because 2.5 years isn't enough

you know, i'm not very sure that cp poor lamb is quite appropriate, considering that said 'lamb' is pes c9l2 and excused just about everything short of taking shallow breaths. but then again, i'm probably bitter because the gahmen has apparently caught up with me as well, and is summoning me to return my exit permit (yes, i kept it) next week. brr. how long after that do they call you up for ict?

Question:

Is Borshch soup supposed to have potatoes in it?

overnight

-- in the lab for the first time on Thursday, looking after a veteran volunteer who has been through four of our studies. Being here at night is more pleasant than I figured it would be, mostly because a chunk of the time isn't actually spent working (Yeah, and those backdated entries just wrote themselves).

happy turkey day!

if you have something to give thanks for, do.

if you don't have anything to give thanks for, you're probably in the civil service.

7.08

i was trying to explain to someone on im what a moo point is, and managed to locate the original exchange:

Joey: All right, Rach. The big question is, "does he like you?" All right? Because if he doesn't like you, this is all a moo point.
Rachel: Huh. A moo point?
Joey: Yeah, it's like a cow's opinion. It just doesn't matter. It's moo.
Rachel: Have I been living with him for too long, or did that all just make sense?

heh.

neal stephenson

Finished Quicksilver. Don't really see why people are raving over it. It's not terribly elegant, and granted, while it is clever, I've since given up on authors who are smart but don't have much else to show for it (cf. Salman Rushdie). The problem now is that books 2 and 3 are sitting at home, and I guess I do have to finish them seeing as book 1 wasn't terrible. This is how I kill myself.

home. backdated entries to follow.

Penn

Philadelphia, PA

Ok, so Columbia? That's how you put a university in a city.

Spent most of the morning with JJ in radiology talking about labeling planes and positioning issues in ASL, and trying to sell our new experimental idea to him as a check that we're not being complete morons. He liked it. I hope he wasn't just being polite.

Was brought up to see David Dinges (aka The Man Himself tm WC) at 11, only to be shooed away by his PA because he was already triple-booked for the slot. Rebooked appointment for 2 pm, then cleverly went and bought myself chicken fajitas stuffed to bursting so that I could spill salsa all over my t-shirt.

2 pm: Ultra-brief meeting with DD: TMH, details unpublishable, ask me if curious. Short tour of sleep lab. The rest of the day was round the campus on my own and perched in Starbucks with gingerbread and latte trying to write.

And in the evening there was beer.

Greyhound ride

-- from DC to Philadelphia with Simon and Garfunkel in my head and Take 6 on the iPod; sunset in Baltimore, and only a phone number on a half-torn piece of paper for when I get there. That's living.r

cont'd

wednesday

24. nothing much happens really.

25.1. h.y. has us for dinner, and his wife and kid tag along. i spend the entire journey to silver spring listening to their one-year-old daughter telling me that "we're going to go mum-mum". what starts out as "precocious" quite quickly degenerates into "annoying as all hell". but you know how i feel about kids.

25.2. it's "chinese" again. the restaurant is zagat-rated, and i'm beginning to think that that's a sham. (am i right von?)

25.3. the more i eat, the more i realise that all i really want is a $2 bowl of lor mee with heaping amounts of garlic, vinegar and chili.

25.4. on the journey back, h.y.'s daughter is still of the opinion that "we're going to go mum-mum". i try to disillusion her, but she's most adamant.

26. i don't win the lottery.

cont'd

tuesday

17.1. the boss wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to go for a run.

17.2. dissatisfied with just that, he also makes a bloody twenty-minute long-distance call back to singapore to make absolutely sure there is no possible way i could still be asleep.

18. i sit in on jamie and michelle's presentations. i worked with them back when i was in biac, so even though i'm not really into social cognition any more i go out of a sense of loyalty. the talks are good.

19. there's not much else in the way of neuroscience for the day.

20. the boss grabs me to explore chinatown. everything is tacky to the nth power. we eat in a little hole-in-the-wall place that's supposed to be one of the best bargains in washington dc. admittedly, for $4.95, the bowls of noodles are big - it's quite frightening to think how much msg goes into each one though. we also have duck that is 100% skin, and vegetables that have been boiled into submission.

21.1. i've been worrying about accommodation for when i visit penn for a while now (actually, since a week before, when i asked cp if we still know anyone there (answer:no)). things get a little worse today when i find out that rooms near the school are either (a) taken, or (b) cost $200++++ a night.

21.2. i e-mail the ssa. one edward wee replies to say that he'll ask around. his email signature is the ocs creed. my hopes flag.

21.3. my boss rescues me. i'm going to be shining his shoes for the rest of my life. his very first ra is a penn grad who's still working there and who lives right on the outskirts of campus. things are put into motion.

22.1 at the drugstore, while looking for chapstick, i decide on impulse to buy a powerball ticket. 8 20 28 37 54 and 24

22.2 the odds against winning, incidentally, really suck. 1:146,107,962? i mean, come on.

23. house is on. the week's episode is, coincidentally, about drugs and performance enhancement. i rediscover the fact that hugh laurie really is awesome. do you still have season 1, su-lin?

(tbc)

cont'd

monday

13. the boss wakes up at 4:30 to go for a run

14.1. we meet stefan and geoff for lunch. geoff's a student in ucl who did a short internship in our lab over the summer. he paid his own way to sfn, and managed, in a week when accommodation was booked more solid than bethlehem at yuletide, to find a room in a cheap-ass international hostel. this would have been totally great except for the fact that it burned to the ground on sunday night. he got out in time and managed to rescue his passport, but the rest of his stuff was in cinders. this should not really be amusing, but somehow, it kind of is.

[i go conveniently deaf as fs tells me that there's a lesson to be learned here]

14.1.1. apparently his stuff would have been ok, except that the firemen had to hack through the floor of his room to get to the flames, which meant that everything upstairs ended up very much not.

14.2. a very deep discussion of ica and artifact removal ensues. i give up about 10 minutes in and start meditating on a far more engaging issue: if lost is such a crappy show, why is it still consistently #5 in the nielsen's, and, more importantly, why am i still watching it?

14.3. stefan leavs to give his presentation. geoff and the boss and i get lunch. i have "chinese" "food".

15.1. the ethics of cognitive enhancement sounds like it will be a great talk, and it is, even though there is no mention whatsoever about the recent issues with dope tests in the acbl

15.2. the speaker is thomas murray. he talks about how immeasurably difficult it is to talk about ethics when it comes to cognition, because (a) we don't yet have a good framework for where the lines should be drawn, and (b) whether cognitive enhancement is "right" is highly situational (no one's going to crucify you for drinking coffee before an exam, for example)

15.3. he ends with an incredibly sad story. his daughter was murdered a few years ago, and he talks about how (obviously) that cut to the bone. he goes on to tell us about this drug for ptsd victims that lessens the subjective feeling of trauma -- and how, for all the money in the world -- he wouldn't have taken it if he had been offered it at the time, because the pain - though agonizing - was necessary to honour the memory of his child. that dulling it would somehow have been robbing himself of all-important, healing grief. my granite heart is moved, just a little bit.

16.1. dinner with geoff, josh, h.y. (a singaporean psychiatrist working in nih) and two random grad students/freeloaders. it's supposed to be a lab outing, but it really isn't. my boss asks me to book the place. steakhouses call out my name, but i resist mightily.

16.2. we end up in a very decent seafood place (i'll pop the name in here when it comes to me). it's the first ok-ish meal i've had since landing, and i tuck into my crabs with gusto. there are also $5 martinis and plenty of chardonnay, and i don't even care that some people at the table think that singapore is the BEST. PLACE. ON. EARTH.

16.3. it's a very good advertisement for why i should be intoxicated, like, all the time. i'd get along so much better with everyone.

16.4. we walk back to the hotel. geoff has managed to get one of his colleagues to let him crash at his hotel room. we pass the capitol, splendidly lit, and take about a zillion pictures, most of them slightly out of focus.

(tbc)

cont'd

sunday

8. the boss wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to go for a run.

9.1. the nearest church is four blocks away. everyone at mass is
(i) italian-american
(ii) above fifty years of age and
(iii) dressed immaculately

meanwhile, there's me, cowering in a corner in yellow timberland shirt and levis jeans. for the second time in as many days, buddhism's appeal ratchets up a notch.

9.2. the sermon, as it usually is in the weeks running up to advent, is highly eschatological. this does not help matters one bit.

10. back at the conference, i strike up a conversation with someone from tononi's lab. we have a fascinating discussion about sleep spindles. i actually learn something. somewhere in hell, a snowball thinks: 'wow, this must be my lucky day'

11.1. we have dinner with ex-lab-josh, denise park, three of her RAs, and two other random people. e-l-j started on his phd in uiuc a couple of months ago, and has already acquired (a) an american accent, (b) the suggestion of a goatee and (c) intellectual airs.

11.2. denise spends 20 minutes talking about her bichon frises (bichons frise?). the conversation turns towards various gastronomic catastrophes that people have experienced in china and other places that serve cat.

11.3. we discuss christopher guest and john berendt. no one has actually been to savannah.

11.4. i have the duck pate, swordfish, and orange cake. it's adequate, and once again, i'm awfully glad that i'm not paying.

12.1. somewhere in all this mess, i manage to squeeze in the walking tour of dc. i've done this before, but with company, and i do like rambling about on my own. the weather is impossibly beautiful for november - after a point i don't even need a jacket. i walk the triangle that has vertices at the capitol, the washington monument and the white house (ridiculous security there, even though dubya was out of town).

(tbc)

a little bit of something very cute

aww

They cancelled Arrested Development. That sucks so much I can't even find the words. Sob. I shall go don midnight.

(Edited on 17/11 to say that it hasn't been cancelled yet -- they reduced the ep. order to 13. Basically, it's on ALS. I'm going to write a strongly worded letter.)

the conference

Washington DC

0.1. backdated, obviously. my boss has been breathing down my neck for the past 5 days, and i've been loath to blog.

0.2. i'll try to get through this with a minimum of technobabble, because that's just boring (for you, anyway).

saturday

1.1. in the grand tradition of american excess, the convention center is beyond huge. 30,000 neuroscientists coverge on it early morning, and miraculously, there are not only no traffic jams, but there's enough coffee for everyone. talk about your five loaves and two fishes.

1.2. and i mean huge. they use the main hall to test jumbo jet turbines.


2. i almost immediately run into my boss hobnobbing with allen song, a genius who apparently keps turning down multi-million dollar grants because he likes duke so much. or something. he gave us a lecture on mr physics once which went so far over our heads they couldn't even catch the pitch in the stands. i tell him as much. he does not remember me.


3. there's FREE INTERNET access everywhere. they've covered the convention center with one enormous wi-fi dome so powerful it extends two blocks in every direction outside the building. i say a silent prayer of thanks to the gods of technology


4.1. the poster displays cover an area about the size of two football fields, but only about an eighth of that is cognitive neuroscience, and of those only a fraction of studies involve fMRI/EEG/simultaneous fMRI-EEG/TMS etc. I talk to a bunch of people in d'esposito's lab to try and be cool by association even though I don't understand what they're saying half the time.

4.2. when it comes to the occasional molecular study i've been asked to go to, i'm even more overmatched. if college has taught me one thing though, it's how to nod and look intelligent even when lost in a fog of ignorance.


5. i have lunch with this one girl from scranton university. scranton is a jesuit school, as you may be aware, and she's the one person i've talked to in my life who's heard of the atom-sized college that the brother attends. i'm inwardly pleased.

5.1. she puts mustard on her fries, which i find exceedingly weird.

5.2. coincidentally enough, she's also applying to do grad school in clin psych in the university of pennsylvania.

5.3. her undergraduate thesis involves removing goldfish telencephalons to see if that evinces changes in their startle response. she's first author. i try to act nonchalant, but the green-eyed monster does a tapdance behind my eyes. i resolve to get my name on a paper - any paper - by next year march.

5.4. fine, june.


6.1. the dalai lama is the keynote speaker. he's simply adorable. i suddenly want to become buddhist all over again.

6.2. he says that he would have become a scientist had he not opted for the religious life. he speaks of wonderment and proof, of how religious teaching must bow to science if the evidence is irrefutable, but that science must respect ethics as well. he struggles with the english (there's a translator offstage who helps him through the difficult bits), but the points are made. there is much figurative hem-touching.


7.1. dinner is meatloaf. it's expensive, and kind of sucks, but my boss is paying so i stay quiet as a mouse.

(tbc)

i aten't dead, although a combination of circadian cycle offset and coffee withdrawal conspired to give me caffeine headaches at 3 in the morning (and an interesting dilemma, if you get my drift)

anyway, it's 9, and i'm full of sausage egg and cheese, and it's time to go and learn something and try not look too much of a fool.

FREE INTERNET

one can never resist blogging from FREE INTERNET. it's a fact of life.

ok. to the other side.

if i end up sitting beside of one of those ****ing americans who just can't shut their mouths for trying, i have my story all planned out. it's the kelly story: i'm the illegitimate love child of a vietnamese prostitute off to america with a faded twenty-dollar bill in my pocket to look for my long-lost identical twin. using this story has two conceivable benefits over the truth. one, my seatmate may actually shut up in bewilderment. two, s/he may be a dot com billionaire and shower me with riches unimaginable.

time for a nap.

more social psych

stanley milgram, (in)famous creator of the yale electric shock experiments, is also, incidentally, father of the small world phenomenon, which you can read about here.

also, while we're on the subject of "six degrees of separation", stockard channing* is set to leave the west wing along with dule hill and richard schiff. what's with the exodus? the show's actually getting good again.

* (who gets five stars out of five)

as always, i had a difficult time deciding what books to bring on the plane, but it shall be john banville's the untouchable, which i just pulled out of nlb, book i of the neal stephenson trilogy, which has been sitting on my shelf since the last expo book fair*, and the david foster wallace of which i have about 50 pages to go.


*su-lin knows this story. i found the system of the world and the confusion among the various piles of fiction, but, in exactly the same way that they never have book i of soseki's i am a cat on the library shelves, quicksilver was nowhere to be found. i eventually got it half off at this weird place i don't even remember the name of, and - here's the part where su-lin laughs at me- i got it in the wrong size. they have big and small versions of the paperbacks, and now i have a mismatched set which sits most awkwardly on my shelf mocking me every time i look at it. curses.

why good people do bad things

Here's a good review article on power and evil. (Zimbardo, by the way, has done some pretty amazing experiments, and is still teaching at Stanford. This addressed to the one who is there: go for his talks!)

old, but good

away on friday

had a bit of a kerfuffle over which suitcase to bring, but all that's sorted out.

if you want anything brought back, speak now, etc.

I need a copy of The Last Temptation of Christ, and it's banned in Singapore?! I'm deeply vexed. *throws it on the shopping list for next week*

(Harvey Keitel gets 8 stars out of 5)

fare thee well

evans has retired, and the two rj teachers rustled all of us up yesterday to get him a farewell dinner. this was supposed to have been a surprise, and would have been had jianyi not blurted in the middle of rashidah's hari raya party. anyway, that attempt at sabotage was ruined, and we were all at the restaurant rather nicely on time, except for yen who had to attend her grandmother's birthday party.

a couple of minutes before evans arrived, i was asking cp if it wouldn't be a bit nerve-wracking for him, what with not having seen most of us for so many years and not even remembering who we are. as it turns out, i don't think i had any recollection of what our old dynamic was when i was his student. cp constantly tells me about how much we mythologize him, and after last night i guess i have to agree. not that he's just another teacher - he always was larger than that, and that i remember - but neither is he the gentle porcupine of sardonicism that i've replaced him with over the years as the real memories faded.

there was lots of sake and good food (thanks su-lin, i've now fallen madly in love with bacon-wrapped enoki mushrooms), and conversations about rj 2005 that were a lot more interesting to listen to than usual. then there was repairing to a bar down the road for more sake and edamame and more talk of medea and larkin and the crying of lot 49 and british thespians and ecclesiastes and students protesting about being made to do dickens (never in our day!) and where all of us are, and where we are going.

so thanks to you and you for cobbling the outing together, and may-the-wind-be-at-your-back to the one who's headed back to suffolk. not all is vanity, no matter what the bible says.

From A Compact History of ?*, by David Foster Wallace

The trouble with college math classes - which classes consist almost entirely in the rhythmic ingestion and regurgitation of abstract information, and are paced in such a way as to maximise this reciprocal data-flow - is that their sheer surface-level difficulty can fool us into thinking we really know something when all we really 'know' is abstract formulas and rules for their deployment. Rarely do math classes ever tell us whether a certain formula is truly significant, or why, or where it came from, or what was at stake. There's clearly a difference between beign able to use a formula correctly and really knowing how to solve a provlem, knowing why a problem is an actual mathematical problem and not just an exercise

* this is an infinity sign, but blogger does not like it.

bake shop

I didn't even know that Singapore had stores that specialise in baking supplies till today, but Phoon Huat & Co. down Bencoolen Street has a pretty nice selection if one is in need. Ingredients are cheap, even if you don't want industrial-sized bags, and, importantly, they have molasses, which otherwise are not to be found except at Tierney's where they cost $6 a bottle.

background

you can complain all you like about the color hurting your eyes - i'm not going to change it. it conveys incarnadine perfectly.

i saw chocolate cheese in the store today. it looked singularly gross.