sick, part two

Last night, my fever reached 103. Strangely, my only symptoms have been the fever, chills, thermal discomfort, etc. and fatigue (standing up was difficult), and a little bit of joint swelling (which I infer from a very slight pain): no coughing, no mucus, no stomach issues. And I only sneezed once.

A good friend came by to look after me. Since this has been going on for several hours, we considered going to the emergency room. I was not able to locate information of which hospitals my insurance will pay for. Apparently, if you're admitted into the ER, it's always covered. But this was a fuzzy line.

I also called the 24h doctor on duty, and she took 1 hour and 35 minutes to return my call. The operators kept saying it would be 10 minutes. Also, urgent care clinics in Pittsburgh inaccessible to those who don't have a car. (good luck getting a taxi!)

Call me spoiled, but I'm not used to this level of service. In Brazil, you can just show up at the doctor's office, and if it's late at night, we rely on family and friends who are doctors.

I've also been having strange thoughts during my "sleep": the same words kept cycling over and over again. Napkin... serviette... napkin... serviette.

Today, I have a doctors appointment at 3:30 p.m. I'm not better yet.

Voice Post

paper style

The first section of my paper is not titled "Introduction", because I want the title to be informative. I cannot think of any other papers violating this regularity.

Likewise, the titles of my sections and subsections tend to be long. Seems like a good alternative to having a "table of contents, in paragraph format and without page numbers (yechh)".

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I'm also very fond of footnotes, it seems. There's normally a trade-off between accuracy/completeness vs. conciseness/clarity. Footnotes let me have both (by apologizing for the inaccuracy/incompleteness in the main text).

buying flights early

Knowing that a lot of people will soon be buying tickets from America and Canada to Helsinki on July 3, should I expect to get a better deal if I buy early? Are the airlines aware of conferences like ICML (~500 people)?

Tangentially, Farecast doesn't work outside of America.