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