These presidential debates often devolve into my yelling at the image of John McCain's large projected face as he erroneously spouts off on some subject or another or tells me that I am his friend. (No thank you, John, I have better taste than that.) The one thing that really set me off came rather early in the debate, when the two candidates ( Read more... )

Stocks Plunge Again; Dow Under 8,500: All of this reminds me somewhat of the Barro-Gordon model I learned in my international finance course last semester. Granted, the game set up there was about inflation policy and how it interacts with the market, but it can be analogised to the current situation on hand. Policy undertaken by governments and ( Read more... )

God damn, I have never struggled so much to finish an exam in my life. For those who don't know what my handwriting is like, it is best described as small, cramped, and requiring a lot of hard pressing against the paper (after I write a full sheet of notes in ballpoint pen, it curls into a perfectly cylinder -- no, I am not joking). Combine this ( Read more... )

( ...or perhaps you've not been studying enough (screencap under the cut) )

One of the problems in today's multivariable calculus problem set:

The surface of Lake Erehwon can be represented by a region D in the xy-plane such that the lake's depth (in meters) at the point (x,y) can be given by the expression 400-3x2y2. If your calculus instructor is in the water at the point (1,-2), in which direction should she swim so ( Read more... )

Comment with one thing/person/place in my life that you would like me to photograph, and in the depths of my procrastination, I will see it done.Ah, I cannot help it; this is one of my favourite memes in the world. By "my life," I mean anything from Georgetown or my actual home up north, although if you request anything from the latter, you'll ( Read more... )

Not as if I'll ever have the time to do this, but I really would like to finally determine just what exactly this Immanuel Kant figure had to say. He's been referenced in everything from my International Relations lectures to my theology reading, which has proved to be the most incomprehensible text in the history of philosophical writing if one ( Read more... )

Oh man. A few minutes ago, I was looking up books to buy for the spring semester. I got to GOVT-006 International Relations -- and sandwiched between the titles like Global Political Economy and International Politics was this little gem.

I had to run it through a Google search just to make sure that my eyes weren't deceiving me. I mean, Harry ( Read more... )

There are a few things in life that I determinedly and irrationally loathe. These are usually limited to things like spiders, rude customers, capricious grading, and such forth.

Chinese traditional characters have not only been added to the list, they have been accorded the honour of being ranked first in Things That Piss Virginia Off. For my ( Read more... )

My current philosophy assignment requires to provide an exegetical analysis of the famous allegory of the cave in Plato's Republic (how's that for overt pretension?). For the past hour or so, I've been copying down relevant quotations from the book; I just stumbled upon this bit:

You must go down, then, each in his turn, to live with the rest and ( Read more... )