Wow
One of the most exciting things about the first party in Berkeley was getting to argue about the Monty Hall problem for half an hour with Daniel Ellsberg, "a great hero of the American people".
I also met a doctor who's working on scientific studies of alternative medicine, and is planning a randomized, controlled, double-blind study of moxibustion for breech babies. There was a previous study which found positive results but didn't use any kind of placebo for the control group. So this new study will include a sham moxibustion treatment to see whether the effect could be due to a placebo effect.
At the second party, I met a woman who managed to complete the inductive proof of the formula for the sum of the first n integers in her head. I've never seen anybody do that before; I kept offering her paper and pen, and she kept on refusing, saying that she could figure it out. So she did.
I also went swimming at that party for the first time in a couple of years. It felt great, but I think I overdid it a little.
"You're a happening geek!"(My sister Rebecca)
