The Six Mistakes of Man

My breakfast cereal had a fun facts flyer in it that fell out this morning while I was pouring it. The flyer was very literate. Here's a fun fact that it had.

Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher, wrote some 2000 years ago:

The Six Mistakes of Man

• The delusion that personal gain is made by crushing others.
  
• The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected.
  
• Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it.
  
• Refusing to set aside trivial preferences.
  
• Neglecting development and refinement of the mind, and not acquiring the habit of reading and studying.
  
• Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.
  

My, how we have progressed in 2000 years!

Thank you Hubbards Bugs 'n' Mud cereal.

Rings Around Uranus

For a Yankee Swap on Christmas Eve, I bought a bottle of New Zealand hot sauce called, "Rings Around Uranus." It's a habenero sauce. I hope that I don't get it.

The Gong Show

It's been ages since I lasted posted to my blog. I've been busy and been procrastinating. It's more of the latter than the former. There's so much to add. My friend Ray came to visit for two weeks and we, along with Margee and Sandra, hiked the Milford Track. I'll get to these stories later. I'll have a lot of time this weekend with Christmas and no plans except to watch a lot of movies with my sister.

We had a statistics seminar this morning titled, "A Likelihood-Based Analysis for Relaxing the Exclusion Restriction in Randomized Experiments with Imperfect Compliance." I wanted to leave after the first fifteen minutes but I like the guy who organizes the seminars and I didn't want to offend him. Plus, the speaker went over by 15 minutes. If I ever run the seminars again, like I did one year at the University of Washington, I will install a gong. Anytime someone wants to end the seminar, we can put it out of misery.

As to what the title of the seminar meant, I sort of understood it. I always found this quote by Einstein pompous,

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

I'm sure that he could do mathematics faster than all of us.