Sam Altmann

This is pretty tough reading ngl

I’VE BEEN HAVING A TERRIBLE MORNING

On this day, of all days, make sure to check in on your gullible friends.

It can be a difficult time of year for us.

I’m personally grieving that my old school friend isn’t actually getting married next month. I really hoped him and that lady he met on holiday would go the distance :(

Econ PhD students and Postdocs!!!

Make sure you submit your papers to the QMUL workshop - the deadline to submit is next Friday. We’ve got some great keynotes! :)

And don’t believe the rumours about London weather in May. I hear it’ll be glorious and sunny.

A little pasta (Farfalle, artistically shot)

I made a little pasta

Please appreciate my little pasta

*or just, y’know, Smith tbh

Marking exams, and I’m kinda dismayed at how many times I’ve read “firms are maximising profits, therefore social welfare is maximised” :/

Guess I really need to channel Marx* harder in my IO lectures next year…

Hi - I suspect you might want the other Sam Altman (who I don’t think is on bsky, or at least not yet).

I’m much less interesting!

Three postdocs positions (36 months each) are available in the School of Geography at QMUL; all working on a great ERC project on the dark side of green energy (waste, labour rights, etc) with Dr Carlo Inverardi-Ferri.

Please share!

qmul-jobs.tal.net/vx/mobile-0/...

I know a lot of Harvard’s course material is all accessible online.

Otherwise both the Open University and Open Yale Courses have modules in GT - I suspect there are others as well.

One thing to look out for is that sometimes GT is taught from the maths/OR departments, other times from economics.

Eg:

Game Theory: A very short introduction (Ken Binmore)

The Art of Strategy (Dixit and Nalebuff)

Game theory: a critical introduction (Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis) -> this one has more conceptual discussion in it.

(These were all on our reading list)

For more advanced content…

Honestly, that course really isn’t worth your time - it was more setting students up for modules later in the degree.

There are some very good introductory books (and more advanced books) I’d recommend instead…

Hi, what questions do you have?

That course was an undergraduate game theory module I taught some years back. The Dropbox link was specifically just to some revision material for the students to help them prepare for the exam, hence no documentation.

An adorable sketch of a mole in hat n gloves looking wistfully (?) at the snowman he’s just made

Please enjoy this happy little mole on a discarded scrap of paper my mother-in-law doodled.

She is very talented.

A solution to the Onion Problem of J. Kenji López-Alt Kenji López-Alt posed a mathematical problem on his YouTube channel about how to best cut an onion. I present a detailed solution.

Someone sent me a great article combining two things I spent a disproportionate amount of time doing - Chopping onions, and Multivariate Calculus: medium.com/@drspoulsen/...

About how to cut onions to ensure all the pieces are as close to uniform size as possible.

I love this stuff

A single missing jigsaw piece found lying on the pavement.

Spare a thought for the poor souls that dropped this. I can only imagine their pain :(

Now that’s just fighting dirty…