Wherein we bully the biostatistics professor

More weather whiplash. Yesterday we had the hot wind coming in from the valley bringing allergens that sent my sinuses into spasms. This morning it was so cold biking to work that I was wishing for gloves. Last night in biostatistics class it was time to present project proposals, so I offered two: a relatively straightforward (read: boring) correlation analysis involving some fermenter data from one of my investigations (downside: I'd have to get permission from legal to use it); and delving further into developing a metric for comparing name pool variability, using several large data-sets as population samples and then working with randomly generated samplings of these of various sizes to try to formulate some comparable descriptive statistics (downside: while it can be argued as measuring human behavior, it's only marginally "bio"). If the professor had simply said, "I'd rather you did something more specifically biological" that would be one thing -- although it would be hard to support given that one of her examples of past student projects was an analysis of the distribution of various pharmaceutical prices in different stores. But she took the angle that it sounded too hard and complicated, so I drew up a 2-page proposal summarizing my previous work (and publication) on the topic, describing my intended methodology, and pre-answering most of her logistical objections (e.g., the data already exists electronically and in categorized form). "Hard and complicated"? We laugh -- ha ha!

Oh, and the plumber installed the new kitchen faucet. Yay.