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The good (?) news is that Geoffrey and I won third place in the university category for the MAS competition for our paper on currency liberalization. The first and second places went to an MAS local scholar and a pair of postgrads (NUS MSc and NTU doctoral), so I think we did fairly well considering we’re both prefrosh. However, the relevant benchmark is Judith who did the same thing, except she won second place and did it at 19 - we should have done so much better. I feel like I’ve let both of us down.

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The National University of Singapore’s undergraduate business program (Bizad) is pursuing an aggressive advertising campaign. The first one I saw was the designer-jeans metaphor. The second was about A-level results - the message is that bizad is the school of choice for the very best. The third is about a foreign student who picks bizad over wharton/sloan (suspension of disbelief aside, note the small envelopes, and you know what that implies…)

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Tyler Cowen’s symmetry thesis:

A given person likes (loves) you as much as you like (love) him or her.

Do I want to know how much you like me? It is simple. I imagine how much I like you. (If you do the same, are we circular? Or does some kind of fixed point theorem apply?)

Perhaps we like other people for their intrinsic qualities less than we pretend. Mostly we like people for liking (loving) us.

If the theory is correct, then not being loved is entirely my fault. I’m the selfish shortsighted one when the optimal strategy for the iterated prisoner’s dilemma is preemptive reciprocal altruism. This is actually quite compelling because it purportedly explains why efforts to improve my prospects have failed.

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Greg Mankiw’s (PhD class?) summer reading list:

* Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
* Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers
* Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity
* Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist
* P.J. O’Rourke, Eat the Rich
* Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street
* Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically
* Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics
* John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar
* William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the Laureates

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Palinurus and I made our way to Far East Plaza, where we found a tiny hole in the wall in the basement called British Chippy, which sells fish and chips, and other deep-fried tasty treats. The most interesting is the deep-fried Mars bar with ice cream. They coat bits of Mars bars with batter, deep-fry them, and serve the brown chunks with ice-cream of your choice, all for 2 bucks.

It goes without saying that this should be an occasional indulgence, like Miharu ramen.

Unfortunately I was not carrying my camera or you would see pictures of the mars bars, or the soon-to-be-less-slim trendy kogal types that consume them.

This season’s anime lineup is actually quite wonderful (ouran high school host club, suzumiya haruhi, higurashi no naku koro ni) and completely make up for the ‘filler’ arcs in Naruto/Bleach - I hesitate to call them ‘fillers’ because they leave one hungry for the real thing. The best of this season is Jyu Oh Sei (planet of the beast king), an SF epic. The synopsis on wikipedia doesn’t do the series justice - it has production values that match last exile and ergo proxy (w/o using CG), and the epic scale to match them.

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I was reticent to accept J’s birthday party invitation because I was afraid something like this would happen. But it would have been unnice to not attend, plus my friends were going, so I thought it would be alright.

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We played board games at Settlers on my birthday, as a sort of backlash against growing up. Chris was there, and his present was a printout of David DeAngelo’s ‘Double your dating‘. At the time, I must confess that I was a little underwhelmed. Oh god, I thought, is it really that obvious? Have I sunk to a state where I have to read an online dating guide? Chris’ present said yes. I suppose it was well-intended and probably useful but I wasn’t about to start flipping through it - I was too busy trying to secure my quasi-paid employment (which has proved to be much less enjoyable and validating than I thought it would be).

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