did you watch that video yet

of the manatee crashing into the wall on cuteoverload???

i really miss this guy

harvard med school

t-shirt boy was the one who exploded artificial banana-smelling oil all over the lab last night and now everything smells horrible.

how many girls were crying in the science center bathroom

this morning post-exam? I counted 4.

World Cup

I don't think I've ever felt so happy about my neighborhood as world cup day when someone set up a huge screen and thousands of people showed up in Dolores park. I was wondering why the base was cranked up so high you could barely understand the commentary, but it made sense when the game ended and it turned into a big outdoor dance party.

Anyone know who set all that stuff up? Can't we do this stuff more than once every four years?

the bacon smell is back

this time it is even in the library. who cooks that many pounds of bacon in the late afternoon??

Nerd Post

It drives me crazy when lotteries are not incentive compatible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_compatibility). For example the Stanford housing lottery is crazy. They assign everyone to their first choice until houses are full and then assign everyone to their second choice and so on. So if you put a popular house first you are taking a big risk. Really stupid.

I was talking to some economist at Harvard who came to Yahoo who convinced the Boston Public Schools so that they used an incentive compatible lottery for school assignments. The lottery is a little harder to explain, but the big benefit is that less informed or sophisticated families don't end up with worse housing. What a great application of game theory.

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~ppathak/papers/boston.pdf

Also, if any nerds are still reading, that Levitt paper on penalty kicks approximating the mixed strategy equilibrium is really interesting: http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/ChiapporiGrosecloseLevitt2002.pdf . I'm not sure if his assumptions are correct, but the fact that kickers actually kick to their weak side more often than their strong side is pretty interesting evidence that game theory can explain some non obvious things.

movie stars watching movies

Sunday we went to see A Scanner Darkly at the Embarcadero Cinema - and lo and behold Robin Williams was standing in front of us in the ticket line, wearing a bright green Brazil jacket no less. I guess he couldn't accept their World Cup loss. Anyway - he took the last two tickets to the movie so my friends couldn't get in. Damn him. I wonder what he would have done if it had sold out a minute earlier and he couldn't get in...I like to think he would have spectacularily freaked out and jumped around like a monkey like he does in the movies.

I think this means his career isn't going so well if he has to see new films at a theatre with the rest of us plebs.

how it is now

this is how things used to be

one of the little organic chemists

in my class has taken to wearing a crimson "harvard medical school" t-shirt every day. does he think that is going to get him in???

p.s. you can buy a tennis dress that says harvard on it.

failure

so i am walking down the street holding my lame-o #1 orgo test and where the chess master usually sits in front of au bon pain is this really large guy with a whiteboard sign that says something like "having low self esteem? think you are the worst? think no one could suck at chess more than you? sit down and play the chess failure!!"