So, I was hanging my clothes when doing my laundry and I noticed this:

What do you notice?

Sincerely,

Roy G. Biv

I will be first to admit I first fell in love with economics thanks to Levitt and Dubner. The first Freakonomics book transformed my view of economics, from a drab and dull (and dry) subject, to something far more interesting. I guess my career path wouldn’t have been as an economist, if I had never read the book.  4 years on, I am now a proper economist (still working towards my PhD though), and Levitt and Dubner has done it again, and had come out with the sequel freakquel to Freakonomics, called Superfreakonomics.

I frequently read back to the original Freakonomics, to see if my level of understanding of economics is up to par. I told myself, that if I can work out the methods the economists come to their conclusion by myself and just the data, I would have made it. By 2007, I was able to reverse engineer the findings, and the way the academics think in Freakonomics (with a little cheatcode known as JSTOR and other academic journal sources).

Anyways, I recently bought and read half of Superfreakonomics while waiting for a business meeting to start. I promptly came home and read the other half in the bath tub. And I like the book. If anything, Levitt and Dubner romanticizes the economics profession. It was a good reminder why I had read economics in university – to be able, and I quote them, “…cold blooded enough to sit around and calmly discuss the trade-offs involved in… catastrophes”.

Of course, now that I am working, doing analysis, nothing is as it seems in both Freakonomics books. The commercial work environment is a highly political arena, and we economists in general don’t get to do fun stuff as described in Freakonomics as frequently as we’d like to. Sometimes, when we come to a conclusion that is not favourable to the company, some clever things have to be done to the numbers (and yes, from reports from my friends who are working, every company (sample size of 4) does, to some degree, some fudging of numbers in their analyses).

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This was my favourite star constellation when I was younger:

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This is one of those My Desk posts – simply because I love showing off my desk. I am a lousy housemate. When I study, I am like the Zerg. I start out from one location, and move to another, with my notes sprawling all over the place. Here’s a photo of my house before I had my last exam yesterday:

I started out behind the monitor (yes, the drawings are Ben Bernarke wearing a pirate eyepatch and George W. Bush, drawn and coloured by me). As the exam weeks go by, I moved on to the white table, and sat and read on the white sofabed for relaxation.

Then in the final week, I used the round dining table as my study ground. In fact, by the final week, I used all three tables, and the bathtub, and the toilet for study. There was no where in the house that I didn’t study in. And where I studied, I left my creep of notes around.

I used the white table mainly for my advanced ‘metrics course study. Basically, all I did was math and math and more math. So, the crumpled papers on the green rug are actually practice questions that I did wrongly, or papers that I had erased till the fibre of the papers had came lose. The notes on the brown sofa are actually printout notes from The Matrix Cookbook (fine matrix algebra website by the way, probably the best).

Notes on the round table are my policy and strategy course notes and my advanced macroeconomics notes.

So.. exams over. I had a very long catchup sleep, and still going to catch more sleep.This is the end of all exams. But I look forward to more research in the future! In the meantime, you can play the game of IkeaSpotting in the picture above

Ye gods, its the time of the month again. I rant as much as a woman constantly having PMT (I can imagine a barrage of feminists protesting this post now, you go girls!). And yes, its that time of every month again, where I feel so bloated from everything that happened. Its that time again, where I rant about the amount of things I have to do.

The entropy of my life has increased by crazy amounts, and yet I do not appear to be doing much. Aha, you say. You’re not doing work, how can you expect to lower the entropy in your life? To that, I give you a tongue in cheek answer, one originally posited by a Leo Szillard: I’m THINKING about entropy. That in itself IS WORK! Just not enough work.

Actually, no. Work has indeed piled up. Last week alone, I had tons of assignments, had to go to work, and class, and also, tend to the running of Pressyo (yes, again, it looks like nothing has been done there either). And I was up to my neck. It’s saturday now. And I’ve finally submitted all my assignments that were due (and 3 more are coming up, yipes!), got home from work, and had 2 long baths in the mean time (my bath time is used for thinking).

Which is what got me to think about entropy to begin with. Now, entropy isn’t my field at all. It remains in the realms of physics, but anyone with an understanding of economics would appreciate its analogies to economics; plus I think the Santa Fe Institute is doing some really brilliant work on complexity economics (I don’t buy some of their arguments though, just like I don’t buy any arguments from any school of economics; though given a chance to work with any institute, the Santa Fe Institute will be at the top of my list).

I was sitting in a pool of hot water, and I let my mind wander, and on and on, I keep thinking about entropy, and life. Its not untrue that in the past few months, my life has been getting more and more disorganized. And despite my doing of things to make it more organized (i.e. lower the entropy), it seems that it automatically gets undone anyways. It can get rather frustrating at times, because I have so many ideas that I need to constantly write them down, but yet unable to do so, simply because I am at work, uni, or on a different computer doing my assignments. The thing about organization is that constant work needs to be done. And work is a function of time (think about it in the most basic newtonian mechanics, W = Fd; F = ma; a=f(t)).

And so, I’ve came to the conclusion that I’ve been sleeping too much, since I don’t have much time on my hands to spare. So from today onwards, I’m going to sleep about 4 hours daily. That should give me enough time for entropy correction .

And yes, I think you can tell what has captured my interests in recent months, what with me talking about the SFI, and entropy.

There, I feel better now. I’m done ranting.

A Pareto Optimal Choice

Wait, wait, wait!! Before you go “again, Chewxy blogging about his groceries pattern”, this is not about MY groceries. But yes, you’d guess right, I’m going to talk about some economics in this one.

The reason for this blog is because I read Dan Meyer’s blog article about optimizing queues in, well, a supermarket. Of course Dan’s blog is more interesting, because he went out and collected empirical data on queues.

Well, me being me, and having insomnia (and desperately needing to do something about my I’m-so-lazy funk), I hacked up a simulator to find out how to choose the best line.

I made 3 types of shoppers: the Random Walk shopper, the Smart shopper and the Even Smarter shopper. This is how they choose their lines:

• The Random Walk shopper randomly chooses a checkout line. He doesn’t care about how many people are there or how many items are there in the line
• The Smart shopper chooses the shortest line. He doesn’t care about how many items each person has in the line
• The Even Smarter shopper looks at each line. He randomly picks 3 or less shoppers in each line and gauges their number of items, then chooses the line with what he thinks has the least number of queuers with the least number of items. I think this heuristic is realistic (woo that rhymes), because humans cannot possibly have perfect knowledge.

I assume that all goods take the same time to scan, which takes 1 second. Which is what Dan himself assumed. Of course, he also assumed perfect information, which I didn’t. And because I don’t assume perfect knowledge, this exercise to find the best queue to be in is done by means of iterative simulation, as opposed to just finding the minima of each session. Continue Reading »

This is the song I shall sing to my kids when I have them:

Twinkle twinkle little star,

How I wonder what you are

Its a ball of fire formed

From the fusion of H2

Into helium it becomes

Light and heat too here they come

I sung this to my girlfriend, and she loved it. She is awesome like that