the corner office

Last exam for the year approaches. Onto the final bit of work, which I haven't touched since August/September last year - which I recall was a blur of assignments and visitors from abroad and job interviews and oh-Jesus-I-don't-know-wtf's-happening-with-this-stuff all rather typical of the non-year that was 2010.

I digress. I see a question in the textbook about some hairy topic and think 'no freaking way,' and only later do I realise that this was an assignment question, and I'd answered it back then. My assignment workings have lots of bits scratched out and arrows linking up calculations and a reasonable attempt to make the flow of logic sensible, for when I typed it up to hand it in.

Problem is I don't remember ever doing the question, and I have no clue how I went about solving the problem in the first place. I can't find study notes suggesting I'd ever made sense of that section of work. It looks completely impenetrable to me now.

:-/

It's a long story, really. Somehow I stumbled across a Peruvian surf/psychedelic band called Los Silver Mornings, and one of their tracks ends with a few bars of the theme music from Midsomer Murders (here's a barely listenable version on YouTube).

So the interesting bit is that the woo-oo sound in the Midsomer Murders theme comes from an electronic instrument called the theremin. That much you may know, but have you ever seen anybody play one? I hadn't, and it's weirder than the sound itself. Here's the lady who's played the Midsomer Murders theme since the first series:

(link).

It's at times like this, when the family are back in SA, enjoying Steers burgers and Wimpy coffeh and baking in the sun, that one feels a little homesick. Don't get me wrong, I love UK winters and the colder and more miserable the better, but still.

On Sunday I got around to doing something I should've done ages ago, and ordered extra memory for our laptop. Got home tonight, and through the letterbox had been dropped an envelope with my two new memory sticks. Made me feel better. Not only the fact that the laptop is instantly a zippier computing experience™, but because it never hurts to be reminded of how awesome a boon to one's life a first world postal service is.

What I'd do for a Wimpy dagwood, though...

The family (other than me) are off to sunny climes for a visit with family and stuff. I am at home, tasked with studying my butt off to pass my final exam for the year, in 3 weeks' time. Yaaaaay.

First one down. Not too bad (I'm trying not to sound too surprised).

UNISA's exam venue in London is a church hall in Kensington. For the past 4 years that I've been to the venue, there's been a particular kind of soap in the gents. It has a distinct smell. Some kind of flower. I recognise the smell, I like the smell, it takes me back somewhere.

Problem is, I quite literally mean somewhere because I can't place it. I get a whiff and it smells so familiar, and I try to picture myself smelling that smell in the past, hoping for a flashback. Home? School? Work somewhere? Someone's home? I have no idea and it bugs the hell out of me each year.

I'm tempted to spritz a sample to bring home and make all my friends and family smell it to see if they recognise it. I really wish I knew where that damned smell was from.

With all the things going on in the world at the moment, the 'Most Shared' article on the BBC news site right now is an article about a man, and a horse, and a jail sentence. That's all I'm saying.

I identify very strongly with this but it's not a way to become popular in this world:

Old joke: Economist and non-economist are strolling in Manhattan. When they pass Carnegie Hall, the non-economist says wistfully to the economist, "You know, I’ve always wanted to learn to play the piano." The economist replies "obviously not."

I have an anecdote along these lines that was something of an eye-opener for me. But since I have exams looming, it'll have to wait.

Anyhoo, the source of that quote is well worth reading.

It's been a lovely week. I've been on study leave. I was quite diligent with some long-outstanding chores and made sure I was up to date with current affairs and had deep thoughts about current affairs and blogged some stuff and got a bit of studying done on the side. It's been a lovely week.

I am not in favour of sharing too much info with Facebook, but if you explicitly agree to give away your data and are not being misled then caveat subscriptor, if you ask me. Some dude from Sophos disagrees:

Right now Facebook is not obliged to force its users to understand what they are signing up to.

How do you "force" someone to understand what they are signing up to?

It reminds me of one of my favourite Simpsons clips:

These are various points on the bonus brouhaha.

• It's inconsistent that many of the people who get most upset if you point out that incentives matter when it comes to social welfare, unemployment benefits, free medical care, schooling, etc, are the quickest to condemn bankers' bonuses because of the 'risks.' You can't have it both ways.

• Incentive is one thing, how much impact it had is another. So far there's little evidence and what has been found is contradictory or goes against the 'conventional wisdom' entirely (read the paper and chase that citation around Google scholar for a bit if you don't believe me - for example this and this and this). The point is not that bonuses aren't bad or dangerous, just that the anti-bonus brigade's certainty is not justified and at least a chunk of the evidence points to them being plain wrong.

• People hear the word 'bonus' and then the brain stops working. If you're earning 20k a year and get a 40k annual bonus, noone would say you're earning 20k a year, you're earning 60k. If you only get a 10k bonus the year after, you've taken a 30k pay cut. How many other labour markets have that much price variability?

• I'll bet most people who moan about bankers have no idea what bankers actually do. I'll bet half the 'bankers' earning big bonuses have no clue what the other half do. And if you don't know, you can't even begin to pretend to have an informed opinion about whether a person is worth their (annual) income or not.

• The only people who should have an opinion are shareholders. Shareholders get the profits helped by a good bonus policy (whatever that is) and should bear the losses incurred by a bad bonus policy (whatever that is). If shareholders don't like their company's bonus system but lack the power to change it, then that's something that should be fixed. But then the problem isn't bankers, it's the government's lousy company law, and the government can and should fix it.