The second time that I followed you

Gah, I don't want to read about KITT today, I want to do the exercises from Mathematics in Civilization by H. L. Resnikoff and R. O. Wells. I've had this book lying on my shelf untouched for over four years, and last night I happened to pick it up and read a short section about real numbers, and suddenly I'm burning to spend more time with it.

Slipping slowly from my reach

The first thought to enter my mind on waking this morning was the thought of all the things I should have mentioned in the midterm, but didn't. It was as if my subconscious had been plotting all night to ambush me.

Between now and the start of exams (on 27 October) I have only three assessments remaining. The year crashes sickeningly to a close, and surprisingly enough, I feel again the way I felt in the dying weeks of my math major. I'm digging in my heels to try to slow time down. Not that I've gone crazy with enjoyment for my study this year, but studying at Vic is all I know, and soon it will be gone forever.

However, I can say with complete innocence of cliche that the thing I will miss most about Vic is my classmates. As there's a fair chance I'll be able to stay in touch with some of them, that means leaving is not as scary as it could be.

Take the plan, spin it sideways

The Micro assignment came back today.

I've been doing all my assignments (and most of my essays) in LaTeX since MATH 301, which comes to just over two years of TeXing. Today, for the first time, a marker offered TeX suggestions in their comments on my assignment. This is a happy day.

It's not every day, too, that an assignment comes back with a comment that begins "okay, it has been a bit of a struggle for me to understand your argument"... and still gets 90%.

We have a different lecturer for the last six weeks of Micro. We're back with Dr A Micro, the same guy who lectured the first six weeks in the first half. He's probably one of my favourite economics lecturers (and I swear it's not just his accent!), so this half should be good, Micro-wise.

Right at this moment, though, I'm deeply embroiled in a Metrics problem set. It's nominally due today and I'm really trying to get it in before... say, midnight.

Never thought I'd do you the same

My referee report grade is not what you'd call outstanding. I got a B+. Dr Macro's comments suggest that I may have spent too many of my 1000 words summarising the contributions of the paper, and not enough suggesting areas for improvement.

If I do okay in the Macro exam I might still get an A in the course. It's happened before.

My Modelling assignments both got A's. This is fine with me.

Me and the dragon

Yesterday I accidentally tried to invert a 200×200 matrix in GAUSS.

Today was the penultimate Macro lecture given by the dynamic adjunct. He'll be back in four weeks to take the last lecture of the course, but until then we've got Prof A. I don't think it's any skin off Prof A's nose if I confess to being slightly sad at the loss of the dynamic adjunct; as a lecturer, he's a hard act to match.

Since the start of the trimester (70 days) I've handed in seven assignments, an essay, and a test. I've got back three of the assignments and the test; the rest have disappeared into a black hole. On average, the items that have returned took 7 days to surface. On average, the ones that haven't returned are now 18 days old. (One of them is 42 days old.)

Seems to last for ages

Microeconomics is easy. Fill in the blanks.

• This problem is analogous to the consumer's ..... problem.
• The objective function is ..... and the constraint is .....
• The Lagrangean is .....
• The FOCs are .....
• Therefore, from the first two FOCs .....
• Substituting this into the third FOC, .....
• So the solution is .....

I spent several hours on this last night. When I reached the stage where the assignment was sufficiently complete that I could afford to sleep, I was suffused by a great sense of relaxation and wellbeing, and realised that it's a long time since I got so intensely tied up in a technical problem. Small wonder I was losing the fricking will to live.

No matter how much effort I make, nothing else is as enjoyable as math, and I'm beginning to think that that will never change for me.

I write my sentence

The referee report is done and crawling over my struggling connection to the lecturer as I write this. It's precisely 1000 words. I feel as if I didn't say many of the thoughts I've had, and certainly didn't cite many of the papers I've looked at (of the 38 papers in my "references" folder, I cited 18). Instead I identified the most important stuff and wrote about that first, and then I hit my word limit so I stopped.

At the last minute, I removed the word "robustify".

All but two of these are essay-related:

To ask the sea for answers

Should I get a Visa Debit Card with ASB (to maintain account separation) or Kiwibank (for instant money transfers)?¹

Should I buy a Cogito Ergo Nom t-shirt from QC, or a Pancakes t-shirt from goats?

Should I do the optional third Metrics assignment on the chance that I'll get a higher mark than in the second, or should I accept the first two assignments as my grade for the first half, and spend the next week doing the Macro referee report instead?

¹I'm really really sick of waiting two days for money to transfer so I can make a transaction on my Westpac debit card. Westpac used to clear electronic transactions in one day, but over summer that increased to two days. My theory: they're compensating for the fall in overnight cash rates by leaving their cash on the overnight market for twice as long.

Grace the evening tide

The Macro assignment is pretty much finished. I'll print it before I leave campus tonight. I intend to be home for dinner :)

Observation: If someone says something is "hard to explain in an email" because it has too many symbols, either they're a highly non-mathematical thinker, or they're assuming that you are. Yeah, actually, I do want you to write pseudo-TeX in your email to me. Is that a problem?

All this could backfire

It's Friday. *groan*

Yesterday Micro was good, but I didn't get any Macro reading done. The first Micro assignment is out, due in two weeks. We've covered just about enough in class to do the whole thing right now, and I want to start it. In fact, I'd start it this weekend, but I've got to do my Macro reading.

The first Metrics assignment will be out on Monday. It will require us to have GAUSS installed, so the lecturer made the software available to us (presumably under an academic license). Guess what? She only has the Windows version. Casual reading of the internet suggests that she should also have access to the Mac version under her license, but of course I don't really know that. She says, no, she can't give me the Mac version. I'll have to use the School computers.

I don't like the School computers. They have Windows. It might be contagious.

Reminds me of the second time

From the ACT Party website:

ACT stands for individual freedom and choice, personal responsibility and the protection of the life, liberty and property of each and every citizen.

No. No, it doesn't. IFACPRATPOTLLAPOEAEC stands for that. What ACT stands for, nobody knows. And nobody cares, because they never have been and never will be a real political force in this country.

Especially if they can't spot, on their own website, stuff that just sounds kinda stupid.

Demons will drown

I've been in my awesome summer job for three weeks, and I still haven't got sick. I can only assume that the germ profile in the office very closely matches that of Wellington at large. The job is turning out to be even more awesome than I expected, and I'm full of sadness that I'm already ¹/₄ of the way through my term of employment. I have my own project, acres of data, and lovely workmates. When did real life become so close to fantasy?

Weekends are a problem. I usually fill them with study, and now am at a bit of a loose end. Today I did little but housework all day. I wouldn't mind living in a place with a smaller floor area.

Today I saw Bruce at Burger King in Porirua.

The light divided

The mark for my last ever math course came out the other day. It was an A+, meaning that my math grades over time make an almost perfect swoop down from and back up to the best grade available. For completeness, here they all are.

Code	Title	Trimester	Grade
MATH 114	Algebra & Discrete Mathematics	1+2/2004	A+
MATH 214	Discrete Mathematics 2	1/2005	A-
MATH 113	Calculus 1	1+2/2005	B+
MATH 206	Calculus 2	1/2006	A-
MATH 207	Linear Algebra	2/2006	A
MATH 312	Analysis	1/2007	B-
MATH 301	Calculus 3	2/2007	A
MATH 311	Algebra	1/2008	A+
MATH 314	Coding & Cryptography	2/2008	A+

Tick tock, tick, tick

More progress! Bayes-Nash equilibrium was a trivial extension of the Bayesian Normal Form. I read the textbook chapter on moral hazard. Where is the hard? It all seemed much nastier when Paul did examples in class. The review sheet he's made, a complete overview of contract theory, is extremely helpful. It really does gather into one place all the theory behind the last six weeks of class. It still doesn't define full verifiability, though. I'm resigning myself to going intuitive on that one.

My plans for next year have changed a bit, with the result that my timetable now looks a whole lot friendlier:

Days dawn and skins crawl

Today's lecture was so interesting, I answered one of Paul's questions!

In other news, the Micro test is still not marked; I have worked out what full verifiability is but not how to recognise it (to see my problem, compare the formal definition of differentiability with what you do in your mind to determine differentiability); and I'm truly intrigued by the fact that 15^x = 15 (mod 35) for any integer x.

Instead of stressed I lie here charmed

Today I handed in the assignment as it was when I finished it last Friday. Having changed my mind a number of times about the single proof (which I ended up doing in words because it seemed too obvious to bother with symbols), I eventually settled on a conclusion that meant it was right the first time. I don't really have any idea whether I've done the assignment right or not, which is troubling.

The lecture today was back to being confusing. Jack confessed to being dyslexic, confirming my suspicions founded on his consistent spelling of "always" with two l's. There's a test coming up after the break (tomorrow's the last day for this half), but I'm not sure when it is exactly.

I also finished my International essay 24 hours earlier than expected. Now I fully intend to go to bed and then go to sleep... if I still remember how.

No glue, no bag of tricks

My immune system hates me. I've now been ill almost continuously for the past four weeks (almost the whole trimester to date). So far this week lectures have had to take second place to sleep.

Good thing for the week: I finally got my Micro textbook from the bookshop. Now that I have the resources to do the assignment I feel that I should be devoting all my time to a different assignment. Diminishing marginal utility FTL.

Wrong place, you're on the back page

The Law of University, according to me: Courses consist of exactly three components which have the potential to enhance learning - lectures, tutorials, and textbooks/notes. Any given course in a particular year will have at most two components which actually fulfill this potential.

In courses where lectures are not one of the useful components, it's okay to skip lectures so long as you spend that time with one of the useful components instead.

ECON 314 is a tutorial-textbook course, and I still don't have my own textbook.

With the aid of the library copy, though, I've now figured out what Jack was going on about for the first three weeks. In terms of the logical order of the textbook chapters, he's been lecturing all over the bleeding place. Attempts to apply my new learnings to the assignment are not yet proving very enlightening, but it's hard to tell whether that's because I'm doing it wrong or because of the fundamental silliness of representing a sequential game in the normal form.

Don't forget to breathe

Today's lecture gave us Bayes Theorem proper and then exemplified a calculation of the value of information (by demonstrating the change in expected monetary value that may arise from purchasing additional information). I like this guy's lecture style. He lectures like a mathematician ;)

My International Econ textbook only weighs 1.25 kg. I wonder if Micro will also be light enough to carry around. It makes it a lot easier to get stuff done if you can have one textbook with you at all times.

Yesterday I performed my once-yearly act of support for the Wellington 0.5mm-nib-pen market by buying up the whole supply at Paper Plus Lambton Square. Next time I go back there they will not carry my pens any more, having doubled their stock following this big purchase only to find that no one else wants to buy them, and so I'll have to go looking for a new supplier. This happens almost every year.

Must be through some lack of kindness

This morning I skipped the tutorial. I hadn't meant to - I had every good intention of grabbing a quick breakfast downtown then heading up the hill early. But by the time I was settled with my bagel and coffee and essay reading, it just seemed pointless to go up and waste an hour of my life in a cold room listening to the fat man being stupid. Even allowing for the chance that something might be said that may be pertinent to my essay, I still calculated a much better profit from staying where I was and finishing the article I was reading, so I did.

In the lecture we had Garth McVicar from the Sensible Sentencing Trust. He was the first guest speaker we've had from a movement whose aims the majority of us oppose. Being students and believing above all in tolerance, followed by good grades, we heard him patiently and then asked him a number of intelligent questions. He was very good - polished and practised as a speaker, ready to take on any type of audience, with all his information at his fingertips and all his answers expressed in the vocabulary of his own social movement, meaning his audience is forced to engage with him on his own terms. Never once in our half-hour of questioning did he answer a question that he didn't want to answer. Brilliant. Seeing him under the (very gentle and understanding) fire of the class was a lesson in the art of political performance.

Essay-wise, I veer uncontrollably between optimism and despair about the quantity of reading still to do.