Month: November 2004

Well I came home and found Rick’s target from his hand gun class taped onto the fridge. Damn. I wouldn’t recommend anyone trying to break in, he’s quite a shot… He invited me to go skeet shoting with him sometime. I haven’t had to deal with this in quite a while, I’ve always felt pretty weird about guns. The last time this came up it was at one of Margret’s friends’ house. He brought out his Sig Saur to show it off. He passed it around and gave it to some idiot there. The firing pin was removed, so I knew it couldn’t go off, but it was still pretty unerving to have the thing pointed at me. I was always taught that you should NEVER point a gun at someone unless you were going to shoot them… The last time I actually shot anything was at boy scout camp around 1983 or so. We were using 22 caliber bolt action rifles. They took great lengths to teach saftey, but little on marksmanship. I didn’t hit a damn thing from 50 or 60 feet. I had plenty of friends that did target shooting or hunted, but I never could get into that whole culture. Maybe it would be a good idea to get over whatever it is I have by learning how to shoot. I don’t think that skeet shooting would be the best reintroduction, it would only amount to me firing a shotgun in the air randomly…:-) Anyway, the invatation was unexpected, I’ll have to think about it.

Isaac

I saw super milk chan on adult swim and I’m happy to report that I
don’t feel compelled to watch it again. I did make the mistake of
watching the “Ghost in the Shell Stand alone complex” last night. It
reminds me of the old max headroom tv show, anyone else remember that?
It was only on for a short time before being canceled, people said they
couldn’t follow it… I was a teenager and I could follow it just fine,
I;m still a little bitter about it but I’m glad that there’s a cartoon
now with the same level of complexity:-)

Isaac

OK, I’ve got a general idea for my macro paper. I’m going to
concentrate on trying to explain the macro economy as a scale-free
network and show what the consequences of that approach are. I know, a
little lame, but it’ll fill the requirements and I find it mildly
interesting. My math paper got more complicated and simpler at the same
time. I’ve ditched a rather complicated optimization problem, but I’ve
decided to add some game theory. Here’s the gist, I had been trying to
see what would happen to gift giving if personal consumption
(everything except gift giving) went up. The obvious answer was that
gift giving would go down, but I was having trouble with both coming up
with the derivatives and explaining them. So I’ve decided to add a
duopoly modeled form of first action gift giving… How does one
respond when you know the number of gifts that the other person will
give you. Once again, the answer should be obvious, now I just have to
show it matematically…

Work really took it out of me today, not much to say except this… It
occurs to me that “Heart of Glass” and “Atomic” by Blondie are perhaps
the most perfect, beautiful disco songs ever made, do you know of any
that are better? Don’t give me that “Disco is crap” attitude either,
good music can be found in just about every genre, and disco was one of
many that Blondie fiddled with. If you get a chance, check out a
greatest hits by them, you’ll wonder why people have called them punk,
new wave, and disco…
Isaac

    I not only got a new (to me) camera, I got a new
lens too! I can see you shaking your head from here, but this is really
nice! It’s an older wooden camera from England, nice and light. Plus
it’s a 5×7 field camera, big negs! I also got a slightly used Schneider
210mm lens for my new baby. Believe it or not, I actually got this
stuff by selling a bunch of my crap that was sitting around, and I
pocketed around 300 bucks on top of that!:-) So I’m momentarily happy,
I wonder when I’ll get to use it… I do need Kenji (from work) to do
some work for me. I’ll need some lensboards made and an adaptor so that
I can use these lenses on my other camera. I’m also going to break down
and order a box of 5×7 color print film too, about $150 for 50 sheets…

Isaac

    Got back from my Dad’s place. It’s really beautiful,
right by the water and the house itself is very homey and pleasant.
It’s nice not being in a cookie cutter type of place… Dinner was
great of course, Butler (dad’s wife) is an amazing cook and she didn’t
let us down. i do wish I could spend more time with them on the
holidays , but until I get a different job that’s not going to happen…

    OK, we’ll see how this goes. I figured I’d start
this thing to jot down random thoughts and be able to come back to them
later on. I’m not sure if I’ll make this public or not… Let’s see,
apparently I’m hooked on adult swim, some things I understand why, but
others… What’s up with Wolf’s rain? Not a hell of a lot happens, but
it is interesting. I’m really worried that I may someday watch super
milk chan and get hooked by it’s weirdness… Going down to dad’s place
for thanksgiving tomorrow, should be good. I’ve never seen their new
house finished, and Butler will be making me a meal for wednesday,
can’t wait! I should be writing my papers, but I doubt that I’ll get
back to them until sunday, at least I’ll have the place to myself.
    With any luck, I’ll get some equations over to
Geoffrey by tomorrow and he’ll be able to tell me what I screwed up by
sunday. What’s that paper about you ask? It’s a mathematical model
trying to explain why we like to give presents at Christmas. It’s easy
enough to show why we like giving presents in general, but why at
Christmas and not the rest of the year? The trick is that there is a
feedback mechanism at work involving the presents we get and give. That
combined with a budget constraint (something I need to become familiar
with in my own life) makes us more likely to give presents at Christmas
than any other time. Believe it or not, the math is pretty descriptive
and it gave me a better idea about what’s going on. Maybe that bastard
Congelton was right about mathematic models…
    I’m not nearly so sure about the other paper. It’s
for macro, something that is pretty alien to me. I have a rough idea
involving comparing a representative agent model of the economy to a
node based emergent model. The rep. agent model has always made my skin
crawl. For those of you not familiar with the concept, a representative
agent model treats each person in the economy as the GDP of the United
states divided by the population. This gives you the ideal “average”
person. This agent consumes a little bit of everything in the economy.
Everything, cotton candy, every model of car, every new house built,
every college class, every everything. Since each person in this model
is like every other, you avoid all those messy aggregation problems…
The true irony is that no one can even approach being the average
person. Anyway, I was going to try to build a different type of model
(in the most abstract way) where everyone is different. Not so easy and
I have no idea how to even start. Anyway, it’s time for bed. i just
hope I don’t have any economic dreams, I hate it when that happens…
Isaac