department of complaints and (slight) melancholy

1. an article came out today in nature neuroscience by someone i know (a singaporean) reporting very exciting findings on pre-conscious neural activity (an extension of the ben libet/dan wegner experiments, but with a sophisticated and very cool new method). this meant a whole day spent in moping and jealousy and talking to minz and daniel for comfort, as well as agonizing about the fact that no one else would really understand why this was causing me so much grief.

2. today was the last day of classes. the semester on the whole has been unkind to me -- too much time spent doing utterly useless classwork, and grading exams, and being accosted by stupid-ass undergraduates. i've also come to accept that i'll probably never be steady and competent, and need to have a brilliant idea fairly soon if i want to have a career, or not starve.

3. also today: ben and jerry's free cone day. every other fellow in the line was a homeless person, which made me feel extremely depressed. not because homeless people disgust me or anything -- i'm rather fond of buying them sandwiches -- but because there something just totally antithetical to the spirit of free cone day about that happening.

4. once you start reading nutritional information, you pretty much can't eat anything.

murderous rage

i swear to god, if i get one more piece of spam entitled "order a phd"...

(as roy clark sang)

Yesterday, when I was young,
The taste of life was sweet as rain upon my tongue,
I teased at life as if it were a foolish game,
The way the evening breeze may tease a candle flame

The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned,
I always built, alas, on weak and shifting sand,
I lived by night and shunned the naked light of day,
And only now I see how the years ran away

Yesterday, when I was young,
So many happy songs were waiting to be sung,
So many wild pleasures lay in store for me,
And so much pain my dazzled eyes refused to see

I ran so fast that time and youth at last ran out,
I never stopped to think what life was all about,
And every conversation, I can now recall,
Concerned itself with me, and nothing else at all

Yesterday, the moon was blue,
And every crazy day brought something new to do,
I used my magic age as if it were a wand,
And never saw the waste and emptiness beyond

The game of love I played with arrogance and pride,
And every flame I lit too quickly, quickly died,
The friends I made all seemed somehow to drift away,
And only I am left, on stage to end the play

There are so many songs in me that won't be sung,
I feel the bitter taste of tears upon my tongue,
The time has come for me to pay,
For yesterday, when I was young

Surprisingly poignant: One Sentence. On a similar note, check out Duke's Me Too blog.

smashing pumpkins

fantastic

oh cp can it be 10 years ago please

Muppet Danny Boy

just like old times

From Peace On Earth, Stanislaw Lem

Professor Tarantoga is of the opinion that people need two things. First, an answer to the question "Who is responsible?" and second, to the question "What is the secret?" The first answer should be brief, obvious, and unambiguous. As for the second, scientists have been annoying everyone for two hundred years with their superior knowledge. How nice to see them baffled by the Bermuda Triangle, flying saucers, and the emotions of plants, and how satisfying it is when a simple middle-aged woman of Paris can see the whole future while on that subject the professors are ignorant as spoons.

primary

if you're in pennsylvania, you should be voting instead of reading this blog you irresponsible bum.

i've developed what i think is called bruxism from the stress of grad school, and have to do exposure therapy on myself 18 times a day to make sure that i still have teeth by the time i graduate. i can recognize the triggers: presentations, having to run review sessons/teach classes, in-class exams, and, after all this time, clinical supervision. i don't know how much the working people get this, but it's a horrible feeling to be constantly judged; loving the work is not the same as loving assessment, and the assessment, it never ends.

had my committee meeting in the morning, in which geoff and martha took turns ripping my study design into itty bitty pieces, and then setting those pieces on fire. even though this was precisely the reason i wanted them on my committee in the first place, it still hurts when it happens. in much, much better news, i finally summoned up the courage to ask if i could use the review paper i wrote as part of my qualifying exams, and the answer was that i most definitely can, which significantly reduces the amount of ass-busting i need to do next year. round of drinks for everyone!

dan dennett gave a talk in the evening on memes and cultural evolution -- he has taken richard dawkins famous idea and run with it, perhaps a little too far. in the very first place, i'm not sure i accept the strong form of human exceptionalism, and without that piece i just can't buy into cultural evolution superceding and overriding genetic evolution. i'm willing to be persuaded though -- i'm sure that von knows a lot more about the topic than i do, and perhaps we shall discuss the particulars some day soon.

thomas managed to snag tickets for yesterday's taping of the colbert report in zellerbach -- it's the first time they've brought the show on the road, and they're here to cover the primaries (april 22nd) and be generally awesome. i wouldn't say that i was the world's hugest fan of stephen colbert before this, but i do love seeing the stuff that happens behind the scenes on tv shows, which explains the one time i suffered through the who wants to be a millionaire taping in singapore with fs, in which we try our damndest to provide the wrong answer every time they polled the audience (it failed.)

even with pre-ordered tickets, the line for admission began at 4 pm, which meant i had to invent an excuse to get out of class early. i normally would have no qualms about this, but our 2-5 class on mondays is ethics. you can go figure that one on your own. anyway, i chose to live with the guilt, and we joined the line, and ate big oversweet almond cookies, and enjoyed the spring sunshine. with the metal detectors and whatnot, it took about 2 hours to get inside. the circular daily show desk had come on the trip from new york, but everything else on the set was custom-made, including a colbert report kite, and a fake 18th-century escritoire complete with quill.

they had a not-very-funny comedian warm us up, and then after a million years stephen came out and answered a few questions while not in character ('have you had a cheesesteak yet?'). he's not altogether unlike his onscreen persona, just...less so? i think it's the voice that makes him. anyhow they started taping, and the first surprise was that the show is edited together pretty much on the spot -- WYSYWIG. he did a duet of the star-spangled banner with penn alum john legend before the cold open. michael nutter and chris matthews were guests, and it was let slip that both michelle obama and hillary were going to be on later in the week, which kind of sucks balls, since we had a choice of which day we wanted to go on. there was a lot of frantic rewriting during the breaks, and i fell even more in love with the job of tv writer, which is on the list of careers i'll pursue if i drop out of grad school (somewhere just after selling beach umbrellas in koh samui).

it was a pretty cool evening, something different from going home to read endless journal articles anyway. more like those, please?

i have saved percy 3 long enough, and can take it no more.

with the semester winding down, the undergrads have begun their extended pre-summer/graduation festivities, which seem to consist of dunking, free concerts, and a lot of beer pong. also: not going to class, which annoys me far more than it should.

as i was explaining to norah the other day, you either get to complain about the amount of work you have or take four-day weekends, but not both. that's the ivy league sense of entitlement -- not that life shouldn't be hard, but that life should be easy yet have the facade of being hard so they can complain about it. it's the exact same deal with asians fighting the overachiever stereotype. i was watching better luck tomorrow* the other day; its protagonist is the top-scoring asian kid who makes the basketball team, experiments with coke and runs with a bunch of hooligans who go around scamming other rich californian kids. in other words: i have to attempt to wreck my life so that i can lament about how stereotypes have ruined me. i just have very little sympathy for that kind of thing, although i allow that it might be a part of adolescence, and try and muster up kindness towards its perpetrators in that way.

* despite the good reviews, i also thought it was a pretty terrible movie in general.

we're having a rash of really good lecturers come along: first christoff koch who talked about the neural correlates of consciousness, and now steven pinker, who was guest lecturer at an award ceremony for students of exceptional talent (not me). the room was full of non-science types, so he had to give a somewhat non-technical talk that was not terribly informative but highly entertaining. he's recently turned to studying innuendo and swearing, and led off byspeaking about the FCC's uproar over bono saying "fucking brilliant" on live tv in 2004, an act of miscreancy that provoked conservatives to present this bill to the house of representatives:

To amend section 1464 of title 18, United States Code, to provide for the punishment of certain profane broadcasts, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That section 1464 of title 18, United States Code, is amended--

(1) by inserting `(a)' before `Whoever'; and
(2) by adding at the end the following: `(b) As used in this section, the term `profane', used with respect to language, includes the words `shit', `piss', `fuck', `cunt', `asshole', and the phrases `cock sucker', `mother fucker', and `ass hole', compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).'.

hysterical. i just love watching people getting their knickers in a twist over this stuff, mostly because it doesn't do an ounce of good anyway. (for the true dregs of what america has come up with, check out the parents television council.) plus, they don't get to watch dexter, which is the awesomeness, and in which the word 'fuck' is used in ways you would never have imagined.

at the end of FNL 2x08, when landry turns himself in, there's this song by sea wolf playing in the background: "well I woke up this morning/and I made a resolution/
I said: never going to sing another sad song again./I decided I'd admit it/I'm not an intellectual/Though the words never come easy unless I'm singing them/And the hills that I was born in will never leave me/No matter how hard I try." it's really quite lovely, and yet another reason to adore the show, and be constantly grateful that it's been renewed.

some days all i want to do is make lists: places to see before i die, books i read in primary school, people i know but have not seen for more than 5 years, bands i would like to see perform live, scientific theories i think are both aesthetic and have genuine merit, times i've broken the law, restaurants i'd like to eat in, songs whose lyrics i can recite perfectly, secrets, times i've wanted to just let go and scream, ice cream flavors, NCAA basketball champions since 1939, rich people who don't deserve to be, days when i've woken up in the morning thinking: "today is going to be a good day", things i would not do for a million dollars, people who i would like to shake until their teeth rattle, monuments, museums, saints, airports i've been in, nights without sleep, canteen uncles and aunties, movies filmed in hawaii, presents that truly meant something to me, times in my life when i stopped and took a deep breath and actually saw the world for what it was and was still grateful to be alive, songs in A minor, gyri, brands of deodorant, bridges, sources of deep and indelible embarrassment, movies i like because i like them and not because other people do, five things i would ask for if stranded on a desert island, people in my CMC platoon, subatomic particles, things worth living for, things worth dying for.

funnily, pineapples have figured in my life for the past 3 days -- thursday: as a motif in chungking express, friday: as a snack during the battlestar galactica season 4 premiere, and saturday: at a fake luau that the hawaiian housemate rounded us up to attend. said luau was filled with undergrads, and the few of us who went all felt like we were 58, and i had to call fs midway through for solace.

Learned Hand, on voting:

I don't know how it is with you, but for myself I generally give up at the outset. The simplest problems which come up from day to day seem to me quite unanswerable as soon as I try to get below the surface... My vote is one of the most unimportant acts of my life; if I were to acquiaint myself with the matters on which I was willing to risk affairs of even the smallest moment, I should be doing nothing else, and that seems a fatuous conclusion to a fatuous undertaking.