the october rains have arrived, and london is starting to resemble the sopping wet mess i expected it to be.

it's not that bad... when you sleep at 2 and have to wake up the next day to go for early class, you're always not really awake. until you step out and it's raining and the wind blows in your face, then you just want to keep running along. or turn back into hall, but that's a wimp's option.

occasionally you can say it's fall now, and it's just rain. the leaves are falling, and turning a bit orange.

also went for a boat party... decided it would be interesting after i have been cooping up so long trying to write ONE essay. (you really do lose it don't you). took us all the way to greenwich, where the laser curved across the thames, following the curvature of the earth. and the thing about boat parties, is once you get on, you can't get off so you might as well enjoy yourself=)

classes are fun, i have half decent tutors who'll do their best (together with their usual eccentricities). i'm done with pre and post war economic convergence comparisons. next week i've one of my favourite topics in economic history: "does geography matter?" i think i'll base my term paper on that. i started reading "guns, germs and steel" just for background knowledge, and it's riveting how 120 spanish on horses massacred 7000 incans at cajamarca (they stopped at 7000 because it was time for dinner), and would later win 4 more major battles each at odds 500 to 1. poor things, occasionally they figured that it would be better to be in narrow valleys where the effects of cavalry are negated, but once the spanish took it to the plains they were always going to be fodder. and when you listen to their offensive religiosity you can't help but think, god, no wonder they needed guns or no one would have let them be their neighbours. but that's all long ago... and isn't the world so unfair? nice guys do finish last. pizarro was a bastard, he demanded a 20 by 15 by 7 foot room of gold for king atahualpa, and the incans, having taken 8 months to fulfill his order, with much integrity delivered it to pizarro, who then took liberty to execute the heathen king! by then it was too late, bronze weapons aren't going to cleave through chain mail and i'm sorry but i have horse and swords and artillery pieces but you don't. and why? because the incans happened to be on the wrong continent(simplistic, but let's try to defend the assertion).

and i think currently research is quite hot on geography, especially as sachs and acemoglu are trying to show that geography does affect development, and of course with the bewitching power of statistics you can have interesting facts like, correlation between landlocked countries and growth, distance from the sea etc...

maths is also riveting! finally there's a nice formal framework for everything and its fascinating when the lecturer goes on about trivial solutions and wanders off to show how leontief's input-output model works. but sometimes the students don't give the lecturers enough respect and i think sometimes they feel quite insulted by the reception.