It Never Rains in Southern California?
Dec. 21st, 2010 11:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowAt least it wasn't raining when my flight came in Saturday evening. Since then, it's scarcely stopped raining.
The flight out was uneventful; I finished reading one book, read most of another, and got a little work done (proved a small theorem and worked an interesting example). The next morning, I hurried over to B&N for a little Christmas shopping prior to the get-together that afternoon. I'd already bought my brother D's gift, and managed to find some good stuff for my father and my sisters.
C and O have already opened their gifts. I got C a DVD of "Gran Torino" - she'd enthused about the movie when it came out, so.... I had the darnedest time remembering the title, though. I was talking to the cashier, trying to give her enough information to identify it and failing miserably. Finally I wandered back to the DVD rack. I was ready to give up and buy her Season 1 of "Meerkat Manor" (c'mon, everybody loves meerkats) when the title finally came to me. I always have trouble buying for O. (Not a dis; I know I'm awfully hard to buy for myself, mainly because, if I want something, generally I go and buy it myself....) I remembered that she'd expressed an interest in Irish music and culture once, so I got her a Chieftains CD.
Dad, D, and E haven't opened theirs yet, so I'll hold off on those.
For the party this year, each of us was instructed to buy a "guy gift" or a "girl gift" (each gender sticking to its own, to make sure there were the right number of each) and send them to O; she wrapped them, guys in red and girls in green, so that no one would know which gift was theirs. Now, I frankly had no idea what a "guy gift" was supposed to be, so I moused around on Amazon and finally came up with a wallet with the Padres logo on it.
Guess which gift I wound up with.
(O realized, a few days before the party, that there was a chance that somebody would get their own gift. D and I had discussed this a bit earlier, and I told him that, well, if you wouldn't like to get the thing you bought, whynell did you buy it? As it happens, this particular likelihood is a standard problem in combinatorics: if the number of people involved is sufficiently large, the probability that no one gets their own gift is very close to 1/e - so the odds are something like 2-1 that somebody will get their own gift. "Sufficiently large" is pretty small: with n people, the probability differs from 1/e by less than 1/n!, so, e.g., five people gets you within 1%, and seven gets you within 0.05%.)
It's supposed to quit raining Thursday.
My father's cleaning lady just brought over some food, so I should probably get offline and try it.
The flight out was uneventful; I finished reading one book, read most of another, and got a little work done (proved a small theorem and worked an interesting example). The next morning, I hurried over to B&N for a little Christmas shopping prior to the get-together that afternoon. I'd already bought my brother D's gift, and managed to find some good stuff for my father and my sisters.
C and O have already opened their gifts. I got C a DVD of "Gran Torino" - she'd enthused about the movie when it came out, so.... I had the darnedest time remembering the title, though. I was talking to the cashier, trying to give her enough information to identify it and failing miserably. Finally I wandered back to the DVD rack. I was ready to give up and buy her Season 1 of "Meerkat Manor" (c'mon, everybody loves meerkats) when the title finally came to me. I always have trouble buying for O. (Not a dis; I know I'm awfully hard to buy for myself, mainly because, if I want something, generally I go and buy it myself....) I remembered that she'd expressed an interest in Irish music and culture once, so I got her a Chieftains CD.
Dad, D, and E haven't opened theirs yet, so I'll hold off on those.
For the party this year, each of us was instructed to buy a "guy gift" or a "girl gift" (each gender sticking to its own, to make sure there were the right number of each) and send them to O; she wrapped them, guys in red and girls in green, so that no one would know which gift was theirs. Now, I frankly had no idea what a "guy gift" was supposed to be, so I moused around on Amazon and finally came up with a wallet with the Padres logo on it.
Guess which gift I wound up with.
(O realized, a few days before the party, that there was a chance that somebody would get their own gift. D and I had discussed this a bit earlier, and I told him that, well, if you wouldn't like to get the thing you bought, whynell did you buy it? As it happens, this particular likelihood is a standard problem in combinatorics: if the number of people involved is sufficiently large, the probability that no one gets their own gift is very close to 1/e - so the odds are something like 2-1 that somebody will get their own gift. "Sufficiently large" is pretty small: with n people, the probability differs from 1/e by less than 1/n!, so, e.g., five people gets you within 1%, and seven gets you within 0.05%.)
It's supposed to quit raining Thursday.
My father's cleaning lady just brought over some food, so I should probably get offline and try it.
