Last Exam

Man. Had a great day yesterday. I got up and exercised, and did morning scripture study. Yay.. it's March, and I'm still keeping my New Year's resolution.

I started off the day with my very last exam for this semester. Unfortunately, it was at 9:00 in the morning about an hour away from my house. So I took off, and made it 10 minutes early, enough to cram through definitions of ultrametrics and coorthologs.

I entered the office of Herr Dr. Vingron one minute early, and sat down. He informed me that the other professor would be 10 minutes late, and that we could wait for him. I told him I didn't necessarily need his presence. "Ok.. because some students would want him to be here."

He started off by asking me what my favorite thing I had learned was. Unfortunately, I answered incorrectly, and in my attempt to impress Herr Dr. Vingron with a rather obscure topic that I had found interesting, I forgot the name of the algorithm.. "Oh, you mean Markov Chain Monte Carlo. That's completely different from Hidden Markov Models." Oops.

After my blunder, the other professor walked in, and started taking notes. Then I got really nervous.

I was able to field most of the questions well, except for a definition of consistency in phylogenetic tree creation techniques, in which I thought it was that as more sequences are added the precision increases, but instead, the length of the sequences increases the precision. Shoot.

At the end of the talk, he asked me if I knew how the German grade system worked. "Ones are good, five are bad." At least I got that question right. He said "I think you're about a 2 or a 3. Is that all right with you?" Honestly, I couldn't complain. I had studied about 3 hours for the test, and that was probably more than I had studied for the whole semester, aside from completing the homework every other week.

And then it was over. Herr Dr. Vingron asked how my research was going. I started explaining my recent work, and he stated, "Well, let me know if you come up with any good results." Thanks.

To relieve my stress, I took the Ubahn over the city center on my way home. I also stopped by my favorite shopping stores, and scored two scarves for two euros each. They will be good for next winter.

When I got home, I called up a friend who wanted to go to the Jewish Museum here. We met up, and she confided in me that she was hungry. So we walked in a direction that looked ghetto, looking for a cheap Döner. It's not hard to find ghetto areas, so we were quickly filled with some good döner. The only problem was that the enterprising owner tried to charge 50 cents for entry into the bathrooms... even for washing your hands.

On the way walking through the ghetto, we stumbled upon a place that cleans out the apartments of people who have passed away, and try to sell of the stuff. Of course, this place was especially picked over. But still good. I found a book on reading palms which looked interesting. I took it to the counter, and offered the guy 50 cents. He told me that the sign said that all the books were 1 to 2 euros. I offered 50 cents, plus teaching him about palm reading when I came back next time. He took the offer.

The Jewish museum was ok. I have already been to the museum 2 times, but never gotten all the way through it, so I agreed to go again. Unfortunately, my friend wanted to read every single word in every exhibit, and although I also learned a lot, we still had to rush through the second half before it closed. I think that the museum is really well-done. It does a good job of presenting the successes of the Jewish people in the German history, and showing that the constant persecution came because the Jewish people could read better than the others, were more educated, had tighter community ties, and could lend money.

They also had a cool exhibit on contrasts between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. One short film presented information on specifically Islam headwear. They claimed that the Quran mandates that a shawl is worn around the shoulders, and that some people have interpreted it to mean that it must be worn around the head too. I am betting that the film was made by a German.. probably not a Muslim. And probably not a Christian either.

After the museum, we met up with another friend at the Babylon theater to watch a heavily-advertised screening of Metropolis, a 1927 German silent film. I was disappointed when we had to pay an extra five euros for the live "orchestra." I was even more disappointed when the "orchestra" was welcomed onto the stage, and it was a lone man. A one-man orchestra, if you will.

But it wasn't so bad. For the first half (over an hour) I had to shift right and left to see around the guy in front of me with a nasty fro thing going on that basically blocked the view of anyone behind him. The second half I was able to watch in peace because I traded seats with a friend who had seen it like three times and written a report on it.

The one-man orchestra was actually pretty interesting. He started out on the piano, and then would start playing the flute with one hand, and accompaniment with the other hand. Then, he would play the flute as he walked over to the organ, and then he would play the organ.

And then, to top the evening off, I went over to a friend's house to pick up a travel book on Prague for our trip next weekend.

It was a good day.

And I don't have any more exams.