And #1: Most often, the winner is the guy who recognizes sciamachy when he sees it, and stops.

---

One last quote for 2006, from the insert of the latest Swingle Singers album, Unwrapped:

The last track is, appropriately enough, the arrangement with which every Swingle Singers Christmas show closes, the Japanese song Hotaru No Hikari sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne:

Hotaru no hikari mado no yuki
Fumi yomu tsukihi kasanetsutsu
Itsushiha toshi mo suginoto wo,
Aketezo kesa wa wakare yuku.

(Translation)
With the light from fireflies and the reflection from snow outside the window
We would read books for months and years;
As the years stole by
On this graduation morning we shall open the door into new years and be parted.

We were pleased to discover that in Japan the tune is widely known although the Japanese version is used in a different context. The words were orginally meant to be sung by students at graduation ceremony at the end of a hard year of study. The themes of looking back over the past and saying goodbye whilst preparing to go on to new things have meant that the song is sometimes played by restaurants as a signal to customers that the evening is over and they should go home! In Japan, it brings tears to the eyes of the audence but, whether or not we understand the precise meaning of the words, we cannot fail to be moved by its beauty.

Happy 2007!

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#2)

Graduate school is humbling, and grueling, and more daunting than almost anything else I've faced -- but right now, it's also the best thing in the world.

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#3)

-- that the world's largest organism is a giant honey mushroom in oregon covering over 2000 acres. (among many other factoids which are apparently too dull for some people)

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#4)

-- that eventually, there has to come a time when something is good enough. No, I knew this before. That it takes an incredible amount of skill to gauge the precise moment when something is just good enough, the inflection point on the curve where marginal effort meets marginal utility, when it's time to pack your bags and move on to the next thing.

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#5)

Island facts:

(1)The Faroe Islands are midway between Iceland and Norway, and are largely, though not completely self-governing.

(2) Christmas Island is not at all self-governing, and is administered by Australia, even though the country it is nearest to is Indonesia.

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#6)

rhett and scarlett don't end up together. su-lin was incredulous that I didn't know this (her: what did you think 'frankly, my dear' was all about then? me: [meekly] i thought it was somewhere in the middle?), but i would like to confess here that this is merely the tip of the vast iceberg of my ignorance about practically everything. (incid: i still have no idea of the significance of rosebud being his sled, or why kilroy was here.)

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#7)

It is possible to have an entire dinner conversation about four words. Did we ever come to a conclusion about "fearfully and wonderfully made"?

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#8)

Multiple comparisons dishonesty in science is easy, tempting, and probably rife. Let me explain. When you start any experiment, you have one, or a number of null hypotheses about the data, which you intend to reject at a significance level of 0.05 (that is to say, 1 in 20 times you will get a false positive by chance, but we consider this a small enough percentage to deem worthy of report.) Once the data are in, what often happens is that you don't find what you want, and you have to go back to the drawing board so that you haven't wasted a quarter of a million dollars. You run other regressions with plausible stories. One of them comes out significant, and you write your paper.

Now, the more tests you run on a single dataset, the higher chance you have of coming up with a false positive. There are ways of correcting for this (and if you report all the comparisons you do in a paper you have to report as well how you done the corrections), but if it's just you, sitting in the lab playing with the spreadsheet, no one has to know what you're doing. And of course, if the model is reasonable, you get published, post hoc ergo propter hoc* be damned. Now, I'm not leveling accusations at anyone in particular, but this is so easy to perpetrate that surely a great number of findings (that have not been reproduced) are just plain wrong. 1 in 10? 1 in 8? The investigation continues.

* admittedly, one should get these things right before conducting public displays of idiocy. however, see #6

From The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker:

I also liked the black Penguins because on the front page they had a biographical note about the translator that was in the same small print as the biographical note about the major historical figure he had rendered into English, a pairing that made those minor translational lives in Dorset and Leeds seem just as important as the often assassinating, catty and conspiring lives of the ancients. The Penguin translators seemed frequently to be amateurs, not academics, who had, after getting their double firsts, lived quietly running their fathers' businesses or being clergymen, and translating in the evenings - probably gay, a fair number of them: that excellent low-key sort of man who achieves little by external standards but who sustains civilization for us by knowing, in a perfectly balanced, accessible, and considered way, all that can be known about several brief periods of Dutch history, or about the flowering of some especially rich tradition of terra-cotta pipes.

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#9)

That I have a desperate need to see as much of the world as humanly possible. 6 years of bouncing around from country to country has been the primer. Cambodia was so dramatically different from anything I had really seen before that I want to be surprised more. And anyway, as the poet said, you can never go home again.

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#10)

Ronald D. Moore is a deity.

(Also: Battlestar Galactica movie after Season 3. I nearly wet my pants.)

I was in Ewa's apartment the other day waiting as she fussed about looking for her ID (one of those drinking nights), and started flipping through one of the journals on her table. In it, I came across a review of experimental existential psychology, a relatively new branch of the discipline that deals with quantifying human behavioral responses to the five big existential concerns -- death, isolation, identity, freedom and meaning. For instance, when subjects are administered a mortality salience paradigm (What do you feel when you think about your won death?), accessibility of death thoughts increases, and, defense mechanisms (such as taking greater pains to boost ones self-esteem) concurrently kick in.

This was kind of interesting, in the way that sexy science often is, but it was only later that I figured out why it was really so appealing to me. Scientists always get slammed by the conservative and the religious for being reductionist and taking the numinousness out of everything -- well, here you have a set of emergent feelings just begging to be understood, so we can have wonder without despair, ponder the infinite without shrinking ourselves to the infinitesimal. Imagine: clinics you can go to to learn cognitive stratification - keep the abstract in your head, and go enjoy a good dinner afterwards. There's a huge market for this; just remember, I thought of it first.

there is a paucity of good dessert places in the heart of center city, which is why our department's discovery of naked chocolate not too long ago was so significant. it fancies itself upmarket, but doesn't have prices as unreasonable as i thought they would be -- for $3.50 you get a cup of hot chocolate that is small but Enough. (someone at the table next to us was having the $5 cup and kind of choking it down, so). a. had the bittersweet, and i had the spicy with chili peppers and cinnamon and cardamom and whatnot mixed in (v. good), and i had brief but very visceral flashbacks of XOXO in barcelona.



anyway. somewhere to go after movies other than bloody cosi.

(if only in my dreams)

I'll get through this, if only barely. Merry Christmas all, and may your days be merry and bright.

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

     Emily Dickinson

if you do go to watch the movie, here's a little something the mother sent to me 4 years ago that might help.

(also known as: america is not god's chosen nation, and dubya most certainly is not the next prophet of christ)

(if you're in sg, though, the film is probably BANNED, so you're spared.)

This is my song, Oh God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
Oh hear my song, oh God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.

                                                Lloyd Stone

ugh

jesus camp is a very distressing film, but at least now i understand why people like richard dawkins are so vehemently against religion in any form (and fundamentalist christianity in particular). i've come to the firm conclusion that a sort of tragedy of the commons operates with religious belief; individually, there's benefit to dumb people being religious (some moral code being better than pure hedonism, say), but put 100 million dumb people and the bible together, and you have a problem. stupidity really depresses me. time for a drink.

seth defended his dissertation today, and it was extraordinarily good -- substantive, multidisciplinary, and beautifully clear. also, he brought small triangular sandwiches, with four different fillings, and horseradish. i'm very happy for him, and also thoroughly convinced that i will never reach those lofty heights -- that everything i do will be riddled through and through with methodological flaws, that all my research will be trite and unconvincing, and that my catering will consist of stale, crusty pastries that stick to the plate and refuse to come loose.

because

-- i have been very very very good at living within my means this semester
-- i have been reasonably good at doing work when it was supposed to be done and not whining about it too much
-- i finally am done with bloody exams, and
-- it's christmas time, and there will be a guest around

i finally went into di bruno's today and picked up a shopping basket, and actually put food into that shopping basket, and paid for the food, and felt happy. cheese, and terra chips, and a wonderful farmhouse chutney with ten different fruit and balsamic vinegar and ginger and roasted garlic, and ciabatta, and gnocchi, and duck liver pate. and then i went to five guys and got one of their superb cheeseburgers, which everyone will try once they get their respective behinds to philadelphia (actually, it's a virginia thing, so maybe minz you'll have been there already). anyway, it was a very good morning food-wise, and once again i realise that, like it or not, i'm going to have to make actual money at some point, or i know not what i'll do.

i intended to stay home in the morning to study for my exam at 12, but at 9:17, lo! do i not get an email saying that there is an emergency staff meeting please attend. against my better judgment i go, and it is an utter waste of time except for the big packet of lindt chocolates that is sitting on my desk as a christmas present from the advisor. anyhow, i scurry back home, making the most of the walk by picking up a falafel expert sandwich on the way back, and then something goes wrong with the email script for the final exam, and it is delayed by 1.75 hours. it's not just airplanes these days. this scuttles my plan to finish all my work for the semester by friday 5 pm. and then go out and drink myself silly; however, i decide that the drinking myself silly part has never been contingent on anything in the past, and that grad school oughtn't change that. (besides, it was our last beer sem for the semester. except, as it turned out, the "sem" part was kind of missing).

we started at roosevelt's at around 8 -- all psych people at first, and then the random hangers-on who always seem to appear and who are different every time. the smoking ban has come into effect, so all the bars have stopped smelling like cigarettes and started smelling like fries. going into one is very disturbing, like walking into a giant steaming potato. i'd had dinner (my lame attempt at cooking bak chor mee and getting all the condiments wrong -- help?), but the craving for grease and salt set in immediately. dopamine rules us all. we had decided to do a pub crawl, but the drinks at roosevelt's are so cheap for this city that it was difficult to initiate the "crawling" bit -- when jared started settling into a burger it looked like we were there for the long haul -- but eventually credit cards started appearing and we managed to extricate ourselves from $4 whiskey and sodas. two blocks down was monkeybar, a place slightly reminiscent of somewhere in singapore that i couldn't quite put my finger on. pulp fiction was playing (on mute) -- the very last bit where sam jackson opens up marcellas' suitcase -- and when i mention the fact, it transpires that jared, who, i found out at the advisor's christmas party, shares my birthday (to the year), also has the same favorite movie that i do. freaky! i entrust alyson to order drinks, and she orders a really weird thing that looks and tastes exactly like a shot of strawberry milk.

pulp fiction finishes, and monkeybar is starting to suck a little, so we proceed to the cafe, where we get stuck in for the rest of the night. i end up being drawn into one of those "are you a neuroscientist or a psychologist" arguments, which i can never seem to win no matter which side of the fence i try to land on. i have decided that functional imagers live in a DMZ between the two disciplines. we're allowed to do our thing, as long as we don't use either of their names. it's a bit sad. of course, it's not as sad when you've had about eight drinks, so the night was good, and ended with k. and i in a cab talking about home and her brother's ORD, and half-promises of ikan bilis in the spring.

to the one who helpfully pointed me to this

the lost room was good, and not just because of peter krause. (god, i miss six feet under).

At one time most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them. Even Sarah found one Christmas that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I've grown old, the bell still rings for me, as for all who truly believe.

You know, when I first read The Polar Express (not when I was a kid, but a while ago nevertheless), I thought, like everyone else, that this thing with the bell was a sweet, poignant sentiment, an allegory for how we need to have childlike faith in this world of cynicism and doubt. Upon (much) further consideration, though, I think I have changed my mind, because the metaphor is wrong. Let me explain. The logic goes that if you believe <--> you will be able to hear the bell <--> you have childlike innocence. What, though, do you expect a bell in the real world to do? Why, ring! So, the remarkable thing is not so much that the children can hear the bell, but that the adults can't. In other words, what van Allsburg is trying to say is that when you lose your childlike faith, you lose something that "ought to be" in the normal world, which is just crap. Now, contrast this with a Peter Pan-like plot device -- say that the kids were taught how to fly instead of given a bell -- now that would work for the allegory because there's nothing abnormal about not being able to fly. I wouldn't have a problem with that, because all it would mean is that when you grow up, and can't fly anymore (metaphorically), you have to rely on (skeptical) faith in the unknown (or the unknowable). Thought about that way, the conclusion of the book as it is written becomes nothing more than a giant guilt trip -- never grow up, you'll lose a "natural" part of yourself! Coincidentally, this is exactly the kind of guilt that Christianity tries to sell people (with the "only if you have childlike faith can you get to heaven" advertisement) -- if you "grow up", (interpreted as "be rational and question your belief"), then you've lost a vital part of yourself. This is utter nonsense, and is also the reason why millions upon millions of Christians everywhere would much prefer to see their faith as that ringing bell. I can hear it, they say, I'm normal! Why can't you?

a mountain of food in the lab -- potlucks are almost grotesque in their excess sometimes -- and joy and good cheer. the advisor leaves for hawaii next week to visit his grandchildren, so i guess it's mob rule for a while. i'll finish my exam by ths saturday, monday will be running a tutorial for someone, and then after that i'm calling it quits for the year. it feels so good to say that.

slightly old news, but the rome season 2 teaser posters came out a few weeks ago -- first as just huge close-ups of the characters faces, and then, about a week later, with "graffiti" overwritten on them: mark antony is a coward, pullo is a thug, etc. v nice. i remember cp and i lamenting after the end of season 1 -- 14 months to january 2007! and now here it is and it hardly seems so long ago that we were at su-lin's place watching the pilot. ah, the dead march of time.

i had a heartstopping moment this morning when i jogged my ibook and caused it to completely shut off -- no frozen screen or spinning beachball of death, just silence, and refusing to turn on again. the only copy of my seminar paper -- due in an hour -- was on the thing, so i hurried to a power outlet muttering all manner of supplications and bargains with higher beings, and merciful heaven, it was only a battery thing, some loose connection or another. (DISSERTATION TIP #3: KEEP AT LEAST 18 SEPARATE SOFT COPIES OF YOUR THESIS.)

Blood pressure through the roof, I went to my committee meeting with the advisor and a slightly sniffly Dr. SB, and we sat there as weird people ate tuna salad sandwiches and tried to poke holes in our proposal. I was very hungry and rattled and pugnacious, especially after hearing about minz's thirty-hour ordeal in siem reap international airport, and wanted nothing more than to give snide and snippy answers; unfortunately, the advisor fielded most of the questions, and my only contribution was to stare and glower and think about lunch.

The Grand Unifying Psychological Theory of Dennis Quaid Movies

Ok. No cheating now.

Name the first movie starring Dennis Quaid that comes to mind

Ok?

---

Bala Cynwyd, PA

The advisor invited the entire lab to his annual Christmas party, which he promised me at Thanksgiving would be thoroughly Gatsbyesque, minus the dying in the swimming pool bit. This was a slight exaggeration -- there were not hundreds and hundreds of people in various states of inebriation, but there was enough food to last a reasonable-sized family till the following Christmas, so.

The first order of business for the evening was watching the Discovery fly heavenwards in a plume of fire, and then all rushing outside in the bitter cold to see if we could catch a glimpse of it (or Mars, Jupiter and Mercury, which are in some kind of weird alignment. I was going to link to an article but Google has betrayed me, and I would imagine people reading this would have heard.) Dr. SB (who is, I think, the second Australian I've met whom I really like) was extremely bitter as the neon countdown ticked down to zero, and for good reason -- she had actually been at the launch pad as a VIP when the thing was supposed to taken off a couple of days ago but didn't. I can't say I blame her. It's the kind of hair-tearing thing life usually reserves for me.

(The shuttle launch had an interesting significance for all of us, because had it blown up, my funding would have evaporated along with it, and I would not have been amused. It was a bit scary. NASA has a pretty impressive record of blowing people up.)

Then there was much partaking in beer and canapes and traditional peppermint cake, and appreciation of a professional piano player who claimed to be able to take any request, (except, apparently, for the very first one I wanted -- I Believe in Father Christmas -- which no one ever knows.) The company split into old, affluent people, and young, not-so-affluent people, and we sat around and spilled drinks on the embroidered carpets and ate too much ham. Oh, and I finally got to meet Dr. SB's husband, who works for Industrial Light and Magic, and is out in SF making lifelike tenatacles for Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World's End. Of course we had to know about that, so we heard a bit about how the sea monsters are animated and the scene where Johnny Depp comes back to life. And [SPOILER] which is significant in the second movie, because [SPOILER], and also that [SPOILER], because Geoffrey Rush is actually [SPOILER].

We were good enough not to ask for the ending though, so there.

Halfway through the evening, I started to make friends with the piano player, who is actually part-time piano tuner and part-time Congressional lobbyist. Or, he was telling porkies, which is more likely but less romantic. I got Lady Madonna, and Shall We Gather by the River, and O Little Town of Bethlehem in exchange for staying through a diatribe of Bush Sucks, and Iraq was the Biggest Mistake Ever. Oh, and I got to have the piano for 3 minutes so that I could play I Believe in Father Christmas for myself. A fair trade.

Jared and a couple of the lab people and I were thinking of going to Manayunk afterwards, but it got late, and no one really knew whether there were good bars in Manayunk, so we gave up and headed home and fantasised about double chocolate stout at Monk's. (Me: Why double? Nathan: Because there's lots of chocolate in it?). And then The Grand Unifying Psychological Theory of Dennis Quaid Movies occurred to me.

---

If you named:

Traffic: You are a yuppie executive working in a big city making obscene amounts of money. You watch about 3 movies a year, and fancy yourself to be "gritty". You have a 95% chance of suffering a major depressive episode in the next year.

Dragonheart: You live at home with your mom, and will till you are 40. During this time, you will develop at least one (1) phobia and one (1) anxiety disorder, if you have not done so already.

Great Balls O' Fire!: You are hypomanic.

The Alamo: You are terminally unhip, and in constant denial of the fact. You go to social gatherings thinking you're the life of the party, whereas everyone else knows you're just an old sad fart.

Innerspace: You're a grad student.

The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia: Wha'?? You need some help, dude.

fighting out of the thicket. the paper got written this afternoon in a spectacular 3-hour explosion of productivity, and for once it's actually not half bad, so i'm going to call it done. i'm watching this is spinal tap while waiting for jared to call so i can get a ride to the advisor's christmas party. it's the earliest of the christopher guest movies that i've seen, and although the trademark style is definitely there, he has many more concessions to slapstick than usual. or maybe i just don't have a very good recollection of guffman and best in show, seeing as i watched both of those at 4 in the morning.

why am i so obsessed with christmas carol lyrics?

thomas and i were talking about in the bleak midwinter the other day -- it's his favorite christmas song -- and i discovered rather delightedly that the words were originally written by christina rossetti. well, almost. when holst put the poem to music, he ended each verse, as you know, with a dum(2)da(3)dum(2)dum(1)dum(1), and rossetti's poem only has three stressed syllables in each stanza's final line. this means that singers have to go through all kinds of contortions so that they don't sound like idiots (in the bleak midwinter, loooooong ago etc.), and everyone does it differently (dan folgelberg: oh so long ago; james taylor: long and long ago, and so on for each verse), which means that the original intended impact of those lines gets lost. go and read the original poem and you'll see what i mean.

sara's exam just about exhausted me of the will to live, but i went to the gym and ran 4 miles and felt better. daniel didn't join me because he's off to delaware -- not driving fortunately because it's snow tonight and 10 degrees. i pulled up the christmas playlist on the ipod, and the pogues' fairytale in new york came up:

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song
'The Rare Old Mountain Dew'
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one
Came in eighteen to one
I've got a feeling
This year's for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true

They've got cars big as bars
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me

You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone
I've built my dreams around you

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas day

today was the double whammy of (a) being beaten half to death by javascript and (b) discovering only microwaveable food left in the fridge for dinner. i figured that having to study for sara's exam alone in my apartment would probably be the coup de grace, so here i am in the other green line being distracted by doo wop music and FREE INTERNET. i like the other green line. it's a little bit gross and unswept, but it is also one of those places where you feel inspired to write, or compose folk music, or take crystal meth. also, if you sit around until they close, unsold muffins and croissants get passed around for free, and the three berry muffin is excellent.

the department system for signing up for classes is such a mess. the university deadline passed us by 2 weeks ago with nary a peep from the director of graduate studies, and now all of a sudden we get an email today from the department secretary asking us to send her the list of classes we're taking. no one knows what they have to sign up for because there are all these strange and mysterious requirements that we have to fulfill, and on top of that everything worth taking seems to be in exactly the same time slot, thursdays 2-5. it's incredibly frustrating.

everyone's busy studying. i spent a large chunk of the weekend cobbling together a very poor presentation only barely held together by colorful pictures and flashing lights. give 'em the old razzle dazzle, etc. today, i fried bacon, and went for a run, and sat for a good hour reading the blog of a penn singaporean freshman (BONDED), who writes with such naivete and insouciance that it breaks my heart to think he is probably either already one of Them, or going to be.

In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them,
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.

In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne'er remember
Apollo's summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting,
About the frozen time.

Ah! would 'twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed Joy?
To know the change and feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.

                      John Keats

my monkeywork has reached the stage where i press a button and wait for 20 minutes while the computer goes off to do an inverse matrix calculation, so i got to reread city of glass for the first time in a while. i have decided that the new york trilogy is probably the only series of paul auster books that has some merit, and because i like city of glass so much now, i'm very afraid that one day i'll pick it up and realise that it's just highfalutin trash. like john irving. i think there was a period in my life where you could get me to swear on my ancestors' graves that john irving was chaucer reborn.

the horror that is next week

presentation (1); finals (2); paper (unspecified length; 1)

scott mccloud, comic book wunderkind, gave a talk at drexel today as part of his fifty states tour, and thomas, some random dude and i crossed the territorial border to go have a listen. mccloud's entire family -- wife and two daughters -- is along for the ride, and his elder daughter (13), actually introduced him before the talk (she's quite the stageperson too).

the talk was highly condensed but utterly riveting, sweeping through history, technique, form and significance in just under an hour. just the high points (for me) then. (warning: nerdy stuff ahead -- not representative of actual talk) comic books, as you may have been told before, do not live in the twilight region between prose and moving pictures, but are an art form unto themselves. this because of a few things:

1) they are the only medium where space represents time -- the tempo of the story being controlled via the frequency of frozen moments between panels.
2) there is a unique interplay of author-reader that you get in neither prose nor moving pictures -- the illustrator/author has absolute control over the mise-en-scene, while the reader has absolute control of suture.
3) they permit a synergy between image and text impossible in any other medium.

(mostly my words, thus possibly balderdash: ignore if you know better.)

thus: they are cool, and the wild optimism of the early comic book artists has finally been justified -- graphic novels have begun to deal in weighty issues and epic story arcs, and at least a few scholars are beginning to take the comic book seriously. and! now we have webcomics, which allow for multidimensional scrolling, and thus the possibility for a perfectly continuous, ultimately flexible space-time arrow. for example: pup ponders the heat death of the universe

i must say that as rubbish as some of this theory probably is, the subject as a whole is rather fascinating, and it would be interesting to read some proper literature, if there exists any. once the horror that is next week is over, i think i'll take a look.

only in berkeley could you find psychologists who sit around thinking: hm, what if we did a study on students filling in surveys while they masturbate. the actual paper that came out of this is really worth checking out -- first of all because figure 1 is probably something never before seen in a peer-reviewed journal, but more importantly because of how utterly disturbing the results are.

(it's easy to read, i promise. also, there was a big controversy about it in congress -- what are our tax dollars funding, etc. -- so in a general sort of way you might want to checkit out as well.)

james flynn is in town, and gave a talk today on his famous flynn effect, on which he has built most of his career (incid: one of the big downsides of being a chinese scientist, it's awful if you find something big and want to name it after yourself. the ng effect, for example, doesn't quite have the same ring to it). his oft-cited observation is that iq scores have risen astronomically over the past century (if you've read any of the hernnstein and murray bell curve nonsense you'll know this) -- to get an idea of how dramatic this is, the average child today would have scored higher than 97% of kids in 1900 on numerous standardized intelligence tests (and i don't know about you, but considering what the average kid is like nowadays, that's kind of frightening to me).

this gain is extremely hard to explain -- the stupid wikipedia article goes for "improved nutrition, a trend towards smaller families, better education, greater environmental complexity, and heterosis", all of which flynn shot down during the talk. his big idea, and this is apparently quite new, is that it's not spearman's g-factor that's increasing (which jibes with ones experiences in the real world, see above), but that kids are thinking differently than they used to 100 years ago. that in the early 1900s, it was far more important for children to think concretely, whereas since then, abstract and categorical thinking has become a norm and a necessity. example: what is the similarity between a dog and a rabbit? concrete answer: dogs chase rabbits; abstract answer: both mammals. and while this is probably patently obvious to any grade-schooler now, the creeping influence of scientific lingo and paradigms of thinking had not yet begun several generations ago, and people apparently just did not think in the same way.

it's a more elegant explanation than the usual gene-environment interaction hokum that biologists pull out of their ass when asked the question (which gene? a combination of many, not all of which have been identified. which environmental characteristic? go ask the sociologists.), so even though it seems at least partially faulty (don't the pre-scientific revolution staples of religion and superstition live or die by symbological thinking?), i can live with it until something better comes along. plus: he's a wonderful speaker, allergic to powerpoint and projectors in the way that professors emeritus* usually are, preferring to stand at the front of the lecture theater, wave his hands, and hold the room in thrall.

* professor emeriti?

ricky gervais is not making a third season of extras. i'm heartbroken.

When Nietzsche Wept, Irvin Yalom:

A stroll that began in sunlight and ended darkly. Perhaps we journeyed too far into the graveyard. Should we have turned back earlier? Have I given him too powerful a thought? Eternal recurrence is a mighty hammer. It will break those who are not yet ready for it.

No! A psychologist, an unriddler of souls, needs hardness more than anyone. Else he will bloat with pity. And his student drown in shallow water.

Yet at the end of our walk, Josef sseemed sorely pressed, barely able to converse. Some are not born hard. A true psychologist, like an artist, must love his palette. Perhaps more kindness, more patience was needed. Do I strip before teaching how to weaave new clothing? Have I taught him "freedom from" without teaching "freedom for"?

No, a guide must be a railing by the torrent, but he must not be a crutch. The guide must lay bare the trails that lie before the student. But he must not choose the path.

"Become my teacher," he asks. "Help me overcome despair." Shall I conceal my wisdom? And the student's responsibility? He must harden himself to the cold, his fingers must grip the railing, he must lose himself many times on wrong paths before finding the right one.

i realise that this will be funny exclusively to cp and von, but nevertheless, it's too good not to link to:

battlestar ecclesiastica (scroll down).

turkey day '06

bala cynwyd, PA

the advisor had a bunch of us over to his place in the afternoon, all the stranded international folk -- hengyi and his wife, and the basners from germany with their ebullient 2.5-year-old son. hengyi + wife gave me a ride there, my penance being that i was forced to speak chinese in the apartment, and then sit silent at the back of the car as the two of them displayed the approximate navigational capabilities of a sweet potato.

(i sort of kid. they're really nice, and i will die horribly if i don't have him to help out with my image analysis next year.)

the advisor's house is tucked away, as one might expect, in a little suburban nook, noise muted by distance, all the illusions you can afford to buy once you have tenure. it seems to be pretty much them -- their elder son has moved away, and the younger is a fratboy senior at wharton (i'm going to singapore!). (even though it's the most natural thing in the world with the benefits and everything, i'm always weirded out by this legacy business -- surely the last thing you want as a male student in college is to be having your wild-ass parties practically next door to where your dad works as a professor.)

the basners were already there, and i settled into cheese and pinot grigio (cavit, 2004) and actually getting to know my advisor as a human being. i've long suspected that he's pretty much the apotheosis of the educated liberal male, and the signs are all still there -- chief among these that what he talks about outside the lab is not work. very few things are more painful to behold than really smart people who can talk about nothing but the blade-thin sector of human knowledge that has their flag fluttering over it. anyway, talking was good, and having a little kid bouncing around with a toy godzilla while screaming in german was a more effective social lubricant than any amount of pinot grigio. also: i'd never considered it before, but dr. basner is kind of interesting. i should talk to him more in the lab.

we got through feudal systems, hairy encounters with bedouin arabs, and the scourge of the american suv before dinner was served. the kids were interrupted from turkey day football, and we sat down to the usual bounty, heaping servings of everything with gravy. the advisor's younger son made his first appearance, and the cognitive dissonance increased about three-fold -- he's the consummate frat kid, down to wanting to come to dinner in his sweatpants. i know i'm being stupid, and of course this is a cookie-cutter scene all around the country -- distinguished parents have adolescents who go to college, create mayhem, occasionally drink themselves into the ER, and then go on to be professors and businessmen and senators themselves, just like philip roth says. still, it's always mind-blowing when you have to sit there and see the process play out in front of your eyes. america really blows my mind. the advisor's son had two friends over as well, and they ate themselves into a turkey coma and went to sleep, one in front of the tv, two on the ottoman upstairs, in preparation to wake up at 11 and go out drinking. dr. basner and i agreed that those were the days (definitely should talk to him more).

coffee and pie made an appearance, and we talked about everything, rogue elephants, boxing chimpanzees in thailand, and by the time it was time to leave, i felt a lot better about the years ahead working in the lab -- things are just so much easier when you know that your PI is willing to interact with you as an actual person. many aren't; and i confess that when i took the place here, i wasn't 100% sure this was going to be the case.

(on a different note, i'm straying a lot from what this blog was originally like. too many names; too much personal nonsense. i think this page is becoming an ersatz confidante. i'm going to consciously stop doing that for a little while, and maybe password protect. let me think about it.)

anyhow -- i'm certainly thankful that i'm not a cube rat, or a ne'er-do-well, or that any of the awful things that were shaping up to happen about two years ago never came to pass. so happy whatsits, even if thanksgiving isn't your thing, and may your whatevers be however you want them to be.

holidays

it started drizzling just before lunch and still has not let up. all day, people trundled up and down campus with suitcases in tow, struggling towards buses and trains in the frigid cold. dr. detre was one of the few people in the cfn, sipping three squash soup and telling one of the pre-med stragglers about how he was the only bastard this year to not invite his graduate students and post-docs over for thanksgiving. there's a little grinch in all of us.

honestly though, turkey day is of very little moment to me -- i'm mostly glad i can sleep in. that the advisor (and his family) are having me over is a bonus -- human company and homecooked food are always nice when the campus is otherwise deserted.

confession: i do get a perverse thrill out of telling americans that i'm not going anywhere -- i guess being more or less alone and away from family on thanksgiving is kind of unthinkable for most. i even bait them.

me: so when are you leaving for thanksgiving?
random american person: this evening. how about you?
me: oh, i'm gonna be here.

and then like a snort of cocaine i relish that one awful moment of silence that comes right after that where the sentiment "oh, that's awesome" gets swallowed like strychnine as whoever it is tries to scramble out of the pit of awkwardness that (he thinks) he's just thrown himself into. it's perverse and addictive -- pretending to care about something that you don't so that you can orchestrate a situation that wins you self-pity -- perverse, but oh-so-good.

today was the first day since i've been here when the cold has been serious, no longer the half-hearted between-seasons sort of chill, but the kind that signals that the winter is coming in earnest. i was the first into the cfn, and only a few more people trickled in during the morning -- the research staff get both thursday and friday off, and i guess most of them decided to just take the whole week. it was angela and dawn and chris and i, and all of us were doing monkeywork, so we chatted about heroes and house and i did the sudoku. now that i have a couple years of experience, i can say with assurance that my research is approximately 85-90% monkeywork, the kind of tedium that anyone off the street could do -- point, click, drag -- and that that number isn't moving anywhere in the next few years (unless someone wants to be my research assistant). when i was a (very) wee lad, i used to love to play this make-believe game of 'factory', where all these playing cards got 'processed' along a conveyor belt of 'machinery' -- and funnily enough, that's the bulk of what i do now: raw data in, mindless, yet not completely automatable processes, interpretable pictures out. the developmental psychologists would have a field day with that one.

bad

(thanks to su-lin)

ian mckellen on extras, also known as, what i downloaded and watched on sunday instead of doing work.

life after alias

carl lumbly is guest starring on battlestar galactica -- not as a cylon as i had hoped, unfortunately, but still.

more with the slapping business

yes, the reward and punishment discussion will never die. (this is posted rather belatedly.)

Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell

"Like Santa, God "knows if you are sleeping, he knows if you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good"... The lyrics continue "so be good for goodness' sake". Catchy, but a logical solecism. In logic, the song should have continued "so be good for the sake of the electronic equipment, dolls, sports gear and other gifts you hope to get but will get only if the omniscient and just Santa judges you worthy of receiving." If you were good for goodness' sake, the all-seeing Santa would be irrelevant as a motivator of your virtue." [Mitchell Silver]

...

We may shun this theme as a foundation of our morality today yet still honor it for having played a founding role in the past, as a ladder that, once climbed, may be discarded. How could this work? The economist Thomas Schelling has pointed out that "belief in a deity who will reward goodness and punish evil transforms many situations from subjective to secured, at least in the believer's mind". Consider a situation in which two parties confront each other with a prospect for cooperation on something both parties would want, but each is afraid the other will renege on any bargain struck, and there are no authorities or stronger parties around to enforce it. Promises can be made and then broken, but sometimes they can be secured. A commitment may be secured by being self-enforcing; for instance, you can burn your bridges behind so you can't escape even if you change your mind. Or it may be secured by your greater desire to preserve your reputation. You may have good reason to fulfill your side of a contract even if your reason for signing it in the first place has lapsed, simply because your reputation is also at stake, a valuable social commodity indeed. Or - and this is Schelling's point - a promise made "in the eyes of God" may well convince those who believe in God that a sort of virtual escrow account has been created, protecting both parties and giving each other the confidence to move ahead without fear of reneging by the other party.

i am old

i went to the liquor store today, and no one asked for my id.

(either that, or this is a very popular store with the undergrads.)

today was long -- too long -- and i didn't get half of what i wanted to do done. the proofs of my paper arrived yesterday and i found 5 typos in it on my first pass through that were clearly not in my original MS. aren't they supposed to just copy and paste the text into pagemaker, or whatever it is they use nowadays? maybe von with his copy-editing experience can enlighten me on what happens. anyway, i didn't have time for a second run-through, and my stupid budget information hasn't been done yet, and i would have done reading for class except that i got sucked into a bridge book that arrived for me in the mail and didn't. yes, i'm criminal. by mid-afternoon the rain was coming down in sheets, and hilary and alyson and i were stuck in the GSC contemplating pontenging sara's seminar on gender development (zzzzz). the girls' ivy league sense of honor or whatever got the better of them however (bloody harvard), so we dashed helter-skelter down locust walk and dripped into class and i covertly did the new york times crossword while people discussed bandura and transsexuals.

it should have been over after that, but there was beer sem*, and i felt a moral responsibility to listen to what some other people are doing for their first year projects. incredible, groundbreaking work seems to be the answer to that one -- not just that, but research that is interesting and thought-provoking and relevant and a bunch of other things that i'm mortally afraid that my work is not.

* yes, beer sem is a seminar. with beer.

kissinger

-- did a q-and-a last night to an auditorium crammed half with policy majors and half with ancient republican stalwarts; WH and i being just about the only people without any deep intellectual understanding of what was being discussed. this was actually almost refreshing. a group of protesters had gathered outside the venue to chant the usual anti-war sentiments and give out flyers explaining in some detail why kissinger in particular and the nixon administration in general were mass murderers who ought to have been crucified on the nearest tree 30 years ago. "you should ask him about the indo-pakistan war," someone behind me suggested to his friend. "i should," she replied. "i should ask him what the fuck he was thinking. do you think i should phrase it like that? 'what the fuck were you thinking?'"

as one might expect, many of the questions were about iraq, variations on the theme of: is it the new vietnam? the answer to that was never going to be yes, but he did draw parallels, and admit that the democratic process was never going to establish itself as quickly as the bush administration hoped (or deluded itself into thinking) it would in such a sectarian state. he said a bit about nuclear proliferation as well, and how the m.a.d. argument doesn't readily extend into a multi-player situation. there was a question about his german heritage, and whether that was ever a conflict of interest while he was in government -- being a jew in germany in 1938, it seems, did not inspire particular loyalty in him to his country of birth.

and finally, someone asked him to ask himself a question that would show off his best attributes and answer it, to which he replied as diplomatically as he could in words to the effect of: "that's a really idiotic thing to ask me to do." how nice not to have to suffer fools.

From The Gates of the Forest, Elie Wiesel:

When the founder of Hasidic Judaism, the great Rabbi Israel Shem Tov, saw misfortune threatening the Jews, it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted. Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Maggid of Mezeritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: "Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer," and again the miracle would be accomplished. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say,"I do not know how to light the fire. I do not know the prayer, but I know the place, and this must be sufficient." It was sufficient, and the miracle was accomplished. Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhin to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire, and I do not know the prayer, and I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient." And it was sufficient. For God made man because He loves stories.

they're putting up lights on locust walk, snowflakes and tinsel, the sure signs of a year drawing to its close.

to the cookie conspirators

thanks for making this a very smiley friday...butter and sugar are indeed an exceedingly good remedy for clerical and all other kinds of hell.

:)

cfn

i have been in and out the center for functional neuroimaging over the past few days trying to get the software licences i need to start doing some real research, and although i still don't have the licences, i have started to get to know some of the people who "work" down there. the inverted commas because it seems to be mostly doughnuts and coffee and online shopping and gray's anatomy watercooler chat and very little science. except for the fact that all the computers are unix machines, i think i could learn to like it there.

it's 70 outside, shorts weather in the middle of november. from mark's cafe, you can look out over the main square of perelman quad, the iconic broken button, falling yellow leaves swirling around in the wind like so much confetti. the air has been rinsed clean by yesterday's rain. someone is having office hours at the table next to mine, a curly-haired TA and an earnest african-american undergrad workshopping a paper comparing superman to jesus christ. the sunlight is bright, intense, it comes off the ledges and railings in blinding shards, and the world smells like hazelnut and toasted bagels.

my prof's housemate, in a market in china, came upon a pen of kittens. she played delightedly with them for a good long while before finally giving in, calling the stall owner over and pointing to the one she wanted. whereupon in one fluid motion, the stall owner reached into the pen, broke the kitten's neck, put it in a plastic bag and handed it to my prof's housemate to take home.

in other news, it rained all day today, and my shoes are sodden.

election day

-- started with me being in clerical hell and sticking staples into myself as i attempted to collate >1500 pages of documentation into 18 neatly organized packages. was rescued by one of the kindly senior lab administrators, who informed me that we pay undergrads and work-study students to do that kind of thing. aha. i was reminded of the conversation i had with hilary the other day -- i was telling her in a wistful, semi-serious sort of a way that i wouldn't mind having an undergrad to do my fmri preprocessing for me, and she was all: why not? you should ask your advisor. i have an assistant. and i was like: oh!, and she was like, yeah, we're real people now! which was funny, but also a little true, and a little scary.

anyway, during clerical hell, a. came online for a while and was sympathetic, minz came online and was not, and then i had to run away to a terribly disorganized meeting, then to stats, which was good today, and funny. grabbed soup and ran back to the lab. all along locust walk were people harassing other people to VOTE BOB CASEY, and BE A RESPONSIBLE CITIZEN, and so on. both casey and rick santorum are kind of feh, but in any case, judging from the circus american politics has turned into the whole world is probably going to hell in a handbasket fairly soon, so who really cares?

edited an 11-page subject screening questionnaire, then dashed back to class and was comatose for about two hours while everyone else discussed infant-caregiver attachment. checked the results (nothing to see yet), went to fresh grocer, bought cranberry sauce, and then home to do laundry and reading and pray for the american map to light up blue, blue, blue.

powers

i've been meaning to write something lengthy about the echo maker for simply ages, but the impetus has gone, so i'll just say a few short things. for starters, it was very unlike his other books. fs called me a few weeks ago to complain about how all powers' characters speak in exactly the same bombastic way -- this has vanished entirely in EM, along with a lot of the delightful syntax and wordplay. also (mostly) gone: the way he uses the central motif as a resource for imagery in the narrative (the musical metaphors in time of our singing i think are the prime example of this, but i know he's done it in most of his other books).

because the technical bits in the book all had to do with neuroscience, i could actually follow along quite well, and that was a bit of a problem. not because he got anything wrong - his research as always was impeccable - but because there was a lot of pleasure to be had from his novels in not knowing exactly what he is talking about (in gain and gold bug variations especially), and being able to enjoy the prose on the level of image, or even prosody (which i'm sure is part of powers' intentions).

still, i enjoyed the story, and the ending especially, but it was not a typical example of a powers book. i only hope the stylistic changes were just for this novel (and i can see why he might have done that) and not a permanent switch because of laziness or something. i was going to offer to lend it to people, but, erm, i guess not. get your own?

there was a halloween party last night in the hangout house. i think that most people didn't really have their heart in it, what with it being 5 days after halloween and all, but at least it was sugar and human company. costume roll call: white trash, blue man, lampshade, peasant, bob dylan, robert smith (from the cure), chinese empress, pregnant swiss goatherd (i think), A CATCH, cowboy, punk rocker, fairy godmother and borat. there was pumpkin ice cream and apple cider (both good), and a lot of being carried in a tide of people from room to room. grad school parties are so much more muted than undergrad ones. i think there's a shared understanding (which no one can openly admit to) that everyone needs to be in a fit state to do work the next day, and so a tacit, nash-equilibrium level of craziness is arrived at, a compromise between wasted and just sad. someone needs to quantify this phenomenon. a noticeable bunch of people were plain missing -- i strongly suspect that they decided to go see borat: cultural learnings of america for make benefit glorious nation of kazakhstan without me, in which case i will be mad.

surfacing to say

thursday was still bad, because of unearthing myself from the reading backlog, but friday was better, and had a talk by luiz pessoa (not bad), time for the gym with daniel (better) and the prestige (v. good...christopher nolan has such a twisted mind).

dissertation tip #2

having spent 8 hours on an exam on monday-tuesday, most of today writing a bloody horrible paper, the weekend nowhere in sight, and reading backed up by about five days, i'm ready to declare this the first Grad School Week From Hell. i'm on the verge of going to read the catcher in the rye again, just so you have an idea of how bad.

anyway, i was handed up dissertation tip #2 today, from ANON, who told me:
MAKE SURE THAT THE MOST SENIOR AND RESPECTED PERSON ON YOUR COMMITTEE HAS THE LEAST IDEA OF WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT.

from the apa website, for the teachers (or do they tell you this in nie?):

Sometimes, we aren't looking to divine someone's overall personality or intelligence based on a first impression; we simply want to know how good they will be at a particular skill or set of skills, like teaching. Tufts psychologist Nalini Ambady has found that students, for example, are surprisingly good at predicting a teacher's effectiveness based on first impressions. She creates these first impressions with silent video clips of teachers--clips she calls "thin slices."

In a 1993 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 64, No. 3), Ambady and a colleague videotaped 13 graduate teaching fellows as they taught their classes. She then took three random 10-second clips from each tape, combined them into one 30-second clip for each teacher and showed the silent clips to students who did not know the teachers. The student judges rated the teachers on 13 variables, such as "accepting," "active," "competent" and "confident." Ambady combined these individual scores into one global rating for each teacher and then correlated that rating with the teachers' end-of-semester evaluations from actual students.

"We were shocked at how high the correlation was," she says. It was 0.76. In social psychology anything above 0.6 is considered very strong.

Curious to see how thin she could make her slices before affecting the student judges' accuracy, Ambady cut the length of the silent clips to 15 seconds, and then to six. Each time, the students accurately predicted the most successful teachers.

"There was no significant difference between the results with 30-second clips and six-second clips," Ambady says.

In a later experiment in the same study, she cut out the middleman--the global variable--and simply asked students to rate, based on thin-slice video clips, the quality and performance of the teachers. Again, the ratings correlated highly with the teachers' end-of-semester evaluations. Ambady also replicated her results with high school teachers.

Of course, one could argue that the true measure of a teachers' effectiveness is not what their students say about them, but how much those students learn. Ambady, acknowledging this, has tried to measure whether students actually learn more from teachers who give a first impression of effectiveness.

In an as-yet-unpublished study, she videotaped groups of five participants, one of whom was randomly assigned to be the "teacher." The teacher spent time preparing a lesson, and then taught students a mathematical language in which combinations of letters represent different numbers, as in 10=djz or 3=vfg. The students took a test at the end of the lesson to measure their knowledge of the new language. Then, as before, strangers watched 10-second video clips of the teachers and rated them on the same variables as in the first study. The thin-slice ratings of teacher effectiveness, Ambady says, significantly predicted students' performance on the test.

"Students learned more from teachers who were seen in the thin slices as having the qualities of a better teacher," Ambady says.

I went with a bunch of random Catholics to Amy Berg's Deliver Us From Evil, the single most horrifying documentary I've seen since the stupid Silent Scream they inexplicably seem to show every secondary school kid in Singapore. (Did they even give us the pro-choice argument back then? Seems terribly imbalanced to have graphic images of feet being sucked out of a uterus on the one hand and just...words, if that, for the other side. I guess showing us someone being raped probably isn't kosher in the classroom though.)

Deliver Us From Evil is about the recent child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, and in particular about Fr. Oliver O'Grady, who engaged in pedophilic acts in various dioceses (dioceze?) in California from the 70s to the 90s. O'Grady was allowed to continue abusing children unchecked because Archbishop (now Cardinal) Mahony kept transferring the priest every time an incident got reported, promising families that he would not get to work with children again, and essentially perpetrating a cover-up on such a horrific scale that it boggles the mind.

Almost all of the film consists of interviews -- with the victims, their families, lawyers, and scholars -- as well as archive footage of deposition hearings. There's almost no editorializing, and no real need for it either. If anything, the even-handedness probably adds to the horror of the experience. Victims and family members break down in sickening long takes. When one father talks about how his five-year-old daughter was raped, in their house, by someone they trusted with all their being, I could have puked right there in my seat.

O'Grady himself speaks a lot. The priest is mild-mannered, unremorseful, and, most terribly, reminds me of the Irish priests I have known since I was young. Superficially, because of the accent, but also in his mannerisms and personality. Obviously I'm not drawing any other kind of comparison, but you can imagine how everything hit me that much harder because of the similarities.

About halfway through the film, Amy Berg gets a psychologist to try to piece together a psychodynamic theory of why rates of child abuse are so high among the Catholic clergy. Her theory (and you might have heard this): because seminarians have to enter the religious life at such an early age, their psychosexual development is essentially stunted in adolescence, which causes them to perceive younger people as their sexual peers. Also (and I find this a little more suspect, although the deposition interviews would suggest that, at the very least, the superiors involved in O'Grady's case felt this way), from the Church's point-of-view, since all sexual acts outside of marriage are sinful, pedophilia, adultery and masturbation are all in the same basket of wrongness. Which is why the Vatican sees fit to allow priests who are child abusers to go on serving -- it's just not bad enough in their eyes to warrant their removal.

If all this is true -- and I'd need more than theories and anecdotal evidence to believe it -- then the Church needs psychologists, stat, as well as some sort of impetus for reform.

So. If this movie ever makes it past the media censors in your fascist country (unlikely), make every effort to go and see it. It's kind of shattering, though, so be warned. Then, after that, talk to me about it, because it's a kind of a crappy thing for Catholics to have to face, and although it's not going to dent my faith, it certainly makes me feel uneasy about the Church as an institution, and humanity in general.

i am ashamed to report that, after just 1.5 months of cooking, i have been reduced to the method of:

* look in fridge
* assemble everything that's about to go bad
* throw in big pot
* call it dinner

(I enjoyed this...because I would like to think that Jesus (and Peter) really were kind of like that.)

From The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis

"And now, Rabbi," Andrew asked, "where do we begin our military life?"

"God," Jesus answered, "took earth from Nazareth and fashioned this body of mine. It is therefore my duty to begin the war in Nazareth. It is there that my flesh must commence its transformation into spirit."

"And afterwards we'll go to Capernaum," said Jacob, "to save my parents."

"And then to Magdala," suggested Andrew, "to get poor Magdalene and put her in the ark too."

"And then to the whole world!" shouted John, pointing to the east and west.

Peter heard them and laughed. "I'm wondering about our bellies," he said. "What'll we eat in the ark? I suggest that we take along only edible animals. Goodness gracious, what use have we for lions and gnats?"

He was hungry, and his mind and thoughts were on food. The others all laughed.

"All you can think about is dinner," Jacob scolded him. "We're speaking here about the salvation of the world."

"The rest of you have the same thought I have," Peter objected, "but you won't admit it. I say frankly whatever comes into my head, whether good or bad. My mind goes round and round, and I go round and round with it. That's why the gossips call me Windmill. Am I right, Rabbi, or am I not?"

Jesus' face brightened into a smile. An old story came into his mind. "Once upon a time there was a rabbi who desired to find someone who could blow the horn so skillfully and loud that the faithful would hear and come to the synagogue. He announced therefore that all good horn-blowers should present themselves for an audition. The rabbi himself would choose the best. Five came - the most skilled in town. Each took the horn and blew. When they all had finished, the rabbi questioned them one by one: 'What do you think of, my child, when you blow the horn?' The first said, 'I think of God.' The second: 'I think of Israel's deliverance.' The third: 'I think of the starving poor.' The fourth: 'I think of orphans and widows.' One only, the shabbiest of the lot, stayed behind the others in a corner and did not speak. 'And you, my child,' the rabbi asked him, 'what do you think of when you blow the horn?' 'Father,' he answered, blushing, 'I am poor and illiterate and I have four daughters. I'm unable to give them dowries, poor things, so that they can get married like everyone else. When I blow the horn, therefore, I say to myself: God, you see how I toil and slave for you. Send four husbands, please, for my daughters!' 'Have my blessing,' said the rabbi. 'I choose you!'"

Jesus turned to Peter and laughed. "Have my blessing, Peter," he said. "I choose you. You have food on your mind, and you talk about food. When you have God on your mind, you'll talk about God. Bravo! That's why men call you Windmill. I choose you. You are the windmill which will grind the wheat into bread so that men may eat.

stole wh out from the library for lunch today in houston hall, which is the second worst place to eat on campus after au bon pain. in 30 degree weather, though, propinquity starts becoming a serious consideration. he's starting his clinicals soon, and is saying precisely the same things that jh was a couple of years ago, chiefly that he's afraid he's going to kill someone. i'm starting to think that med students really mean this, and it's not just one of those things that they say. way back in combat medic course, we used to joke about screwing up cases quite a lot, and yet somehow, i don't think left us any less prepared. a lot of us did end up facing patients in fairly critical condition, and it didn't matter that we were flip about things in ulu pandan, all that mattered was that we believed it could happen. so: to WH, and all clinical folks out there (and eventually, to myself, when i have to start dealing with people who want to leap onto the train tracks): worrying about it probably doesn't change a thing (or, to look at it another way, no one's going to die in the OR because you didn't worry enough). groucho marx, i think, had the idea, when he famously said: "afraid? me? a man who's licked his weight in wild caterpillars?"

today, i decided that instead of doing my seminar reading i would much rather watch dave gorman's important astrology experiment.

yes

getting something straight in my head

One of the biggest circularities in sleep research, and the reason why it is far more popular among biologists than psychologists, is that many behvaioral studies end up saying, essentially, that sleep deprivation causes people to become sleepy. This is not revolutionary news, and people recognise that, and yet under different guises they say it again and again.

Why? The problem is this: when one studies how sleep deprivation affects cognition, behavior and performance, the fact that subjects are sleepy is mostly an irrelevant phenomenon. Performance declines for two reasons -- (1) because you're cognitively impaired, and (2) because you just want to sleep. The first is interesting because it's related to some physiological ceiling, a biochemical battery that needs to be "recharged"; the second is far more fundamental, the basal parts of the brain telling you that the first thing is happening, and that it's time to give up the ghost. Theoretically, one could be asleep, but still technically capable of functioning fine -- if one were awake.

Schizophrenia is a good analogy. Schizophrenics are often cognitively impaired - on certain tests of memory and executive function in particular -- but that impairment often goes undetected because it is completely masked by the fact that these people have lost their marbles. It's extraordinarily difficult to study brain function in very low-functioning schizophrenics, precisely because their putative cognitive deficits are convolved with the whole kit and caboodle of their other problems, including things like: "Do you even understand the instructions to the damn test?"

In the real world, of course, this doesn't always matter. If you fall asleep at the wheel, no one cares if you could potentially have been attentive had you been awake, you're still wrapped around a tree. Falling asleep trumps everything else. In other situations though -- say pulling an all-nighter before a big presentation, or flying the red-eye to a business meeting -- the two things get pulled apart: you haven't slept, but you're aroused enough that you're not likely to nod off in front of the board of directors. Those are the interesting scenarios, and those are the data that a lot of groups fail to capture and explore.

hmm...henry kissinger is coming to speak next month.

dissertation tip #1

today in the grad student center victor introduces me to rene, also in the history department, and in the throes of his dissertation. he has a deck of cards, and we randomly play a few rounds of blackjack while he offers us advice on how to write a thesis. and since that's something that i guess i will have to do in the not-too-distant future, i thought i'd jot down everything that i learn about that in this blog, so that when the time comes i'll have a veritable treasure trove filled with the experiences of penn students before me.

thus, dissertation tip #1 is:
ANY THESIS CAN BE IMPROVED BY ADDING ":THE BIRTH OF A NATION STATE" TO ITS TITLE.

cont'd

so to understand the reason for this little pilgrimage, you have to know that the mother was born and spent most of her childhood in guyana, and has frequent bouts of nostalgia for her time there, and particularly for the food. and if you've spent any significant amount of time away from home (or, if you want to avoid that loaded word, from your country of origin), you'll know how powerful the craving for familiar food can be, and also how contagious that craving can be. 21 years of hearing about guyanese food has had quite an impact.

Queens, NY

after making (d~)(a~) promise that she would do a philly trip one of these days, i hopped on the 'a' train and sat among the crazies for 45 minutes while we trundled towards liberty avenue. got off right at the end of the line, at lefferts boulevard, or 118th, and there i was, in little guyana, which is, well, "da place in NYC where all of da people from guyana n trinidad are livin".

the area spans about 20 city blocks of liberty avenue, maybe more, but by the time i got to 132nd it looked like i was heading into the ghettoes so i turned back. as soon as i got off the train, what immediately caught my attention was how people were speaking, which is: exactly as the maternal grandmother used to (and the mother still can. kind of. this is the "tentacular" voice, tm cp, and the reason why once upon a time he asked her to read zora neale hurston. but that's a different story. don't die, cp.)

so, chattering west indians, general atmosphere of commerce and gaiety, and, as hoped for, plenty of food. a lot of it, unfortunately, was produce, and i didn't think that bringing slabs of uncooked fish with me back on the chinatown bus would make me particularly popular. so, as per instruction, i bought:

* tennis rolls - which look just like ordinary bread rolls, but are sweet and coconutty and full.
* cheese rolls - which are what you would expect
* lamb black pudding. it's criminal, by the way, how the british fry black pudding. that's just...no. this example was quite good, although it somewhat strangely had rice grains in it.
* casareep - made from cassava extract, and used for cooking lots of things that i can't make.
* potato balls - which are also what you expect, and something that fitzie should strongly consider for his b'day celebration. recipe: potatoes, mash, batter, fry.

finally, i grabbed this:



a somewhat unremarkable roti and curry, despite the mother's insistence that it's the best thing since sliced bread. the bottled coconut water that you see in the corner, though, was special, and also frighteningly expensive. oh well. it good fe yu dawta.

---

the bus ride back was awful. don't travel by apex, ever. it was like riding down the highway in a giant toilet, and i swear to you that the russian couple behind me were making love in the back seat.

anyway, this is the first step to shaking off the intertia of the past two years: i'm willing to move my ass further away from my apartment than koch's deli in an attempt to find food and culture. it's a good sign. a few more months, and i'll be calvin trillin, or something, just you wait.

a burning question answered

the burning question: would i travel three-and-a-half hours and more than 100 miles on vague and possibly misinformative directions to an unfamiliar area of the united states for food.

the answer: yes.

manhattan, NY

the chinatown bus seemed like just about the cheapest way to get into new york from here, so i booked myself an 8 a.m. ticket for sunday morning. in a departure from my usual habit of being comfortably early for things, i arrived at the corner of 11th and arch at 7:58, and was faced with a terrible dilemma as i passed the wawa: do i stop and risk missing the bus, or suffer caffeine headaches for the 2 hours it will take to get into manhattan? i went for the coffee. i assembled the coffee in record time. i ran out of the wawa. and...i know i'm prone to hyperbole, but i literally made the bus 10 seconds before it pulled away. this was a very big achievement so early in the morning.

there's a reason chinatown bus tickets are so cheap -- the bus interior smelled like dried fish and star anise and semen. the ticket guy was a very dubious vietnamese dude who did not seem to understand the concept of an e-ticket, until a gang of us who had bought tickets online essentially told him that we weren't going to pay him again, and that he could take his luddite sensibilities and stick them you-know-where.

the journey to manhattan from philadelphia takes you over the benjamin franklin bridge, and into jersey suburbia, jiffy lubes and cracker barrels, then onto the highway bypassing trenton and new brunswick, the trees this time of year turning all their beautiful colors. it's a little over an hour-and-a-half to the NJ turnpike, not an uncomfortably long ride at all, and with good music on the ipod practically nothing.

i was a little early for (duke)ailian, which was fortunate because that meant i could go to mass, where there was a v good sermon on suffering, and why it is necessary, and why most people, if they are completely honest with themselves, will realise that it's mostly suffering that made them the person they are. i was reminded of thomas murray, who also would not have traded all of his suffering for anything in the world. it's a good lesson, but one of the harder ones. possibly one of the hardest ones. (the reading, incid, was mark 10, where the james and john want to sit on jesus' right and left in glory. also incid., while i would usually write about any new church i go to, the one last week in atlanta was very unforgettable, and full of old people. this one -- st. theresa's on the lower east side, has a large hispanic community, and gorgeous singing -- a lot of the time the organ just dropped out and left the choir to its own devices to harmonize with the congregation, and the congregation didn't drop the ball, and the choir nailed all the sevenths and ninths and seconds and other gospelly-type harmonies).

(duke)ailian called at 11-something, and we agreed to meet on west 4th and 3rd ave, which meant i had time to duck into one of the chinatown bakeries and finally buy a couple of lian rong mooncakes, $1 each. i ate one, and got on the subway, and it was really good so i ate the other one.

we ended up in a thai restuarant, where i finally got (d~)a~ to spill the whole story of how she ended up where she is (she was, actually, BONDED, but did something very naughty and immoral and should be roasted on a spit somewhere in the n-teenth circle of hell). anyway, it was a lovely story, except now of course she has to live with the devastating guilt of sin on her conscience while going to broadway plays and operas every weekend while earning four times as much money as she was. how one looks oneself in the mirror after such a misdeed i just don't know.

after pad thai we migrated to a cafe down the road (i'm sorry, i absolutely wasn't paying attention to names today), for cannoli and rum babas and cafe latte, and it was nice sitting there watching the saner portion of NY flow in and out, and chatting about american corporate culture and traveling and the eternal-suffering-of-phd- students-for-pitifully-little-reward. i kid, though. this is reward enough.

i still haven't got to the answer to the burning question, because rum babas, though nice, were not what i went to NY for, but i'm going to write that bit tomorrow and backdate, so come back in a while.

blogger was bad for a few days, so it's fortunate those days were rather boring.

thursday

finally got round to trying the falafel expert who sits himself over from qdoba on 40th. $3.25 buys a fat pita sandwich stuffed with falafel, baba ganoush, assorted greens and hot sauce. ingredients v fresh.

friday
did the take-home midterm for our pro-sem while chatting on msn with e. and justin. went 2 blocks down to the chinese takeaway, and in the five minutes they were filling my order it began to rain. heavily. it's not amusing when that happens.

ran.

evening: sat in bucks county and finished last temptation. it's in many ways less provocative than the movie, but that may purely be because of the medium. i'll have to think about it a little more.

saturday
watched battlestar galactica 3x04 twice, the second time with ron moore's podcast commentary on, both times in utter amazement at how good this show is, and how they keep topping themselves episode after episode. (ron moore on the podcast: if we don't win the fucking sfx emmy this year, i swear to god...)

ran.

cooked pork chops, oven-baked fries, and a very lousy can of peas. no more green giant for me.

it's nice being back in my apartment, but it was even nicer because the echo maker, which had its release date pushed back a couple of weeks, was waiting in my mailbox for me when i got back.

cont'd

tuesday

15.1. the weather is miserable in the morning. i grab coffee from a sketchy vietnamese grocery store on the way in to the morning. when i place my order, he has to bring out, from the back, cream, stirrers and cup holders, which makes me wonder how long it's been since he's actually sold coffee at his establishment.

15.2. nevertheless.

16. i have a nice long talk with dr. larson-prior, who works in wash u. in st louis with marcus raichle (of default-mode network fame). i'm somewhat heartened to hear that the their group has suffered all the practical difficulties of simultaneous eeg-fmri that we did back last year - chief among these silly things like subject discomfort. it's amazing how people who make eeg caps stoutly refuse to consider that human beings are going to be wearing them. we bitch gleefully about engineers, and it's a lot of fun.

17. there were meetings, but i'll skip over those.

18.1. at the end of it all, i have a couple of hours to kill before i have to make my way to the airport.

18.2.1. 3 days before, su-lin says, via e-mail:
take pictures please of any gwtw memorials or associations?

18.2.2 and i reply:
there is a margaret mitchell museum along the shuttle bus route that I can
try to take a picture of as it zips past. I think you know this, but I've
never read gwtw, or watched the movie. i've looked at it once or twice and
always thought: god, this is going to be really boring, and put it back
again.

18.2.3. and su-lin says:
I know. I think you have to be a twelve year old girl, and I suppose you've
never had that experience. is there a peachtree street?

(and there is, and i'm on it, but also half the streets in downtown atlanta are some variation on peachtree street, so this is a bit of a cheat).

18.2.4. and i reply:
But cp has read it and I'm assuming he was never a twelve-year-old girl. (I
hope)

18.2.5. and su-lin says:
no he hasn't, he's seen the movie. I think anyway. in any case only
because of the movie, she sniffs

take a picture of peachtree street please -- lots of action takes place on
peachtree! aunt pitty's house was on peachtree street and scarlet lived
there (: is it the main street, or something? but please do; a picture of
a street sign would be great (: julian under street sign (like tom!) also
can

(and so there is a movie, which su-lin will get shortly).

18.3. the further upshot of this is that i spend the couple of hours in the margaret mitchell house and museum, which is 990 peachtree street, a brick-and-mortar building where mm and john marsh once lived. anna, who has a most gorgeous southern accent, takes us around, and we view such artifacts as the Actual Icebox used by mm, and the Actual Typewriter with which gwtw was written (doubtful).

18.4. mm was apparently sceptical about clark gable being able to play the role of rhett (and it is completely untrue that the part was written for him. for that matter he was extremely nervous about taking the part because it required him to do things like cry, and act).

18.5. at some point i actually have to read this book.

and that's about it. my flight was delayed 3 hours, first because of weather, then because they couldn't find us a pilot, but this was stupid airtran so it's hardly surprising.

two days to fall break!

cont'd

monday

11.1. it transpires that jiat has never before eaten a krispy kreme donut, so at my insistence we pick up a half-dozen from the grocery store, along with a bag full of red delicious apples. together with orange pekoe tea, that's breakfast.

11.2. needless to say, he loves them.

12. nobel laureate paul greengard is one of the day's featured speakers. he has published over 2000 peer-reviewed papers over five decades, mapped out innumerable neurotransmitter signal transduction pathways, and fully described the actions of DARPP-32, (which is the molecule that ultimately makes you happy when you take cocaine, pot, MDMA, caffeine, and other such lovely substances). a large chunk of neuroscience exists today because of this guy. he's also the most lucid octogenarian i've ever seen, and delivers an extremely technical talk clearly and with panache (and even manages to slam the republicans a few times).

13. by 4 i'm fairly exhausted. i shlep back to the hotel and force myself to run on the treadmill for half-an-hour to make up for a very bad weekend full of bacon and grease.

14.1. dinner is with scott h.'s group from my old duke lab. it's at the globe, a ten-minute walk through drizzle and fog, and when i get there i discover that i don't really know anyone, except the ex lab person who's the reason i was invited.

14.1.1. (and jamie, but i think he thinks i'm an idiot so that doesn't count)

14.1.2. (kevin pelphrey, my old advisor, and an inspirational up-and-coming expert on autism, has begged off the conference for the second year in a row. it's sad -- i haven't seen him for ages.)

14.2. i'm seated between scott, who is very scary, and sarah, who looks like jeanne tripplehorn.

14.2.1. which means the evening starts off extremely awkwardly, in the way of trying to find something, anything in common to talk about.

14.2.2. we go through the obvious things in about eight-and-a-half seconds.

14.2.3. it's kind of like two quadruplegics trying to play frisbee.

14.2.4. the waitress performs a flying save by coming round to ask if we want any drinks. i order a grey goose dry martini post haste. between them, scott and david manage to order about half the wine list.

14.2.5. the martini is large, chilled to the perfect temperature, and has three (3) fat olives in it.

14.3. the food starts arriving. the appetisers are a very good sign of things to come -- chorizo-stuffed dates, asparagus, haricot verts and mushrooms in a light tempura batter, hummus, and calamari. the dates are so good that we order another 2 plates.

14.4. i finally manage to uncover the fact that sarah's work revolves around decision-making, something i can talk about, and we're off to the races. we have both started work by this point on the cabernet blanc, and suddenly everything is very funny, and we take a left-turn off the highway of decision-making to talking about whether women watch football exclusively because the uniforms show off players' asses.

14.5. the main course is brilliant - pan-fried cod with gnocchi, pancetta, parsnips and dates. i love the way cod flakes, and how it has a little bit of a bite without being a steak. the gnocchi is subtly sweet, neither mushy, nor too chewy, and has the slightest suggestion of a skin. the parsnips and the dates make the dish exciting without being overwhelming. my (limited) experience in expensive restaurants here has generally been that the food is not worth the price, and i'm glad that i've finally found somewhere where that's not the case.

14.6. sarah spills her water. i switch from white to red. one half of the table is discussing the duke lacrosse incident and the other is telling pedophile jokes.

14.6.1. pedophile joke #1:
what's so good about twenty eight year olds?
there are twenty of them

14.6.2. pedophile joke #2:
how do you know when it's bedtime in the jackson household?
it's when the big hand touches the little hand.

14.6.3. and so forth.

14.7. dessert is quince and apple cobbler, piping hot, with marsala ice-cream.

14.8. i think this was paid for on a duke department credit card, so i'm completely remorseless. after all, i have to start recovering our $200,000 from somewhere.

cont'd

sunday

6. jiat wakes up at 3 in the morning and potters around. i think the curse of my existence is that every single person i have to share a room with while traveling must have intractable jet lag (jiat lag...heh. *slaps self with a rubber glove*).

7. cliff saper is one of the featured speakers today. if you're starting in the field of sleep, his are among the first papers that you would read - he's figured out the neurobiology of the transitions from sleep to wake, and from REM to nREM, and all in the last 10-15 years. it's pretty awe-inspiring. he blazes through his speech like a chipmunk on amphetamines, and i bravely try to keep up with him while scrawling notes on my little pad. ink flies. paper tears. looking back over my scratching, i have no idea what any of the abbreviations stand for.

8. outside, there is capoeira.

9.1. we rendezvous at the cog neuro social – this is the ex-boss, jiat, geoff (whose hostel burned down last year), and the same three RAs who tagged along at the last conference to the Exorbitantly Priced Yet Entirely Mediocre French Meal. the social is disappointing; last year there were personalities like randy buckner, this year it's PRC grad students who hang around in large chinese-speaking clumps eating all the potato chips.

9.2. we make a quick exit and head for dinner. vickery's is a wonderful pub four metro stations away from the conference center, far enough away that it's not overrun by starving scientists. (also, for the GWTW lovers, it says on that webpage that "We called the place Vickery's after Margaret Vickery, for whom the house was built. Until the late 1970's, Margaret lived in and operated an antique and fabric shop in the house. Rumor, based on facts, has it that Margaret Mitchell used to visit Margaret Vickery for hours on end (in part because she liked Margaret Vickery and because she hated her own house up the street). Speculation has it that a great deal of "Gone With The Wind" was written in that house.") as it turns out, the theme of the evening is one of my favorites: R(s)ODPFBSE, and we start work on the sierra in earnest. the menu is pretty inspired for a bar: starters include grouper fingers, calamari in what tastes exactly like bottled thai chili sauce, parmesan artichoke dip with assorted dipping things, and fried green tomatoes with arugula and feta cheese (the best i've had since joe's crab shack in miami 3 years ago). i order the seared ahi tuna sandwich with wasabi mayonnaise and fried plantains, and it's v good: the tuna exactly how it should be, which is slightly blackened on the outside, succulent and raw about half a centimeter from any given surface. more pints of beer materialise, and i do an atkins and toss out most of the bread from my sandwich. jiat orders the grits without even knowing what grits are, and for the LAST TIME EVER, they're made of GROUND CORN so STOP ASKING. geoff cannot stop talking about orexin hypocretin. the ex-boss sits there looking very pleased that he has people from 4 labs sitting with him at one table, and who can blame him, i'd like to have an empire some day too.

9.3. jiat and the ex-boss depart at 10-something. the rest of us sit around for a while feeling rather bloated and talking about our various post grad-school plans (some of which are v exciting, but which cannot be discussed here. i don't have a plan at all, by the way, in case it sounds like i do. i just want to get through my midterms next week.)

10.1. after a while, we head back to the uiuc guys' hotel, and, as they say, hang. lucas starts doing somersaults across the bed, and i warn him that someone i know got a prolapsed invertebral disc doing just that, but he doesn't listen, and then geoff joins in, and it's like: ok people, we have had too much to drink.

10.2. so of course the next natural thing to do is to go out to a bar.

10.3. vortex is a mere three blocks away. it's horrible, and smoky, and the waitress is a pincushion of body piercings. we're joined somewhere along the way by a villaneuva student who does interval timing in rats, a north indian postdoc who looks like a jew, and one other random woman who is somebody's girlfriend, but whose i can't quite figure out.

10.4. people order strange drinks like pumpkin pie and beer cocktails. if beer before liquor makes you sicker, i would imagine that doing them at the same time is probably an even worse idea. but that's just my conservative side talking.

10.5. the random woman turns out, embarrassingly enough, to be a fifth-year psych grad student at penn. we've been to at least two socials together, but just never met. we finally get introduced, and naturally start complaining about how badly department unity sucks.

10.6. the bar kicks us out at some point, and i manage to get back to the hotel without getting accosted by too many homeless people. i really want to read tim powers, but two pages in i find that i'm passing out, and call it a night.