In his armchair, you can feel his disease

Another good exam in Micro. It wasn't as great as Modelling, but it was perfectly fine. I ran out of time to do all of the low-marks part for which I hadn't prepared so well, but I'm very confident in my work on the high-marks parts.

After the exam we all stood around and sort of looked at each other. It was as if none of us wanted to admit the course is over (for most of the class, this also means the year is over). I guess I'm not alone in loving Micro.

I asked the exam supervisor why they're still having to take away our question papers after the exam. Apparently the official reason is still swine flu. I don't understand. If the question papers get germs on from a coughing class member, won't our pens and things then have germs as well? How does confiscating only the papers prevent the spread of disease? And what happens to the papers now? Unless they're destroyed immediately, they'll still be effective transmission vectors regardless of whether students take them home or not.

Now Metrics, Friday, and that's it!

Pink, brown, yellow, orange, and blue

Back on form. Yeee-ah.

The Modelling exam was great; of the six questions (choice of three), there were five I could have done pretty well. I chose the three questions which related to the two Reserve Bank models we studied. All went well, I wrote lots and didn't run out of time in any dramatic way. Naturally I was mid-sentence, nay, mid-word when the examiners called time; you don't stop writing with time to spare just because you've finished the core of what you wanted to say. Hopefully Prof Modelling will be able to decipher what I meant by "a combination of fan charts and traditional multiple proj".

As for those 65 INFO 102 students, by the end of the exam only three were left in the room. Must have been an easy exam for them. Yeah... I remember first year.

Can't stop my brain

I'm so tired I'm even finding Salient funny.

Some kind of happiness is measured out in miles

Yesterday was a day of furious perambulation around Wellington. Highlights: nearly getting hit by three separate vehicles while crossing Salamanca Road (I had the right of way!); spending almost $20 on photocopying; losing the annoying bits of my hairstyle.

At the second lecture yesterday, Micro had the same number of students, but the makeup had changed: Russian Guy seems to have dropped and instead we now have German Exchange Student. We learned about the implicit function theorem. I've never liked this theorem much; it's inelegant no matter how you state it. Turns out, though, that it's rather useful in certain types of application. Glad to know that it does serve some purpose in the world, so that part of MATH 301 wasn't torturing us in vain.

Modelling, this morning, has lost three people, leaving us with three guys and four girls. Dr Modelling has been bringing along various colleagues from the think-tank he works at, which helps the room feel a bit less empty. (No less cold or dark, though.) Occasionally his colleagues correct him during class. In his shoes I would find this extremely disconcerting, but he doesn't seem to mind.

Another disconcerting thing is that, come Tuesday lunchtime, my week is already half over. Last trimester it hadn't yet begun by Tuesday lunchtime!

Not so self-assured

This is supposed to come out at ⁵/₁₂. What on earth has gone wrong? (Yes, g(x) is zero outside the range [¹/₈, ⁷/₈].)

Nothing you can do that can't be done

In the Metrics exam I only need to get 70%, on a strict numbers basis, to get an A+ for the course. The formal exam on Monday will contribute 80% of my exam grade, with the rest coming from the "take-home question" due Thursday. This means I need to get 62.5% in the formal part of the exam and full marks for the take-home question (which is possible; it's a programming question, and Dr Metrics is a sympathetic marker of code). Things are looking up.

The most amazing thing: all my plastic L-files are empty of paper!

My "temporary filing" shelves aren't quite empty yet, but they're getting there!

The only bad thing about life at the moment is that our central heating system has failed. Today it reached 10°C on the back doorstep, 14°C in the hallway and 21°C in my room, where I spent the day with the door closed, curtains drawn and oil heater running. This made me quite popular with certain members of the household.

Blue mist round my soul

Working so hard I have nothing to blog about. Handed in the last Micro assignment on Monday. Finishing Growth essay 1 today.

I was so sceptical about some empirical assumptions in this paper, I wrote a GAUSS simulation to find out what would happen to the results if the assumptions were violated. The conclusion from this is most interesting, but how can I use it in my essay? My lecturer won't understand the code and isn't that into econometrics. Oh dear.

Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid get

Metrics is killing me.

We're currently having weekly assignments with only seven days to complete each one. In the math department, weekly assignments are done in ten days - handed out on Tuesday to be handed back on the Friday ten days later. In this way you can finish an assignment in, say, eight days, and then start straight in on the next one, which by that time is due in nine days. All it takes is one or two shortish assignments in a trimester and you stay comfortably ahead.

None of that here. We get the assignment on Tuesday, and it's due the following Tuesday. And then again, and again. I don't know what I'll do when the next Micro assignment comes out. I really don't know when I'm going to do the article critique for Macro.

Having said all that, I got 100% in Metrics assignment 1. The consensus seems to be with me that it was an easy assignment. Nonetheless, I'm celebrating by having breakfast in Trax :)

A little while ago, I got a new Flash disk.

The write speed isn't exactly what you'd call satisfactory.

Now that the download size limit is gone, I'd get better performance backing up to a network drive over university wireless.

Yes, you know it's good news

During the break I managed to do a fair bit of cooking. Never as much as I'd like, of course, but more than I usually have time for. The bach kitchen is fairly well set up - it only lacks a weighing machine - and most of my favourite recipes I carry in my head, so it didn't matter that the "Bach Recipes" folder is a bit on the thin side.

While refining my technique on honey date muffins one morning, I noticed that my baking method has, through experience and experimentation, become quite different from that described in most cookbooks. When making cookies or muffins, the average recipe will tell you to:

1. Soften the butter
2. Transfer it to another bowl
3. Cream the butter and sugar
4. Add eggs and vanilla to the butter mix
5. Sift the dry ingredients in yet another bowl
6. Add the liquids to the dry ingredients
7. Add fruits, nuts, chocolate etc

There are a few things wrong with this method. First is the transferring of the butter from one container to another. When butter is soft it's almost impossible to move it without leaving some behind, so much better to just soften it in the same container that you're going to use for working with it. A related problem is the use of two different bowls for the liquids and dry ingredients, which creates unnecessary dishes as well as more serious technical issues (see below).

Second is the whole issue of creaming the butter and sugar. While this exhausting and time-consuming process is very necessary for more delicate products like scones and some cakes, it's a total waste of time for muffins and cookies. Cookies are very hardy - the only way you can stuff them up is by burning them. For muffins, the only tricky part is not over-mixing them. Neither relies on having light, fluffy creamed butter and sugar to start off with, so just melt the butter already. If you beat the sugar in pretty vigorously then you end up with something that's fairly fluffy anyway.

Finally, the practice of adding liquids to drys. Whoever came up with this idea, and what made them think it was a good one? If you add liquid to flour, it's very difficult to ensure that the flour is all combined. Inevitably you get halfway through spooning your mixture into pans, or rolling it into balls, and you discover that there's a large pocket of dry, uncombined flour in the bottom of your bowl. Mixing this in to what remains of your batter will result in strange variations in the consistency of your product (that is, some muffins will be dryer than others) and general unsatisfactoriness. If, on the other hand, you add dry to wet - sift the flour directly into your liquids - this issue never arises.

When you combine the solutions to all these problems into one glorious meta-solution, you get...

Fibby's one-pot fail-proof cookie and muffin method

1. Prepare the fruit or nuts first. You'll need them to be ready at step 8. Get the nearest idle soul to grease your muffin tins with soft butter. (For cookies, don't use grease, use baking paper.)
2. Melt the butter completely in your largest pot over your lowest heat.
3. Take it off the heat when only small bits of solid butter remain. Swirl to complete melting.
4. Add the sugar or honey and beat furiously.
5. Add the eggs, vanilla, and any other liquids that go at this stage. Beat again.
6. Sieve the dry ingredients directly into the pot. Do the flour first and baking powder last, to avoid the baking powder being activated too soon by overlong contact with the warm butter.
7. Don't leave the sifted mixture sitting too long unmixed, or the baking powder will go frothy.
8. Put the fruits in on top of the flour.
9. Mix it - hard for cookies, gently for muffins. Muffin batter needs to be quite soft, so be prepared to add milk or water. Cookie dough, on the other hand, can be very hard, especially if there are chocolate chips in it. Be prepared to tip it out and get your hands into it to finish the mixing.
10. Spoon it, roll it, cook it, eat it.

Clutching forks and knives

Suddenly food has become a really big part of my life. I'm inventing new dinners from scratch in my head, then going to the kitchen and turning them out as if I've done each dish thousands of times before. I'm planning out a Christmas meal (of some sort. It may turn into a series of small Christmas snacks). I'm using the internet to research approximately eleventy-hundred different and unusual types of cookies. I'm surrounding myself with palisades of recipe books as I drink tea in the evenings. I'm taking aside the Englishman in my team at work to quiz him about how he makes fruitcake. And of course, being the time of year that it is, we keep on and keep on going out for lunch.

The key point about all this newfound foodology is that I actually have the time, now, to do it properly. If this is what it's like having a job and a life, I'm in.

Ginger sling with a pineapple heart

The French Green party is called Les Verts. This is not half as awesome as Chartreuse. However, I see that the colour is named after the drink and not vice versa, so I suppose we must forgive them.

Edit: My god, is there really an entire band founded on a single obscure Beatles reference? What kind of people choose to call themselves Ginger Sling and then produce an album named Pineapple Heart? What would people think if I founded a group named Ground Control and then addressed all my songs to some dude called Major Tom? They'd think I was a derivative idiot, that's what. Jeepers.

Very strange

• Planned and done:
• Easy half of Micro assignment (first year calculus again!)
• Read International article
• Planned and not done:
• Start math assignment
• Summarise International article
• Not planned, but done:
• Cooked two dinners
• Massive amounts of filing
• Mowed lawns
• Read an entire novel

In my living room there is a central light fitting that holds three bulbs. It's attached to a dimmer switch. For the past year or so it's contained two CFL bulbs and one incandescent bulb (I can't now remember why this is). This morning the incandescent bulb blew. In the time before it was replaced I observed the following phenomena, all of which disappeared when an operative incandescent bulb was installed in the third socket:

• The two CFLs emitted a soft humming sound while switched on
• They spluttered and pulsated wildly when the dimmer was operated
• They flickered gently and continuously while switched off

My questions are, why does this happen with two CFLs in one fitting, and not with any other CFLs in the house? And why on earth should installing a single working incandescent in parallel cause these phenomena to cease?

No joke, it's doing me harm

So far I've spent this week at home sleeping off a mysterious viral infection. I'm not yet thinking clearly enough to be too worried about the missed lectures.

Three weeks, I'm going insane

I picked up my photocopied material on Thursday, but other than that I've had nothing SOSC-related to blog about. The penultimate journal submission is on Friday. If I hand in four articles in this fortnight, I will have made terms for the course (20 articles). Doing another 10 articles, as I originally intended, will only be worth 3¹/₃ course marks. I'm not sure if this is worth having or not.

You'd say I'm putting you on

Proofreading proved to be rather tricky. When I imported the whole essay into MS Word (so undignified) for a final spellcheck, it picked up around 20 typos I had missed. Good thing I did that check.

Aligning each section along the same argument wasn't very difficult, and although my final conclusion was perhaps a bit too strong, at least it expressed an opinion. Wishy-washy conclusions make me uneasy, although I have no idea how markers may feel about them.

And my actual final conclusion? The main thing wrong with political process theory is almost exactly the same thing that is wrong with string theory.

There goes 40% of the course...