1. Honestly, I had mixed feeling when I saw the TV coverage on Saddam capture Sunday morning. I always hate him (as much as I do to Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, and Milosevic). There was a relief in me knowing that he's going to pay for what he had been doing to the Iraqis. This man is powerful, yet evil. But, when the camera showed him in that Karl Marx look but with deemed eyes, he looked so powerless. Fine, he's paying up. Then it was shown how the US officer "checking on his health condition". This is when I felt something bothering me. Why do the media show that to the word? Is it just me: or is it not anywhere in Geneva convention or whatever that enemy should not be humiliated in public? But maybe I was wrong.... Another thing: what if that scene invites even more misundestanding, more bloodshed?
So to make long story short, I was having coffee this morning at Panera. I picked up USA Today, and came across this piece by Stan Weintraub. He can't describe what I felt better.

2. The day as it finishes: Breakfast: Panera's hazelnut coffee plus choc croissant. Lunch: Indomie plus sun chips and two tangerines. Dinner: mackerel, salad, salsa plus chips. Readings: DI (a story of local taxi driver), NYT (Krugman on Halliburton-Cheney scandal in Iraq), Morey and Rossman 2003. Work: Consulted with Rossman of BSC. She sent her Gauss code for bootstrapping confidence intervals. Simulating main effects plus attitudinal variables in one set, letting the environmental parameters to be randomly drawn from normal distributions. Got frustrated with Excel (it can only handle 254 variables!). Music: Armstrong-Ellington-Bechet. Bads: Got ticketed for illegal parking (oh, $20). Others: Today is 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers invention (Google logo is cute).