I Will Really Be Here

Tomorrow morning if you wake up and the sun does not appear,
I will be here.
If in the dark we lose sight of love, hold my hand and have no fear.
I will be here.

I will be here, and you can cry on my shoulder;
When the mirror tells us we're older I will hold you
And I will be here, to watch you grow in beauty
And tell you all the things you are to me
We'll be together.
'Cause I will be here.

Tomorrow morning if you wake up and the future is unclear,
I will be here.
As sure as seasons are made for change, our lifetimes are made for years.
I will be here.

I will be true to the promise I have made
To you and to the One Who gave you to me.
I will be here.

A little while ago, Amy and I sang a Steven Curtis Chapman song (the partial lyrics of which are above) at a wedding. It was fun, and the song says some really nice things about commitment between a man and a woman, doesn't it?

A little while later we sang it again, this time in the living room of a man and woman, the latter being just out of the hospital after brain surgery to remove a potentially deadly tumor. And this isn't just any man and woman; these are Amy's parents. Now the song isn't just nice; now it grips your heart and makes you really think about waking up to a sunless world, about crying on the shoulder of that one to whom you've committed your suddenly tenuous life.

I haven't much thought about music in this way since Tom went through a time of draining sickness, how that music put to words aren't just empty platitudes when someone is lying on a bed wasting away, not just another pretty melody when you woke up this morning beside your wife and the future was, actually, unclear.

People don't usually speak in poetry, and thus this is one of the great powers of music it seems, to say things that you might not otherwise say, and in a way that you never could.

I love you mom (both of you).

YouTube

Just a couple of YouTube videos that I think are hilarious.

Laughing baby. This is the 10th most viewed video on YouTube all time.

Frozen Grand Central. People just stop moving on cue in the middle of Grand Central Station.

My First Citation

I hope this isn't too self-aggrandizing, but I got my first citation!

Ok, so I wasn't the first author on this paper, and it was something I did as an undergrad which has little-to-nothing to do with what I do now, but it's still exciting.

Funny Thing for a Statistician to say to Statisticians

In colloquium today, our speaker was hurrying through his presentation and in the process said:

"I don't want to bore you with the data."

Except we're statisticians; we're all about the data.

I will give him that what he really meant was that he had shown us his method but he didn't have time to show us how it applied to this dataset. Still, in my mind statistics is just math if there is no data. Off the top of my head I would say that data is probably the fundamental defining concept in statistics.

Presidential Hypothesis

My hypothesis is that if the presidential election was decided tomorrow based on the number of signs for each candidate along the road, Ron Paul would have a good shot.

To attempt to gather data for this hypothesis, Amy and I counted the number of signs for each candidate on our way in to work this morning.

Hillary Clinton: 4
Ron Paul: 2
Barack Obama: 1
John McCain: 0

Random sample? No way, so I still can't be sure that my hypothesis is false!

Crazy idea

Saturday, while Amy worked at the hospital, I worked on campus on a variety of things, one of which was a homework assignment that went terribly. Thus, I hatched a crazy idea that should really only work if you are an unmarried computer science undergrad, and even then they wouldn't do it like I planned.

Yesterday (Sunday), I took roughly a 4.5 hour nap while Amy was again working at the hospital. We went to bed at a decent hour, and after about 3 more hours of sleep, I got up. Amy was sweet enough to get up with me and drive me to school (we only have one car at the moment), so I arrived on campus somewhere around 3 a.m. I actually can't remember exactly; the chronology is a little muddled for me right now.

But here I am, six hours later, feeling pretty decent. The homework assignment that went so terribly Saturday? Well, it went about as bad for awhile, but I seem to have broken through.

By the way, I turned in one homework assignment Friday, so I'm down to five left. Today I'll turn one in, and Wednesday another.

Homework Countdown

6 more homework assignments this semester.

Two due next Friday.