Congratulations, squirrel!

Good news tonight. Ardillita was accepted to St. Paul's for graduate school. Her first choice. Well done, little squirrel :) . A nephew, and being accepted into a grad school. Perhaps this semester won't be so bad after all, eh? Sure you still have a butt-load of reading (what was the exact measure of a butt-load, again?), but so far you've had very good news. Well... aside from my very scary stories about Ben, his neighbor Robert, and the Peruvian mail-order bride. Just so happy that I get to open up that very special part of American culture for you.

After proving the first lemma (of four) that are due Tuesday, and deciding to put off micro reading until tomorrow morning, I watched all six episodes of "the Office" (the BBC version). The first couple of episodes, I didn't get it. But the dialogue was so well done, and the actors were so good that I kept watching. By the third episode I couldn't stop laughing. I highly recommend it.

Back to schoolwork... the spirit of Aishwarya Rai has been watching over me. I proved that lemma in record time. Cramer's Linear Transformation Lemma. If X has a normal distribution, such that X ~ N(u, S) (X has a mean u and variance S), then the regression Y = BX + b, where B is a matrix, and b a vector (both constant), is distributed N(Bu + b, BSB'). (B' means "B transpose". It's matrix notation. Basically you take the matrix, and flip it about it's diagonal. So [2, 2; 1, 1] becomes [2, 1; 2, 1]. Proven, and I only had to refer to the HMC* book once. The next challenge is the second lemma, and then supposedly lemmas 3 and 4 follow from the results of 1 and 2.

So we (ardilla and myself) crashed an international students "welcome back" event last Sunday. Three of the first years (like myself) were there, as was a second year. All good people. I really look forward to working with all of them in the coming years.
I also got some further proctoring assignments, and I'm in the process of constantly revising and updating what I think I want to write a dissertation about. Manun was right when he told me that during the first year, "everyone has this idea of what they think they want to do, but after December, it changes. And after May, it changes again." So I will have to take his advice and just keep myself open to the opportunities that present themselves.

I will leave you all with a quote, by the (in)famous Prof. Mohammed el-Hodiri, who taught my Western Civilization and Microeconomics class back at KU,
"The people who quote Marx usually have no idea what he was saying, or what they are saying. You can go anywhere, say anything, and attribute it to Karl Marx, and people will believe you, and think you're a genius- just be sure to include a page number, because no one has actually read the book. But anyone who has actually read Marx, and understood it, will know you're just BSing."


* Hogg, McKean, and Craig.