Beware of Geek

Thursday was an interesting day. With Wife 1.0 out of school for the summer, things change at Canoelover Manor. After an appropriate day of rest (or two), Wife 1.0 takes on what we call projects. Projects that would have been done during the school year if we were both meth addicts. Since we're not and have a reasonable amount of energy, the summer is when the important but not critical projects get done.

So I comes home from workin' on Wednesday and I see:

1. a lot of empty space on the basement storage shelves,
2. a large pile of stuff for the garbage,
3. a larger pile of thrift store donations, and
4. A stack of empty fruit boxes for a friend who is moving soon.

This means that a project has begun.

There were several bushel boxes I had not opened in ten years. Probably longer, as I don't think I opened them in our other house either, and we lived there seven years. So as part of the purging process of this particular basement variety project, we went through boxes, almost time capsules.

As I opened one box I could see that one of the boxes was my grad school archives...data sets, articles, and analyses. Giant printouts from mainframes, a BMDP manual, and one really good article by Paul Meehl.

For the most part, everything else was severely outdated, the programming language dead due to graphical interfaces, and while interest in my small branch of social psychology (intimacy levels in childhood and development of non-invasive testing tools to predict emotionally healthy long-term relationships) is still alive, my guess is that research was moved forward not long I left the U. of Rochester.

I gotta say it was a wee bit nostalgic to put out these reports and look at the factors, residuals, significant effects and Eigenvalues of the factorial analysis.

So I tossed the data set, and A.B.D. I will remain all the days of my life.

Also in the box I found a few statistics journals. Dumb. I started reading one and had flashbacks. Then I looked at the date: 1993. I was reading these after grad school.

Sorry. Geek City. Maybe that's why it took me so long to throw it away. I occurs to me that I was reading these for fun. Scary.

Good riddance, data set.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover