Cheat

I've been on a bit of a Brontë kick lately. I just finished reading Charlotte Brontë's Villette, which is, for the most part, rather charming - little or none of the Gothic, little over-wrought emotion. The narrator is almost supernaturally calm in the face of the vicissitudes of life, and the story develops toward romance smoothly and organically.

Unfortunately, the ending can only be called a diabolus ex machina. Had the book been made of paper rather than electrons, I think I would have thrown it across the room - and I almost never feel that way about a book. I felt cheated, frankly.

Redshirts

In my GenEd Statistics class, we've finally gotten around to probability. (Yes, it's three weeks until the end of semester. I did not write the textbook or the syllabus.)

I just got a neat example to use in tomorrow's class. Somebody went through all the deaths in Star Trek:TOS, and discovered that, yes, a higher fraction of the deaths were redshirts rather than goldshirts or blueshirts, but a higher fraction of goldshirts died than of redshirts or blueshirts. (See item 14 in this File 770 post.)

Myth. Busted.