ec102 lecture reminded me of a macworld conference. about a 1000 people, into this theatre, two huge projector screens projecting whatever models are meant to learnt on the day. a lecturer with pressed shirt, jeans and trainers enthusiastically bundling up and down stage, speaking with loads of energy. everything struck me as pretty american... much more american than i've experienced in my 3 years in london.

well, it extends to the course as well. no more relying on past exam papers. everything's going to be theoretically more tractable (less technical), but the questions are going to be different every year. better for creative and critical thinking, they say.

meanwhile, stephen fry has gone on the record as saying he's migrating to america. he thinks europeans make fun of midwestern americans too much without going over and really understanding what they're like in the country (generally nice, according to him).

at the same time, @ leveragedsellout.com comments you see some of the most hilarious comments imaginable. it reminds me of the comments you get when you've been playing starcraft over the internet when you're 13.

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have had a little more time recently after the mad rush that was the september course.

for lse alumni, they'll be interested to know that the new academic building is indeed very new, and is one of those buildings which actually looks up to par with a modern city campus building, ala SMU. gated entry etc... looks fantastic.

in an older corner of the school, brunch bowl has been rather stunningly revamped. very beautiful, clean place, same food though. there are also two rooms in the old building where there is a touch screen whiteboard. you project the stuff onto the whiteboard, the grid on the whiteboard figures what you're touching and clicks accordingly.

Will be doing MRes Metrics this year, the lecturer graciously agreed that I might be bored with the regular Methods of Economic Investigation. Well, the first five weeks are not as important to me, it's basically probability and mathematical statistics built up more rigorously using set and measure theory (like learning grammar). But I'm glad I get to learn different estimation methods, particularly methods which are more amenable to computation.