♥ In Hopes of a Life Less Ordinary ♥

Well, I’ve been working on a statistics paper since 10am this morning. I decided to do it on  the regression between macrocystis pyrifera, red and purple urchins, black  rockfish, and blue rockfish on the california coast.

- Lesson #1: Don’t choose so many damn variables. As thorough as it may be, a stats class doesn’t know sh#t about how many variables there actually are in this ecosystem. 

So it’s been difficult trying to find data that corresponds to the same years. I finally narrowed down my range from 1987-2011 to 1991-2009. I originally chose 1987 cause it was the year they enacted the “No Otter Zone” (ridiculous, I know). Oh well. I couldn’t find as much data on just Purple Urchins, so I gave in to Red and Purple Urchins landing data. I FINALLY found all of my data by 5:15pm. SEVEN HOURS of searching the internet for this data. 

Now that I found my data, I began working on data analysis on SOCR, a program that my professor designed and insists we use. For 3 hours i have been trying to figure out why my data isn’t doing anything - and I mean ANYTHING AT ALL. Finally, my friend goes, “maybe the commas in the data is what’s making it not work”. After trying everything to get this to work, I was willing to do a headstand if someone told me that’d fix it. So I fix my data and press calculate….WELL WHAT DO YOU KNOW! Commas cause a stupid program to go insane and do nothing! 3 hours wasted because of COMMAS. 

- Lesson #2: Make the data as simple as possible….your professor apparently doesn’t know how to write a program that allows for commas in the data. 

- Lesson #3: I hate stats…so. much. 

Such a simple answer to a complicated problem. Hopefully I can finish writing this tonight. -.- Still have a genetics and human evolution final to do this week! Wish me luck! :)