A group of EITMers, including me, went to the zoo on Wednesday, and I took about a bazillion photos. It was fun, although I’m not sure I’ve recovered yet from the 4+ miles of walking I did that day (the bulk of it to and from the zoo from the northwest corner of the WashU campus).

A few of my fellow EITMers and I went to see the last performance of Much Ado About Nothing in Forest Park last night. I’d never seen Shakespeare set in the Wild West before, but it worked somehow. However, my reward for seeing Shakespeare was a mosquito bite on my scalp which has been bothering me all day.

I’d plan on taking some antihistamine, but if tomorrow is like today was I’d be out like a light—it probably didn’t help that the afternoon included a 90-minute lecture that could be basically summed up in a sentence as “econometric models that are misspecified and have omitted variables are incorrect in really bad ways, so don’t do that.” Perhaps it was a useful refresher for those who have forgotten the Gauss-Markov assumptions, but it did less for me in my insufficiently-caffeinated state.

∂x/∂θ = Chris’ head exploding. I’m pretty sure the last time I did any serious calculus was about 13 years ago; today I got to reacquaint myself with the chain rule and the product rule (at least I could remember how to partially differentiate polynomials). I may have to go to Borders, pick up Calculus for Dummies, and hide it under my desk (so as not to embarrass myself in front of the young whipper-snappers in the room) if this keeps up.

I got my Express Mail refund today, although it took at least 30 minutes out of my life at the Clayton post office. On the upside, I did pick up some of those fancy Jamestown 41¢ stamps while I was there, as well as having the rather amusing experience of seeing someone who had brought in at least 20 first-class letters stamped with both a 39-cent stamp and a Forever stamp.

After the postal service ordeal, I ate lunch at Lampert’s Plush Pig BBQ on Forsyth, which was reasonably good although a bit pricey (Hog Heaven in Daytona was substantially better).

EITM today was nicely bifurcated; I understood everything this morning (basically a review of mathematical statistics through Bayes’ Theorem) but a lot less this afternoon (basically a review of game theory through comparative statics), although my vague recollections of my undergrad calculus and differential equations helped somewhat. Lesson of the day: I probably should have crammed in a game theory class at ICPSR.

I also learned today that walking back home from the Metrolink station in the middle of summer at 4:45 pm while carrying a full backpack is not very much fun. Tomorrow’s plan: park and ride, the environment be (partially) damned.