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.