doctor who & torchwood in 5min; disappointing statistics.

...i miss my ipod so so much. maybe i can talk wax into coming with me to the computer store this afternoon and getting a usb 2.0 card. :/

last night V was over. he agreed to watch anything we liked, so we introduced him to torchwood with the recent episode involving time-travellers from the 1950s. we said we'd pause to explain anything that came up as we went along, and then when i mentioned doctor who it turned out he'd never heard of it, and we tried to summarise the entire thirty-something years of it in about five no doubt very confusing minutes. XD poor guy is a very good sport. wax also insisted, in the lulls in conversation, that i talk about the insane crack aus i've been reading in the professionals, and the first one of those i mentioned was the brigadoon one, which left him going "O.O?", especially when we tried to explain what purple prose was.

i was looking forward to statistics a lot because i loved it in high school, but i've realised now that it's going to be very different. this is a career-oriented class to teach social scientists the principles of statistics and how to use a point-and-click computer program that does the calculations for you, assuming we will need statistics professionally, but only as a certain element of our work. the lectures are theoretical; the only formula we've even seen is for standard deviation. and Professor DetDär is an adorable little white-haired dude, but his lectures are a bit repetitive and slow, which sucks at 8 am because it's really hard to stay awake.

omgwtfDANISH

the guest lecturer on denmark, the faro islands and iceland... is from denmark. OH MY GOD. that lecture was so traumatic. i'm whimpering. it feels like the inside of my brain itches really strongly. i want to stab myself in the head with an icepick.

it's like the equivalent, for a regular american english speaker like me, of listening to someone speaking a really dense scottish dialect... with a marked american tennessee-appalachian accent.

i understood something like seventy to ninety percent of everything, practically down to the smallest unit of meaning - sometimes down to the syllable, which means i also never quite understood anything, but i had to concentrate hard enough to hurt myself and still, occasionally, lose the thread - and then find myself shockingly adrift and with no idea where i was in the speech. the powerpoint handout was in danish too, which meant everybody in the class (native speakers of swedish included) had to concentrate too hard on listening to be able to effectively read along, let alone well enough to take notes.

ow.

(eta: wax says "he wasn't speaking danish, baby. then you wouldn't have understood anything." "what if he was speaking danish slowly and trying his hardest to imitate a finland-swedish accent...?" "then he was speaking scandinavian." okay, he was speaking scandinavian. or something. with way more danish vocabulary than it logically should have.)