i begged off my undergraduate class in the morning and brought our prospective student on a little walking tour of west philly and the campus. we stopped off for a good long while at the center for cognitive neuroscience (which his potential advisor works out of) to escape the cold and sip coffee and talk about the research that is conducted within, including a project mysteriously titled "purple carrots". the other housemate was there, and ben, and we google-earthed the island of jersey, and myth-busted the transatlantic rail, and generally prevented anyone in the room getting work done for a good hour.

we left late morning and married up with grace and the person she was hosting (south korean) and went to see if anyone from the brainard lab was in. they were not. dave brainard and co. study the psychophysics of color vision, and are beginning to join forces with the cog neuro empire to understand neural dissociations between perception and interpretation of color stimuli. from what i understand, the project is a tour de force of engineering, biology, psychology and linguistics, the meeting of several mighty empires, etc. it's also highly uninteresting to me, but i find nowadays that every other person i talk to seems to be involved in this work, including the south korean prospective, the other housemate, and a large number of the very serious neuroscientists who roam the top floor of solomon and steal our beer from the department fridge.

more wandering, then kinjal joined us and we had a late lunch at marathon where i bitched about our DCT and got sympathy, and we told the prospectives about how great the penn program is, except for the parts that are not. i still hate marathon. we split up, and i read articles for an hour, and then we had social psych led by todorov which went the full 3 hours and nearly killed me. social is a gigantic seminar that has attracted wharton (i'm going to singapore!) graduate students, nefarious individuals who want to talk about subliminal advertising and unconscious manipulation and raping your mother. gross; and we're only a quarter way through. anyway.

the day closed with us going out to dinner and the department picking up the tab: pietro's with the prospectives and nick and ben and the housemate and the other housemate and grace and ewa and a neuroscience student who got invited by accident but turned out to be cool. almost despite itself, our department has really good people in it, and it shows when we have guests. if i were them, i'd want to join us for sure.