snow day

It's really snowing. Quite unusual here in the city. It makes me think fondly of snowfall in Ithaca. (No, not the sludgey black-ice gunk on the roads, just the fluffy clean white snow as it's falling.)

I think we only get this kind of snowfall in Seattle about once every other year.

Unfortunately, the UW is still open. So I'm off to my tutorial... could be a fun bus ride!

rusty math wheels turn

I'm taking the snow day to read the material for my over-ambitious EE class. I don't read mathematics very well -- not that I ever did.

I'm rusty and I wonder what fraction of the class understands text like:

Again we see that the k-nearest neighbor classifier directly approximates this solution -- a majority vote in a nearest-neighborhood amounts to exactly this, except that conditional probability at a point is relaxed to conditional probability within the neighborhood of a point, and probabilities are estimated by training-sample proportions.

*sigh* I feel a little out-of-depth.