Les Bonnes Choses

Well, it's now all over but the crying. I still have some revisions to do, though I have no idea what they might be, as I have yet to meet with Ken. I've been home these last few days with the flu, you see. But I'm not here to complain about that.

Instead, I'll complain that I feel pretty-much like I did at the beginning of the week. I'm a dot-your-i's and cross-your-t's sort of person, so until I hand in the final revised version of my dissertation, I have not fulfilled the requirements for the PhD. And then there's the technical "graduation in absentia" in February, when my degree is technically conferred. It isn't until the June convocation that I get my pomp-and-circumstance and the official paper, suitable for framing. That reminds me, I still have to find out whether I ever did pick up my MA degree from the registrar's office. I hope I didn't, otherwise I seem to have lost it. Come to think of it, I don't know where my BA degree from '97 is either. I hope that isn't taken as an indication of how much I value all the work I have done since 1993.

I'd like to write some essays, or somesuch. It seems like I now have the authority to spout off on any random topic. Lately, I have been wanting to get my head around greed, as the backbone of capitalism. I agree with hardcore capitalists that greed and self-interest should be the gas that fuels the economy, mostly because it's probably the only human behaviour we can actually rely on. I do think measures should be in place to check it, however. Mostly, it's the wage disparity that bugs me because, consistent with the capitalist ideal (I think), I believe in meritocracies. Are CEOs exponentially more capable than the lowest level employees of the companies that they run? Why are they paid exponentially more? When I analyze error-rate data, I first transform the error rates by taking their square root. It pulls in outlier values. For example, the difference between 1 and 100 is 99. The difference between the square roots of these numbers is 9. Just thinking outside of the box.