mathbabe

Aunt Pythia is psyched to be able to answer your questions and dispense (self-described) invaluable advice today as always.

If you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia. Most importantly,

Submit your question for Aunt Pythia at the bottom of this page!

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I already have great sex with my hot bearded husband, and I’ve been on hormonal birth control pills for years. So how amazing will it be if I switch to a non-hormonal copper IUD, if Obamacare makes my insurance cover it now? Please be specific. I am weighing my options.

Thank you!

Considering a Change

Dear CAC,

I love that you mentioned your husband’s beard. I needed to know that.

How amazing will it be? I’m guessing somewhat more amazing than it already is.

But I’m not sure, because I have a feeling every woman’s body responds differently to being on the pill. I’m a woman who naturally has a lot of testosterone, among other things, and so it throws me totally out of whack. For you it might not, although I’m guessing it does but just less so.

Also, I’ve been on the copper IUD, and when they say you bleed more on that, they aint lyin. But that problem doesn’t start for a few years.

Kind of annoying that the most obvious choices are so hard on a woman’s, body, isn’t it?

If you’re avoiding pregnancy but it wouldn’t be the end of the world, let me recommend spermicidal inserts, although you really do need to follow the instructions whereby you wait 10 minutes after insertion before any sperm enters (many women would consider this a feature, not a bug).

They obviously don’t protect you from STD’s or anything, though, so I suggest you go with spermicidal inserts for your hot bearded (bearded!) husband and condoms with anyone else.

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

Two questions. I googled “talk to a mathematician” because I wanted to see if anyone had an idea how I could split a league of 10 soccer teams into two groups, in order to minimise travel (well, its a bit more complex than that, but that’s sorta the gist).

But then I read your page, and of course the Sex questions, and a far more interesting one came to mind. So you said “Just to be clear, it is possible to see real female orgasms but you have to look for them, and they aren’t really considered mainstream porn.” And my question is, “Where?”

Love,

CurvePurve

Dear CurvePurve,

First the soccer question: I’d say cluster by geographic area, so nobody has to drive very far, but as you said it’s more complicated so I don’t have enough information to answer it. Even so, I’m going to take this moment to point out that the amount of traveling my friends do for their daughters’ soccer teams is super insane. They pretty much don’t have a life because of how much driving they do, even the ones who live in Manhattan. WTF?!

As for the second question, maybe try this.

Auntie P

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

Okay, I’ll bite. Why do men and women report differing numbers of sexual partners? I imagine it’s partially due to social expectations.

But I did have this conversation with my partner, and I found out we defined “sex” differently – I said oral counted, she did not (I guess this could be a reflection of social pressures as well). Is that issue of differing definitions sufficient to explain the different numbers?

More generally, how do the curves compare between men and women for number of partners?

OK I’ll Bite

p.s. I promise to ask a more interesting sex question next time.

Dear OK,

I chose your question out of the remarkable collection of people doing as I asked last week and asking me this same question (thank you everyone!) because you promised to follow up with another sex question. I totally cannot hold you to that promise, since I don’t collect email addresses or anything, but I figure by putting it in italics it’s as good as a blood pledge.

It also inspires me to appeal to my readers more generally, since last week worked so well: please follow up with another, more interesting sex question next week, thanks!

On to your question. I love what you pointed out, that the different definitions of sex come into play. And I think that makes a lot of sense, especially the example you gave of oral sex.

Because why?

Because, as I think you’ll agree, when “oral sex” occurs, it’s often only the guy getting it! And then in what sense has the woman really had sex? Unless she’s Monica Lewinsky (one of my heros), there’s really nothing much there there. Which is why it totally makes sense that she wouldn’t “count” it.

Now, going back to the discrepancy.

Let’s just agree, once and for all, that if you actually got a good sample of all (straight) men and all (straight) women, meaning you got some normal men and a few slutty men, in proportion to the population at large, and if you got normal women and slutty women, again in proportion to the population at large, then the average number of sexual partners would have to be equal. It’s just a statistical truth.

One caveat: if we all had a bunch of sex, and then there was some war or illness that only affected men, and for whatever reason only affected slutty men, then we’d get a bias if we did the poll after all the slutty men died. But I don’t think that issue is in play here, and so we can’t explain the discrepancy in any way except that woman and/or men are lying about the number of people they’ve slept with.

Reader Artem commented last week with a link to a nifty article explaining this, called Men and women lie about sex to match gender expectations. The study is published here (thanks, other anonymous reader!).

From the article:

But when it came to sex, men wanted to be seen as “real men:” the kind who had many partners and a lot of sexual experience. Women, on the other hand, wanted to be seen as having less sexual experience than they actually had, to match what is expected of women.

Well, that’s the interpretation anyway. In any case they saw big discrepancies between men and women’s reported sexual experience, although these are college kids so nobody seemed to have much. Next they hooked people up to lie-detector tests and they changed their tune. This had been done before:

Back in 2003, women went from having fewer sexual partners than men (when not hooked up to a lie detector) to being essentially even to men (when hooked up to the lie detector.)

Here’s a link to an article on that 2003 study, which satisfies my statistician’s heart. The result was not exactly replicated when they did it more recently:

In this new study, women actually reported more sexual partners than men when they were both hooked up to a lie detector and thought they had to be truthful.

Hold on a second. What? That doesn’t even jive with the oral sex issue we talked about above. There must be some other thing going on. Maybe there’s a selection bias among college kids who do these studies. Maybe we should study if women are more honest than men when they’re attached to lie detectors. Maybe they have an urge to brag when attached to lie detectors.

Next week: stay tuned for OK’s  (and y’alls) even more interesting sex question! I’m counting on you guys!

Love,

Aunt Pythia

p.s. I have no idea about the distribution of sexual partners for men and women. We’d have to get our hands on the raw data, which would be awesome. One of the reasons I’m proud to call myself a data scientist.

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Please submit your sex or data science or other question to Aunt Pythia!

I’m psyched to be able to answer your sex-related question today, really. I just don’t know how to thank you guys. Please keep them coming.

And by the way, if you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia. Most importantly,

Submit your question for Aunt Pythia at the bottom of this page!

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

A bit of a fake [sex question] and [fake sex] question. Is there a correlation between the time taken from initiation to climax in fake sex, a.k.a. porn, and the real thing in studies anywhere?

I’m assuming that the requirements for filming, and the ability of editing, and various other factors (chemicals?) might mean that the simulated stimulation will be longer than the real-life version. If so, does the modal time change over the years (e.g movie theatre production runs vs video tape vs internet streaming times)? Or to put it another way, has our ability to maintain attention actually altered as distribution means have changed?

Fake Name

Dear Fake Name,

For a moment I was confused when I read this, because I so wanted it to be another question entirely, which it really isn’t.

Namely, I was wanting it to be a question of why women’s orgasms in porn never actually happen. I have never once in my entire porn-watching adult life seen a real woman have a real orgasm. WTF? Discussion needs to ensue here, it’s very messed up. Just to be clear, it is possible to see real female orgasms but you have to look for them, and they aren’t really considered mainstream porn.

Now that I know you’re talking about men orgasming, I have the following response: who cares?

Fake questions deserve fake answer,

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

Help!!! An all male cast of Mathdinosaurs sat on stage at the May 2013 Math Graduation. I wanted to puke from their smugness. We need a token alpha female mathematician here! Will you ask Mathbabe to speak here, please? Can she talk about how amazing little Mathbabes are and make the Mathdinosaurs cry? At least a little?

Will you ask Mathbabe to deliver the commencement address at Berkeley Math graduation in May 2014?

Puking and in need of rehydration

Dear Puking,

I included your question even though it’s not about sex because you’ve invented the phrase “token alpha female” which needed to happen. Also you referred to the Mathbabe in the third person, which she always appreciates.

I’m pretty sure she’d say yes if asked, she loves Berkeley! And she also loves talking about young female mathematicians and how awesome they are.

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I recently saw the following statistic:

The survey also questioned students about their sex lives, finding that 72 percent enroll at Harvard as virgins and 27 percent graduate without having sex.

Surely this can’t be right!

Dance Off Pants Off

Dear DOPO,

Wait, why? Does it surprise you that quite a few people start having sex whilst in college? Or does it surprise you that not everyone has had sex by the time they leave? Or are you reading it incorrectly? Note it says: 72% of people didn’t enter actively sexing it up, 27% of people left not actively sexing it up. There’s no contradiction in terms here.

As an aside: my experience while a resident tutor at Harvard, after being an undergrad at UC Berkeley, was that those Ivy League students could really do with some more sex. It might relax them a bit – too stressed out by far.

Again, this is not the question I was hoping for, though. I was hoping for someone to ask me about how it’s possible that on average, when polled, straight men have more sexual partners than the average straight woman. Someone please ask me that, because it’s one of my favorite subjects in statistics.

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’ve started experimenting with some kink stuff—nothing too crazy, but sometimes I have rope marks or bruises on my ass. I’m still doing vanilla dating, though. What do I do to explain the marks/bruises when I get intimate with a vanilla guy? Thanks!

Boldly Daringly Sexually Mixing-it-up

Dear BDSM,

Yes! Yes! YES!!! Finally a straight up sex question. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I have asked a bunch of my favorite kinky people this question in the last couple of days and I’ve gotten a pretty consistent response. I will put them all together in a kind of decision-tree format just to be incredibly nerdy:

1) Only explain it if he asks.

2) If he asks, depending on your mood and how much you enjoy fucking with him and/or how worried you are about his reaction, you might either just tell him the truth outright or you might want to ask him “do you really want to know?”

3) If he answers to that “No I guess not”, depending on how you feel you might want to say, “Oh it’s just from playing rugby”, which for whatever reason seems to be a catch-all explanation of any bodily harm.

4) If he answers “I’m interested in knowing” then tell him the truth outright.

5) Important: when you tell him the truth, it has to be like you’re sharing an awesome thing which he’s lucky to know about. Don’t act ashamed of your kinks, because his reaction to it will be very dependent on how you present it. In other words, talk about it like it’s a secret Star Trek series that nobody’s ever heard about but which is now on Netflix.

I hope that helps!

Aunt Pythia

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Please submit your sex or data science or other question to Aunt Pythia!

If you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia. Most importantly,

Please submit your questions for Aunt Pythia at the bottom of this column!

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

Do you prefer that we ask you fake [sex questions] or [fake sex] questions? From your website it seems that you prefer the former, but would you also be amused by the latter?

Fakin’ Bacon

Dear Fakin,

I can’t tell, because I’ve gotten neither kind (frowny face).

If I started getting a bunch then I could do some data collecting on the subject. If I had to guess I’d go with the latter though.

Bring it on!

Aunt Pythia

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Aunt Pythia,

Are boredom and intelligence correlated?

Bored

Dear Bored,

It has been my fantasy for quite a few years to be bored. Hasn’t happened. All I can conclude from my own experience is that being a working mother of three, blogger, knitting freak, and activist is not correlated to boredom.

Aunt P

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

How can I get my husband to pee IN the toilet? 

Pee I Shouldn’t See Ever, Dammit

Dear PISSED,

Start by asking him to be in charge of cleaning the bathroom. If that’s insufficient ask him to sit down to pee – turns out men can do that. If he’s unwilling, suggest that you’re going to pee standing up now for women’s lib reasons (whilst he’s still in charge of cleaning the bathroom).

Hope I helped!

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

How can I get my wife to stop nagging me about peeing in the toilet? 

Isaac Peter Freely

Dear I.P. Freely,

Look for a nearby gas station and do your business there. That’ll shut her up.

Auntie P

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

Is there any reason I should bother knitting a Klein Bottle? Isn’t just knowing I could do it enough? Or would it actually impress (or give pleasure to) others?

Procrastinating Parametricist

Dear PP,

If you’re looking for an excuse to knit a Klein Bottle, find a high school math teacher that would be psyched to use it as an exhibit for their class.

If you’re trying to understand how to rationalize the act of knitting anything ever, give up immediately, it makes no sense. We knitters do it because we love doing it.

Love and kisses,

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’m a Data Scientist (or Business Analytics pretending to be a Data Scientist) and I’m the leader of a small team at the company work for. We have to analyse data, fit models and so on. I’m struggling right now trying to figure out what’s the best way to manage our analysis.

I’m reading some stuff related to project management, and some stuff related to Scrum. However, at least for now, I don’t think they exactly fit our needs. Scrum seems great for software development, but I’m not so sure it works well for modeling development or statistical prototyping. Do you have any ideas on this? Should I just try scrum anyway?

Typically, most of our projects begin with some loose equirements (we want to understand this and that, or to predict this and that, or to learn the causal effect of this and that). Then, we get some data, spend sometime cleaning and aggregating it, then doing some descriptive analysis, some model fit and then preparing to present our results. I always have in mind what our results will look like, but there is always something I didn’t expect to intervene.

Say, I’m calculating the size of control group and then I realize my variables of interest aren’t normally distributed and have to adapt the way we compute sample size of control group. Then either I do a rough calculation based on assumptions of normality of data or we study and adapt new ways to better approximate our data (say, using a lognormal distribution). Anyway, I’ll probably delay our results or deliver results with inferior quality.

So, my question is, do you know of any software or methodology to use with data science or data analysis in the same ways as there is Scrum for software development?

Brazilian (fake?) Data Scientist

Dear B(f)DS,

I agree with you, data projects aren’t the same kettle of fish as engineering projects. By their very nature they take whimsical turns that can’t be drawn up beforehand.

Even so, I think forcing oneself to break down the steps of a data project can be useful, and for that reason I like using project management tools when I do data projects – not that it will give me a perfect estimate of time til completion, which it won’t, but it will give me a sense of trajectory of the project.

It helps, for example, if I say something like, “I’ll try to be done with exploratory data analysis by the end of the second day.” Otherwise I might just keep doing that without really getting much in return, but if I know I only have two days to squeeze out the juice, I’ll be more thoughtful and targeted in my work.

The other thing about using those tools is that upper-level managers love them. I think they love them so much that it’s worth using them even knowing they will be inaccurate in terms of time, because it makes people feel more in control. And actually being inaccurate doesn’t mean they’re meaningless – there’s more information in those estimates than in nothing.

Finally, one last thing that’s super useful about those tools is that, if your data team is being overloaded with work, you can use the tool to push back. So if someone is giving you a new project, you can point to all the other projects you already have and say, “these are all the projects that won’t be getting done if I take this one on.” Make the tool work for you!

To sum up, I say you try Scrum. After a few projects you can start doing a data analysis on Scrum, estimating how much of a time fudge factor you should add to each estimate do to unforeseen data issues.

I hope that’s helpful,

Aunt Pythia

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Please submit your question to Aunt Pythia!

Aunt Pythia is yet again gratified to find a few new questions in her inbox this morning. Sad to say, today’s column really has nothing to do with sex, but I hope you’ll enjoy it anyway. And don’t forget:

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Aunt Pythia,

I’m an academic in a pickle. How do I deal with papers that are years old, that I’m sick of, but that I need to get off my slate and how do I prevent this from happening again? I always want to do the work for the first 75% of the paper and then I get bored. But then I’m left with a pile of papers which, with a biiiit more work, they could be done.

Not Yet Tenured

Dear NYT,

One thing they never teach you in grad school is how to manage projects, mostly because you only have one project in grad school, which is to learn everything the first two years then do something magical and new the second two years. Even though that plan isn’t what ends up happening, it’s always in the back of your mind. In particular you only really need to focus on one thing, your thesis.

But when you get out into the real world, things change. You have options, and these option make a difference to your career and your happiness (actually your thesis work makes a difference to those things too but again, in grad school you don’t have many options).

You need a process, my friend! You need a way of managing your options. Think about this from the end backwards: after you’re done you want a prioritized list of your projects, which is a way more positive way to deal with things than letting them make you feel guilty or thinking about which ones you can drop without deeper analysis.

Here’s my suggestion, which I’ve done and it honestly helps. Namely, start a spreadsheet of your projects, with a bunch of tailored-to-you columns. Note to non-academics: this works equally well with non-academic projects.

So the first column will be the name of the project, then the year you started it, and then maybe the amount of work til completion, and then maybe the probability of success, and then how much you will like it when it’s done, and then how good it will be for your career, and then how good it will be for other non-career reasons. You can add other columns that are pertinent to your decision. Be sure to include a column that measures how much you actually feel like working on it, which is distinct from how much you’ll like it when it’s done.

All your columns entries should be numbers so we can later make weighted averages. And they should all go up when they get “better”, except time til completion, which goes down when it gets better. And if you have a way to measure one project, be sure to measure all the projects by that metric, even if they mostly score a neutral. So if one project is good for the environment, every project gets an “environment” score.

Next, decide which columns need the most attention – prioritize or weight the attributes instead of the projects for now. This probably means you put lots of weight on the “time til completion” combined with “value towards tenure” for now, especially if you’re running out of time for tenure. How you do this will depend on what resources you have in abundance and what you’re running low on. You might have tenure, and time, and you might be sick of only doing things that are good for your career but that don’t save the environment, in which case your weights on the columns will be totally different.

Finally, take some kind of weighted average of each project’s non-time attributes to get that project’s abstract attractiveness score, and then do something like divide that score by the amount of time til completion or the square root of the time to completion to get an overall “I should really do this” score. If you have two really attractive projects, each scoring 8 on the abstract attractiveness score, and one of them will take 2 weeks to do and the other 4 weeks, then the 2-week guy gets an “I should really do this” of 4, which wins over the other project with an “I should really do this” score of 2.

Actually you probably don’t have to do the math perfectly, or even explicitly. The point is you develop in your head ways by which to measure your own desire to do your projects, as well as how important those projects are to you in external ways. By the end of your exercise you’ll know a bunch more about your projects. You also might do this and disagree with the results. That usually means there’s an attribute you ignored, which you should now add. It’s probably the “how much I feel like doing this” column.

You might not have a perfect system, but you’ll be able to triage into “put onto my calendar now”, “hope to get to”, and “I’ll never finish this, and now I know why”.

Final step: put some stuff onto your calendar in the first category, along with a note to yourself to redo the analysis in a month or two when new projects have come along and you’ve gotten some of this stuff knocked off.

Good luck!
Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

Thanks,
Newly Entrenched With Bankers

Dear NEWB,

First, I appreciate your fake name.

Second, there’s no way you can do your job right now short of becoming a data engineer yourself and starting to hit the unstructured data with mapreduce jobs. That would be hardcore, by the way.

Third, my guess is they hired you either so they could say they had a data scientist, so pure marketing spin, which is 90% likely, or because they really plan on getting a whole team to do data science right, which I put at 1%. The remaining 9% is that they had no idea why they hired you, someone just told them to do it or something.

My advice is to put together a document for them explaining the resources you’d need to actually do something beyond the standard analytics team. Be sure to explain what and why you need those things, including other team members. Be sure and include some promises of what you’d be able to accomplish if you had those things.

Then, before handing over that document, decide whether to deliver it with a threat that you’ll leave the job unless they give you the resources in a reasonable amount of time or not. Chances are you’d have to leave, because chances are they don’t do it.

Good luck!
Aunt Pythia

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Please submit your question to Aunt Pythia!

Aunt Pythia is yet again gratified to find a few new questions in her inbox this morning, but as usual, she’s running quite low. After reading and enjoying the column below, please consider making some fabricated, melodramatic dilemma up out of whole cloth, preferably combining sex with something nerdy (see below for example) and, more importantly:

Please submit your fake sex question for Aunt Pythia at the bottom of this page!

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I met this guy online and we met for three dates. I pinged him to meet up again, but he pleads busyness (he’s an academic, he has grading to do). Thing is, when I go on the dating website, I see that he’s been active–NOT communicating with me. I haven’t heard from him for a week. I sent him a quick, friendly email yesterday in which I did, yes, indicate that I was on the dating site and saw that he was active there. Is this guy a player, blowing me off, or genuinely busy with grading at the end of the semester?

Bewildered in Boston

Dear Bewildered,

I’m afraid that the evidence is pretty good that he’s blowing you off. To prevent this from happening in the future, I have a few suggestions.

Namely, you can’t prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future – not the part where some guy who seems nice blows you off. But you can prevent yourself from caring quite so much and stalking him online (honestly I don’t know why those dating sites allow you to  check on other people’s activities. It seems like a recipe for disaster to me).

And the best way to do that is to have a rotation of at least 3 guys that you’re dating at a time, which means being in communication with even more than 3, until one gets serious and sticks. That way you won’t care if one of them is lying to you, and you probably won’t even notice, and it will be more about what you have time to deal with and less about fretting.

By the way, this guy could be genuinely busy and just using a few minutes online to procrastinate between grading papers. But you’ll never find that out if you stress out and send him accusing emails.

Good luck!

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’m an algebraic topologist trying to learn a bit of data science on the side. Around MIT I’ve heard a tremendous amount of buzz about “probabilistic programming,” mostly focused around its abilities to abstract away fancy mathematics and lower the barrier to entry faced by modelers. I am wondering if you, as a person who often gets her hands dirty with real data, have opinions on the QUERY formalism as espoused here? Are probabilistic programming languages the future of applied machine learning?

Curious Mathematician

Dear Curious,

I’ve never heard of this stuff before you just sent me the link. And I think I probably know why.

You see, the authors have a goal in mind, which is to claim that their work simulates human intelligence. For that they need some kind of sense of randomness, in order to claim they’re simulating creativity or at least some kind of prerequisite for creativity – something in the world of the unexpected.

But in my world, where we use algorithms to help see patterns and make business decisions, it’s kind of the opposite. If anything we want to interpretable algorithms, which we can explain in words. It wouldn’t make sense for us to explain what we’ve implemented and at some point in our explanation say, “… and then we added an element of randomness to the whole thing!”

Actually, that’s not quite true – I can think of one example. Namely, I’ve often thought that as a way of pushing back against the “filter bubble” effect, which I wrote about here, one should get a tailored list of search items plus something totally random. Of course there are plenty of ways to accomplish a random pick. I can only imagine using this for marketing purposes.

Thanks for the link!

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I heard that some of the “real” reasons couples choose to have children are peer pressure and boredom. Is that true? I never understood the appeal of children, since they seem to suck the life (and money) out of people for one reason or another.

Tony’s Tentatively-tied Tubes

Dear TT-tT,

I give the same piece of advice to everyone I meet, namely: don’t have children!

I think there should be a test you have to take, where it’s really hard but it’s not graded, and also really expensive, and then the test itself shits all over your shirt, and then afterwards the test proctor tells you in no uncertain terms that you’ve failed the test, and that means you shouldn’t have children. And if you still want children after all of that, then maybe you should go ahead and have them, but only after talking to me or someone else with lots of kids about how much work they are.

Don’t get me wrong, I freaking LOVE my kids. But I’m basically insane. In any case I definitely don’t feel the right kind of insanity emanating from you, so please don’t have any kids.

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I feel like a math fraud. I teach algebra and geometry but don’t have a math degree, (I just took the math exam for the single subject credential). I love math but fear I do every problem by brute force, taking twice as long as my fellow faculty members who show wicked fast cleverness in our meetings. Should i just sleep with everyone in the department to feel more like part of the gang? I am not finicky when it comes to orientation.

Faking under circumstances, keen math enthusiast

Dear Fuckme,

I really appreciate how you mixed the math question with the sex question. Right on right on!

I infer from documents like this that you are a high school math teacher. If you don’t mind I’ll address the sex question first, then the math question.

Honestly, and it may just be me, but I’m pretty sure it’s not, I’m hoping that all high school teachers have sex with each other at all times in the teachers’ lounge. Isn’t that what it’s for? Besides smoking up and complaining about annoying kids, of course. So yes, I totally approve of the plan to sleep with everyone in the department. Please report back.

Now on to the math: one thing that’s awesome about having a teacher who both loves math and is slow is that it’s incredibly relatable for the students. In other words, if you’re a student, what would you rather have for a teacher, someone who loves math and works through each problem diligently, or someone who is neutral or bored with math, and speeds through everything like a hot knife through warm butter?

Considering this, I’d say your best bet is to project your love for math to your students, by explaining your thinking at all times, and never forgetting how you thought about stuff when you were just learning it, and always telling them how cool math is. If you do all this you could easily be the best math teacher in that school.

Good luck with both projects!

Auntie P

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Please submit your question to Aunt Pythia!

Aunt Pythia is yet again gratified to find a few new questions in her inbox this morning, but as usual, she’s running quite low. After reading and enjoying the column below, please consider making some fabricated, melodramatic dilemma up out of whole cloth and, more importantly:

Please submit your fake question for Aunt Pythia at the bottom of this page!

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

Can I have a nose piercing and still be taken seriously as an academic in Mathematics?

Math Dyke

Dear Math Dyke,

Actually, I think you can. Mathematicians may be elitist snobs about some things, but it’s not about the way they’re dressed. They tend to be pretty open-minded about physically presented strangeness. Plus they’ll probably just think it’s some kind of cultural signifier that they don’t understand.

Don’t let this fear hold you back from getting your nose pierced if that’s what you wanna do! It’ll look fabulous!

Auntie P

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Hi Aunt Pythia,

I was recently dating this girl, and thought I had no feelings towards her other than enjoying her company and being attracted to her. Recently, after dating for a month or so, she wanted to have a “talk” and make things serious. I confessed that I did not love her, but told her that I did not expect these feeings at this point. She dumped me. What could I have done? Should I lie? Thanks 😦

Adones

Dear Adones,

First of all, I’m sympathetic to your viewpoint. But I’m also sympathetic to hers – and I’m much more like her myself.

People just move at different paces, and yours was too slow for her. I think the conversation you two had was probably the best thing, and I’m glad you didn’t lie.

My guess is that, from her perspective, you guys had been dating for a full six weeks (I’m interpreting your “or so” broadly), that you were pleasant yet tepid, and that she just wanted more from her love life than that. She didn’t get the impression, based on your conversation, that passion was around the corner, so why bother? From her vantage point, she deserves an interesting and exciting love life.

But don’t despair: there are other women who want to move slowly, especially if they’re not interested in having kids any time soon. My advice is to go find someone with a slower pace that matches yours!

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I love to twiddle my fingers . . . but I never took up knitting, for example, because I figured you have to have the mind of an accountant to keep track of the pattern. I supposed I could crank out a scarf or two …. Plus, wool is so itchy. (I note that linen is an option?). Should I be discouraged?

ItchyFingers

Dear Itchy,

One possibility is to have the “mind of an accountant” (I put this in quotes because I know a few accountants that may be offended by the assumptions) and count out each stitch as you go. Or you could instead have the mind of an artist, and not worry about imperfections in stitch count, since they add texture and individuality to your project. Or, you could do what I do, and have the mind of a mathematician, and choose or design patterns that allow you every now and then think, but mostly just happily knit whilst watching Star Trek or something.

The real reason I love knitting is that I love color and I love the touch of yarn. I just can’t get enough of touching it. And most luxury wool yarn is not itchy at all. My suggestion is to go to a yarn store and touch everything in sight. It’s what people do, don’t worry, nobody will be surprised.

Aunt P

p.s. if you live in New York, try Knitty City on 79th near Broadway.

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I don’t have a math background. I studied Political Science in college. But I’m fascinated by data science and want to learn more. If I keep chugging along, teaching myself things, do you think this is a viable career? I’m teaching myself programming right now (JavaScript, Ruby), a bit of R, a bit of SAS.

Don’t Always Take Advice

Dear DATA,

I do think you need to understand the math behind the algorithms in order to really be a good data science (as I explained in this post). But that doesn’t mean you have to have a math background – you can give yourself a math foreground right now. So yes, if you are willing to really go deep and understand these algorithms from top to bottom, of course you can become a data scientist. There’s no secret property of college learning that makes it somehow better, after all. And there are tons of online resources that you can use for this stuff, as well as the book I’m writing which will be out soon.

One more piece of advice: get yourself a github account and store your code for projects in that, as well as written descriptions of what problems you’ve solved with your code. Since you don’t have a standard background in math and stats and CS, you’ll have to have evidence that you really can do this stuff.

Good luck!

Aunt Pythia

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Please submit your question to Aunt Pythia!

I’m gratified to find a few new questions in Aunt Pythia’s in box this morning – I really thought I’d have to retire her persona, since I plumb ran out of questions last week, and that was making me sad. Thanks for the questions, friends! And please don’t forget to:

Submit your question for Aunt Pythia at the bottom of this page!

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I was recently on a flight where the person sitting next to me found it appropriate to hit on me. Now, he was a reasonably intelligent and nice person (up until the time that he mentioned that most of his recent dates were “short fat pigs” and asked me if I was single, despite previously indicating in his conversation that he thought I was 20 yers younger than he is).

However, now he has hunted down my email address and started contacting me. Is there anything wrong with getting my friends to anonymously pay him back for his objectification and slight harrassment of me (putting him on spam email lists, sending him fake magazine subscriptions, etc.), and if not, can you recommend things for us to try?

Sexy, If Not Going for Lame Extra-masculine-creeps

Dear SINGLE,

I have to ask a couple of things here for the sake of clarity.

First, I need to assume you expressed a lack of interest in this guy when he started hitting on you – either by saying “I’m not interested, thanks” or something along those lines, or by lying outright when he asked you whether you’re single (“I’m married with 14 kids, if it’s you who’s asking the question”). I would include the possibility of an evasion of all things romantic/sexual, but if he didn’t ask enough of a direct question to have you respond like that, then I’m not sure I’d call it hitting on you. And if he did hit on you and you didn’t say no thanks, then maybe he felt like your signals weren’t negative, so why not give it a shot.

As for hunting down your email address, if you mentioned you work at a certain math department, say, and he found your email address on that website, and then wrote to you, that’s a different level of hunt then if you have a private email address which he found god knows how. I’m not saying there’s no creep factor at all in emailing you, but if he felt a connection that he didn’t want to assume was only him, than this whole thing might be kind of sweet and explainable and not really creepy (from his perspective).

I guess my point is that you do have to say no at some point for someone’s wishful thinking to get on track. I realize this isn’t exactly fair, since you never asked for the attention in the first place, but a lot of people, especially men, are trained to assume they’re right unless they’ve been explicitly told they’re wrong.

On the other hand, if you did say “no thanks” in one way or another, and/or if he really hunted for your email address, then I’d agree that it’s too much. I hope the very first time he wrote to you you responded by saying, “I’m not interested. Please do not write to me again.”

Now, assuming that the above happened, and he still wrote a second and third time, pressing his case, I’d say you and your friends definitely sign him up for all sorts of stuff. Especially Viagra stuff. Plus, one of your other friends should write to him telling him to back the fuck off. And then block his emails using a filter.

Hope that helps,

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I recently heard your interviews on Econ Talk and Frontline and enjoyed them VERY much. Thank you. I was wondering … in light of your experiences, how do you invest your money?

Warren Buffett

Dear Warren,

Thanks for the kind words!

I don’t invest my money in an active way. And it annoys me to think about how much the managers of retirement accounts get paid to do nothing with people’s money, but on the other hand I sympathize with people who don’t change that set-up, because it would require some real research, and in the end the retirement industry isn’t set up to let people invest in things they actually care about – instead we’re supposed to think that the only thing we care about is when we retire, which is supposed to translate magically into a risk appetite.

One more thing: I’m not regretting any of this. I never, ever want to become one of those people who check their stocks all the time.

BORING!! You people are BORING!!!

Almost as boring as people who talk about exercise and/or dieting all the time!!!!

Instead I am grateful that I have a job that helps me pay my bills and allows me to not think about money very much.

This might mean I don’t have enough money at retirement, but first of all I’m not planning to retire, and second of all there are a hell of a lot of people in this country way worse off than I am, and we’re all going to have to figure this out somehow (expand Social Security!).

Auntie P

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I am in my late twenties and have begun thinking about saving for retirement.

I am a public school teacher and I make around 35k/year. I currently have a small amount of money in a generic target-year retirement Roth IRA. I would like to do so in a way that helps my money grow but also is not supporting unethical banks or other companies that contribute to social/environmental degradation. Is this possible?

Now that I am looking into “socially responsible investing,” it seems like a rabbit hole. For example, I found a Vanguard fund that was billed as “socially responsible” that avoided oil company and tobacco company holdings, but that meant that most of its top holdings were in financial institutions that have been in the headlines for their mismanagement of money and power.

Other funds I have found (Domini), require a larger up-front contribution that I can make at this time. I have also heard that investing (as I would do it) is value-neutral because you’re not actually buying the company or benefitting directly from their profits, but I am suspicious of this reasoning. Anyhow, as someone with background in finance and an eye towards making money decisions that take a broad view of “cost benefit analysis”, do you have any insight into so-called “ethical investing”?

Investigating

Dear Investigating,

You already know way more than I do about this stuff (see previous answer). I’d love to hear from readers who have even more knowledge of “ethical investing”, specifically if it’s a scam to take advantage of people who want to consider themselves environmentally conscious (probability: 99.3%).

As you can see I don’t have a lot of faith in this industry. I don’t even think it should be an industry – I think we should provide for retired people directly through Social Security and stop feeding all these funds to the market.

Speaking of this question, has anyone seen the new Frontline called “The Retirement Gamble”? Producer Marcela Gaviria told me my previous Frontline interview inspired her to make it (I’m so fucking proud!), and the questions today inspired me to watch it just now. It contains a really great explanation of why I don’t trust the assholes in this industry, nor do I have much hope for it to change any time soon. Everyone should watch it! Caveat: a bit too much of an advertisement for Vanguard, but otherwise excellent.

I wish I could be more encouraging.

Best,

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

Have you seen this crazy letter from a sorority member to the rest of her sorority? Is this your typical sorority? If so I really missed something in college but that was so long ago that reptiles walked the earth. 

John Doe

Dear John,

Oh my god I was hoping someone would ask me about that. For those of you who haven’t read the letter, here’s the critical part:

I do not give a flying fuck, and Sigma Nu does not give a flying fuck, about how much you fucking love to talk to your sisters. You have 361 days out of the fucking year to talk to sisters, and this week is NOT, I fucking repeat NOT ONE OF THEM. This week is about fostering relationships in the Greek community, and that’s not fucking possible if you’re going to stand around and talk to each other and not our matchup. Newsflash you stupid cocks: FRATS DON’T LIKE BORING SORORITIES. Oh wait, DOUBLE FUCKING NEWSFLASH: SIGMA NU IS NOT GOING TO WANT TO HANG OUT WITH US IF WE FUCKING SUCK, which by the way in case you’re an idiot and need it spelled out for you, WE FUCKING SUCK SO FAR.

My take on this: for whatever reason, and it’s a total mystery to me, these sorority members feel like they have to win the approval of a bunch of men in a fraternity. And it’s not a mystery what kind of approval:

“Ohhh, I’m now crying because your email has made me oh so so sad”. Well good. If this email applies to you in any way, meaning if you are a little asswipe that stands in the corners at night or if you’re a weird shit that does weird shit during the day, this following message is for you:

DO NOT GO TO TONIGHT’S EVENT.

I’m not fucking kidding. Don’t go. Seriously, if you have done ANYTHING I’ve mentioned in this email and have some rare disease where you’re unable to NOT do these things, then you are HORRIBLE, I repeat, HORRIBLE PR FOR THIS CHAPTER. I would rather have 40 girls that are fun, talk to boys, and not fucking awkward than 80 that are fucking faggots. If you are one of the people that have told me “Oh nooo boo hoo I can’t talk to boys I’m too sober”, then I pity you because I don’t know how you got this far in life, and with that in mind don’t fucking show up unless you’re going to stop being a goddamn cock block for our chapter. Seriously. I swear to fucking God if I see anyone being a goddamn boner at tonight’s event, I will tell you to leave even if you’re sober. I’m not even kidding. Try me.

Okay so it’s a sexual kind of thing, judging from the phrasing. Although I’m not sure exactly what being a boner means.

My take is: whatever social currency these women are hoping to capture, it involves impressing men with their friendliness, flirtatiousness, and possibly their actual sexual promiscuity, if I’m not reading too much into it.

If I’m not wrong, what’s being described sounds like a piece of a larger system whereby sororities compete with each other for the approval of fraternities. And a system in which the sorority members get yelled at if they weren’t brazen enough with their attentions.

WTF?!

Here’s a shot in the dark: this competitive currency system, whatever the hell it is, was set up by the fraternities.

Please explain to me if you can!!

Best,

Aunt Pythia

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Please submit your question to Aunt Pythia!

Aunt Pythia is happy to be be here, striving as always to answer your questions helpfully and wisely. Even if they have nothing whatsoever to do with sex (single tear running down her face).

If you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia. Most importantly,

Please submit your PG questions at the bottom of this column!

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

What are your thoughts about the use of amphetamines or other stimulants (specifically as performance enhancing drugs) in academia or the workplace? Clearly, there are legal issues that one could bring up should a person be obtaining them illicitly; so let’s say for the sake of argument that you read an article online interviewing an academic who has a doctor that knowingly prescribes her/him ritalin for its use as a “performance enhancer” (as opposed to prescribing it for ADD). The doctor assures the interviewer that she carefully monitors the academic’s use of the drug so as to minimize the effects of physiological dependence or addiction and that, from all observations she has made, the academic is responsible about taking the drug and does not abuse it. The interviewer then asks the academic why she/he uses it, and the academic responds that taking the drug allows for a level of productivity that is at or above the level of others in their field, and they fear they could not be as competitive as others in the job market should they stop taking it. What reaction are you left with after reading the (hypothetical) article?

Ever Reflect on the Debate On Speed

Dear ERDOS,

It’s no secret that Erdos was a benzedrine addict. My parents knew him when I was a kid (my dad wrote a paper with him) and so even if I hadn’t heard it through the grapevine I’d know it through that channel. It’s totally true. Moreover, he wasn’t the only mathematician who was popping pills beck then, or for that matter even now. It’s widespread.

In terms of my opinion, I have no moral opinion about it. As far as I’m concerned drug use isn’t a moral issue at all, unless it leaks out into people’s responsibilities to others, which as far as I know never happened with Erdos.

But I do have a personal theory about who does that and why, and Erdos is a great example for my theory. Namely, people who really don’t have any other interests in their lives except math. They are single-mindedly pursuing theorems at the exclusion of having a family, or love, or sex. They’re willing to forgo sex in order to prove theorems faster.

Note I say faster, because I don’t actually think drugs make you smarter, they just let you focus more efficiently. I might be wrong about this, it’s a guess. It would be interesting to see evidence one way or the other.

That’s a pretty huge sacrifice, since I usually think the way things work is something like: be good at something, so you can be successful, so you can get laid. Someone who is forgoing sex for the sake of being good at something is therefore, in my framework, sacrificing the end for the means. But all that means is that other people have different ends than I have.

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

My son’s teacher was fretting about how dangerous it is to teach in view of sandy hook. Of course anytime you are in public someone could shoot you. But if you are alone you might choke with no one to help you. So it is it more likely to be saved or killed by a stranger when you are in public

Kill or be Killed

Dear Kill,

A more gruesome statistical question you’re never gonna see. I don’t know the answer either, especially if you consider the case where the guy was pushed into the subway tracks and nobody helped him. And if the killer has a gun, then what’s a bystander to do?

In general I think people who really want to kill each other are pretty good at doing it, at least the first time they try. Considering that, we are pretty lucky how rare that is. I’d also add that staying inside all the time is also pretty safe, but your quality of life is pretty low.

As far as the case at hand, namely teachers, I’d worry more about standardized testing and the vilification of my profession than about armed killers.

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

Do you think introverts stand a chance when it comes to working up the ladder at a cutthroat large corporation?

Quiet in Seattle

Dear Quiet,

If you’d stopped at “large corporation” then I’d have said, “sure, why not?” since all corporations rely on the work of a bunch of different types of people, and introverts are bound to find a place there as well.

But you added “cutthroat” so it’s all about that word. I think you’re kind of answering your own question: if by cutthroat you mean you need to play politics with the sales guys and win, then no, introverts have no chance in such a place.

But if that’s the way it seems from your seat, I’d suggest there might be a different place in your company where you’d find plenty of introverts. Maybe you could switch your division. If not, then just get out altogether, it doesn’t sound healthy!

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I have been writing Smalltalk programs that use heuristics to make lottery predictions. The process entails creating competing rankings of numbers and then using wheels to generate combinations. Numbers are ranked using rules about history patterns. The process is deterministic and a combination in a particular position is always generated with the same process. I collect winning information by block and by line. I play the best blocks or the best lines in the next drawing. Do you have a better system?

Lost in Space

Dear Lost,

Yes, yes I do have a better system. I call my system “don’t play the lottery.”

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’ve been interviewing at a lot of different places in data science in several major cities lately. One thing that really sticks out is that there has been literally zero female technical representation amongst the interviewers — besides myself, everyone is a [Caucasian/Asian] male. Where are all the chicks [and Hispanics/Latinos/African-Americans]? We’re such a huge chunk of the population, seems like I should be seeing more different types of people. And do you think this diversity thing matters much anyway?

Diversify This!

Dear Diversify,

I hear you! I think data science is a ton of fun, and I’d love to see more diversity in our midst. I’m getting feedback on my company’s upcoming bootcamp that we should make it for women, or at least make a version for women. That might help, And it would be a lot of fun.

In terms of whether I think it “matters,” I do think there’s an enormous amount of selection bias in the ways companies think about their users and what they want, and they shrink their potential by having only narrow views. So yes, I think it matters. But more immediately the question is how to improve it.

What do you think?

Aunt Pythia

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Please submit your question to Aunt Pythia!

A couple of sad updates on Aunt Pythia.

First, someone hacked my Aunt Pythia spreadsheet and added hundreds of bizarre and offensive questions (at least they seemed intended to offend, but luckily Aunt Pythia doesn’t offend easily), which I then erased in huge blocks. This means if you actually had a valid question in the last week it has been, sadly, removed.

Second, possibly because of all the removed stuff, Aunt Pythia has no smutty sex questions to answer and has resorted to answering sober and serious leftover questions. But don’t fear! Aunt Pythia will do her best to sex up the answers anyway.

If you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia. Most importantly,

Please submit your smutty sex (or otherwise) questions at the bottom of this column!

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Aunt Pythia,

What do you think of Sheryl Sandberg and Malissa Mayer as role models/advice givers to young women? I ask you because I am confident you will give a measured response, not the reflexively pro or reflexively con reactions they seem to get.

Female enduring mostly masculine explanations

Dear Femme,

I’m going to preface my remarks by admitting I still haven’t read Sandberg’s book. But I have read enough reviews to get a feeling for what she’s going for. I have a bunch of comments:

• Do women sometimes undermine themselves by not going for things whole-heartedly and holding back? Yes, yes they do. So do men, of course. There are lots of people in this world who have missed opportunities by not giving things a real chance. Maybe this happens more often for women – I’d not be too surprised to hear that (but I also think I have an explanation, see below).
• On the other hand, I fundamentally question how bad we should feel when highly educated women choose not to try for a promotion that will require them to travel half the time and work 80 hours a week. Why would someone want that lifestyle? Why would that be their route to happiness? This is a death bed consideration, and if you ask me I’d rather not have death bed regrets about missing out on all of my personal interests, hobbies, adventures, friends, and family because I was so sure that promotion was important.
• In fact, I think highly educated women like Mayer and Sandberg, and myself for that matter, are luckier than the men they compete with. The truth is women actually have more options than men because society’s expectations are so much narrower for men. Want to leave the corporate scene after your second kid and start writing children’s books? Ok fine. That would be really weird for a man to do.
• In fact, where are the academic papers which assume that women leave the rat race by choice, to maximize their utility functions? Why don’t we assume that women have different options than men and that the fact that only 15% of women run large companies is a result of most qualified women deciding “I’d rather not, thank you”? I’m not saying that’s the only underlying effect but I honestly think it’s part of it. Plus, if we looked at it that way then the culture inside the corporation could be analysed a bit more, and we might start to understand what’s so unappealing about it. If we made it more appealing to women, they might decide to stay longer.
• Or for that matter, that women have different utility functions altogether, and that they leave the rat-race or stay in a job which doesn’t require 80 hours a week because they are (locally) maximizing their utility?
• It wouldn’t surprise me, if such a study were done, to figure out that (highly educated) women are actually happier than (highly educated) men in general, at least the women who have quality daycare.

In other words, I get some of their advice but I question their narrow perspective and narrow definition of success.

I hope that helps!

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’m almost finished with my masters in pure math. But now I’m doubting about becoming a high school teacher or do something in companies. I like children and I dislike most aspects of corporate culture, but the burn out rate for teachers is very high. Can you give me pros and cons about either career path?

Doubting

Dear D,

It’s a tough time for teachers out there. Read this resignation letter (h/t Chris Wiggins) if you haven’t already. An excerpt:

With regard to my profession, I have truly attempted to live John Dewey’s famous quotation (now likely cliché with me, I’ve used it so very often) that  “Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.” This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching “heavy,” working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised. STEM rules the day and “data driven” education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education and particularly not at Westhill.

On the other hand, there’s definitely a severe need for good math teachers. So I don’t want to utterly discourage you. One possibility is to try out teaching for a couple of years and then decide whether to stick with it or not (although the learning curve for teaching is steep, so keep in mind it gets easier over time). Have you talked to people at Math for America?

Also, do some research about where you want to teach, and make sure you land in a school which values their teachers and gives lots of clear feedback and doesn’t just submit blindly to the testing borg. Talk to the principal about that stuff beforehand.

Good luck!

Aunt Pythia

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Aunt P,

My wife and I have been enjoying a politico/sci-fi drama called Continuum, which features model and actress Rachel Nichols, a Columbia University grad with a double major in math and economics. What’s more, the show has serious undertones implying the Occupy movement is spot-on. Now I have this fantasy of a series of action movies centered around a demure blogger by day and a sexy fighter for the people by night who uses her succubi powers to enervate and destroy evil banksters. Isn’t this something we should get on Kickstarter right away?

Distinguished Opinion Maker

Dear DOM,

I haven’t seen the show, but I dig the idea of a superhero blogger, bien sûr!

Just one quibble about the use of “succubi” though:

succubi  plural of suc·cu·bus

Are you suggesting that the main character flies around at night sleeping with banksters for the good of society (note I threw in the ability to fly because that’s what awesome superheroes do)? I’m a bit confused on that point, because I don’t think it makes for good TV. Not to mention I’m not sure how that shows the banksters the error of their ways. Here’s the image I found when I google image searched “banksters”:

I mean they’re healthy enough but I’m not sure they’re porn star material. It’s all about taste though. Whatever floats your boat.

Tell me if and when you’ve started the Kickstarter campaign, please! I want to keep tabs on how much money people will contribute towards this fetching concept.

Auntie P

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Aunt Pythia,

I’m defending my dissertation soon! Woohoo! I’m curious to know what Aunt Pythia thinks about the following things: (a) board vs. slide talk, (b) how to pitch a talk about your research to mathematicians who aren’t specialists in your field, and (c) what to wear. It seems to me like (c) can’t possibly be separated from the issue of gender, so let’s pretend I’m female. (The underlying question is: how do I impress a room full of people in 40 minutes without spewing jargon or dressing like PhD Barbie?)

Nervous in Nebraska

Dear NiN,

This one’s easy. The answer is that it doesn’t matter one bit because we all know this is a formality and you’re all done! You’re getting your degree! YEAH!! Congratulations.

If I were you I’d wear something bright and celebratory, like the peacock you must feel yourself to be. And I’d say slide so you don’t get your bright clothes chalky.

Love,

Aunt Pythia

——

Please please please submit questions!

Aunt Pythia is excited to discuss the following topics today: sex with students, how to get men to stop trivializing women near you, and how to feel attractive.

Did you expect and hope for something less titillating? Then please unsubscribe from my RSS feed immediately (speaking of which, can someone help me give advice to people getting bumped off of Google Reader? How do you get your daily dose of mathbabe? Please comment below).

If you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia. Most importantly,

Please submit your smutty sex questions at the bottom of this column!

 ——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I teach online using a chat-based tutoring system, which creates some interesting situations. I get a lot of comments from students like, “hey, you’re hot, let’s hookup tonite.” I don’t take them up on those requests for many reasons, including

• I don’t want to get fired,
• I don’t want to go to jail,
• I’m in a happily committed relationship,
• I don’t get paid enough to make last minute cross-country flights,
• I already have enough people and activities vying for my spare time.

I usually just write boring stuff like “please focus on your lesson” or “sorry, I’m not allowed to do that.” But, just for fun, and assuming the students were of legal age, etc, what does a math-babe say when a student asks to hook up or hang out, whether virtually or face-to-face?

Might Actually Teach Humans

Dear MATH,

From your concerns about going to jail, which seem to be alleviated in the scenario where the student is old enough, I’m going to assume you tutor high school students as well as older students. If this is the case, then let me congratulate you on making the wise decision to avoid such opportunities. High school students are best left to each other, with a bunch of well-meaning advice, a few copies of “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” and boxes and boxes of condoms.

For that matter, the same could be said about college-age students. Leave those guys alone too, they’re still developing.

With that, I’ll assume that you and the student in question are both grownups, i.e. about 23 or older. And for the sake of this question I’ll assume that you’re not a college professor teaching grad students, since I don’t want to become an expert on the nationwide norms of professorial conduct this morning.

Even so, if you are formally teaching a student in any capacity, and thus responsible for their grade and/or feedback, then I’d certainly expect you to avoid expressing romantic or sexual interest in your student until after the grades are turned in, lest it be construed as creepy pressure for a good grade. But even then it might not be ok – what if you might someday write them a letter of recommendation? In that case a romantic relationship would make that extremely difficult. I’d say that the formal relationship of teacher-student pretty much rules out sex for quite a while. I’m not saying it never happens, obviously, but it’s best to avoid.

Now, to your situation: you’re a tutor. You’re a grownup. The students you teach are grownups. There’s presumably no grade given by a tutor, and considering it’s chat-based and online, there might be an army of tutors that the student can turn to if they decide you’re bad in bad (true? about the army, not about you being bad in bed). I really don’t see a problem here.

That’s not a green flag to start flirting with all of your students, that would be creepy and weird and could easily get you fired. Don’t be creepy.

I hope that helps!

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I have a history of my male friends talking to me about women they are dating in a way that makes me feel unattractive. I can think of (at least) two things that contribute to my feeling unattractive:

1. I assume if they thought I was attractive, they wouldn’t talk to me about other women.
2. They talk about other women in simplifying terms that seems to reduce women down to a few dimensions of attractiveness (skinny, high heels, dumb, girly and deferential), and I don’t fit into the space they’ve defined.

What do I do to make this stop?

Feeling Unattractive, Chasing Knowledge

Dear FUCK,

Sounds like you hang out with a bunch of dudes who have forgotten the golden rule of PUA’s (Pick-Up Artists), namely don’t share the secrets!!

Just kidding – PUA’s love sharing their secrets, because it gives them yet another chance to brag about their conquests.

I’m really glad you wrote. It pisses me off when the nasty way a given man thinks about women and sex leaks onto other people. Especially because this trivializing posture towards women is actually an silly act of self-defense and insecurity on the part of the man you’re hanging out with. It’s not enough that they feel insecure, they’ve got to make everyone around them that way too. Lame.

By the way, I’m not at all sure that, if a man starts talking about sex with other women around you, that’s he’s not also interested in you. It might be his awkward, awful way of expressing interest. But that doesn’t mean it’s meant to make you feel attractive. It sounds like one of his ways of getting laid is by making women feel unattractive and trivial. It might even be a script he wishes you to follow. Not cool.

Here are some options you have:

1. Next time you’re in the conversation with him, you might anticipate his modus operandi and start talking about sexual attraction before he does. You could, for example, talk about attributes you honestly like in men like, say, the strength of ego not to trivialize women.
2. Another possibility is you could talk to him directly about this issue (assuming he’s an important enough friend of yours that you’re willing to go there). Tell him that, when he trivializes women around you, it makes you feel unattractive, and you’re pretty sure that it’s unintentional but in any case you’re wondering why he does it. You might want to ask him how he’d feel if you did the same thing in terms of men.
3. Another possibility is you could just up and tell him you don’t want to hear about his conquests.
4. Finally, you could just find other men to hang out with who have figured out honest and direct ways to deal with women. Maybe because they’re not from an English-speaking country.

Good luck!

Auntie P

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I walk around society feeling unattractive and I don’t know what signals to look for in my interactions with other people that they think I am attractive. I’m not looking for Glamour Magazine kind of advice. But Aunt Pythia kind of advice. How do I know if other people find me attractive? I assume for the most part they don’t.

Feeling Unattractive, Chasing Knowledge, I Need Guidance

Dear FUCKING,

Good questions this week! I’ve come up with an idea which I hope will help.

Namely, I think one of the main ways women get feedback about their attractiveness is through other women. For whatever reasons (some of them no doubt reasonable, some of them not), our culture deems it inappropriate for men to go up to women with direct feedback on their attractiveness. But girlfriends can play this role, especially if you ask them to.

So my first piece of advice is, if you’re looking for feedback and advice on your attractiveness, go ask your girlfriends.

That’s not to say all girlfriends are created equal. There are some girlfriends that are competitive and jealous of their friends, and  will give you weird advice that makes you think you need to be skinny, high heeled, dumb, girly and deferential to be attractive, kinda like the douchey man you talked to above. These bad girlfriends, by the way, are also the women who write the advice tips for Glamour Magazine. It’s a bad sign if they tell you about a great diet they heard of.

The kind of girlfriend you’re looking for is the kind that, when you express ambivalence about your attractiveness, instantly proclaims you hot as hell and offers to take you out shopping for clothes that show off your boobs (or some other body part of which you’re particularly proud). Or better yet, whips out the nearest catalog and goes through it page-by-page with you, showing you what to look for that will flatter your incredible body.

Good luck finding yourself some awesome girlfriends!

Love,

Aunt Pythia

——

Please please please submit questions!

Many thanks to Aunt Orthoptera for her fascinating, insect-related advice from last week.

Aunt Pythia is psyched to be back, is psyched to refer to herself in the third person, and is psyched to continue her sex and dating advice far beyond what anyone asked for or wants.

If you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia. Most importantly,

Please submit your smutty sex questions at the bottom of this column!

——

Aunt Pythia,

After how long without any sign of interest from any member of the (or an) appropriate sex should you give up on trying to date? Also, how do you get over a crush on someone who likes you as a friend and who you want to be friends with when breaking off contact is not an option?

Forever Alone Probably

Dear FAP,

Thank you so much for the question. Over my vacation I read The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss and I’m dying to talk about it. You’ve given me the perfect excuse to do just that!

According to the book, if you’re a man, you should do a bunch of things to get laid with “really hot chicks”, among them:

1. Get used to people saying no to you – don’t dwell on one relationship.
2. Dress and appear confident, which means think about how your appearance and actions come off to other people.
3. Ignore your “target” (i.e. the really hot chick you’re interested in) until you’ve …
4. won the admiration of the alpha male of the group by doing magic tricks (no shit).
5. Learn how to “neg” your target once you deign to pay attention to her, which means insult her in playful (read: obnoxious) ways such as (not a hyperbole) carrying around a piece of lint so you can pretend you found it on her outfit and then say, “How long has this been on your shoulder?”
6. Once you have her attention, have interesting things to say and…
7. generally pay her attention and know how to talk.
8. Make it clear that you’re interested in continuing to spend time with her (without be creepy).

Here’s my take on this weird and disturbing set of instructions: it’s not rocket science that it works but it’s unduly evil.

The pick-up artists who studied up and tested out these techniques collected a lot of data and tried out a lot of things. They started out completely dweeby and socially awkward and ended up being able to hold a conversation with a women in a nightclub. They were essentially on-the-ground data scientists.

But they made a classic mistake of data scientists, namely they overfit. They came to the conclusion that they needed to do magic tricks and be assholes to get laid. But just because that didn’t prevent them from getting laid, it doesn’t mean they needed to do that. My theory is that it was a replacement for actually having something interesting to say.

Let me give advice to anyone, man or woman, that I think will help you in terms of meeting people and dating. In fact, this is also my advice for people who aren’t interested in dating but who want to be able to engage socially in any situation.

It’s easy – I’ll just add one thing they forgot about (having a life) and which they replaced by a bunch of unnecessary, stupid and quasi-evil shit:

1. Get used to people saying no to you – don’t dwell on one relationship (unless it’s making you happy to do so!).
2. Dress and appear confident, which means think about how your appearance and actions come off to other people.
3. Work on being an interesting person with cool life goals.
4. Once you have someone’s attention, have interesting things to say and…
5. generally pay attention to that person and know how to talk.
6. Make it clear that you’re interested in continuing to spend time with that person (without be creepy).

Now, to answer your questions.

I don’t think you should give up if you’re actually interested in dating. But I do think you should think about getting over your crush, or at least ignoring your crush sometimes (not the person, the feelings) so that you actually allow yourself to meet other people and find them fascinating. Otherwise, like it or not, you’ll close yourself off to new people and experiences.

Next, keep in mind that the most exciting things to whatever new person you’ve just met is that a) you’re interested in them, b) you’re paying attention to them, and c) you want to spend more time with them whilst d) you’re an interesting person with cool life goals.

About the crush: it won’t seem tragic to have a crush on someone who doesn’t reciprocate when you also have other romantic relationships brewing. In fact it’ll seem cool and awesome to be near someone that attractive.

I hope that helps!

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’ve sometimes noticed on receipts instead of just a single charge for something, a single charge plus a duplicate, plus a credit to nullify the duplicate. This has happened often enough to make me suspicious that these duplicate/credits aren’t appearing by accident. I’ve only noticed it happening at venues owned by large corporations. The most recent occurrence was a checking deposit at a bank, that appeared in duplicate on my statement along with the usual credit/retraction. I wonder, do these fake transactions serve some books-cooking purpose?

Curious Observer-Participant

Dear COP,

I’ve decided to answer this question even though it has nothing to do with sex because, first of all, it’s a fascinating observation and second of all, I think it could do with a bit of data collecting.

Readers, please check your receipts for the next few days for this weird phenomenon. And accountant readers, please explain this weird phenomenon if it does indeed indicate a book-cooking purpose.

Auntie P

——

Dear Aunt Orthoptera,

I have spent the last couple of years modelling the beheavioural neuroscience behind the always respectable Acrididae. Recently, I came across this strange species of primate called Homo sapien. Unlike regular folks who rub their legs against each other when they are gregarious, these primates like to make sounds at each other or send symbols or pictures!

I would very much like to study them and was wondering which part of industrial data science would find my skill set (math, biology, neuroscience) useful. Also have you seen my cousin Melanoplus spretus? I haven’t seen him in a while.

Solitary Schistocerca americana

p.s. here’ my picture:

Dear SSa,

I decided to answer your letter even though it’s addressed to Aunt Orthoptera because it’s about sex.

I wanted to repeat a point about the mating rituals of humans which my friend Laura made recently. Namely, every man she knows somehow knows about The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss (see above description), even though most women have never heard of it.

At the same time, every woman she knows somehow knows about another book called All the Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right by Ellen Fein, even though no man has ever heard of that. [Aunt Pythia’s personal note: I’d never heard of the latter book either]

Both of these are more or less instruction manuals for getting what you want from the opposite sex. Or maybe a better way of describing them would be manipulation manuals. Not much there in terms of adult honesty and saying what you really feel. Makes you wonder if we’re so very different from grasshoppers rubbing their legs together after all.

Food for thought!

Aunt Pythia

——

Please please please submit questions!

I’m afraid the concept of “giving advice” has been taken down a notch this week, considering how many ridiculous examples we have right now of people are giving advice as a way of congratulating themselves. It’s enough to confuse an advice columnist and put her into an existential angst spiral.

However, it’s not going to stop Aunt Pythia!

At most it will divert her to talk exclusively about something that nobody doesn’t love reading, namely sex. It’s a tried and true last resort of the advice columnist: let out the dirty laundry of yourself and everybody who dares bare themselves to you. I don’t see where this could go wrong.

Having said that, I’m not promising to be exclusive like this every week. I’ll probably cheat on you people every now and then and answer questions about how to get a job in data science or something. Also, my guest advice columnist next week, Aunt Orthoptera, will answer whatever questions she chooses (from a grasshopper’s perspective, of course).

By the way, if you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia. Most importantly,

Please submit your smutty sex questions at the bottom of this column!

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

How can I make compatible my sexual attraction for dominant women and my fear of being controlled?

Horny in Montana

Dear Horny,

Let me start out by admitting honestly that I have no direct advice for you. I just don’t know how to resolve issues surrounding sexuality, and I’d be deeply skeptical of anybody who claims to be able to do so.

Sexuality is a crazy thing, a super entrenched and powerful force, and there’s just nothing and nobody who can change it for you once it’s on a roll. Sometimes people seem to be able to change it for themselves, mainly by repressing it, but that’s always so amazing, not to mention deeply threatening, I wouldn’t proffer it as advice.

I sometimes think of my own sexuality as having a personality, and an agenda, that I can only observe, not control. The best case scenario for me has evolved into trying not to be too judgmental of it and to and make sure nothing unsafe happens. I’m like a benign referee of my own dirty urges.

Having said that, I have two pieces of indirect advice for you. First, it would probably be useful to separate sex play with “normal life” and realize that you can ask someone to dominate you in the bedroom, and even pretend to control you, and even actually control you, whilst remaining nothing like that outside the bedroom. That’s totally normal and common and it might help in the sense that you’d actually have control over being controlled: it would happen if and when you wanted it.

The second piece of advice I have it totally selfish, namely, please don’t blame the women of the world for your unresolved problems. Just because you’re both attracted and afraid of these dominant women doesn’t mean they have a responsibility to deal with your confusion and frustration. Don’t take it out on them.

I hope that helps,

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

What would you say to a woman who told you that she is not able to make a commitment to anyone because she regularly finds herself in search of romance (not originating from sexual desires) with other people? Do you think this is a common behavior?

Itchy Litchi

Dear Itchy,

There are three stages of understanding in this story, at least for me.

First, you know yourself (I’ll refer to “you” even though you might have been asking on behalf of someone else) pretty well if you avoid commitment based on a theoretical understanding of your roaming eye. Most people I know throw themselves into commitment in spite of really good evidence that they won’t be able to sustain it, due to their cognitive biases.

Second, you claim your romantic urges for other people are not sexual. Theoretically this may be true, but in my experience romantic urges are always sexual if you probe deep enough or if they get strong enough. So either I’m a sex maniac (possible) or else you’re in denial about those nonsexual romantic urges.

Third, let’s put the above two together: A) you know yourself deeply, and B) you’re in total denial. The second conclusion makes me rethink the first, honestly, and I come to the conclusion that the first conclusion was wrong. You aren’t avoiding commitment because you know yourself so well, but rather because you’re avoiding commitment for some reason. Maybe you’re afraid of commitment? Maybe you’re afraid of sexual urges, which is why you both avoid commitment and avoid admitting your romantic urges are sexual?

Finally, if this question was actually written by, say, a man who wanted to understand the reasoning a woman gave him for why she couldn’t commit to him: she just wasn’t that into you. And yes that’s a very common behavior.

I hope that helps!

Auntie P

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I just studied the “Authentic Women’s Penis Size Preference Chart” (I say “studied” because I need to convert everything to metric units to make any sense of it) and, while – unlike many men, I am told – I am not too concerned about length, I feel that the ideal circumference IS REALLY BIG, at least for a man’s penis. Is this for real? Are women looking all their life for that eluding ideal-sized penis or am I just unlucky?

Concerned Reader

Dear Concerned,

Once again here’s the chart for the readers who missed it last time:

To answer your primary question, it’s not the length, it’s the girth. A truer statement has never been said. Of course, there are exceptions to that rule, namely if the length is truly miniscule.

Now, I do have some comforting words for you, you’ll be happy to know. Namely, my guess is that women responding to this very scientific poll had a biased measurement error. Namely, they didn’t have (probably) an erect penis handy and a flexible measuring tape as well, by their side, whilst answering the poll (apologies to the women who did!).

So what they did is they eyeballed the “circumference” measurement by imaging holding a penis in their hand like an OK sign:

And then, since it’s hard to measure a circle, they then straightened out their fingers. The reason this is so biased is that your fingers and thumb are actually quite a bit longer once you’ve stopped making the OK sign.

There may be a measurement bias of up to 50% on this. Probably not, but I’m trying to make you feel better.

I hope that helps!

Aunt Pythia

——

Please please please submit questions! Especially if they are grasshopper-related!

You’ve stumbled upon yet another week’s worth of worthy questions that will be awkwardly sidestepped by mathbabe’s alter ego Aunt Pythia.

By the way, if you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia. Most importantly,

Please submit your question at the bottom of this column!

I’ve officially run out of questions so this is for real.

Please come up with something before I do.

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I just moved to NYC from a small university town, and I’m finding it much harder to meet nerd girls. Most of the nerd hangout spots that I’ve found are male dominated, and I meet mostly artists at the bars and coffee shops. Do you have any suggestions beyond trolling the nearest physics department?

Nice, Easygoing Roamer Drawn Swiftly Around Real, Engaging Hackers On Town

Dear NERDSAREHOT,

Let me suggest you enroll in Meetup yesterday and sign yourself up for all the nerd meetups you can find. There are plenty of cute nerd girls who go to those, and it’s a perfect situation for you to ask someone to have a beer afterwards. Also consider getting involved in weekend hackathons, which attract lots of nerd girls as well.

By the way, these events are still male dominated, but that’s a good thing. Nerd girls should have their pick. It’s one of the many advantages of being a nerd girl and it aint going away.

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I recently got a job as a data scientist, and I’m feeling like my stats skills are woefully inadequate. I have a master’s in pure math and I work as a programmer, but I’ve never taken a statistics class. What books would you recommend I read to get up to speed on statistics? I’m looking for something with examples that’s applicable to my work (not too much definition/theorem/proof), but that isn’t scared of the math.

Regretting Spurning Statistics

Dear RSS,

Congratulations! Can you write back and tell everyone how you got the job? Guest post?

Honestly I learned stats (the stuff I know anyway) by reading wikipedia extensively. It’s surprisingly good. Also, the book I’m writing with Rachel Schutt will contain some good explanations of how stats is used in data science, thanks of course to Rachel, not me. She’s working on the causality chapter right now.

In general my advice to you is, draw lots of pictures, including a histogram as well as a time-value scatter plot of every data set you use, and every data set you generate as well. You’d be surprised by how quickly you learn the statistics that is relevant to your dataset when you’re intimately familiar with its properties.

Good luck!

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I have been reading up on regression to the mean originally as described by Galton. He notes that the sons’ height data had reduced variance versus the height data of the preceding fathers’ generation. If this is so, wouldn’t the grandsons’ generation have even more reduced variance in height compared with the 2nd generations’ height…and so on down the generation lineage. Therefore wouldn’t the variance in succeeding generations get narrower and narrower and approach some limit? Where am I going wrong with this, or am I misunderstanding something?

MeanIQ

Dear MeanIQ,

Thanks for bringing my attention to this, it’s clearly an important historical part of linear regression and I’d never heard of it.

You’re absolutely right to think that Galton was wrong. Galton’s working theory was that two people have children by averaging their characteristics, which is just not how genetics works (as we now know). Not only would what you say be true, that after a few generations everyone would be the exact same height, but we’d also see that, if you went backwards in time, there’d be people of arbitrary height, tall and short.

As for why he saw larger variance in older generations, my best guess is that he had a selection bias. Maybe the decreasing variance he observed was due to environmental factors such as the quality and size of the local food supply, where the “current” generation were localized (and so more consistent) but the “older” generation had come from various other places where they were either better fed or less well fed, which would lead to an increased variance.

There’s another totally different interpretation for the phrase “regression to the mean” which is also confusing though. Namely, the idea that if your first measurement of something is extreme, then your second measurement will tend to be less so. The problem with this is that you have to have a notion of “extreme” in the first place. And if you do, then it’s kind of obvious (and also kind of dumb).

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

Is the Mathbabe religious? 

I really like the new mathbabe logo/marque. The typeface is totally flapper and I really like those bulbous upside down B’s, and the offsetting of the bottom text in order to give the text texture. But when I look at the symbolology of the whole logo/marque I can’t help but wonder if the Mathbabe is religious. The T looks like a deproportioned Greek cross, and the alpha above it suggests that there should be an omega below it somewhere. So clearly the new logo/marque has some Christian symbolology, and my eyes keep looking for more. Maybe the A’s are three sided figures that represent the Trinity, and the M represents a firmament that has fallen, and therefore symbolologizes our fallen state.

Anyway, it’s cool if you are religious, as lots of great mathematicians were devout people, and some were even priests, like Bayes. And if you’re not that’s cool too. I see you describe sex both profanely and sacredly, so I know you are a spiritual person. And it’s cool if you don’t want to answer either. I respect that religion is a personal matter. Just saw your new logo/marque and was wondering.

Semi-semiotic

Dear Semi-semiotic,

Honestly I have so little religious background that I am not even sure if you’re kidding (but the “symbolologizes” kind of gives you away).

For the record, my parents were atheists who made fun of me when I told them I believed in God in first grade (I think I learned about the idea of God from a babysitter). One of their favorite stories of my childhood is when my first grade teacher, a devout Catholic, called up my parents in alarm over my essay which said “I believe in God but please don’t tell my parents” and my mom was like, “Har har that’s a good one, thanks” and hung up on her. Not that my mom is a rude person, she isn’t.

Two more points: First, I plan to refer to myself in third person from now on as “The Mathbabe”, and second, when did I ever refer to sex sacredly? That’s bullshit. Blasphemy even.

Aunt Pythia

——

Please please please submit questions, thanks! I’m desperate!

You’ve stumbled upon yet another week’s worth of worthy questions that will be awkwardly sidestepped by mathbabe’s alter ego Aunt Pythia.

By the way, if you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia. Most importantly,

Please submit your question at the bottom of this column!

——

Aunt Pythia,

I graduated seven years ago and since then I’ve been working in finance. (I was a floor clerk when Bear Stearns took a nosedive and the words “too big to fail” reared their ugly head.) Now I’m finally ready to flee this flaming cesspool. Do you have any advice on how to get out without suffering a major career setback? I have some skills relevant to data science — python, SQL, some tinkering with Hadoop — but I don’t have any formal training in either computer science or in statistics, and I don’t know a soul outside the financial industry. Is there a way out, or am I stuck here forever?

Lonely in Finance

Dear Lonely,

You are not stuck. Quit your job, live off your savings, and start networking in another space. What do you want to do? What turns you on? Take a leap of faith and get yourself moving. Of course it will be a career setback! Because you are going to begin anew! That’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

I’ll be you don’t have 3 kids and a mortgage even, and yet you still somehow feel like you need to be completely safe. You don’t! You have highly marketable skills, and yes you’ll have to develop even more, but for god’s sake don’t stay in a flaming cesspool just because the money’s good. That is something you know you will regret on your deathbed.

Get the fuck out.

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’m terrible at asking for advice, because whenever I think of a problem I immediately dismiss it as too silly, or too easy, or I convince myself that I know the answer. Sometimes I don’t ask for help because I feel too much like I’m mooching people’s time, or something like that. How can I get better at asking for advice?

Acrimoniously Chancing Ridiculously-Off Name, You Minx

p.s. Too meta? Or not meta enough?

Dear ACRONYM,

You’re right to be worried. Asking a question is a tough business, and it’s all about timing.

Say, for example, you came up to me on a packed subway car at rushhour, when I was reading my kindle (current book: Mostly Harmless Econometrics), say, and you poked me in my back and said, “hey buddy I’ve got a problem and you’re the person that’s gonna solve it!”. In that situation, and I have to be honest here, I’d be somewhat reluctant to consider your problem as one of my own.

Or, imagine you approached me while I was in the women’s lavatory stall at a public bathroom, and, say, wrote down your question on the back of the bathroom tissue and scooted it over to me on the floor, again I can’t promise you I’d appreciate it (unless you were asking me for more toilet paper, then we’d be good).

However, this being an advice column, I’m pretty confident I’ve made a safe place for even silly questions (and questions that are too easy are even better, because they make me feel smart!). That’s what Saturday mornings are for: I love doing this, and you are helping me do this!

Love,

Auntie P

p.s. Just meta enough!

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

Our culture would have us believe that we are nothing if we are not statistically above average, preferably gifted. Being successful is practically considered a matter of common courtesy. Nonetheless, most of us stubbornly persist in a state of statistical mediocrity, defiantly average. How can we quell our culture’s craving for exceptionalism?

Average Without Being Mean

Dear Average,

I’ve never met someone who thinks they are actually average. I might meet someone who will tell me they’re bad at tests or that they suck at math, but people generally know better than to stop there when self-assessing (hopefully! unless they’re actually really depressed).

After all, a given person has their own personal passions and interests and each develops their own skills and natural talents. While it may be true that someone is born with average potential for a certain thing, it’s more a matter of their passion and time spent practicing that thing than anything about their inherent ability that makes them good or great at something.

In other words, to exist in a state of (supposed) statistical mediocrity is to submit entirely to external measures of generic skills. Who would do that, and why? If I was against standardized testing before, this idea makes me double down.

In terms of our culture, I don’t know how to avoid these kind of “cravings for exceptionalism” if you want to work as a data scientist in a tech startup, for example, because of the competitive nature of that industry. But there are plenty of jobs where being a thoughtful, hard-working person who isn’t a jerk is welcomed.

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I have a PhD in math and have been interested in getting a job as a data scientist. I have been following your blog, following a few classes online, and talking to people from my program about other resources. I have been applying for jobs in California for over a month now, and since I have no established experience with analyzing big data sets, I have not received any requests for interviews. I would appreciate any advice you can offer! 

Searching in California

Dear Searching,

I wish I had a better answer, because it kind of drives me nuts how hard it is for people like you to get a good job. But first I’d examine your reasoning: how do you know it’s because of a lack of experience analyzing big data sets that you haven’t gotten an interview? I’m not saying that’s not relevant, but I’m pretty sure it will be a combination of factors – including connections. Plus, what is your “program”? Are you still a student? Are you in an academic institution? Possible things you might try:

• finding a class that will give you mad skillz working with big data sets
• reading “Mostly Harmless Econometrics“
• networking with other Ph.D.’s you know who already have a job in industry
• going to data conferences or tech meetups and introducing yourself to a bunch of people
• finding out about internship possibilities
• going to data hackathons and working alongside someone who knows the ropes

Good luck!

Aunt Pythia

——

Please please please submit questions, thanks!

I’m psyched to be back here at my weekly inane advice column. Glad you’re here too.

This week I had the hugest compliment payed to my alter ego Aunt Pythia, namely that in a domestic dispute her name was floated as the person who could solve the dilemma at hand. There was even a threat of writing to Aunt Pythia, mid-argument!

Now that’s what I call real-world impact, which as you know is how I measure all things.

By the way, if you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia. Most importantly,

Please submit your question at the bottom of this column!

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

What do you wish you had known when you were 21 years old? If you could go back and yell, “That’s not important, don’t think about that! Look over here!” what would you explain? I’ve got only one run through the early 20s and I need your help.

Gloomily orating, an undergrad not totaling plenty years turning humbug into acronym

Dear Goauntpythia,

This will sound trite, but here goes.

There’s one thing I figured out when I was about 23 or so that has served me incredibly well, which is something I call “death bed reckoning”. Namely, when I struggle to make a decision, I think about how I’d view this decision one way or the other on my death bed. For whatever reason I have a lot of time on my hands in this imaginary bed.

So, for example, if I think, “I’ll regret it (on my death bed) if I don’t try, because it’s actually something I want to have at least attempted” then my answer is obvious, and I do it. If instead I think, “I won’t give a shit (on my death bed) if I do this or not” then I stop worrying and just do whatever I freaking feel like.

It’s actually incredibly nerdy if you think about it: an asymptotic limit of whether it matters and which direction it matters.

I recently came across a list of the “5 top regrets of dying people” with interest, since I think about death bed regrets so much. And guess what? I can happily say I’m avoiding those top 5 by living my life via death bed reckoning. They are (according to this possibly totally unscientific article):

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

I am going to restrain myself from giving you advice that’s more precise than this because I honestly know nothing about what it would mean for you to have the courage to live a life true to yourself. But the cool thing is you know what that means. Good luck!

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’ve been reading this blog by a total babe, and I love it. She is just so f*cking right all the time. I read her posts every day and I feel like telling her how much what she is writing comes from the bottom of my heart. It feels like having a mental hard on, but then I feel that it would be cheesy and cliche to say that. Do you know a good way to handle this situation?

Mental Hard On

Dear MHO,

I hear you, same thing happens to me. I feel like anything too overt would run the risk of giving her even more of a cult of personality – after all, I don’t want her to get all fake and/or self-conscious! What if she starts giving TED talks, for God’s sake!? That would be horrible.

Even so, I need to somehow feel close.

The best I’ve come up with to deal with my crush is to buy lots of t-shirts and coffee mugs that remind me of her so she’ll be with me in those stolen intimate moments I eke out in lavatory stalls.

Good luck!

AP

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’ve been dating this amazing woman, but there’s one issue that I feel uneasy about (I’m a man).

She’s a few years older than I am, and very successful and well-regarded in her field. Her independence and intelligence, which are doubtless big contributors to her success, are also huge turn-ons for me. I have a lot of ambition, but in my profession, being good at what you do does not lead to much money or recognition without, in addition, a big stroke of luck.

I worry that if things grow more serious, the status-income inequality will become an issue. It doesn’t bother me, but I get anxious it might start to bother her down the line. Is that the same thing as it bothering me?

I know there’s some ingrained, implied sexism here on my part that on a conscious level I disagree with–it’s not from her these worries come but from some past experience and general societal input re: gender roles. How do I get over this anxiety–which, I stress, I think is MY problem–and not let it damage what could be something wonderful?

R. Burns

Dear Mr. Burns,

I want to separate the issues here a bit.

First of all, you’re right that it’s your problem, so don’t ascribe it to her until she starts saying something like, “I feel weird that I make more money than you.” But second of all, it’s not about money.  It sounds like together you guys make enough. It’s really about status and recognition – outward success, if you will.

So putting those two things together, I’ll rephrase your question: Can I make myself feel like I deserve this sexy successful amazing woman who loves me even though my chosen field is difficult to break into and even though I have not yet achieved outward success? And the answer to that is, I hope so.

I’ll be honest with you: if you can’t figure out how to feel good about yourself, you might very well fuck up your relationship through sheer insecurity about your relative outward appearance of success. That would be a shame, but I’ve seen it happen.

There’s a part of us that wants to be able to parade our lovers in front of the world and shout, “look at who I’m with! I’m with a celebrity!” but there’s an even deeper part of us that wants to be with someone who has long-term goals, who is striving towards them, and who takes them seriously. I’ll bet you’re with someone who digs you on the second level. After all, she started dating you as you are.

As for myself, I’ve always been attracted to people who are really fucking good at something, but that thing could be playing the guitar, writing awesome code, or understanding politics. It’s the passion, the swagger, and the work ethic that matter, not the awards.

Good luck!

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I am an undergraduate studying pure math and I can say with firm resolution that I love math and it will hold my intellectual attention for the rest of my life (no matter what I end up doing). That said, I will be 25 by the time I graduate and so I am more enticed by the prospect of finding a good job, being financially independent, and gaining real workplace experience once I finish rather than going to grad school for another 5-6 years (but don’t get me wrong, I absolutely want to get a PhD at some point).

How marketable could I be for those data science jobs with just a bachelor’s in math (even though I’m currently taking lots of grad math classes and have experience working in computational labs)? Would it be naive of me to think that I could find a job with just a bachelor’s, narrow down the potential array of dissertation topics I could undertake based on patterns/data that I see in real life, and then return to academia? I just fear being past the age of 30 with overly specialized knowledge of just one area of math with no other real job prospect than gaining membership to some Merlin-bearded, nerd-coven of mathematicians (again, not that I wouldn’t consider that awesome, I just want to have more than one option for the road ahead).

Absolutely Dreading Dissatisfaction

Dear ADD,

I don’t think one strictly needs a Ph.D. to get a job in data science, but one should certainly have the quantitative smarts to be able to get a Ph.D. in a hard science. It sounds like you have those smarts, and moreover you have experience in a computational lab (was that on a break from college?).

I think you should look for an internship with a tech data team over the summer and see how you like it and see how you fit in, etc. My guess is that your maturity and experience, combined with intense love of all things math, will go a long way both for you and for your colleagues.

I wish I had a place to send you for internships (readers, please comment below on where to find out how to apply to such things!) but start with a google search and some questions to your fellow nerds.

Good luck!

Aunt Pythia

——

Please please please submit questions, thanks!

Readers, I was really close to declaring this the last Aunt Pythia column.

My explanation was gonna be this: I am finding myself surprisingly unqualified to answer most of the questions submitted. I thought I was a loud mouth and would have no problem, but when people ask me hugely philosophical questions about the existence of god, or ask me questions about how to change fields from physics to politics, it just makes me feel very unthoughtful and small.

So in other words, as a mode of self-preservation, I was going to discontinue this practice and go back to doing stuff that makes me feel smart.

But after doing the actual writing (which you will find below) I’ve changed my mind. It’s too much fun! But I have fired you guys from answering a question each week since you suck at that.

If you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia. Most importantly,

Please submit your question at the bottom of this column!!

——

Let’s start out with the question from last time that remained unanswered:

Dear Aunt Pythia,

As a graduate student, I enjoy attending departmental teas, if only because it’s an excuse to get away from the books for a few minutes. However, my department recently started having some of our teas sponsored by a trading firm. As somebody who has concerns about the finance industry, I am bothered by this. I thought about dumping all the tea in one of the fountains on campus, but I’d like to find a more constructive approach. Any suggestions?

Tea Party Patriot

TPP,

Interesting. Let me ask you this. Is the money given with strings attached? Do they also expect to be able to recruit math people on campus? Do they advertise their firm in some way at the teas? How do you happen to know who’s sponsoring it?

If one of the above is true, then yes I’d say dump the tea in a fountain, and object to the blatant commercialization of your department. But if none of the above is true, and if I haven’t forgotten something, then the money is a kind of bribe, but it’s lower level.

That is, your department is psyched to not pay for cookies, but over time the money that it’s saving will be used for other things, and people’s taste in cookies will be inflated because of the extra fancy cookies that finance people can afford, and there will be this weird dependency set up. At that point they may try to advertise or recruit, which is in my opinion totally outrageous on a campus and deserves some fountain dumping. Hopefully you can band together with other outraged folk and make a big scene of it.

Another possibility: if they are recruiting on campus, tell me where in advance and I’ll come recruit for Occupy at the next table.

Good luck, Patriot!

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

Dear Aunt Pythia, after living for quite a lot time I think my life has been mostly erratic and not driven by myself but for random forces beyond my scope. I don’t mean I am in a bad position. In fact I am quite happy and own everything I and my family need to live comfortably. However a lot of people think of themselves as making long term plans and succeding (or failing) at them. Sometimes I think there are essentialy different kinds of people (with and without living plans speaking on binary mode), sometimes I think they just deceive themselves. What do you think about? Do you have a long term plan for yourself?

Rooted At Nothing Durable On My Living Years

Dear RANDOMLY,

First, let me speak of my gratitude for your excellently chosen fake name, which translates so beautifully into an appropriate word (see how RANDOMLY did that, people?). Thank you so so much.

Second, you have essentially described me twice, in different parts of my life. So when I was 15 and went to math camp, I decided to become a math professor. For twenty pleasant years I was one of those people with a plan. Actually, my life wasn’t consistently pleasant during those years, but having a plan was a consistently pleasant part of my life.

But ever since I quit my math professor job at Barnard College in 2007, I’ve been adrift in a world without a plan. I essentially don’t know what the future will bring, nor do I want to know.

Back to your question: are long-term planners deceiving themselves? Yes and no.

Yes because, by dint of it being such a very long time before your plan is fulfilled, you will be a very different person by that time, and who knows if you will still have the same goals and interests. Chances are you won’t, and you’ll be less naive about the negatives of your plan, and your role models will have disappointed you, etc. Long-term plans are filled with bittersweet consequences.

On the other hand, I do think it can be good to have some plan, especially if you’re a woman. I don’t regret getting my Ph.D. in math for a second, partly because I learned so much (about math but also about myself, as trite as it sounds) and because it’s a pretty flexible achievement – people respect that on your resume. So in fact I tell young math nerd girls all the time to make it a goal of theirs to get their Ph.D. and then decide what’s next. I suggest that people have a long-term plan but keep in mind they can always change it.

Having a plan helped me make decisions, so in that sense it acted as a crutch (“Should I do this? Do math professors do this?”). Not having a plan has been harder but I luckily waited until I was old enough to deal with the uncertainty. It’s not unlike the feeling I described in this post about learning to not understand tensor products.

One thing that has surprised me about not having a plan is that you might expect I’d have less interest in learning new things, since learning can be seen as investing in a new long-term plan. But actually, if anything I’ve learned more, more quickly, since giving up plans, because I’ve been following my instincts and curiosity rather than my idea of the what would be appropriate for the person I expect to become. So that’s an advertisement for not having a plan, at least for me.

I hope this rambling answer has helped, RANDOMLY!

Aunt Pythia

——

Aunt P,

What’s the difference between a hipster and a nerd? Aren’t they both purported minorities with fringe obsessional interests? One of them is sexy while the other is only ironically sexy. But which is it?

Nerdster

Dear Nerdster,

I have never compared the two groups until now, but I’d argue that hipsters are generally hyper aware of what’s “normal” and act in constant reference to that, whereas nerds are oblivious to what’s normal, or at least ignore it because they’ve got more interesting things to think about. That’s a big difference.

Personally I find almost everything sexy, but if I had to decide between nerds and hipsters, I’d go with nerds. Here’s why: if you think about it, nerds in groups commonly invent their own universes (think “Star Trek”), which light the way to aspirational societies, which are very sexy. Even the singularity stuff is exciting in that kind of nerd nirvana way.

Whereas if you take the hipster to the asymptotic limit of his philosophical mindset, you get artisanal pencil sharpening.

I am completely willing to believe my vision is biased because I’m a nerd, by the way. Hipsters, please speak up for your peeps and correct me if I’m wrong about your sexiness.

Best,

AP

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’m a queer gal and last year for about 5 months, I worked with an amazing woman and we got really close. We connected so well, unlike anyone I’ve met before. She’s married (to a guy) with kids, and I have a gf of 8 years, so nothing happened between us, but the possibility was there.

I’m in a new location (unrelated circumstances), and tried reconnecting with her via email but she never responded, so obviously I get the message. Trouble is, I can’t get her out of my head a year later. And the kicker is I’m doing a presentation at the old location in a few months. I want to see her and maybe I’ll get over this serious crush. Also, there are others I want to reconnect with, so I want to send out an email letting them know I’ll be back for a day. Questions: 1. Is including her in the email stupid? 2. How do I stop thinking about her?

Gal Apparently Yearning

Dear GAY,

First, thanks for the great fake name, it brings tears to my eyes that you guys are on top of this shit.

Next, let’s do this in cases. Best case scenario she’s in love with you but can’t handle it because she’s got kids and doesn’t want to fuck up her family. In that case your plan has to be super sexy but also protective of her life, so in other words send her a brief email that you’ll be back and, if she dares to see you, spend the whole time holding her hand, looking into her eyes, and talking about how beautiful she is and how you know she can’t jeopardize her family but you love her anyway. That makes a great story and it’s true.

Worst case scenario she doesn’t acknowledge even to herself that she’s in love with you. In that case same plan since you’ll never know which it is unless you try.

Good luck!! Tell me what happens!

Aunt Pythia

——

Please please please submit questions, thanks!

Aunt Pythia is excited by all the snow outside and has at least a couple of appointments with a sled this morning, but before she runs off she’d like to spread her words of wisdom to her good readers.

If you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia, and most importantly, please submit your question at the bottom of this column!!

And… thank you for making your questions funny and/or outrageous. Extra points if your fake name is also funny before or after I shorten it into initials. For example, you could sign your letter “From A Rotten Town”. And when I say “funny” I could mean “puerile”.

From last time:

——

Aunt Pythia,

How do you explain your work (and its importance/relevance to the world) to laypeople? I’m interested in your answers to this question for math, for finance, and for data science.

Pre-Expositor

Dear Pre-Expositor,

First, reader Mr. Exposition had this to suggest:

When non-mathematicians ask, I usually start off by describing something simple in my general area of math that has a cool real-life application. If and only if they then ask me about what I do in particular, I start breaking out the analogies and trying to give them an idea. (This gives the other person an escape valve if they wanted to be polite but don’t want to have an intense conversation.)

I’ll add a few words too. I think it helps to know a bit about the person you’re talking to. Are they wondering what math could be useful for at all? Or are they physicists? The answer is going to depend a lot on who your audience is.

Sometimes it turns out they want to be convinced that math can be interesting to someone in its own right, and why, but sometimes they might just want to knowhow the lifestyle of a mathematician is different from that of a high school teacher. I am happy to have those conversations and leave it at that. I especially love the “why is math important one” because people who ask it often answer it without my help.

If they really want to get into the details of what you think about on a daily basis, which is pretty rare, then as a data scientist I compare my approaches to something they are aware of, for example a Netflix-like recommendation system, or a Google search-like algorithm, or a finance-style trading algorithm.

If they want to talk about what I did as an academic mathematician, I talk about elementary diophantine equations and how they get increasingly difficult as you increase the degree, and if they’re still with me I talk about seeing solutions through the eyes of individual primes, and if they are still with me I talk about the local-global principle.

I don’t try to sell academic research math as important per se, just as fascinating and beautiful.

I hope that helps,

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

You seem like a very un-neurotic person. What’s your secret? Do you have personal demons? What’s your go-to strategy for when they rear their ugly heads?

Wanna-be neuroses-free

Dear Wbnf,

I do of course have personal demons, as everybody does. I often find myself waking up at 3am thinking about things I’m behind on or things I wish had gone better. I have two pieces of advice for this kind of thing.

First, use suppression. I think suppression has a bad name. People think of it as a bad thing. They say stuff like, “oh you’re just suppressed” like that’s a crime.

But I say, use suppression to your advantage! If you can’t fix something that’s bothering you, agree to ignore it (which is an agreement you make with yourself, so nobody can even complain about it). And I don’t mean ignore it forever, either. Just make a plan to start thinking about it if and when you might have control over it. OWN your suppression and it will give back to you.

So for example, if you are stressing about your kid getting into a good kindergarten in New York City, then do what you can in terms of looking up schools and applying to them, and then after that, start up the suppression motors til you hear back. There’s absolutely nothing you can do in the meantime except fret, and you have better things to do with your time. Suppression is your friend!

Second, be pro-active. I know that’s a trite, overused phrase, but there may not be another word that means what I want to say – namely, do your best, to the best of your knowledge, on whatever it is, and forgive yourself in advance if that wasn’t enough. Of couse sometimes it wasn’t, and you have to live with the consequences, and sometimes you take notes on what would have been better. That’s ok, because the third thing is you gotta forgive yourself. It’s so obvious I won’t even make it a separate thing.

In my experience, being pro-active about something in advance, followed by 100% suppression mode, works a lot better than constantly putting something off and feeling guilty about it.

By the way, one more thing. I also let things slide. If I can’t get myself into enough of a froth to be pro-active about something, then I just let it go and I don’t look back (I do this via suppression, see above). It’s important to know when to do that too.

I hope that helps!

Cathy

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’ve decided to leave academia and become a research scientist in the tech world. In addition to my area of math, I know a bit of programming and machine learning. What else can I learn in the next few months to better prepare myself?

Rambling On

Dear Rambling,

Great question, but I’m not sure how many “research scientist” positions there are in the tech world. Most of them don’t want you to research, they want you to model! So I’m going to assume you meant something like “data scientist” if that’s ok.

First, learn python, for reals. Next, learn statistics, enough so you can explain to anyone what statistical significance is and mean it. Then, read the book I’m writing with Rachel Schutt, Doing Data Science. Oh wait, it’s not out yet. So for now, read the notes I took on Rachel’s Columbia Data Science class last semester.

And to test your new knowledge, implement the recommendation system using python. And send me the code! We’d love to have it for the book, thanks.

Good luck,

Auntie P

——

Now it’s time for you guys to help me answer a question. I’ve got a juicy one for you:

Dear Aunt Pythia,

As a graduate student, I enjoy attending departmental teas, if only because it’s an excuse to get away from the books for a few minutes. However, my department recently started having some of our teas sponsored by a trading firm. As somebody who has concerns about the finance industry, I am bothered by this. I thought about dumping all the tea in one of the fountains on campus, but I’d like to find a more constructive approach. Any suggestions?

Tea Party Patriot

——

Please please please submit questions, thanks!

I’m excited to be spending the day at the BiCoastal Datafest looking into money and politics. But before I go, I need to answer some questions as my alter ego Aunt Pythia.

If you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia, and most importantly, please submit your question at the bottom of this column.

——

First, let’s review last week’s advice you helped out with:

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I need a pie crust recipe and a personal lubricant recommendation. Please try to incorporate lard into both answers.

Apple Pie Seductress

Apple Pie Seductress,

Wobblebug gave you an amazing and involved pie crust recipe here. Please send me feedback on the smear-and-fold-and-roll-out method.

As for the personal lubricant, I spotted that immediately as a trick question, since you do all the pie crust stuff with your bare hands.

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

Are all people supposed to feel down when they are thirty? If so, is this something we learn or a defect we are born with?

Hurts all over

Dear Hurts,

I’m not sure about everybody else, but 30 was a really tough time for me. I had 2 small kids, a post-doc at MIT where nobody else did number theory and I always felt crappy, and I had no idea how long that feeling would last. I was on the job market for the 4th year in a row wishing someone would eventually want me to be part of their department and wondering why I decided to be a mathematician.

I am a lot better now, and looking back I can understand why I felt so completely stressed out and lost. A large part of it is that I’ve shifted the expectations and now, instead of wondering when someone will want me, I wonder if I’ll want them. It’s not like that makes it all better but somehow it’s comforting.

Plus, ever since I turned 40, I have realized that everyone’s entitled to my opinion. Thus the blog and this column. But somehow the confidence I feel now in the way I look at life was something I just didn’t have when I was 30.

I’m not sure what my advice is, exactly, except to say hang in there and you might become as obnoxious and opinionated as me.

Oh, and in the meantime you might benefit from a pep talk (hat tip Becky):

I hope that helps!

Aunt Pythia

——

Aunt Pythia,

I have been successfully self-employed for a several years but I want to move into a more formal job. I have a decent presence online and would like to let readers, peers, Twitter followers etc. know that I’m looking, but without alienating current customers and clients. Should I just try through private channels first, and save a public notice for last in case nothing turns up?

Maple Leaf

Dear Maple Leaf,

Have you considered asking for a lead “for a friend” who has qualifications that are uncannily similar to yours? And then when it comes down to the private conversation you can say, “Actually, ‘Fred’ is me. I’m looking for a job.”

Auntie

——

Aunt Pythia,

I have a skeleton in my closet… actually it’s more like a still warm corpse. I hate to advertise it (why should I tell people something bad about myself) but I also want to avoid disingenuousness in the event that they find out later. What would you do?

Between a rock and a hard place

Dear Between,

I suggest you remember back to what your reasoning was that made you decide to do whatever it was or be involved with whatever it was, and be prepared to explain it openly and efficiently. Depending on what it is (“I killed children for their livers”, “I used to work in finance”) you will find people understand past mistakes, especially if they are owned up to, and especially if you can say, “it was a mistake, but I didn’t know better at the time because (insert truth here).”

Good luck!

Aunt Pythia

——

Finally, a question for the readers:

Aunt Pythia,

How do you explain your work (and its importance/relevance to the world) to laypeople? I’m interested in your answers to this question for math, for finance, and for data science.

Pre-Expositor

Please respond to Pre-Expositor below!

——

And please submit questions, thanks!

I’m here in Nebraska at a conference for undergraduate women, already late to the morning session, so we’re going with a speed round of advice this morning. Apologies for the shallowness.

If you don’t know what you’re in for, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia, and most importantly, please submit your question at the bottom of this column.

First, let’s review last week’s advice you helped out with:

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I was one of those kids who when asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?” said “Errrghm …” or maybe just ignored the question. Today I am still that confused toddler. I have changed fields a few times (going through a major makeover right now), never knew what I want to dive into, found too many things too interesting. I worry that half a life from now, I will have done lots and nothing. I crave having a passion, one goal – something to keep trying to get better at. What advice do you have for the likes of me?

Forever Yawning or Wandering Globetrotter

Dear FYoWG,

Look at Savanarola’s excellent advice and also keep in mind Mathematrucker’s maxim, “life is to enjoy”

Aunt Pythia

——

Aunt Pythia.

Can something as vast and as complex as the universe ever be reduced to the scope of human mental capacities, or are there natural limits to what we can know?

UncleC

UncleC,

There are definitely natural limits to what we know, but even more to what we wonder about.

AP

——

Aunt Pythia,

If you could make any robot, what would it do?

Robocop

Robocop: It would be an Alf-like character sitting in the corner and making wise-cracks.

——

Aunt Pythia,

Favorite planet?

Elon

Elon: earth.

——

Aunt Pythia,

I teach statistics and find myself often getting frustrated and angry at my students. They don’t want to do any work, but they all expect A’s anyway. They seem to think that blessing me with their presence (although certainly not their attention) is enough. I lay it all out for them at the start of the semester, yet still have a line of whiners out the door 3 months later when their grades reflect their ACTUAL level of effort and understanding. How should I handle this frustration? Am I just not cut out for teaching?

Universities would be great without all the students

Dear Universities,

Two suggestions. First, be very precise on the first day about your grading policy and expectations for the class, and tell them it’s fixed. This avoids future people whining about turning stuff in late (of course you might have a policy about turning stuff in late but in that case hold firm to it).

Second, keep in mind that as young people and as Facebook users, these kids are used to having different personas in different places in their lives, and use that fact to manipulate influence them in your class. Which is to say, talk about how awesome they are and how hard they work, and how you know they know they can’t learn this stuff without working hard, and you know they’re up to the task.

A good strong dose of early positive encouragement prevents a lot of later negative reinforcement in my experience.

Of course, there will always be students who just don’t do the work for one reason or another (if it’s because of a serious problem, and if they have a doctor’s note, please be kind). In that case refer to the very clearly spelt out rules and don’t give it a further thought.

It’s also possible you aren’t cut out for teaching. If you have a visceral reaction against being encouraging to students then that’s a sign. If so, please do everyone a favor and get out.

Aunt Pythia

——

For you guys, have fun with it!

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I need a pie crust recipe and a personal lubricant recommendation. Please try to incorporate lard into both answers.

Apple Pie Seductress

——

And please submit questions, thanks!