Biweekly Update From Ira's Intercontinental March on Rejecting The Null Hypothesis #10

Bonjour, For those who don't know now you know, I've been working with my great pal Yonatan on a sickle cell study that he is running at SUNY Downstate's Cardiology Lab. We're at the part of the analysis where we need to prove that something statistically significant happened and that there are non-zero relationships between the different data that was measured; this is called rejecting the null hypothesis which means rejecting the possibility that there is no correlation. The three main null hypotheses that I've rejected in the last two weeks were: <ol> <li>Friday night is not different from Shabbat: I had the privilege of being invited to an Italian rave in a remote part of town by the one and only Simone de Milano, who woke me up around 10pm at the hostel on Friday night to offer me the rest of his dinner and then get me to come out with him. Simone really only speaks Italian so the two of us made quite the pair, but I figured it beat sitting in the hostel reading 1984 by myself (dark book no?). I asked him before we left whether I would need my phone and he assured me that it was tuttu bene. The whole night was a strange mix of dancing with people who have countless tattoos and piercings, talking to Simone's professor friend who has a PhD in chemistry and makes $1500 Euros a month, trying to leave before the doors were reopened at 5am at which time the guy at the front assured me the place was a prison with no way out and I assured him that that was not going to work, and then bumbling my way back with little to guide me home apart from the tram stops that most people were getting off at and the kind taxi drivers who had mercy on me and nudged me in the right direction. It all reminded me that more often than not Friday night is filled with overpriced drinks, people who can barely move from exhaustion after their fat weeks, sexual dissappointment, and emotional dejection which likely would have been better spent just chilling at home resting.</li> <li>Traveling does not open the mind: The 10th update marks 20 weeks on the road and I notice that I'm chock-full of intentions including rejoining a (different) political club (no offence Mom and Dan), starting drumming lessons, growing lotus and hemp, and presumably working for starters. It's a big shift from July when I left on the heels of being knocked down four times in a row at Epic, Criticality, running for mayor, and then Uncommon. It gives me reassurance that if things ever go south I can always travel and a reminder that traveling is different from a vacation that gets squeezed in between Christmas and New Years - it's the freest state there is filled with new peaks, new people, new languages, and new news.</li> <li>Cooking on the road is not inconvenient: The worst part of the intercontinental march is a three-way tie between constantly packing and unpacking, rarely having access to recycling so tons of waste just gets chucked, and how inconvenient it is to cook (with close runner-upper statuses for Food Production at Neot Semadar and the scum-blaster in Cairo). Every now and again I get inspired to use the hostel kitchens to whip something up, but just about every time I do so I end up making too much food, putting it in my bag, and getting madanad everywhere (for those of you who are unfamiliar with what madanad is, you clearly haven't seen <a href = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcp8rN-YqLw" target = "_blank" rel = "noopener">The Bensonhurst Italian Spelling Bee</a> - you're welcome). Sometimes there's a perfect storm of ingredients in the free food basket that I can't, nor shouldn't, resist and it yields the right amount of food, but on the whole I'm eating out most meals in part to avoid carrying or wasting too much food on the move which is regrettable as far as digestive quality control goes.</li> </ol> I'm currently in Geneva crashing with my pal Disco Steph who I met in Crete; pouring one out for our two missing bandmates Rez and Juicy, stand by for some of our jams. Check the third photo in the <a href = "https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1e4mfhvIHbMZ9M0H8-jOi--V5aAF8E9en?usp=drive_link" target = "_blank" rel = "noopener">drive</a> and you'll see that I've greatly optimized the tightness of my luggage and found my Swiss cousins, the Seidenhofs! Or maybe just other descendents of German silksters... My Capital One Quicksilver card is alas in my possession after four trans-Atlantic trips thanks to fraud and Israel Post botch jobs - this marks the end of paying transaction fees on literally everything, a very momentous week indeed. Finally, my return flight is bitter-sweetly booked for Jan 18th 2023, but it'll be time. A bientot, Ira