A Veritable Cornucopia of Useless Information

So, classes have started up once again; I have only the spring, summer, and fall 2005 terms left at Dear ‘Ol Nebraska U… Anyway, I’m taking Design Studio, 2 ECON classes, and 1 FINA class. For some completely planned reason, all 3 non-DS courses have “Finance” in the course title (Public, International, and Real Estate, for the curious). Anyway, I had a random flash of insight in my Public Finance class that I thought I’d throw out there for the world to digest and comment upon:

• As any society grows at some function X (X being some extremely expansive function that measures overall socioeconomic complexity, somehow); the institutions in place to administer/regulate it (usually governmental units, but not necessarily) will generally grow at a rate that is greater than X.

I haven’t yet nailed down a rate that I can use on a regular basis, but I feel that this rate could be anything from 2X to O(x log x) to O(x^2). What do you think? Am I way off-base for even thinking of this in the first place?

The first week of 2005 has been more interesting than usual for me, as I’ve both seen people and been places. A quick recap:

New Year’s Eve, I went out to the bars with Mike and Alan; for some inexplicable reason, a decent amount of drinking was involved. We were at Bricktop for the stroke of midnight (I know, I know…but Alan appreciates the Eurotrash/hipster atmosphere of the place) and then went to a decent house party until around 5 a.m. A good start to the year, in any case.

January 2 - 4, I visited Rusty and Beermann in KC. As with the visit back in July, much eating and drinking ensued. Also, many movies were viewed. (Shaun of the Dead is one of the funniest and most clever movies I’ve seen in quite some time; I highly recommend it.) The timing of the KC trip was also fortuitous, as I was able to return to Lincoln during a relative lull in the Tuesday-Wednesday winter storms. I went grocery shopping on Wednesday; now, that was an adventure.
Thursday night, I went to the not-quite-monthly Beers Gone Wild cask event at FireWorks. The cask Imperial Stout (10% ABV)? Amazing. I also managed to meet several members of the Lincoln Lagers homebrewing club, who were very friendly and happy to share their knowledge and experience with me, so hopefully the future beers I’ll make will continue to improve.

And now, people are wandering back in to Lincoln for another semester of class, so the cycle begins once again. Life goes on, and I’ll continue to comment upon it (hopefully slightly more often, to boot).