i like --

the way snow accumulates on flat surfaces, right to the edges, perfectly even, like marzipan lovingly smoothed.

grace, jared, stephen and a bunch of other people decided to go to atlantic city on a whim the other day, and were reporting their winnings/losses (mostly winnings, it seems) + massive quantities of alcohol consumed to us over chocolate satsuma cake in kinjal et al's house. everyone is earning money in every possible way, even the people in the program, who are supposed to be suffering in penury. i think that it's a matter of honor that grad students be poor, at least for their tenure as trainees, lest they shatter the morale of the other people in their department -- even if you can cheat, you don't (or you lie), to maintain solidarity, and the illusion that it's all about passion. after all these years of black-as-pitch pessimism, i'm shocked that i still think that way. this needs to be beaten out of me, soon.

the first real run of my study is next week, which means of course that it's time for everything imaginable to go wrong. the most amusing mishap, i think, was the magnetic strip on the scanner room door breaking, meaning that it swings open and refuses to stay shut. doorstops won't work -- no gap between seal and floor -- so we have resorted to propping sandbags up against the outside to keep it closed, and, when those don't work, leaning against it when the scans begin. it's all very apollo 13, except without the danger of dying horribly in space.

winter hit philadelphia with a vengeance this week. it snowed, on and off, from monday to wednesday, and as thursday dawned the temperatures dipped into negative numbers on the farenheit scale. you can tell how cold it is outside from people's postures as they walk down the road -- in temperatures that frigid there is a particular stoop to ones gait, the shoulders hunch like a pugilist. everyone is covered, anonymous. when you're outside, the world narrows to the thin slice between here and where you want to be, and all the periphery is blasted inconvenience.

---

whether or not there's truth to the myth that the cold makes you hungry, it certainly seems true for me. when i have cereal or a sandwich before i leave the house in the morning, i'm usually ravenous before 11. i have 2 unhealthy fixes for this: (1) snack, or (2) wait till 9-ish to eat breakfast, and then get something with cheese. the same thing happens when i have salad for lunch -- i love gia pronto to death, but it leaves me starving long before dinner. damn winter.

---

i'm spending a lot of time in van pelt instead of the lab. mark's cafe is quiet early in the day, abandoned by sleep-phase-shifted undergraduates until "morning" (11-1) classes let out. i think i'm being productive, at least some of the time. everything moves with such painful slowness in research that writing -- even at the lumbering pace of 1000 words a day -- seems like explosive progress. this is another one of my (multiple) grouses with people who do surveys -- mountains of data in obscenely short times, but surely there's at least some inverse relationship between utility and ease of acquisition? truth just can't be that simple to come by; there has to be sweat and tears and burning and sleepless nights.

From The New Yorker, Jan 29, 2007

Wonder Boys

The first meeting of the Athanasius Kircher Society, held in the CUNY Graduate Center, on Fifth Avenue, last Tuesday evening, was billed as a contemporary wonder cabinet. Not the least of wonders is the revival of interest in Kircher, a seventeenth-century German Jesuit priest. A human search engine, Kircher published dozens of volumes on matters both large - astronomy, Egyptology, cryptography, botany, geology, geography, magnetism, and linguistics - and small, such as the real size of Noah's Ark. Travelers from all over Europe came to see his collection of marvels and oddities in Rome, at the Museum Kircherianum.

By the end of the century, however, modern methods of scholarship had proved many of Kircher's assumptions wrong, and his reputation sank to that of a gifted charlatan. According to Anthony Grafton, of Princeton University, who spoke at the meeting, a Kircher resurgence began in academic circles in the late nineteen-seventies. Kircher's popularity is also growing among the general public, at least with a certain type of self-consciously twee New York hipster (the event sold out a month in advance), for whom YouTube is a modern-day Museum Kircherianum.

Joshua Foer, a twenty-four-year-old freelance science writer, called the meeting to order. Foer is the founder of the Kircher society, which consists mainly of a Web site that draws attention to subjects (hair museums, blind photographers, thousand-year-old pieces of popcorn) that Kircher might find inspiring. Then Grafton invoked the spirit of Kircher by reading, in Latin, a description of his descent into the crater of Mt. Vesuvius in 1638, undertaken in order to gather data on volcanism.

The first presenter was Kim Peek, the model for the Dustin Hoffman character in the 1988 movie "Rain Man." Peek has read nine thousand books, and has complete recall of the all; he can read a new book in an hour, sometimes scanning the left page with his left eye while he reads the facing page with his right. (His condition may be caused by the absence of his corpus callosum, the tissue that connects the two hemispheres of the brain.)

Peek began by asking Grafton where he lived. Princeton, the professor said. Peek informed him that the Princeton area code had been changed from 609 to 732 (almost; it changed nearby) and added, correctly, that New Jersey was ratified in 1787. The audience was then invited to try to stump the Rain Man. This turned out to be pretty easy to do. Peek didn't know the stops on London's Northern Line, but he did recall the details of the Packers-Giants championship game from 1962. There was polite applause from the audience. Kircher, in a portrait at the side of the podium, looked out at the crowd, practitioners of a kind of reverse hip - instead of being up to the minute, the point is to accumulate as much historical arcana as possible. His slight, smug smile seemed to say, "Fools! I had only books and artifacts to consult, and I knew everything. You have your Treos and your Facebook, and what do you know?"

Rosamond Purcell, another presenter, showed slides of her photographs, an eerie grotesquerie of natural-historical specimens. (She made several of these "catalogues" in collaboration with Stephen Jay Gould.) Her work conveys a sense of darkness within the scientific method; she seemed drawn to Kircher not for his contributions to science but for his curatorial interest in freaks and pathologies.

Then it was time for the world premiere of the balcony scene from "Romeo and Juliet" performed in Solresol, a seven-syllable language invented in the early nineteenth century, in which each syllable corresponds to the seven notes of the major scale.

"Fa do-re re-sol-do mi-do-do-sol?" Romeo beseeched. For sheer geekiness, this was the evening's high point.

Finally, the society heard from retired Colonel Joe Kittinger, who made the world's highest parachute jump, in 1960, from 102, 800 feet. He told a harrowing story of a seventy-six-thousand-foot jump, in which his parachute wrapped around his neck, sending him into a 140 r.p.m. spin - until, at last, the reserve chute deployed. It wasn't clear what Kittinger had to do with Kircher.

At the end of the meeting, a replica of a two-foot-long walrus-penis bone or baculum, was presented to whoever had the program printed with the words "Walrus Baculum".

"Mine!" said a man in the audience, leaping up with his program.

"All right!" Foer shouted, shaking the penis bone above his head, while the Kircherians roared.

-John Seabrook

but this, of course, is one of the big trade secrets -- the psychologist's job is not to get the client to face reality, but to embrace an acceptable and livable version of it. i don't think there is a way to cope with actual reality without going van gogh.

brick

i think that many people who read this blog will like brick; it's a quirky movie that's kind of the o.c. meets the maltese falcon, noir with teens. the closest movie i can think to compare it to is rushmore, although only insofar as both are a chimera of two completely different genres. the gimmick in brick succeeds because it's not been overused (compared, for example, to the "non-linear narrative" trick, a conceit that's so last week), and because rian johnson's script gets the tone exactly right. it's the kind of script i would like to come up with, if i had talent.

the movie opens on the corpse of emilie de ravin (claire, from lost, if anyone cares), jumps back in time to a couple of days before her murder, and then follows hard-boiled teenage detective brendan as he chases down the truth. the film is more a whydunnit than a whodunnit -- you find out long before the end who her killer is, but this isn't classic detective fiction, and the real payoff comes in the very last scene.

joseph gordon levitt plays the lead. after his 16-million-year stint on 3rd rock from the sun, i figured he was about due to fade quietly into obscurity, but between mysterious skin and this film it looks like he's carving out a pretty good niche for himself (sullen adolescent in arthouse movies no one will ever see). nora zehetner from heroes is in it, with the same two expressions she has in heroes (well, had). the rest are sort of unknowns, which is fine, because teen movies are like that, and you're so busy marvelling at the cleverness of the story that you don't even have time to notice.

dissertation tip #4

Our first research design class was on "generating research hypotheses". This is from the reading (on heuristics for doing so):

Heuristic G22 involves using some physiological prod to jolt one's thinking out of the usual ruts. Chemical stimulants might be legal and conventional like caffeine, or illegal and stigmatized like LSD. If one is to use chemicals as a jolt to enhance hypothesis generating, one should lower one's base level of the substance so that when needed it will make a difference (e.g. one should forego drinking coffee until one needs it to keep alert through an all-nighter). Instead of chemical doses, one can use behavioral prods like hyperventilation or jogger's high, or purportedly mind-altering meditation tricks, or musical backgrounds, or massed practice to extinguish responses normally prepotent in the habit-family hierarchy. Low-inhibition states such as daydreams or even night dreams may allow elusive insights to surface, as when Kekule formulated the hexagonal-ring model of the benzene molecule after dreaming of a serpent biting its own tail.

McGuire WJ (1997), Creative Hypothesis Generating in Psychology: Some Useful Heuristics, Annu. Rev Psychol, 48:1-30.

i'm in the gsc, working on the scholarpedia article the advisor wants me to write. it's incredibly hard. partly because i feel there are gaps in my knowledge of the subject that you could drive a bus through, but also partly because i only have 2000 words to work with, insanely few for a review paper. (just you watch though, when i have to do a 25000-word version for major areas in a couple of years i'll be screaming again for an entirely different reason). 2000 words means crisp, unembellished sentences, draconian standards of exactitude and the mass extermination of adjectives; also, having to find the right synonym to improve cadence rather than lazily sticking in extra words. the wordsmith in me stirs, and licks his chops.

dr. sb returned from australia bearing baskets of chocolate, including a blast from the past in the form of freddo the chocolate frog. the occasion, (as if you need one for chocolate), was an early celebration of australia day (jan 26), which is not, as you might think, the date of their independence, but the date when the bloody british came and claimed the continent as their own. as with guy fawkes day, therefore, the holiday is either a day of celebration or mourning, depending on your sympathies.

also learned today (by one, several or many):
1) new zealand is not north-east of australia
2) nor is it a part of australia, although some may wish it were.
3) the closest living relative of the dodo is the nicobar pigeon, native to south-east asia, and
4) bananas contain melatonin

martin luther king jr. day

-- is only a holiday if you can afford it to be. which i couldn't. i did have a rather nice dinner with wh, though, in which we merrily dissed the practices of clinical psychology and medicine, and decided that given increasing life expectancies and the individual probabilities associated with various diseases physical and mental, we are both almost certain to die of something excruciating and horrible.

how weird is it that stephen fry dies in v for vendetta? thanks to qi, i couldn't see him as anyone but himself for the entire movie, and when the gestapo came for him, i was like 'oh!'. maybe i don't want to see him guest star on house after all.

(yes, the movie is more than a year old and i only just watched it. it was good, though. i might buy the dvd.)

we went to dahlak, an ethiopian place, for dinner. the communal food dish was almost as large as the table, and highly reminiscent of the plastic basins that hang from hooks in void deck mama shops, down to its particular shade of blue. the curries were excellent, but, as always, not spicy enough. there was too much injera; also, it has a way of just sitting in ones stomach rude and unmoving. i suppose there is a demand in african countries for food that keeps one full. (reminded of -- q: what does a somali do with a bowl of rice? a: open a minimart)

ewa, who was with us, had just returned from poland the night before -- we agreed unanimously that her break had been the most fun, having featured pub-crawling through dublin on new year's eve. she's one of a few people doing the grad student apartment shuffle, moving across over the other side of clark park (great view), and has no furniture, so we adjourned to the hangout house and tried to be an impromptu salvation army. (net collection: one mattress, and a table broken in half; it's the thought that counts.) and then there was coffee cake, and coffee, and apocryphal stories of people who went insane in the third year of the program under their committee's unrelenting whip.

2 stories i will tell my students, when i have them

1.
--that galileo, after creating a stir by announcing that the earth was not the center of the universe and, in fact, revolved around the sun, after being told by the catholic church that this was incompatible with doctrine, after being forced to publicly recant, had, according to folklore, this to say under his breath: 'eppur si muove' -- 'it moves nevertheless'.

2.
-- that in the late 19th century, there lived a man named percival lowell, astronomer, mathematician, and founder of the lowell observatory. lowell famously believed that he could see canals running across the surface of mars, long straight criss-crossing tracts running from poles to equator. he was so convinced of this that he was able to persuade many of his contemporaries that he had seen them, and collectively, this group of scientists decided that the canals were sufficient evidence for life on mars. they named the canals. they formulated a theory that they were built because of the scarcity of water on all parts of the planet save its poles, and they thus postulated that whatever society existed on mars was both technologically far more advanced than earth, and also utopian, for how else could they facilitate such large scale planet-wide cooperation? lowell himself wrote several books on the subject, including mars and its canals, and mars as the abode of life. at the time, all this was taken with deadly seriousness; lowell was highly regarded, and pluto, in fact, was named in his memory (PL being his initials). which just goes to show, that for a while anyway, you can fool all the people all of the time.

incidentally:

(#1: knowing this helps makes sense of why h.g. wells radio broadcast scared the hell out of so many people)

(#2: if you have jstor or some other access, this is a cute paper reviewing all the details of what happened.)

i have a course with the director of the clinical program, and i think i managed to make her hate me in the very first hour of the very first class. this is an accomplishment, even for me. i've decided to just keep a very low profile from here on in and hide under the aegis of protection my advisor provides -- fortunately, he's the only one whose opinion really matters right now.

---

i'm getting to spend much more time in my lab this semester than last, and i like that. i feel a much greater affinity to the profs in my lab that the ones in the clin psych group; we talk the same language, we don't treat biological imperative as a dirty, vestigial product of our days in the trees. psychologists -- and people in general -- are far too worried that the fact that we are animals cheapens the richness of the human experience. not only is this completely unfounded, it's also highly delusional, as well as (implicitly) saying that we really would like intelligent design to be true, *pretty please*?

---

i piloted my experiment on myself, so i finally have some real data to look at it, even if it did come from my own stupid head. there's an indescribable excitement in processing the very first set of data in a study, like opening christmas presents or an unfamiliar bottle of wine. i've learned to savour it, because it's drudgery pretty much all the way after that until everything is collected, which is a long way down the road, longer than there've been fishes in the ocean, etc.

mm

A Quick One Before I Go

There comes a time in every man's life
when he thinks: I have never had a single
original thought in my life
including this one & therefore I shall
eliminate all ideas from my poems
which shall consist of cats, rice, rain
baseball cards, fire escapes, hanging plants
red brick houses where I shall give up booze
and organized religion even if it means
despair is a logical possibility that can't
be disproved I shall concentrate on the five
senses and what they half perceive and half
create, the green street signs with white
letters on them the body next to mine
asleep while I think these thoughts
that I want to eliminate like nostalgia
0 was there ever a man who felt as I do
like a pronoun out of step with all the other
floating signifiers no things but in words
an orange T-shirt a lime green awning

David Lehman

our multivariate stats professor is almost completely blind, which means he teaches the class without notes or computer aids or even writing on the board, an absolute first for me in the history of my experience with math. he also insists that we use sas, which gives you an idea of what era he's from. powerful and "flexible" (the academic f-word) as they are, i hate command line stats packages. it's not even a phobia, because i'll grunt and complain my way through matlab -- it's knowing that 95% of the time i can do whatever i need to do far more simply in spss. hopefully this is the semester where i finally outgrow that phase of life -- certainly i don't think some of the more prickly analyses i see on the syllabus are easily performed by the old faithful.

(it's a very frightening syllabus, by the way, all the stuff that i've heretofore skimmed over in methods sections of papers finally confronting me like so many inescapable gorgons. oh well. i suppose it's about time i actually know something for a change.)

cp, you are priceless. even from here, i rofl.

spring '07

-- 2.5 classes, and many sleepless nights in the lab. onward, then.

a batty man on the street today flung a quarter at me with projectile force (but, fortunately, very poor aim). i hurried on, happy to ignore him, but he called out to me 'you dropped something', and pointed at the coin, so i picked it up and went on my way. his price for missing, perhaps, and the fee for my peril.

just for the record

(because sometimes i just need placeholders for memories on this blog)

Manhattan, NY

jan 2nd: i see von for our once-yearly "meet in a different part of the globe for 3 hours" thing, which consists, in rough chronological order, of: jelly donut (levain's!), finding the restaurant we want to go to is closed, going up and down streets trying to locate another using google maps (unreliable), sapporo, onigiri, sapporo, tuna belly, sapporo, more wandering, highly pretentious dessert place with countertop that von cannot stop admiring, more wandering, enormous second-hand bookstore, home. i look forward to more of these, ahem, but you know, touch wood, salt over shoulder etc.