I like it when you're talking to someone. And you're agreeing with each other about something that people don't often agree on. So you've found someone with the same unusual sorts of ideas that you happen to have. And so you talk. And then they say something which suddenly seems strange. And you're not sure if you've just misunderstood what they just said, or if you've misunderstood all the stuff they'd said before it. You're trying to work it out, and trying to think of a polite way of checking which it is.

And then they say "But of course, that's not really true...", or they suddenly laugh at you wryly. Or the conversations twists back around into the direction it was heading, and the kink it had just been on makes sense. And you realise that you still agree on the odd sort of thing you're talking about.

Not only do you understand them when they are making sense, but you understand them when they aren't. And vice versa. That is something I love.

I blogged about people saying "just" all the time when they pray. I thought it was strange, and a bit funny. I didn't think anyone else noticed it, and felt kind of cynical. But Lauren noticed it too and she's a proper Christian, so she's allowed to talk about that sort of thing.

Yay, yay and yay! I got a Google Mail account. Dave found a thing, and told Andy, who told me. I now I've got one. It's so tops. And so fast, and so completely, unbelievably less crap than poor old Hotmail.

Fi has joined us at the Bog.

Teksolution have heaps better on-hold music than us. Ours is crappy Triple J music, all mono. Dodgy as hell through this tinny earphone plug cable.

While sitting here having a lovely conversation with Haley, I decided to work out why James' blog wasn't showing up on blogfeed. And of course, I'm sure you all guessed it, it was a blogger content type encoding problem. Silly blogger.

I'm Finished with a capital "f". Oh my word the yayness. I'm very glad. The exam wasn't even that bad. Though my 2 hours was about 5 hours too few. I don't reckon I did that topsly, but prolly good enough to pass. I went in early to cram with Ali, but we didn't. It was still good but.

At the end I was so over the moon, that I walked to Central while listening to Blonde on Blonde. Just tops.

Yay. They finally posted our marks. But boo, I got a crap one. It sucks when you put no effort into one thing and heaps into another thing, but you get the same mark for both.

The good thing is, if I go crap tomorrow in the exam, it's not going to bring down my average.

I should be grateful that my second mark went up at all. It's two whole points higher, breaking into the brave new world of upper-middle mediocrity.

Gee whiz. My HD average dropped to a credit average without so much as a cheeky wink.

Why is it that I do well in the non-writing bits of uni, and crappily in the writing bits? Especially when 47% of my university is ESL.

Karl Popper is the bomb I reckon. Everyone bags him because they say he's just a positivist. From what I've read he isn't at all, and he's happy with a small, very sensible sort of proposition. If I've read it right, he basically said that instead of saying "facts" are things we know to be true, let's call facts things that could be proven wrong, but no one has been able to prove wrong.

So a theory makes some claim. It describes ways in which that claim is predictive and describes events that would prove the theory wrong were they to occur. Then everyone runs off to their laboratories and telescopes and does their best to prove it wrong. If no one can, then you can tentatively call it a fact. It doesn't mean that something is right, only that so far no one has shown that it's wrong. Which seems very good sort of assumption to make.

Self perpetuating oligarchies who feed on their own young

This is the title of a chapter in the paper I'm currently reading. It is amusing for me.

I'm broke.

Someone did a study, I think not that long ago. In that study they asked people how they rated their own ability to relate to other people. 80% of people said they were better than average at relating. I'm worse than average. I suspect much much worse. I don't know how to do it. And I'm not good at it.

I like economics so much because it's one of the only ways I reckon I can help people without having to be good at relating to them. I guess that's the stereotype isn't it.

On the up side, Jem bought a mushroom house today. We're going to have buckets and buckets of mushrooms for 8 whole weeks.

Man oh man. I sure found out. I counted up the marks I thought I'd probably got. 32 out of 60. If I get 29 then I fail the subject. So that sucks.

I forgot everything. I walked into the room and couldn't remember at all. The exam wasn't even hard. They were nearly all questions I could have fairly easily done the day before. I got much harder questions of the same sort right in the mid-session exam. I couldn't even find the answer to the simplest of simple annuity dudes.

On the up side, I was able to eavesdrop on an absolutely hilarious conversation on the bus on the way home.

And I almost talked to the girl. But didn't again.

My bruised-from-frisbee-diving ribs are really sore today. I'll go get a bandaid I reckon.

It doesn't take very many weeks of being lazy, to make a waste of all the other weeks of unlaziness. I think I'm going to find that out first hand tomorrow morning at 8:45am. I've spent the last 12 hours straight trying to work out what has been going on in lectures the last 4 weeks. I'm still only vaguely sure.

Now I've got 6 hours sleep before I have to hop on a train. God bless sleep.

According to the Oxford Latin to English dictionary, the word fides means all these things.

• allegiance
• reliance
• guarantee
• loyalty
• fidelity
• faithfulness
• engagement
• dependence
• promise
• truth
• trust
• honour
• conscientiousness
• authenticity
• faith
• warrant

Which I reckon makes it a pretty good word to use for non-religious civil unions. I'm not sure how you'd create all the extra adjectives and verbs from it. Maybe Rach can do that part. Everything I think of sounds silly.

fidet, fiderite, fidate.

Needs some work.

Frisbee tonight. I haven't played for three weeks now, and it was good to be back. I didn't play super hot shit, but I did some good dives. And now I've got rocks in my arm and bloody grazes on my knees. I did two dramatic dive-falls. And they were both useful even.

I dropped it lots of other times, and threw a crapload of crap throws.

But we won, despite me.

My economics exam today was a bit nasty. Lots of vague theoretical questions. Won't do great, but I reckon I'll pass it.

On an even less lively note, I wish I was better at being normal.

I reckon we need a new word for marriage. Let the church keep it, and just invent a new one that means "publically aknowledged, legally recognised commitment to a consenting adult partner for life". They good just update their laws with the new word. And since most of the authors and journalists are liberals anyway they might start using the new word. The church would be happy, because "marriage" is still unblemished by the horrors of equality. And gay folk could participate in an institution that over time would come to mean far more than church-endorsed but socially-sidelined marriage. Everyone's a winner!

I think it's odd how important humour is too me, and I think to lots of people. You might have nothing much in common with someone except your sense of humour, but it will seem like a lot. And yet there are other people, who you have heaps in common with but don't laugh so much with, who you think are very different. A sense of humour, and the ability to fart the alphabet, are good and important. But are they really that important? I think I would like to value other things more, and humour a tiny bit less.

Could you marry someone who never ever laughed at any of your jokes, but who was otherwise really tops?

Beth is on the Blog Bog. I don't know who you are Beth, but welcome. And Lauren has been removed until she next posts.

Gay men CAN MARRY. Just not each other. How ashamed I am to admit that my government would rather legalize marijuana than legalize marriage between two loving men, or women. Haley

I love the way showers warm you up completely, all the way through. There aren't many things that can do that once you get really cold. Probably only wood fires, or I guess long enough in a warm room.

And I just checked, and only weigh 62kg. I've lost 3kg in the last few months. That's not very good. Exercise is supposed to make me more healthy.

Each was expert in a few things, ignorant about most things, offered what he could, and generally learnt more than he could teach. Donnison

I don't know who he is, but I like his sentence.

Is it possible to write about "politics" without sounding like a wanker?

I think it's funny when people quote themselves in their old books.

Who can tell it's a study day?

Reading these articles has got me to thinking about distributing research outcomes to different people. Currently we don't do it very well. Getting an idea of what sort of stuff is out there requires days/weeks/months of research, and usually another paper summarising it all.

So maybe when SOAP gets a bit more stable, someone could develop a system for categorising research. And attaching some sort of reputation system, so that all the different organisations can attach ratings and reviews of papers. So you could do a search for all the papers that the top 20% most reputable left-wing organisations gave 80% or better, and filter it by "racism" or something. And you could have a network of relationships where each stakeholder records it's view of a whole lot of other organisations as to credibility and all that jazz. So you could work out who the most secular, respected organisations are. Or a web of of all the organisations that The Economist thinks are credible. Or some combination. If you put in a list of organisations you consider good and left-wing, then you'll get back a list of reputable "left-wing" organisations, and then research papers they've done. You don't even need a system for storing the papers themselves. You could just store one or more categories, and an abstract, that a Google-like something could probably generate automatically. Then there's a centralisedish (but distributed too somehow) spot where people can record their rating of it. And all the stakeholders can publish and record their responses to it. And those responses will be taken more or less seriously depending on the organisations rating.

And I think the overhead would be low. You can have a crawler that has a list of SOAP-enabled namespace things. Which are just anyone who wants to be involved, doesn't matter who. You just have some anonymous form where people stick in their special URL. And the indexer can get everything it needs from there. Each organisation that was interested could have a light-weight SOAP server, that served out the authoritative list of publications, information about the organisation and even stuff like a database of that organisation's opinion on every other related organisation (just a number I guess).

Then your Google-like crawler could be given a kick in its SOAP bum whenever stuff changed, and it could go and reindex. You don't need much of a critical mass, because organisations can use the super-duper search engine on their own site, so it's in their own interests to do it, even if there's no one else doing it yet. And people who are looking for things will see that some publisher is using this new Google-like thing, and think "Gee, that sounds good, I'll go see what it is". And then they can go somewhere and search for lots of other things as well as what they were just searching for.

Oh dear, I'm such a geek. Now I really have to go study.

I reckon that the government should subsidise the salaries of press secretaries for all our independent commissions and research organisations. I suspect there's a natural distrust of media people in those fields, and it would be good if they had more of them. They need people who are good at making boring research seem interesting. And that's hard so they'll need to pay people a lot to do it. So it won't happen unless the government pays for some of it.

I know what's right, so the government should listen to me.

Oh, and Chris taught me Go last night. It's so hard. But heaps fun. He was helping me a lot with my moves. And then accidentily helped me to beat him.

I feel like one of those bald and bearded martial arts experts in American-Asian films. They're always playing Go.

I've been reading about reading about rational actors or some such today. Apparently there's a paradigm or a model for political analysis called "The Rational Actor Model" which has gone out of fashion recently. People seem to prefer "The Bureaucratic Dynamic Model" and "The Political Process Model". I can't remember what their proper names are, but that's the jist of them.

So people are saying that the rational actor model doesn't work because not all decisions are made by individuals, or by entities with a unified agenda. That's true, but it doesn't mean that assuming rational actors is a bad idea. The rational actor model seems to be an abstracted superset of the other two. The other two talk about "process outcomes" and "political resultants" as the "units of analysis". Which is fair enough. But they aren't operating on the same level. The rational actor model, I think, is assuming that those outcomes and resultants (whatever that means) will tend to be rational in general. Which seems quite a reasonable assumption, especially in the case of big, effective institutions like governments. Governments tend to last for a long time and would be replaced by an alternative if they didn't come up with good (which I guess tend to also be rational) decisions.

So the rational actor dooby isn't saying that bureaucratic processes and political fandangling don't play a part. All it's saying is that those models tend to result in outcomes that are safely abstracted to a simpler analysis of choices made by a unified entity. It might be interesting to go down deeper, and analyse the causal components, but it generally won't be necessary.

But who knows. These folk are way smarter than me. I'm probably just not understanding. And they use lots of big words that I don't understand. So far I don't understand "entente", "detente", "recidivist", "hermeneutic" and "phenotypical". And I've only just started. But then one of the things I enjoy most about university is how stupid it makes you feel.

This one I'm reading now talks about anyone who isn't an academic researcher as a "lay actor". The media, government and voters. How condescending is that!

I got a pretty crappo mark for my first Social Science assignment. The most crappo mark of university so far actually. But I was just looking back through it, and I realised that my tutor had put a comments page on it. And she said nice things. And I don't feel so flaky anymore.

Robert, I made the bright yellow sunflower (the one in the bottom left hand corner) change sizes if you open it in a little window. All for you. And I spent this morning doing it, instead of studying. That's how much I love you.

It was fine. And good. And even fun. I liked it. It wasn't very hard. And I had lots of time. I still could fail it but.

It's good. That should be the hardest one. Except for QMA maybe. And possibly Social Science. Micro could have some surprises as well. So.... accounting could be the easiest one too.

I reckon the best time to ask someone out on a date is right after a big exam. There's all this adrenaline everywhere because of the stress, so it's easier to build up the courage. Everyone is glad it's over, and is optimistic. And I reckon that after scary sorts of things, people are more likely to do frivolous things in their normal lives, so people would be more likely to say yes.

The good thing about asking people out somewhere before you really like them completely, is that you never get to the point of really liking them completely. So you don't have to go through the whole heart-thumping messiness and weather the awkward conversations that stray to close to home. And there's no second-guessing. And if they're good, you can still be friends with them too, because they don't have to worry so much about how you'll react. It's much more good.

Life would really be much more pleasant if people didn't ignore other people they knew. I wish you could just wave hello to anyone and everyone that you'd ever talked to or exchanged eye contact with.

Mum and I went to Chris and Carolyn's house for dinner. That was tops fun. They're good folk. They live in Cheltenham, but aren't much like other people who live in Cheltenham. But the other day they got picked as a sample family for the CPI indexes for the area. It's going to stuff up their stats. Those poor public servant economists won't know what's gone wrong.

I've stuck pretty good guns to my poverty so far. But there've been a few breakages:

• Going out with Andy, Bob, Ben and Liz for Supersize Me
• Bought Kettle chips for lunch (I'd done this once before, and I forgot that it was before I'd started the poverty budget)
• Contributing money to a fund I suspected/knew would be used for wedges buying
• Buying a vegie-burger and V yesterday in the afternoon

I agreed with myself not to use MSN for a week for the first one. Not sure about the second one. With the third one, I figured that I wasn't doing anyone any favours if I failed my degree because I hadn't eaten enough during my study times, and there wasn't a supermarket. But the whole point was to force me to bring food from home, which I have mostly done up until now. It's been a boring month so far.

The earthspin just then was so unbelievably-tastic pink and good. It only lasted for a few moments. Now there's nothing at all. Grandma rang at 7am to ask us a question about Iana or something. It was mildly annoying for about 2 seconds, and then I looked out the window and saw the sunrise. Then it was all good. Yay for the colour pinky-bluey-purpley-grey. It's one of the prettiest I think.

Then I cleaned up some poo. I had to wash my hands after. But the water was so cold that I had to go jump back in bed to warm back up my hands. I got up 5 minutes later with warm hands but no sunrise. I think there must be a moral to this story, because I was so disappointed when I saw it was gone. The moral might be about leaving poo-cleanup to other people.

I watched Moonlight Mile last night. It was the tits. Craphouse short (one of the worst). Tops film (one of the best). So yay for that.

I might go back to bed now I think. I have a big exam today. Three fun-filled hours.