Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with boring

Which statistical test for these two variables?

unSane — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 12:05:22 -0800

How to calculate the probability of a result not being due to chance? Not homework! I'm trying to work out how I should calculate the probability of something not being due to chance.

I'm calculating the return over various periods of various stock market 'buy' signals. For instance, 'buy when condition A is true, and sell after 50 days".

I have a control signal, which is 'buy every day and sell after 50 days'.

So, over 200 days I will have 200 buys from the control signal and can calculate a mean and SD deviation for the expected return of buy-and-hold.

Over the same period let's say I have 50 buys from the entry signal I am testing. I can also calculate a mean and SD for these.

Let's say the entry I am testing has a mean return which is better than buy-and-hold. What is the test I should use to determine the probability of this result being due to chance?

Brevity is the soul of wit, which is funny, because it reminds me of this short joke I heard a few months ago...

contessa — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 08:17:24 -0800

How can I be less long-winded? I have a tendency to go on and on, especially with written things (like emails, reports, Mefi comments...) but also in spoken communication too. If I realize what I'm doing while I am doing it, I start to self-edit and get to the point. That switch in my brain doesn't always fire. Part of it, I suppose, is that I don't want to leave anything important out. Getting there can sometimes be like telling an epic saga, I swear.

I don't want to be the boring/rude person who doesn't know when to shut up. Do you have any tricks or tips to keeping it brief?

I wonder if I can buy a gag in the company colours...

Solomon — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:56:05 -0800

Please help me find the most tactful way to deal with a coworker who never shuts up. Long ranty details follow. I'll preface this by saying that usually, in this situation, I'd simply say something to the colleague in question, but that's already been tried.

Short version: A has some problems. She seems to think that the rest of us at my place of work (about 5 of us are regular staff, with some Saturday people as well) want to hear all about them. We don't. We really really don't. What can we say/do to make her shut up and stop treating us all like her therapist?

MUCH longer explanation: She comes from a strongly religious household, has a very controlling mother, has very few social skills (despite working in retail for the past 10 years) and has recently moved in with a boy. Her mother has quite predictably gone mad about this, especially since A has now formed a sexual* relationship with this guy.

*(They haven't actually had sex yet. She's hung some handcuffs on his bedroom door, but the most they've done is hold hands. Oh, and he kisses her on the cheek as he goes out to work.)

I've learned now not to say "alright?" when I see her at the start of my shift, because she will launch into a ten minute (as in actual ten minutes, not "feels like" ten minutes) harangue about the text messages her mother sent her last night, how many marshmallows her new beau put on her hot chocolate before bed last night and how stressed out she is about her brother's wedding.
I've learned not to make eye contact with her when it can possibly be avoided. I've learned not to ask her for help with customers, because she'll jabber on for a while about some random nonsense instead of helping either myself or the customer.
I've learned not to say "alright?" because I am not interested. At all. In the slightest. I was serving a customer at the till once, when she came to chat. When I moved onto the next customer, A moved around to the other side of the till and spoke to the back of the monitor for 15 minutes. At no point during this fifteen minute period did I acknowledge her in any way. She still kept talking.

What can I do to get her to stop talking to me? And by extension, what can all of us do to stop her talking to us about it?

I've tried offering advice. I've tried steering the conversation in a different direction. I've tried walking away but she follows me. I've spoken to our mutual supervisor about it, who spoke to A about the situation. A went missing for an hour and was found crying in the toilets. I'm running out of options here.

Lest anyone think I'm being callous, I am sympathetic. She's 26, having her first relationship ever with a guy she moved in with 2 months previously, and her mother does seem a little bonkers. I get that there is a lot of stuff going on in her life, and that she might feel overwhelmed about it. However, I am not close to this girl. I go to work to do a job and get paid. Greasing the wheel with a little social interaction is fine. Being turned into an emotional bucket for this girl's problems is not.

What can I do/say to this girl that wont cause a scene but will get her to shut the F up about her issues? Please give me some advice, because the Christmas meal is in a couple of weeks, and nobody wants to go, because A has put her name down on the list. This is a shame, because the rest of us get on quite well. It's just A.

I don't care what is wrong with her (if anything). I am not her friend, nor her gorram babysitter either. I also don't care about her problems. I just want her to go away so I can do my job in peace and quiet.

(Think this is too much info about something that you're not really interested in? Welcome to my world, 5 days a week. Pleas help me make it stop.)

I'm so bored - how do I make my meetings fun?

emjay — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:59:00 -0800

How to make my meeting NOT boring! The (newly promoted) big boss man wants us to come up with ideas to make our weekly(sometimes bimonthly) meetings more fun and productive.

We currently start our meetings with a brief chat and we have a coordinator review projects 1 by 1 with people chiming in on their parts as they come up. What ways have you successfully used to jazz up your meetings and make them a little more enjoyable, while still covering the topics required.

I'm open to any suggestions as long as they wouldn't be entirely alien to a corporate/government culture.

I've already browsed this and this.

FYI - the boss does have a sense of humor, we're all a good group but we all get a little tense in those presentations. They used to be every week and it seemed too redundant so we switched to every 2 weeks.

Boring Books

daboo — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:22:15 -0800

I'm trying to find incredibly boring books. The kind of books that you'll try to read, and can't help but space out. Bonus points if its in the public domain. Also, if you have any experience with LibriVox, and know of any particularly boring books or boring recordings, that would be greatly appreciated as well.

I have no life...during the day.

sixcolors — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:24:32 -0800

I get bored and lonely on weekdays. What can I do? There seems to be a lot of "what can I do?" and "how do I meet people?" here on metafilter and other forums. I notice that a lot of answers tend to be night or weekend oriented, such as taking a class, going to a pub trivia night, playing team sports, or doing community service.

I have a part-time job, do community service, and have a pretty active social life. However, those activities tend to take place at night and/or the weekends. When I was in school (just finished), I only had class at night or the weekends. So, on my weekdays, I just surf the net. Every now and then, I watch TV, or go to Borders/library. Most of my friends and relatives have day jobs or day classes.

I get bored and VERY lonely. I even get depressed on occasion. Summertime is coming up and I don't want to go through another dull summer.

Save me from working over the weekend!

BobbyDigital — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:14:16 -0800

BoringFilter: I have to send out a large group of emails (around 175), and I would love to use mail merge to do it, but there is an annoying twist... ...each of the recipients needs to get a message with an individual file attached. The files (.pdf's if it mattes which it should) are all clearly labeled and in a directory, and I have an excel list of recipients ready to go.

My question is whether I can automate this task to some degree rather then just individually sending this message out many many times.

Also, all programs are of the microsoft office 2007 variety, and I am using Vista Pro.

I need to understand

bobber — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:06:31 -0800

How does one read pages (dozens, maybe even hundreds of pages) of boring 17th century sermons or other boring material? I could skim the texts but I have to have an in-depth understanding of the literature. I could be tested on any facet of the reading. This reading is for an early American literature correspondence course. I have great reading comprehension but this stuff bores me to death. It is getting in the way of me finishing my course. I have tried taking notes while reading but then I just get distracted. What are some tips for getting the most out of really boring material and maybe actually enjoying it? Also, I'm taking this course during a semester off from college so these tips will help me, and hopefully others, as I advance through my higher education.

I hate cooking. I need to love it.

WCityMike — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 21:58:02 -0800

I hate cooking. I hate cooking. I really, really, really hate cooking. I need to learn how to love it. I mean, I even get annoyed when I have to slap something frozen on a cookie sheet, and I even very often don't make toast, for God's sake, despite liking it. (No problem with shoving a frozen meal in the microwave, however.)

All that having been said, this massive aversion is a real problem that I want to complete turn around 180 degrees — both for the cachet of it (so few guys cook) and for the simple health of it (eating self-cooked food is going to be much healthier than a near-perpetual diet of delivery, frozen meals, junk food, and fast food.

As best as I can figure this out in my head, I'm essentially asking for two categories of responses here: practical and behavioral.

On one hand, I'm looking for practical tips (both any procedural tips or "kitchen hints" you might have, as well as very-quick-prep healthy recipes) as to how to make cooking (i) extremely low-impact, timewise; (ii) fast and efficient; and (iii) actually fun and not incredibly boring — keeping in mind the level of aversion described above.

On the other hand, I'm looking for behavioral tips. (I wouldn't be surprised if this angle of the question has been asked before in other Ask Mefis with other things people detest but have to do — but I wasn't sure how to frame the search in order to dig them up.) If you hate to do something, but it's necessary that you not only overcome the hate but transmute it to enthusiasm, what steps do you take?

I find cooking an extremely annoying obstacle to doing other things that I want to do, and I find that I'm incredibly bored while I do it and that something deep within me just frames the whole thing as a immensely boring, massive waste of time. How do I change that gut emotional response? I need to start to actually like this stuff.

Thanks, guys.

How do I cope with time-wasting meetings?

occhiblu — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 07:52:11 -0800

How do I get through time-wasting meetings without dissolving into a homicidal puddle of resentment? Cognitive, behavioral, and affective suggestions welcome. I am in grad school full-time, in a program that meets two afternoons/evenings a week. I am also working part-time 20 hours a week in order to afford to live. I am also in a required internship for 10 hours a week. I have no car, and these places are all spread out all over the city, so I'm also spending a great deal of my time on buses and subways.

My internship has required trainings, one two-hour session every week and one four-hour Saturday training once a month. These trainings are beyond pointless; the presenters/facilitators are disorganized, rambling, and repetitive, and they all seem completely unable to answer direct questions. One of my classes is similarly disorganized (one of my classmates said, "We spend at least a half hour every week going over which of the instructions were incorrect the previous week"; I get most of the assignments via email because the professor can't seem to get it together to explain them well enough during class).

These trainings and classes are driving me insane. I walk out of there seething and exhausted from trying not to roll my eyes for two hours straight. They tend to ruin at least the next several hours of my day, as I struggle to stop being so pissed off at the waste of my time. I feel like I have so little time to devote to anything right now, and having to give up five to ten hours a week to these activities is leaving me really angry.

I'm looking for suggestions of things to do during the meetings to make use of the time (but the meetings & classes are small and reasonably interactive, so I can't just read a book), cognitive framework shifts that will knock me out of this "I don't deseeeeeerve this, wah me" thing I've got going, or any other thoughts of how to cope with some of this in a more productive, healthy way.

Fishin' in the P-Land Metro Area

iced_borsch — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 16:05:00 -0800

Portlanders - where is your favorite place to fish? Specifically, I am interested in areas east of 122nd Avenue, and especially the surrounding towns and villages of outer southeast Portland e.g. Gresham, Sandy, Boring, Damascus, etc.

Boring Webcams

Lebowski — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 11:10:26 -0800

A friend is looking for a list of boring webcams.

How do you get through mind-numbing tasks?

WCityMike — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 05:27:14 -0800

I'm dealing with some boring things to do at work. I'm wondering what things you do (mentally, emotionally, procedural 'tricks', self-benefits/rewards, discipline, etc.) to get yourself through stuff you find excruciatingly boring, but necessary. One of the reasons I enjoy doing what I'm currently doing (being a legal secretary) is that my mind is kept challenged and alert throughout most of the day by a variety of tasks.

However, I recently changed positions, and this position includes filing duties. (At my old firm, we had separate file clerks.) This task is very unexciting to me -- it involves filing paper away, creating necessary subfiles, etc.

I'm wondering how other people get through tasks they very much dislike ... what things you set yourself up with, what reward/punishment system, what things you tell yourself, and so on.

(I should note that this fortunately is not a huge part of my job, probably more a weekly-type duty -- except for right off the bat, where there will be a very large portion of "make-up" filing that my predecessor didn't accomplish.)

I ate a cheese sandwich

Nikolai — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 14:36:13 -0800

Where was the quintessential boring weblog post example of "I ate a cheese sandwich" first mentioned?