Hi, woefully un-educated statistic enthusiast here. I have been thinking about the function you describe, i.e. "x chance of an event happening on a given day, what is the probability of it occurring in y days." Can you tell me what this function is called and how to calculate? Thanks!

Nothing beats pen and paper, except pen and paper then recopy.

Take your notes in class with pen and paper, then, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE AFTER CLASS, sit down with your notes and recopy them, using reference material if necessary. This reinforces the info, and helps to clarify the notes. I did this in college and medical school, and found that doing this alone took care of 80% or so of my my studying. Something about hearing it in class, then immediately recopying it really made it stick in my brain, plus my notes were much better when I did go back to review them.

High school didn't really prepare me to study for college, so my first semester was rocky until I discovered this method and other tricks for studying. After I adopted this method, I got A's in all of the rest of my college (ChemEng) classes and had a 3.8 GPA in med school.

Sorry, this just isn't true in practice. The Geo's, Suzuki's, VW's and Audi's which used odd-numbers of cylinders did so only for packaging considerations, not because the engineering (smoothness, etc.) made sense. They represented a cylinder added onto or removed from a 4 cylinder engine to meet displacement needs while still fitting in the car.

The smoothest piston automotive engines are in-line 6 cylinder engines or V-12 engines, which provide a power pulse with every 30 degrees of crankshaft rotation.

Anything else (3-, 4-, 5- cylinder in-line, V6, V8) has more widely-spaced power pulses and is less smooth. Most of these engines use a rotating counterweight (either an off-balanced flywheel or a separate rotating countershaft) in order to dampen these power pulses and increase smoothness. This works imperfectly and comes at the price of increased weight, rotating mass, and/or complexity.

Yet another approach which should be very smooth is the boxter design, which is used by Subaru and Porsche: cylinders are horizontally opposed at 180 degrees; this works quite well for Porsche, somewhat less well for Subaru.

Of course the smoothest automotive engine is the Wankel rotary currently used by Mazda - the "pistons" (rotors) rotate rather than reciprocate, and each power pulse lasts for 270 degrees.