “60% of the time, it works every time” – if we think of it as Brian Fantana testing it on 100 different women, then 60 of those women will not be able to resist the allure of his masculine scent at all.  That leaves the question of the other 40 women.  It’s not a simple case of “60 women go for it, 40 women don’t go for it” – rather, there is a 100% success rate with 60 of the women, and an unknown % success rate with the other 40 – all we know is that it is less than 100%.

So, it’s conceivable that on the 40 women the scent does not work at all – this would mean that there would be an overall success rate of (100 * 0.60) + (0 * 0.40) = 60%.  On the other end of the scale, on the 40 women it could work almost all the time – i.e. a success rate of 99.999%.  In this case, the overall success rate is (100 * 0.60) + (99.999 * 0.40) = 99.9996%, which for all intents and purposes we can take as 100%.  So how are we to decide the overall effectiveness of Odeon’s Sex Panther?

In probability theory there’s a simple way to measure the “average” rate of something, called the expectation, or expected value.  Technically I’m modelling this as a uniform distribution, distributed evenly and continuously on (60,100) – in simple terms, this means that every value in the range of 60% to 100% has an equal chance of being the correct answer, since we know nothing about the 40 women on whom it does not “work every time”.  For example, 67%, 85% and 94.565% are equally likely to be the overall success rate.  In this case, the expectation is easy – we just take the mean (average) of the two endpoints – i.e. (60 + 100) / 2 = 80%.

So there you have it.  When someone tells you that “60% of the time, it works every time”, you can tell them something smart.