LIfe

..is good. I put some pics up on facebook, but I'm a little too lazy to put them on here right now. Sometime though.

I can't even try to recap the last month, but it has been one of the best in my life. I'm solidifying friendships and doing math all the time. Life is a party.

I went to Eger, another city in Hungary a few weeks ago. I also went to Krakow, Poland with LIZA. Both trips were a blast and very relaxing. Everything was totally pleasant the entire time except it was freezing cold in Poland (it was snowing when we got there!) and the trip to Auschwitz was good in a very different sense. I can't really talk about it, but LIZA did on her blog a little, so you could read hers.

I'm learning some new skills. These include blindfold cubing, speed 5x5x5 cubing, harmonica and Lindy-hop swing dancing. The latter two are worth expanding on.

I'm actually serious about learning to play the harmonica. I was practicing everyday until a certain friend of mine started stealing my time, but I still play a lot and I feel like I will continue playing the rest of my life. (Note to FUTURE DAN reading this: "Well, if you aren't playing, do you at least know where it is?").

Swing is amazing. Turns out LIZA and HAGGAI are swing instructors at their school and I may have mentioned I coerced them to teach a few of us once a week on Tuesdays. I hope to keep dancing in Santa Barbara when I go home.

I miss home a lot, but having such a great time here keeps me from thinking about it overly often.

Ok, the real reason for this post was to write a problem down that I thought of. If you don't do math, don't work too hard on this problem because it is pretty tough.


Everyday I walk to my girlfriend's house and pass a TV store that played Return of the King for weeks on end and I thought of this problem which my Probability Theory professor couldn't do.

I walk passed the store once a day and see t seconds of a looping movie with a runtime of m seconds. What is the expected value of the number of days I need to walk by to have seen the entire movie out of order (ie having viewed every instance of the film at least once)? In order?

I don't really want an approximation, unless its really good, but I'll take what I can get.