Denouement

"It is criminal to steal a purse, daring to steal a fortune, a mark of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases." -- Schiller

I was sitting in the City Cafe (accent intended) Bakery (held in slightly-above-average esteem by the professor who brought Waterloo's CS frosh such delights as Scheme), taking a quick breakfast with my brother; this quote was written on their blackboard. City Cafe is an economic enigma. They have no cashiers, opting instead for a self-serve honour-system model; you deposit your payment into a bus fare box (Cleveland Transit, I'm told, although I've never verified this) before leaving.

Question of the day: why does this work? By traditional economic theories, the dominant strategy is to eat and run. One theory holds that this is a form of the tit-for-tat strategy: the City Cafe Bakery places trust in its customers, who then feel compelled (perhaps because reciprocity helps maintain social norms) to pay. Another possibility is that the players are maximizing self-interest according to a different payoff function. There might be quantifiable reward in keeping the bakery open or in appearing honest to one's friends. (It is notable that customers often leave tips - maybe it is psychologically easier to tip when the register and tip jar are combined into one receptacle!) There is also the novelty factor; by following an unorthodox business model, they generate a certain amount of word-of-mouth buzz.

(According to Schiller, your best strategy is to grab everything in the bakery and run - that way, you minimize blame!)

Denouement (again, accent intended) comes from the French noeud for knot; the literal translation is "unknotting". I'll leave that open to interpretation.

On a More Personal Note

My posts have been fairly tech/rant-heavy over the last while, so I figured I'd take a breather and bring everyone up to date on, well, me.

I've been madly posting to the PKCC sessions and regional talk, doing my part to help revive the Ottawa parkour scene. Yesterday, fainjoe (one of the PKCC regulars) and I paid a visit to the Ottawa Gymnastics Centre for their open gym session; apparently this is where all the traceurs are hiding, and no wonder - there's plenty of equipment and floor space to play around with. I'm confident that we can turn this into a cohesive and highly active group again. In the meantime, I'll be hitting up OGC and Vertical Reality (thanks for the tip, fainjoe!) as much as possible, aiming for my (possibly foolhardy) term goal of 5 consecutive muscle-ups.

Aside from that, I've been trying to knock all those menial but necessary items off my to-do list - things like filing taxes (in both the US and Canada!), making sure I can graduate on time (despite my propensity for taking the hardest classes possible), and finally firing off some essential emails. Not so exciting, but it will be nice once I have these weights off my shoulder.

I did manage to come up with a decent approach to my current project at NRC. I could tell you what it is, but - well, you know.

I'll be in Indiana for the last weekend in April - prepare your lynch mobs now, Hoosiers! As we Canadian pirates say, ehhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!