Dear Readers,

This is what I think you’re made of:

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I like telling stories. I can imagine telling them to my kids in the future (the wife would probably have heard most of them when I was courting her).

Here’s a retelling of a koan:

Once upon a time, there was a man, who sauntered up to a jacaranda tree. He sat underneath it, and contemplated life, the universe and everything else. He meditated on the subtle emptiness of things.

It was winter, and the scenery was dead-looking. After some time, out of a sudden, the man beneath the tree is sprinkled with a shower of purple flowers. He was surprised, as there wouldn’t be flowers at this time of the year. He looked up and saw a few gods above him, sprinkling flowers at him.

He said: Thank you!

The gods say: No, thank you, for giving us such a great lesson about emptiness! (These were polite and humble gods, unlike the typical image of an arrogant god)

He said: I said nothing. I gave no discourse on emptiness.

They said: You said nothing, we heard nothing. There was no discourse on emptiness. That was true emptiness that we experienced. That was the teaching of what experience of emptiness is. That is true emptiness. For that we thank you.

And the gods zoomed back into their heavens, leaving the man amused and in a rain of flowers.

And thus ends the story. BRB. I’m going to sit under the jacaranda trees in front of my house. See you guys later!

Economics people like to think at the margin. Yoram Bauman even made a joke out of this - “I’m going to buy an orange, I’m going to buy another orange, I’m going to buy another orange - ”

So do I. Of course, I don’t buy one orange at a time; my margin unit for fruits is usually the mass of it (1/2 kg of oranges is at the margin already) . Ah, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about.

A few days ago, I got an email saying that a department in uni had wanted to get rid of some furniture, including some very comfy chairs. Most people on MSN know that I’ve been complaining about my chair, and my intention to go to OfficeWorks to get a new one. So when such an opportunity arose, why not just go grab a free chair?

So yesterday, a few friends and I went to grab some furniture. There were many (more than 20) identical chairs that were up for grabs. And so we each took 2. I took… 4.

The reasoning is simple - assuming that carrying the chairs back is like a production, carrying two chairs back isn’t marginal. You don’t really incur an extra cost carrying more chairs, but you do lose out on opportunity costs (i.e. more chairs in this case). But with 4 chairs, its at the bottom of of the U curve. Carrying one extra chair would incur an extra cost (in time and effort - the chairs are free anyways).

Here’s a marginal cost curve:

As you can rightly see, the cost of ‘producing’ chairs decreases as the number of chairs ‘produced’ per person approaches 4. ‘Produce’ any more than 4 chairs, and the cost will significantly increase. Okay, perhaps this graph isn’t useful in this case. The MR-MC graph would be more useful… but I’ll talk about that later.

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Today was a crazy crazy day. Let’s see what happened today:

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What language do you dream in?

I usually dream in English. Occasionally I dream in other languages. For example, if I do happen to watch a Japanese drama before I sleep, I’ll dream in Japanese, and wake up the next morning only to gain the temporary ability to speak Japanese. It lasts for about 20 minutes only though.

These are the languages I dream in:

1. English (about 98% of the time)
2. Mandarin
3. Japanese (thanks to the crazy amount of J-dramas I watch)
4. Cantonese
5. Hokkien

Also, I once did a very interesting experiment - that was to record my own sleeptalk. Apparently I dream of techy stuff quite a lot (a lot of sum of errors squared, ciphers, locks and stuff). Also, quite a bit on money. And of course, no dream of mine is complete without her (I did wean off a bit though in the past few months). And when I was watching Liar Game, a lot of my sleep talk involved being methods of conning people.. in Nihongo naturally.

So… this morning, I woke up to my housemates talking outside, and the TV being turned on. I dreamt in Mandarin last night (a large part of the dream involved me being scolded by her mother for not taking care of her - weird, because her mother usually speaks Cantonese).

Anyways, when I woke up, the people outside my room sounded like they were speaking Italian. I knew it couldn’t be right, because none of my housemates spoke Italian (they speak English, Mandarin, Hmong, Japanese, French… none Italian). I knew they had to be speaking English, because one girl is American and she can’t speak any other language than English (and French).

But it sounded like Italian. In fact, everyone sounded like they were speaking Italian. It took more than half an hour before my brain settled down from the Mandarin dream when their language became English again. And when the languages transformed, they actually sort of warbled in my ears.

This leads me to one conclusion: I have a babelfish in my ear. Hope I never get exposed to Vogon poetry. Har har!

Now, what language do you dream in?