This is not going to end well.

After three hours in the math lab today I quit and went home, just about the time I discovered that even the tutors there couldn't tell me how to do this. I predict a more and more messy wrap up, with four weeks of the outer shell burning away, the conflagration constantly fed by the leaking hydrogen from within. Hopefully by the time I hit the ground most of the observers will have been able to clear the area. I'm trying to make an appointment to find out whether withdrawl is any better than failing at this late date, and if I have other options.
I cannot tell you when I use x, x-bar, mu, p, p-hat, z, z*, t, t* or any of the other variants let alone when I should take the value from a formula or a table or when degrees of freedom are important. And that statement probably made as much sense to you as it does to me, unless you're Jake.
Regardless. If I'd had my cigarettes with me, I would have been smoking. I'll have to settle for alcohol.

And I thought I was nauseous before

Eric Holder and Barack Obama have taken pains to tell the American people that water-boarding is illegal torture. So what? That's just their opinion. President Bush disagrees. The persistent failure to hold anyone accountable at any level for years of state-sanctioned abuse speaks louder than their words. It has taken this issue from a legal question to a matter of personal taste. What we choose to define as torture is now just another policy disagreement, like extending the Bush tax cuts or picking a caterer. This is precisely the kind of sliding-scale ethical guesswork the rule of law should preclude.

Those of us who have been hollering about America's descent into torture for the past nine years didn't do so because we like terrorists or secretly hope for more terror attacks. We did it because if a nation is unable to decry something as always and deeply wrong, it has tacitly accepted it as sometimes and often right. Or, as President Bush now puts it, damn right. It spawns a legal regime that cannot be contained in time or in place; a regime that requires that torture testimony be used at trials and that terror policies be withheld from public scrutiny. It demands the shielding of torture photos and the exoneration of those who destroyed torture tapes just a day after the statute of limitations had run out. Indeed, as Andrew Cohen notes, when the men ordering the destruction of those tapes are celebrated as "heroes," who's to say otherwise?

And yes, I think it's apt that the Man in Black is my icon here.