Reporting from Workstation 9

Do I want an emacs client for blogger?
I don't know what the fuck that means. Some super smart tammy from India T V Raman, a research scientist at google is offering it to all bloggers. I checked out his page. PhD in applied mathematics. He lives with a dog. And has a bunch of software patents. 9.78/10 GPA. And to think I had so many papers to submit this term, I had no time to breathe.
Anyway, a quick post before I go back to work.

Today for curiosity I went for a theology session. My room-mate is very active in the church circuit. I took two of my classmates along. One a protestant, who shifted from being an "unbeliever" to being a "believer" some years back. The other who came to singapore as an atheist, and started attending church cell group meetings and is now an agnostic..in other words pretty lost. And myself. I can once remember being an agnostic. But I can't seem to remember
why I now consider myself an atheist. I'm fairly happy being that too.

The topic was "faith and reason". The brother who gave the speech was not one of the better ones. He initially cracked a joke of a religious nature that nobody got. It was a flowchart speech. As in ".. There are three kinds of truth... There are two kinds of faith: Objective and subjective etc...". After that we were made to sit at tables with some church reps and discuss the topic. It was interesting. After putting my thoughts forward, the girl Stella was kind enough to tell me that I still had subjective faith, but of a diifferent nature. I promise I will get into this in a greater detail when this term is done.

After the talk, for the first time I went shopping! My first whimsical shopping spree in Singapore. There are such beautiful clothes in Singapore. Since I've managed to keep up my gym routine for quite some time now, I feel all the more like buying new things. Or it may just be a way to spend my frustrations.

Yesterday I attended the most exhilerating seminar. This chap, Olivier de la Grandville gave a wonderful seminar on the proof of "smith's conjecture" or the invisible hand. It was new and fascinating and straightforward and for the first time, I felt like I'd followed at least most of what he said. Else I hardly even follow the first 10 minutes of these seminars. All the math goes above my head. My professor keeps telling me that one day I will be able to follow 15 minutes and then 20..

But the experience of being one the first few to come to know about this new discovery(which he believes is the biggest achievement of his career) was thrilling. Maybe it was the way he gave the seminar, but I felt so good. I wish we had these in India..

Anyway I'll leave with this link to Brad De Long's blog. He has written a post of 'how rich was Mr Darcy anyway?'. Being fond the book Pride and Prejudice(I cannot hide the fact that I did enjoy Jane Austen's books.Most of my friends didn't), I found this post quite entertaining. Check it out http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/
Update: There's not a direct link to the post . You'll have to scroll down and find it yourself. Sorry!

Labels: Update