Sundry Items

Today i learned how to solve linear difference equations. For all of you that say "huh?," yup, I said that too. Apparently there is such a thing as discrete time differential equations -- sort of like the riemann sum of differential equations. The only thing that seems to be useful about it is that it's a recursive relationship infinite series sort of thing. You have a rabbit population of two and bam! take n = 100 years, and you have a population of fifteen million trilligazillion. You can also compute the stability of such a series, does it go to infinity, or does food run out and population growth fluctuate? And you do it all in matrix form (if you're smart) or algebra (if you're not) to convert it from said recursive form, and into something that looks like an exponetial, thereby defeating the one cool thing about it.

So much for that one cool thing.

REAL differential equations are so much prettier to work with, once again, contrast riemann with calculus, plus you can also do lots of stuff with it, like, calculate the stability of systems in matrix form with differential equations, as i learned to my chagrin in my engineering class. Turns out you're not allowed to blow stuff up, even if it's on your homework.

The international students have to take an english test next tuesday. Because of that, the regular class got moved to the discussion section's time and the discussion section got canceled.. Nobody liked the discussion section, during one of my lunches, someone called it a negative externality, which in econ-speak is a polite way of refering to taxes, inefficient government funded programs, and more recently, the Taliban, and what we did to them. Basically, the class is like a movie, except in French (or a language you don't understand), with an econ grad student as the hero. And we watch and watch as he monkeys around on the board, trying to derive an equation using The-Very-Hard-Method or even worse, using The-Two-Very-Hard-Methods, just because he's the hero and can.

Most of our lunches are spent in idyll fantasie speculating about the serious things in life. We chat about wonderful things ranging from like, "what would happen if we stole all the money in the Fed computers" to "what would happen if we stole all the money in the world." Before you snicker, dear reader, these are very serious questions warranting serious answers. You see, in the first case, you would have to ration out the money very carefully if you wanted to preserve the value of your money, but in the second case you wouldn't be able to do even that because you have all the money in the world. The moment you spent your first dollar, your money decreases in value, since someone else has a dollar to compete with you. These two examples aren't even similar because in the first place, you may very well be stealing money that doesn't physically exist yet (it's still in the Fed computers... by the way, taking a million or a trillion dollars is just a matter of punching in a couple more zeros), thereby increasing the money supply, whereas in the second case it would SEEM that there are no effects because no money is being created but somehow it does...yes, very serious questions indeed.