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!!"

the entire science center

smells like bacon. it is really distracting. also everyone is from harvard and already knows each other and is fancy and i want to go home.

restauracja

german babies

my bro learns to drink 52-cent beer

krak-tour

1. licked a decorative side of meat hanging in poland's most famous restaurant to gain respect of new canadian friends

2. ate lard at same restaurant

3. saw baby wearing shirt printed with " I am looking at the crocodile, thinking baby to you"

4. managed to order a pizza in a small town via smiling and crazy gestures; had ketchup in lieu of sauce

5. went to art museum where main exhibit was a video of piles of different colored paint that someone placed a handful of earthworms in nasty

Me and my friends at the world cup

crack-ho

poland has these things so far:

sketchy internet cafe named "nonstop!!" i am definitely the only lady here.
rabbit that ran across the airport in front of my plane
chickens on the road
horse and buggy setup playing ghetto superstar from boombox
world's smallest loaf of bread named "chleb"
a festival involving a hybrid bird-elephant that i cannot figure out
an old polish man in a tshirt reading "friend with benefits"
elderly nun wearing slingback heels with shaved legs
lipton tea and sutter home sold at high prices in the luxury market
ice cream sandwich named "milk slice"
polish guys dressed as cowboys trying to get you to buy pizza
polish guy dressed as an american indian doing karaoke in park to a recording of peruvian music

Michelle Pfieffer has a really nice beach