thomas and i sat at home with beer on friday night and watched the first presidential debate, the most distressing part of which was mccain stating that he would cut funding for things like studying the dna of bears in montana. you know, his point about wasteful spending is well-taken, or at least, taken, but that was a particularly poorly-chosen example (surely there are conservative basic scientists out there somewhere. you at the back?) i think last night more than ever i felt that mccain is just methuselah old -- alluding to russians in afghanistan cuts both ways; there's a fine line between experience and decrepitude, particularly from the vantage point of someone under 35. also, old politicians don't seem to me as eminent as old academics; i think this is something to do with the cyclical nature of history. what was it that one philosopher quipped: that the only thing we learn from history is that we don't learn anything from it? i guess that's what cheapens the experience argument for me -- what's going to be important in the (quite clearly unpredictable) future is going to be discovered accidentally, fortuitously, and by a leadership willing to take chances on LHCs and wireless electricity and the investigation of near-death experiences. and yes, bears in montana as well.

From Under the Net, Iris Murdoch

I used to talk a lot with Dave myself about abstract things. I was pleased, when I first got to know him, to hear that he was a phillosopher, and I thought that he might tell me some important truths. But somehow we never seemed to get anywhere, andmost of our conversations consisted of my saying something and Dave's saying he didn't understand me and my saying it again and Dave's getting very impatient. It took me some time to realize that when Dave said he didn't understand, what he meant was that what I said was nonsense.

...

Dave does extramural work for the university, and collects about him many youths who have a part-time interest in truth. Dave's pupils adore him, but there is a permanent fight on between him and them. They aspire like sunflowers. They are all natural metaphysicians, or so Dave says in a tone of disgust. This seems to be a wonderful thing to be, but it inspires in Dave a passion of opposition. To Dave's pupils the world is a mystery; a mystery to which it should be reasonably possible to discover a key. They key would be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some eight hundred pages. To find the key would not necessarily be a simple matter, but Dave's pupils felt sure that the dedication of between four and ten hours a week, excluding university vacations, should suffice to find it. They do not conceive that the matter should be either more simple or more complex than that.

instead of reading about meta-analysis

A limerick fan from Australia
Regarded his work as a failure:
His verses were fine
until the fourth line

dissertation tip #9: DO NOT BE ANYWHERE NEAR AN INTERNET CONNECTION WHEN READING STATISTICS TEXTBOOKS

have decided that the second part of my qualifying exam should be a meta-analysis, and have begun the long and dreary process of actually learning how to do one of them. it's been about a year since i've had to think about the nuts and bolts of statistics, and this time i'm without expert help and staring alone at a very thick and daunting textbook. math really should be done by someone else.

in one of the most alan ball-esque moments of my life to date, i was sitting with some friends in the bar above abyssinia last night when this random woman stumbles along into our conversation, a conversation which rapidly turns to her recent experience in a japanese art/porn museum where the final exhibit was snow white being eaten out by one of the seven dwarves while the others looked on with various expressions of curiosity and disgust. which one? i found myself asking, while simultaneously not wanting to know the answer. she thought about it for a while. it wasn't bashful, she concluded, because he was standing to the side and being a prude. sleepy was...asleep. beyond that, she had no clue. also: the whiskey and soda i ordered came in a tall and very unsophisticated glass, everyone in the room was either an artist or a musician, and there was a very large styrofoam tarantula hanging from the ceiling above five feet above our heads.

neither distrito nor table 31 had good enough food to justify the prices they charged. the general consensus about distrito is that it's nice to have around as a symbol of gentrification in west philly, but that none of us would go there would a meal again. maybe for their margaritas, which were admittedly yummy, but $8 for two miniscule carnitas tacos, not so much. table 31 had their prix fixe restaurant week menu, which was decent i suppose, but unimpressive enough that i wouldn't go back for anything more expensive. the only truly memorable part of the meal was the little mound of peanut ganache that came on top of my "pbj" (a raspberry-peanut butter bar), which was highly reminiscent of the hua sheng hu in the dessert shop i like on purvis street. i think i'm getting to the point where i'd rather go back to places i know i like rather than potentially blow the scarce money i have on things that may be terrible; i know that salento and friday saturday sunday make me quite happy, and i don't go to nice restaurants often enough to soften the blow of having a bad meal.

lamarck all over again

so my one very large complaint about spore is this; back in the bronze age when we were all taking introductory bio and learning about xylem and frangipanni and doing bark rubbings, it was drilled into our heads (not in these exact words) that evolution is not teleological, that blind selection accounts for genetic variation and environmental pressures are what change allelic frequency, i.e. there is no watchmaker, evolution does not "improve" species, etc. now, this may be self-evident for most of us, but i warrant that most of the people you pass on the street will have at best a foggy idea of this concept, and at worse completely misguided lamarckian (or worse) notions. this is bad. what is worse is that spore, a game that purports to be true to principles of evolutionary biology, inadvertently (and completely necessarily) perpetuates these misconceptions by implying that there is a watchmaker (you), and that evolution is goal-driven (to progress to the next stage). i think i'm just going to spend all my time in space so i don't have to think about this horror.

(speaking of space, you can read about gliese 581 for your nerd info of the day).

had our first supervision for this year's clinical practicum. i've heard from friends in other therapy practica that they got thrown in the deep end with patients (borderline pd!) from session 1; the CBT prac is apparently gentler and kinder, and staffed by people who make delicious homemade salsa out of molasses and peaches and poblanos grown in their own backyard. we don't get clients till next month, and only a few at a time so we get to spend less time making phone calls and writing reports and more time making sure we're actually being, well, therapeutic.

otherwise, the semester has been slow in picking up speed -- not having to teach and take 3 classes has made a huge difference in my weekly schedule, and i'm still adjusting to the fact that i have much more time now to do work i should be doing rather than work i have to be doing. discipline is the watchword. must knuckle down and start work on quals.

a poor beginning

we were talking in class today about how there is a significant negative association between levels of fish consumption in society and levels of violent crime (read about it here), which seems to be linked specifically to omega-3 fatty acids. was immediately reminded of course of the silly science research whatsits we did in sec 3 (wasn't it bong and von who were looking at omega-3?), and how mine in particular had no scientific merit whatsoever, being completely devoid of any kind of statistical inference. it occurs to me that even as a means of getting feet wet, the SRP was for many of us a pretty lousy excuse for research, especially compared to the opportunities a*star is providing to kids in short trousers nowadays to do eastern and western and whatever-have-you blots. (here! use our million-dollar machines! oh wait, BONDED!!) thinking back, i realize my cynicism wrt science probably increased severalfold just because of SRP alone, making it a double, nay, treble wonder that i sit here now worrying about structural equation modeling and how on earth i'm going to get it done with my dataset.

more interesting than heat death

so against my better judgment, i've decided to buy spore. hell, it's early in the semester, and it's been a while since my last cycle of indulgence and regret. in case you've been chained up in your basement for the last few years, spore is sim everything, the last in the logical chain of god games, and supposedly faithful to the principles of evolutionary biology. you start off manipulating unicellular organisms, then creatures, then civilizations, then colonize space and control everything. pretty neat.

the brother and i were discussing a few weeks ago, well, where does will wright go from here? and the answer we came up with was this: Sim Sim, a game about programmers of god games, where you control your own maxis-like company, provide facilities, income, have "inspiration" points, market your games, and so forth. ultimately, you aim to grow the company to the stage where its employees create their own version of Sim Sim within the game, thus setting you down the road of infinite recursion. then of course, you could make Sim Sim Sim, in which you control a character who purchases and begins playing Sim Sim, at which point you might walk in on yourself playing the game in the game, thus creating a sort of grandfather paradox, and perhaps destroying the entire fabric of space-time in the process.

anyway. if you've got it as well, share your creatures with me.

consolation

if life were a college class, everyone would get an incomplete.

tokyo pictures (iv)

edo-tokyo museum





tsukiji fish market was closed for the summer holiday, which was one of the few sad things about the trip. we had a lot of great sushi anyway, so there was that.



and finally, hachiko the dog statue