My first published puzzle; Difficulty * (out of 5)

Merry Christmas to you, if that's your thing. If not, go eat a cookie anyway. It's been a long year.

to my great chagrin, my adviser has temporarily run out of money to fund me, and i have to go back on the dole TA a blasted intro course next semester to foot the bill. this is a severe pain in the ass, and i've already decided to be the meanest, grumpiest TA ever.

haven't really been talking about this much on here, but i've been seriously trying to decide when i should graduate. the committee has said that i've paid my dues, so really all i have to do is scrape together this last dataset into something that looks like it has findings and science in it, and i'll finally become a (fake) doctor. the problem, as ever, is where to go from here. the places i really would like to do a post-doc don't seem to be taking new people on at the moment, and i don't think i'm at all ready to go out on the job market. tentative poking around in the police state has revealed that there is a grand total of one lab that's suitable for me, and guess what: i've been in it. basically, where i'm at is: gross fluctuations between despair and high anxiety. the plan, i think, is to eat a lot of chocolate and drink a lot of scotch this christmas, and tackle the problem again come the new year.

admission

after 3 years of clinical supervision, i still get a kick when i get to begin a case summary with "xx-year-old [race] (fe)male with a history of xyz". tv shows just have too much of an influence on my life.

paddle pop

was wondering with the brother just now about whether or not paddle pop still exists, and where one might get it. i always remember the original paddle pop -- the psychedelic one -- as having a most improbable taste, as if it were from an alien planet. in any case, it appears that it's still all the rage in australia, and that ads for it are still being made (with the olde paddle pop music!), but that the rainbow ones are no longer in vogue:

From The Long Day Wanes:

The fact was that Victor Crabbe, after a mere six months in the Federation, had reached that position common among veteran expatriates - he saw that a white skin was an abnormality, and that the white man's ways were fundamentally eccentric. In the early days of the war he had been in an Emergency Hospital, a temporary establishment which had taken over a wing of a huge County Mental Hospital. Most of the patients suffered from General Paralysis of the Insane, but the spirocaete, before breaking down the brain completely, seemed to enjoy engendering perverse and useless talents in otherwise moronic minds. Thus, one dribbling patient was able to state the precise day of the week for any given date in history; no ratiocinative process was involved: the coin went in and the answer came out. Another was able to add up the most complicated list of figures in less time than a comptometer. Yet another found rare musical talent blossoming shortly before death; he made a swanlike end. The Europeans were rather like these lunatics. The syllogism had been the chancre, the distant fanfare of the disease, and out of it had come eventually the refrigerator and the hydrogen bomb, GPI. The Communists in the jungle subscribed, however remotely, to the Hellenistic tradition: an abstract desideratum and a dialectical technique. Yet the process of which he, Victor Crabbe, was a part, was an ineluctable process. His being here, in a brown country, sweltering in an alien classroom, was prefigured and ordained by history. For the end of the Western pattern was the conquest of time and space. But out of time and space came point-instants, and out of point-instants came a universe. So it was right that he stood here now, teaching the East about the Industrial Revolution. It was right that these boys too should bellow through loudspeakers, check bombloads, judge Shakespeare by the Aristotlean yardstick, hear five-point counterpoint and find it intelligible.

so, after long last, my meta-analysis has been accepted, which is some pretty amazing stuff considering i'm still more or less a nobody. my favorite part so far of the tying-up-loose-ends portion of the exercise is that the editorial team, for some inscrutable reason, needs a paper copy of the manuscript, which i fully intend to send to them in a nice hefty cardboard box. i think it's always been one of my dreams to send someone a manuscript in a nice hefty cardboard box. it feels so like something jane austen would do, although she probably never did.

here's an interesting take on "professional opinions" by josh olson. i don't think i have personal experience with this on any level, but i totally appreciate what he's trying to say.

Joan Baez

i got the proofs for our neuroimage paper a couple of days ago, and was slightly disgusted with the number of errors that remain in it even after the copy editor had (supposedly) done his job. i may not have mentioned this on here, but after i gave the thumbs-up to the final version, one of our co-authors (who shall remain unnamed) took it upon himself to make a few "improvements" just before making the submission. there's nothing egregious -- a few omitted and extraneous words, and some stylistic clunkers -- but it annoys me that i should still have to make those corrections at this late stage of the game. there should be a rule in collaborative writing where one, and only one person is the grammar guy, and that person gets to be the last guy to touch anything before the final version is locked down. and by 'one person', i mean not the native chinese speaker who doesn't believe in indefinite articles.

aargh

the aargh page

decisions

von's post yesterday reminded me a little of a talk i attended recently by brian knutson, who studies neuroeconomics and how decision-making is instantiated in the brain. through various studies over the last decade or so, we've shown pretty convincingly that there are certain areas in the reward pathway and frontal cortex that give us the power to predict decisions a person will make above and beyond their stated preferences. it also seems that the more difficult the decision is, the more incremental validity the neural information gives us. in other words, in cases where we have trouble a lot of making up our minds, it may be that having direct access to neuronal activity in these regions of interest may tell us what we "really" prefer (i.e. laceration, or broken phone). so, von, for $500 and a trip to philly, you can have your answer. i'll even throw in a couple drinks of scotch.

erdos number = 8

more than a year after first trying to figure out what my erdos number, is, or if i even have one, committee member geoff has come to the rescue by posting his on his lab profile. in 4 days, i'll officially have an in-press co-authored paper with dr. detre (hold your applause), which means the chain goes thusly:

Step 2: John Detre with Eric Zarahn: Aguirre GK, Detre JA, Zarahn E, Alsop DC. 2002. Experimental design and the relative sensitivity of BOLD and perfusion fMRI. Neuroimage. 2002 Mar;15(3):488-500.

Step 3: Eric Zarahn with Karl J. Friston: Friston KJ, Zarahn E, Josephs O, Henson RN, Dale AM. Stochastic designs in event-related fMRI. Neuroimage. 1999 Nov;10(5):607-19.

Step 4: Karl J. Friston with Michael Breakspear: Breakspear M, Terry JR, Friston KJ. Modulation of excitatory synaptic coupling facilitates synchronization and complex dynamics in a biophysical model of neuronal dynamics. Network. 2003 Nov;14(4):703-32.

Step 5: Michael Breakspear with Jalal M. Fadili: Bullmore E, Fadili, J, Breakspear M, Salvador R, Suckling J; Brammer M. Wavelets and statistical analysis of functional magnetic resonance images of the human brain. Stat Methods Med Res. 2003 Oct;12(5):375-99.

Step 6: Jalal M. Fadili with David L. Donoho: Bobin J, Starck JL, Fadili JM, Moudden Y, Donoho DL. Morphological component analysis: an adaptive thresholding strategy. IEEE Trans Image Process. 2007 Nov;16(11):2675-81.

Step 7: David L. Donoho with Charles Kam-tai Chui: Chui, Charles; Donoho, David Special issue on diffusion maps and wavelets. Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis. 21 (2006), no. 1, 1-2.

Step 8: Charles Kam-tai Chui with Paul Erdős: Borosh, I.; Chui, C. K.; Erdős, P. On changes of signs in infinite series. Anal. Math. 4 (1978), no. 1, 3-12.

Yes! One more thing to strike off the bucket list!

halloween. i sat on the stoop with wh (and assorted friends) at his house, and we gave out candy as the sky slowly turned dark. one of the girls had dressed up as an age-inappropriate word search, and had to conceal the word VAGINA circled in orange every time a kid of elhi age came past. the reese's pieces went first, and the stragglers got horrible tootsie rolls and mini lollipops that tasted like codeine, and then we went inside and had cheese, and pot pie, and roasted brussel sprouts, and a quite-fantastic chocolate torte, and finished off a languishing bottle of clos du bois. it started raining, and the phillies lost game 2 of the world series, but it's ok because no matter what people say to me i still hate baseball. there may be riots this week, though, so stay indoors if you're in the city.

trier

lately, I've been helping another team in our lab administer the trier test, a standardized stress induction procedure that involves subjects giving a video-recorded speech, then counting backwards by 13 for 5 minutes. it's pretty terrible for the participants (who of course don't know that it's a stress test); what I failed to realize before I actually had to administer them was how awkward it is for the experimenters. the instructions prohibit smiling, nodding, or giving any kind of positive reinforcement while the subject is in the room, which is bad enough, but the worst part of the procedure by far is having to allow 20 seconds of complete silence to elapse at the conclusion of the subject's speech before asking a question. it doesn't sound like it, but those 20 seconds last eternity when you're actually in the room. also, while the subject gets to squirm physically, you're there fighting all your deepest social instincts on the inside and you don't even get to show it.

of course, the test was invented in germany. only the people who gave us the word 'schadenfreude' could have thought it up.

another quibble

i like that "from whence" has been referred to as "a vicious mode of speech". not only is it correct, it's also much classier to drop the "from", especially if doing so elicits stares.

a puzzle

ok, here's one for you.

a psychologist sits you down and tells you that you're going to play a guessing game for some money. he pulls out a deck of (playing) cards and allows you to take a cursory look at them; only long enough to ascertain that there are indeed red and black cards in the deck. he shuffles the cards. the game is this: he turns the cards up one by one. before he turns each card up, you guess whether the card is red or black. if you're right, you win $x. if you're wrong, you lose $x. the object of the game is to win as much money as you can.

once you finish playing that game, the psychologist pulls out another deck, explaining that for this second game, the rules are exactly the same, but this time the card faces only show either a solid red, or a solid black rectangle (they have normal playing-card backings). you play the game again.

so:
1) what's your strategy for the first game, and why? if at some point you notice a duplication of cards (e.g. you see the 9 of diamonds appear twice in a row), does this change how you play?
2) what's your strategy for the second game, and why?

they've played this theme out on house over and over again, but every time they give house lines like "you don't get what you deserve. you get what you get." i know that it's true, and i think hugh laurie knows that it's true too, and then i get very sad and go and drink wine.

i find that i'm enjoying my clinic days these year more than the last. for one thing, assessment suits me much more than therapy because i actually feel like i know what i'm doing sometimes, but also, patients this year all seem to come in thinking that they're going to see a real doctor, and i do nothing to disabuse them of the notion. after all, i feel like i'm entitled to at least one day a week when i don't have to feel like i'm the lowest form of life in the universe.

i'm now sure how one is supposed to stop being a perfectionist when one has advisers and mentors who expect ones work to be perfect. to all extents and purposes anyway: one can quibble about infinitesimals, but the fact of the matter is that once you reach the 95th percentile you're so far along the exponent that you may as well call the standard perfection. you read all these articles about how to get anxiety under control, that a thesis that's good enough is good enough, and so on, but none of those things seem to apply to me, or to other people i know who are getting phds worth a whit. the real test for us seems to be how to live with the disappointment.

open access

one of the big issues in academia nowadays is the question of whether open access journals are going to supplant traditional publication venues and cause a sea change in the way research as a whole is conducted and reported. a lot of the best academic journals nowadays are commercial, having been bought over by various monstercorps of the kind that take over the galaxy (think k-mart for universities). unlike k-mart, however, these entities typically make you pay out the wazoo for subscriptions and individual articles, all in the name of ensuring that you get the best possible science, i.e. facts you can trust. open access journals, of course, make use of the magic of the interw3b to bring all that stuff to you free of charge, so that any hillbilly with a 56k modem can logon and learn about the cytotoxicity of timosaponin AIII.

proponents of open access cite the argument that information wants to be free, and not just that -- academics have a responsibility to make the information they generate free, so as to encourage greater accountability and availability, and the more rapid progress of research as a whole. there is, in fact, some evidence that open access boosts citations, although i'd take that with a grain of salt until more and better data start rolling in.

now, i really do buy these arguments, and i feel that those against open access are generally old fogies who don't understand that video always kills the radio star, you can't stop the beat etc. now that i'm on the cusp of actually submitting something to an open access journal however, i do feel a little twinge of unhappiness about it, and for the very ignoble reason that it just doesn't feel as good. it feels something like editing an article on wikipedia, except that instead of 20 minutes it's taken me 20 months. there's very little nervous anticipation -- as long as you've done real science your paper's going to be accepted. there's no smug satisfaction in engaging in the dick-measuring contest of who-has-papers-in-journals-with-higher-impact-factors. it's platonic. it's how science should be reported, and it's utterly joyless.

at least there are rating systems and opportunities for peer commentary. trust that i'll be logging on every day to see if anyone's said anything new about the article. for that matter i have an idea: SCHOLARLY HOT OR NOT. every day, a new paper on the main page, scale of 1 to 10. is it HOT or NOT?

From The Alchemaster's Apprentice, Walter Moers:

One evening -- the two of them were standing in front of a kitchen cupboard -- Ghoolion suddenly laid aside the egg he was peeling. Unlocking the door, he invited Echo to look inside the cupboard and tell him what it contained. Echo did as he was bidden, but all he could see was a dusty jumble of unidentifiable kitchen utensils.

'No idea,' said Echo. 'Just junk of some kind.'

'That,' Ghoolion said in a voice quivering with rage, 'is my dungeon for useless kitchen utensils. There's one such in every kitchen worthy of the name. Its inmates are kept there like especially dangerous patients in a mental institution.'

He reached into the cupboard and brought out an odd-looking implement.

'What cook,' he cried, 'does not possess such a gadget, which can sculpt a radish into a miniature rose? I acquire it at a fair in one of those moments of mental derangement when life without a miniature rose-cutting-gadget seems unimaginable.'

He hurled the thing back into the darkness and brought out another.

'Or this here, which enables one to cut potatoes into spirals five yards long! Or this, a press for juicing turnips! Or this, a frying pan for producing rectangular omelettes!'

Ghoolion took gadget after gadget from the cupboard and held them under Echo's nose, glaring at them angrily.

'What induced me to buy all these? what can one do with potato spirals long enough to decorate a banqueting hall? What demented voice convinced me in a whisper that I might some day be visited by guests with an insatiable hankering for turnip juice, rectangular omelettes and potatoes five yards long?'

He hurled the gadgets back into their dungeon with a look of disgust. Dust went billowing into the air and Echo sneezed involuntarily.

'Why, I ask myself, don't I simply chuck them all on to the rubbish dump? I'll tell you that too. I keep them for one reason alone: revenge! I keep them just as medieval princes kept their enemies on starvation rations. A quick death on a rubbish dump would be too merciful. No, let them languish in a gloomy dungeon, condemned to everlasting inactivity. That's the only condign punishment for a rectangular omelette pan!'

So saying, Ghoolion slammed the cupboard door and turned the key three times in the lock. Then he went on cooking as if nothing had happened.

From that day on, Echo regarded the kitchen cupboard -- and the bottommost compartment in particular -- with new eyes. No longer a cupboard, it was a medieval fortress whose dungeon harboured a terrible secret. He often slunk past it, and when all was quiet he would put his ear to the door and listen. And he sometimes fancied he could actually hear Ghoolion's pitiful captives whimpering for mercy -- pleading to be allowed to rust away on a rubbish dump.

the annual potluck in our estate was held today, and there was the usual assortment of tasty delights, and kids running everywhere and skinning their knees, and the first hints of fall in the slightly chilly air. at the end of the meal, the brother and the housemate and i mused over the fact that some of the dishes had been completely cleaned out, while there was still food in several others. the Theory was this: that for dishes pre-cut into discrete portions, people feel less shy about taking the last piece than for dishes that are not. because: without pre-slicing, a form of zeno's paradox operates, where increasingly smaller pieces can get cut off from the remainder of the dish without a person feeling like they've been the greedy bastard who took the last portion. supporting evidence: pre-sliced lasagna (finished), unsliced shepherd's pie (unfinished), pre-sliced chocolate cake (finished), various salads (unfinished), etc. experiments need to be run.

not that profound, but intensely true

from this NYT op-ed

The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.

A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job, a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful about the tour, imagining Brussels, Paris, and London, meeting new fans and colleagues and being taken out for beers every night. The cartoonist, meanwhile, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”

One of the hardest things to look at in this life is the lives we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.

there was quizzo at the bar last night, which we did horribly at, and only partially because of hockey. i've come to the tentative conclusion that being good at trivia games is less to do with what you actually know and more to do with having heard of everything at least once, and forming a vast network of weak associations*. to elaborate, i feel that my level of confidence upon generating an answer is only weakly correlated with whether the answer turns out to eventually be correct: the fatal questions are those where nothing at all comes to mind. more sporcle!

in other news, the sam adams oktoberfest is not half bad this year.

* speaking of which, i have 2 of the 4 corners of funny farm done, my major accomplishment of the year so far.

semester the 7th

4th year is the easiest year. 4th year is the year where they can't really fail you out of the program any more, but where you need to take a nice deep breath, and figure out what in tarnation to do with the shiny, but quite possibly useless three letters that are soon to be appended to the end of your name.

boston, ma

8/29 to 9/2 to settle the other brother into boston college, which on the one hand was terribly exciting, but on the other means that it's been 8 years since i was a freshman. as burt ward famously, said: "holy senescence, batman" (ok, maybe not). photos imminent here*. BC actually has a much nicer campus than i'd pictured, and would be perfect if not for the fact that it's built on the steepest hill in new england.

the good
1. i only got mistaken as being the father twice.
2. von! it's been too long. my records say jan 2nd, 2007, so 2.5 years. too, too long. i hold you to visiting philly. there will be *ahem* tincture.
3. toscanini's. i fully understand why the boston people have blogged about it like 8 million times.

the bad
1. chastised for getting a hotel in lechmere and dragging von all the way out there to see me. (a) he offered (b) it's his town (c) i'd been to cambridge 2 days ago. note to everyone: if you're passing through here for 2 days, i will travel all over creation for you, promise.
2. took the overnight train to boston with the intention of sleeping all the way. hours of sleep = 0.
3. undergrads are yukky. it doesn't matter that they're not my undergrads; i've just been spoiled for life.

the ugly (but slightly awesome)
ran into one (1) s******rean dad who spent like an hour talking about himself and his pull with the government and how he's going to get his son out of NS and into harvard yale stanford princeton and how the super amazingness of his business acumen has made him the best and wisest and most wonderful person in the universe. this is addressed mostly to the mother as i concentrate very hard on eating a chocolate-chip cookie, and when he finally pauses for breath (the mother has literally not been able to get a word in edgewise for minutes), she looks at him, and says just one word: "Yah", in the MOST PERFECT WITHERING TONE, and i have to dive into her bag pretending to look for something so that he can't see that i'm cracking up all over the place.

* stupidly forgot to bring my camera. you would think that by now i'd have figured out how to pack a suitcase, but no.

pa

was tweaking a few figures in my MS and took a "short" break, during which i found funny farm. guess what happened the rest of the afternoon.

also of interest, the MIT mystery hunt. von: shall we form a team?

oh, and re: tincture, the seven are or, argent, azure, gules, purpure, sable and verte. if this makes no sense to you, just move right along.

sg

1) back a week, and lodged uncomfortably in the brother's old room, where it's stifling hot all day and night. the attractions and demerits of this country shift continuously depending on where i am who i'm with at any given moment. e.g.: woo!.

2) i have decided that i'm quite firmly in denial about everything, and would like it to remain that way as long as possible, preferably until death or senility. for instance, i've decided that i know longer want to think about graduation. perhaps if i do that hard enough, it will cease to be a real thing.

3) to the people who've talked to me, thank you, at least, for being sensible and wise.

lots of luscious free time this week, but precious little to blog about. was on the verge of feeling guilty for not working hard enough till i ran into christian today coming home from the gym, who said that he's basically not done any work, like, all summer, and then the feeling went away.

other stuff:

1) for our inaugural movie night this week, the brother and i netflixed wilde, whereupon he finally understood why the dvd was not to be found in the police state (BANNED, for "promoting" the "homosexual lifestyle"). once again: why was stephen fry not cast as horace slughorn?

2) i'm all for eco-friendly/sustainable farming, but our locally-grown summer squash just isn't very good. it's not meaty, if that makes any sense at all, more reminiscent of those squishy brown cucumbers that i hate (what are those called?)

3) learned from the sunday nyt crossword: LATRIA, one of the three levels of worship, the other two being dulia and hyperdulia. why do they not teach us awesome things like that in catechism? also, if hyperdulia is for the virgin mary, and dulia is for the saints, what is it called when you pray for the intercession of deceased relatives? so many important questions!

4) oh, and when i'm back this week, remind me to tell everyone at home the story of the mother and a clockwork orange, which i've refrained from reporting here at her behest.

in what may well be anti-climax of the decade, the other housemate moved out, and the brother moved in on thursday this week. this is a cause for minor celebration, as i (probably) no longer have to contend with crumbs/spills/unwashed dishes/stolen beer/unbagged trash etc etc. also, if you happen to be sharing a house with someone, please don't steal their beer. it's very uncouth. i hope one day to make a List Of Things That Are Fair Game When Put Into a Common Refrigerator: yogurt, bananas, carrot/celery sticks, etc. but NOT BEER. never beer. and especially not dogfish head aprihop.

in other news, i submitted, this week, a crossword to the LA Times, and my meta-analysis to psych bulletin. guess which possibility of acceptance i'm more excited about. (this is not a rhetorical question).

not for grad students

got a piece of spam today with the heading "Your Data Is Lost", and nearly had a heart attack.

have been watching kings, a show that started out promising but very quickly devolved into nonsense. the conceit was cool: a modern-day retelling of the biblical stories of the kingdom of israel with ian mcshane as king saul/silas and christopher egan (who?) as david. the producers also started out on the right foot, i think, by selling the show to nbc, and investing a ton of energy in art direction: everything is starkly lit and carefully crafted without having the awful glossiness and glare that the particular style often falls prey to. there are also some quite lovely moments in the pilot -- for instance, a scene where david confesses to his dying brother that the act that made him a hero (standing up to a 'goliath' tank) was not what it seemed ("everyone thinks i'm brave, but i'm not..."), prompting his brother's last words to him: "be brave now".

unfortunately, the pilot is more or less where the loveliness ends. it very quickly becomes apparent in subsequent episodes that the show has a number of fatal flaws. first, chris egan can't really act, and you can almost picture the vets of the production (mcshane and susanna thompson especially) getting increasingly frustrated with that. i mean, look at alias. lena olin, victor garber and ron rifkin combined couldn't combat the awfulness that was jennifer garner's "acting". second, the writers resort very quickly to the preposterous situations that should be reserved as last-resort ratings grabs or season cliffhangers at worst, with members of the royal family exposing themselves to deadly viruses and generally running all over creation trying to get themselves killed. i mean, c'mon. little common sense goes a long way.

which brings us to the biggest problem with this show. it doesn't seem like the producers/creators spent any amount of time thinking through how an absolute monarchy in a modern technological society would work. (or if they did, they needed better consultants. were you really short of unemployed history phds?) that was the coolest part of the show for me when i started watching -- how does this system run? unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the writers intended to go anywhere with the idea, choosing instead to spend time on pretentious symbolism, ridiculous lessons in "theology", and the cringe-worthy love affair between david and the king's daughter.

sigh. on to the next heartbreak

in the LAT crossword today

"Composer" of "Fanfare for the Common Cold": (P.D.Q. BACH)

self-diagnosis

while downloading music last night, it occurred to me that i have a very bad case of e-hoarding. what i usually do when i discover a new band is download their most popular songs, listen to the first 30 seconds of each, and move the ones i like onto some sort of current playlist. the rest of the music goes into the big slushy mess of other songs on my ipod, quite often never to be played again. every time i go through this, it crosses my mind that i should just get rid of the songs i don't want. i never do, though, not because i'm too lazy to, but because -- well, you never know when you just might want to listen to that horrible kings of leon song just one more time. corroborating evidence: i still have every single journal article, syllabus, paper and electronic assignment that i used or wrote in college, sorted by class and semester. further corroborating evidence: i have archived e-mail dating back to 1995 (!) including correspondence with A01A people i haven't see for close to a decade now. i feel like this is quite close to being a diagnosable disorder, except that within the next 10 years people are probably going to have a video recording of their entire life from birth hanging in a tiny chip around their necks, so maybe i don't have it so bad after all.

4th

since i'd hosted the thanksgiving dinner last year, i figured i may as well go the whole hog and host a 4th of july bbq as well. (with apologies to the brother -- you'd said you had plans. i thought of you!) there was a lot of meat, and a lot of beer, and nothing caught on fire that wasn't supposed to, and we managed to get a decent spot afterwards out on the parkway to watch the fireworks with sheryl crow* singing her 2 hits over and over again, so i count that as a success. speaking of the brother, i actually was going to say something rather similar to what he did, which is that independence day here is a lot more fun than back home, although ironically i often am a lot more drunk in the police state because i'm usually sitting in front of the tv downing shots of whiskey every time the ndp commentator says something from a list of pre-determined shibboleths. this is likely to be the plan this year as well, btw, so if anyone would like to join me in drinking to the clusterfuck that is our celebration of mediocrity and the destruction of the human spirit, you are more than welcome. i have a preference for jameson, but am open to suggestions.

* seriously, start naming sheryl crow songs now. despite how famous she obviously is, i defy you to name more than 5**. please don't e-mail me if you can.

** no, that one was by shania twain.

since all the hubbub of traveling and having visitors has come to an end, it's actually been sort of dull. jared and norah both graduated last month and i'm the only person left in the grad student room in the lab; i.e. having to deal with dead silence all day, every day. i think that starting from next week i'm just going to give up on the notion of going to lab entirely and work from home -- right now i'm mostly writing and preparing a few lectures, and i'd much rather do that eating honey nut cheerios in my underwear than suffering in the office. (yes. TMI.)

website of the day: cycorp, the most serious and scientifically-rigorous effort so far to create a true artificial intelligence. if you're interested at all in linguistics, semantics, cognitive psychology, computational modeling, neural nets or neurophilosophy (among the things i care to name), check it out. or, you could just be a dork and amuse yourself with the trivia game. i think one of my ultimate geek fantasies is to one day have the entire lexicon and semantic net of cyc uploaded into my brain, whereupon i'll be able to complete any crossword ever made in, like, 6.5 seconds.

and...i don't believe i actually admitted that on the internet.

*kills self*

comic-con

i was going to write a long post about this, but reconsidered because

a) you had to have been there, and
b) i was a bloody fool and didn't have a camera.

instead, i'll just write in ALL CAPS to say that I GOT TO SHAKE HANDS AND TALK WITH EDWARD JAMES OLMOS. IN THE FLESH. AND IT WAS THE MOST AWESOME THING EVER.

e-mail me if you really want to hear more gushing.

murdered by the crossword today, the highlight being "victim of terrible teasing" (TANTALUS). with __TAL_S in place, i spent ages going over words that might refer to someone who had a bad perm. also murdered yesterday by "jewish parchment scrolls put on doorposts" (MEZUZAHS), which i had never heard of in my life.

have started timing myself for mondays through fridays to check for progress.

study finis

pa

ran my final two scans on wednesday and thursday. the scan kitty is exhausted, and we have n = 31, and it's time to start tearing the stuffing out of these data to see what there is to see. jared successfully defended his dissertation on wednesday, and the advisor came up to me afterwards to say that it's all me now, which is like, great, no pressure at all. if there are no significant findings in these data, i'm seriously going to koh samui to sell beach umbrellas.

palo alto, ca

4 days in california, and i'm finally feeling like summer is here. on saturday, we drove up into napa valley on a still bright day to stare at young grapes beginning to get sugary on the vines. lunch was at bouchon, and consisted mostly of cholesterol -- pate, escargot in delicious puddles of garlic butter, and a quite-tasty boudin noir + stewed apples. the nicest thing, i think, about slow european lunches is that by the time they end, dinner is not far away.



re: wines, i still like cabs the best of all, which i think makes me young and unsophisticated. what are academics supposed to drink, anyway? i guess being able to appreciate single malts helps. we got a bottle of a delightfully complex cask-strength aberlour (a'bunadh, batch #26) on monday from beltramo's, and sat around and sipped it and felt like we were tenured. btw, i feel like starting a savings jar so i can put money towards buying beltramo's when i'm 35. they have more whiskey in that one store than in the whole of philadelphia.

apss '09 (final thoughts)

8. i sense that i will probably continue to hate conferences more and more, until i start bleeding.

9. i know that seattle is starbucks capital of the world, but 3 outlets on one block is really rather excessive. anyway, to close, here's a picture of the very first one:

apss '09 (iv)

7.1. my actual talk is on wednesday afternoon, by which time i'm so calm it's a little bit frightening. the first time i had to do this i went through most of the conference in a sort of a dissociative state; it's heartening to know that my habituation curve to the anxiety of public speaking is rather sharper than for, say, the curve for seeing therapy clients, something which i'm still not 100% comfortable doing even after a year.

7.2. matt walker is chair of the session, which is like, the biggest adrenaline rush since six flags magic mountain, 1995.

7.3.1. the first speaker who gets up acts as if it's her first time giving any talk, anywhere. seriously, it's like show-and-tell in kindergarten, where you have the grasshopper from the backyard bouncing around in an empty gerber's baby food jar.

7.3.1. it also goes on way overtime. by the time she gets done, there's like, 8.5 seconds left for questions

7.3.2. and then this guy comes up and starts ripping everything she's said to shreds, like, point by point, and every time you think it's going to end, he keeps going on and on and on. it's quite possibly one of the most fantastic things i've ever seen. she stands there, trying desperately to get a word in edgewise to defend herself, and he's just going on and on and pretty soon they're just balls out screaming at each other, and matt's like, settle down, and it just about devolves into a complete melee.

7.3.3. these are the moments you live for.

7.3.4. when it comes to my turn, i practice, for the first time, actually giving a talk instead of just saying the words, which is really all i've been able to do till now. powerpoint is such a crutch. i need to work on having slides with no words at all on them. that would be awesome

bainbridge island, wa

took a little break from the conference to wander around one of the offshore islands. there was a lot of nothing on this particular one, but we did get a rather spectacular view of the city:





and, as promised, llamas (for sale!):

apss '09 (iii)

5. monday is boring, except for $3.50 martinis complete with the world's most delicious pimiento-stuffed olives. i am not a martini purist. i will drink mine with good vodka, and whatever proportion of vermouth the bartender sees fit to mix in. if this happens to ruin my friendship with anyone, so be it.

6.1. the advisor gives a talk in a symposium where he spends a fair amount of time talking about my work.

6.2. for some reason, this makes me feel extremely uncomfortable.

6.3. squirming, etc.

6.4. at the end of the talk, someone gets up to ask a question about a data slide that i gave to the advisor about 24 hours before i left philly. of course he doesn't know how to answer it, and to my acute horror, he confesses that one would have to ask me to find out.

6.5. this is exactly the kind of dumb thing that happens in academia all the time; people jump the gun on presenting unchecked data from one grad student, and suddenly it becomes the Word, and people everywhere are using it as evidence for their own claims. not what's said, but who says it.

6.5.1. as a corollary: if it's in the science section of the newspaper, it's almost certainly not true.

apss '09 (ii)*

4.1. sunday is 'trainee day', where graduate students gather and listen to one another talk non-stop about how all the work their advisors have made them do, and persuading themselves that they actually wanted to do it in the first place.

4.2. in order to get anyone at all to attend this, they get the people who have won travel awards and hold the checks ransom till the end of the day.

4.2.1. sneaky bastards.

4.2.2. we're each made to sign up for four sessions, plus a lunch thing where somehow i've been pressganged into giving a talk to a room full of people who don't care about or understand my work.

4.2.3. i suppose the speakers could have been worse. at the very least, there was matt walker, who i'm trying to schmooze up at every available opportunity in case i want do a post-doc in a state where i can actually buy single malt scotch. his talk teaches me a number of things, the most important of which is British Accents FTW.

4.2.4. lunch is awful. my talk goes ok though. i have by now firmly decided that the most unimportant part of giving a talk is its actual content. this is probably not a revelation to anyone who does a lot of public speaking, but i personally get a lot of mileage out of very small things. stepping out from behind the podium for one. you can be quaking in your shoes, but as long as you get out from behind that podium, people immediately assume that you Know What You're Doing.

4.2.4.1. most of the time, i still don't know what i'm doing.

4.2.5. the best part of the day is when this prof from wash. u. stands up and gives us the skinny on how to handle the final years of grad school. he basically says what i've suspected all along, which is: grab all the data you can get your hands on, write it up, stick your name on the front, and claim the paper as yours. i can't remember if i wrote about our little authorship mess a while ago, but the advice basically confirms what i suspected, which was that i was too nice, and was lucky that the advisor was looking out for me. never again.

4.2.5.1. also that experiments mostly don't work, and that you just have to get over it, which is possibly the most depressing thing i've heard all year.

* feel free to insert sleepless in seattle jokes anywhere, i got tired of them the moment i heard where the conference this year was going to be.

apss '09

seattle, WA

0.0. justin had the slightly demented idea that we should get into seattle early and try and make the worldwide pairs at noon, a game we have now played in 3 countries in as many years. next time: malawi. the nearest and "best" bridge club to the city center was, to my chagrin, in a strip mall, which meant burger king for lunch and the most venti cup of starbucks in the western hemisphere in order to prop me up for the game, which we quite fortunately made, and did fairly well for, all things considered.

0.1. notes to bridge clubs all around the world: please do not use dratted plastic cards if you have lacquered tables as well, because that's just suffering.

0.2. also pertaining to bridge, i am seriously considering creating a "spaceman of the session" award, with a little shooting star mounted on a base that plays a .midi file of david bowie's starman, something small i can keep in my back pocket and award to those whose minds suddenly and spontaneously leave the galaxy in the middle of a hand.

1. anyway, i'm here for the big annual sleep conference.

2. thanks in large part to j., i actually have a big room on the 29th floor of a proper hotel with a view of the puget sound. coastal cities have it so good. they used to be my favorite in the days of playing simcity

2.1. no FREE INTERNET, though. i don't understand how you could get FREE INTERNET in like, motels, and belize, and not in a 4* hotel in seattle, but perhaps someone will explain the economics of the situation to me.

3. in general, i tire of conferences already, and i've not even graduated yet. i never was very good at the backslapping and mutual congratulations, seeing as i lifted the painted veil on these things like 8.5 billion years ago, never mind the dick-measuring contests which happen which such frequency that there's hardly any point wearing trousers. i'm beginning to think that the best and only solution is to drink often and early -- i swear that some presenters i've seen are quite drunk while giving their talks -- but i'll try and give it a few more years at least before it comes to that.

the last run of the study i've been conducting since my first year here was supposed to come to a close today, except that the damn scanner broke down, so ugh. went back to lab instead and stressed out about the talk i have to give next week, and finished the crossword easily for a change, and walked home in the rain. i'm off to seattle tomorrow for a sleep conference, so updates may continue to be scarce.

have jumped right in to my new practicum (neuropsych) in which i do assessments in the clinic, the VA, and periodically on inmates in the pennsylvania prison system. many of these guys are on death row, and yesterday was my first go at one of those medico-legal cases. people kind of give me an incredulous look when i tell them that i'm doing assessments on murderers, but honestly, it's not at all as bad as it sounds, except, perhaps, for going through security, where they frisked me rather vigorously and confiscated my lunch.

apparently i'm allowed to be somewhat freer about discussing these cases, because all the results are available in the public domain, and inmates don't have the same protections and privileges my other clients would have. that is to say, i could, in theory, publish names here and not be in trouble, although i guess that would still be kind of rude (and pointless). i will say that i learned a number of things, among them:

1) that inmates make their meals more palatable by crushing them up in a ziploc bag with cheese doodles and re-cooking them in boiling hot water*.
2) that one really should not base ones mental image of prison on the green mile, the shawshank redemption, and prison break**.
3) that, convicted murderer or not, a WAIS is just a WAIS.
4) that really, the most awful thing is the same awfulness i've seen consistently over the past 2 years: that between bad genes and a brutal environment some people just don't stand a chance, and never did.


* it strikes me as a little bit funny that death-row inmates have access to 170-degree water while i was not allowed to bring a banana into the testing room, but such is the pennsylvania corrections system. perhaps they were afraid that i had hidden a shiv inside it.
** especially not prison break

ugh

with bruce wayne "dead" and tim drake off to be red robin, we begin the official era of pedophile batman, in which damian gets to be robin, and all of us get to be stabbed repeatedly by the poison pen of grant morrison. i mean, just look at the issue #1 cover:



9-year-old robin? that's just...wrong.

pa

because there appears to be confusion in some quarters, i am actually back in philadelphia, and trying to get masses of work done. also, justin is in town, and i'm trying to prove to him that there is actually good food to be had in america, so blogging may be a little scarce for a bit. seattle in 10 days, and then we may be back in business shortly after.

hava nagila

so this has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but i learned on this trip that the bat mitzah song that everyone knows the tune but not the words to is hava nagila (let us rejoice), which led to me to possibly the most awesome youtube video i've ever had the pleasure to watch.

san pedro, belize

have been mulling over what to say here for a little while, and honestly, there isn't much. we spent three days lolling on the beach and drinking rum punch and doing a fat lot of nothing, much of which can be summarised in one picture:



and really, that is all.

somewhere in the san ignacio cayo

so what's more fun than seeing temples used for human sacrifice? caves used for human sacrifice, of course. on monday, we joined a little group of 8* to head to the actun tunichil muknal, or "cave of the stone sepulcher**", discovered in 1992 by people who truly had balls of titanium, as you will see in a moment.

as i commented to the brother, this was ecotourism at its best, and possibly one of the only tourist attractions i've been to so far with no gift shop. that's really saying something, if you think about it. even the killing fields had a gift shop. back when i was doing my study abroad in beaufort, i took a class on ecotourism and sustainable development, and have since been dying to see whether praxis and theory really do converge, or if like so many other things the whole operation is already fatcats and neon signs. well, it seems like for once my cynicism was unwarranted -- our guide made a huge deal about taking only photographs/leaving only footprints, down to forbidding us from using sunscreen because of the dangers of it washing downstream into water used for crops and human consumption. my one small beef was that mayatour, the outfit that we used, was a little more of a large-scale operation than i thought it would be. still, all the guides were local, and do seem to be benefiting from the deal -- our guide was an active part of the academic community doing fieldwork in the caves, and had pretty much doctoral-level knowledge on what the heck was going on.

in the jungle

cave entrance. this picture really doesn't do justice to it. the water going into the cave is an almost surreal shade of blue, cold and deep.

so they warn you (a little bit) before hand that going in isn't really your typical tourist piece-of-cake, and you're like, ya sure, and then they're right. the cameras all go in a waterproof bag while you traverse the 0.5km to the dry chamber, which is something of a pity -- the wet chambers were eerie but spectacular, strangely alive as the scant light from the headlamps caught minerals sprinkled like glitter over the rocks and formations. the water level fluctuates by season, and at its deepest was chest high, sometimes very suddenly. narrow openings we could barely get through led into chambers 50 feet tall. it took a good hour, possibly more to navigate the 500 meters (although to be fair we did stop a fair amount for the guide to talk about everything from stalactite formation to mayan mythology). apparently the maya used to walk into this pitch blackness -- believing they were entering the underworld -- by the light of a single lit torch, something i can imagine was the very definition of No Fun At All.

rock formations in the dry chamber

oh, yea, and as i said in the beginning, human sacrifice:

spot the skull. creepy.

very creepy. also, overexposed, in more than one sense. wokka wokka.

anyway, next time you feel like you hate your job or your life, feel glad that at least you weren't brought into the "underworld" at the age of 11 to have your head bashed in.

one last pic and i'm out:



oh, 2 more things:

1. for the wikitravel page that we created like nerds, go here.

2. the brother's take on the experience.

* a yiddish woman from israel and her daughter who lives in manhattan(?), a strapping guy born in england and now residing in charlotte, NC, his girlfriend, and a middle-aged european couple who said more or less nothing at all.
** seriously, there was a mayan transliteration of 'sepulcher'?

Petén, Guatemala

tikal is an archaeological site about a 90-minute drive from the belizean border, and one of the most well-preserved and excavated of the mayan cities. getting there was an experience in and of itself, in that there wasn't much of a road to speak of most of the way, to say nothing of the strange helplessness one always feels when surrounded by third-world poverty.

View from the van

the thing about the mayan ruins is that of course you've seen them a million times in books and cartoons and whatnot, so you think you know what to expect in shape and form and size, but still, you get there and it's like: oh, they do exist, and here i am among temples that were built 16 centuries ago, and no amount of exposure to any kind of representation ever diminishes that.

Yea, they're big.

Chak, the rain god

Two curious things:
1) The temples all used to be red (they were painted with a dye made from hematite). Never knew that.
2) The courtyards were all stuccoed so that rain water could accumulate and drain into reservoirs. Never knew that either.

View from the top of tallest temple

anyway, in sum, i give you longfellow's the builders, which i've quoted a verse of before. i was blown away, and you have to have been there to really get why, so poetry i guess is the next best thing:

All are architects of Fate,
Working in these walls of Time;
Some with massive deeds and great,
Some with ornaments of rhyme.

Nothing useless is, or low;
Each thing in its place is best;
And what seems but idle show
Strengthens and supports the rest.

For the structure that we raise,
Time is with materials filled;
Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build.

Truly shape and fashion these;
Leave no yawning gaps between;
Think not, because no man sees,
Such things will remain unseen.

In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods see everywhere.

Let us do our work as well,
Both the unseen and the seen;
Make the house, where Gods may dwell,
Beautiful, entire, and clean.

Else our lives are incomplete,
Standing in these walls of Time,
Broken stairways, where the feet
Stumble as they seek to climb.

Build to-day, then, strong and sure,
With a firm and ample base;
And ascending and secure
Shall to-morrow find its place.

Thus alone can we attain
To those turrets, where the eye
Sees the world as one vast plain,
And one boundless reach of sky.

the road to guatemala

we did end up crossing the border into guatemala, but not without a little trepidation, due in no small part to a full-page text box in frommer's explaining how tourists have experienced hold-ups, and robberies, and death. this is obviously especially bad in guatemala city which has travel advisories up the wazoo, but apparently even the road from san ignacio into eastern guatemala was not a lot of fun either up to a few years ago.

anyway, this particular post is not about how we got there in one piece (see the brother for his treatment on that,) but rather about the economics of highway banditry. see, it would appear that, left to the free market as it were, highway robbery on the way to a tourist attraction is a weird form of a tragedy of the commons. if everyone operating along that road just got robbed/raped/killed, it wouldn't be too long before the government and/or various states would put out a severe travel advisory, thus shutting down all tourism to the region and closing off that source of income forever. on the other hand, there's no particular reason why any one bandit should curtail his activities out of that fear.

we puzzled a little while over why that scenario did not come to pass prior to the government increasing its presence in the area, and decided that it must not obtain due to gangs fighting amongst themselves for the right to rob, thus establishing a monopoly/oligopoly of robbing and preventing the over-robbing that would lead to complete shutdown. alternatively, the bad guys have figured out the principle of dunbar's number and managed to appropriately split the territory into small enough groups to ensure an optimal solution.

in conclusion:
a) there is definitely a paper in here somewhere.
b) no, we didn't get robbed.

while we're linking all over the place

minz and i have a doctor who moment

san ignacio, belize

san ignacio is some 2.5 hours drive west of belize city along roads of variable and sometimes dubious quality. along the way: cows, horses, slash and burn, the capital (belmopan), and a whole lot of nothing. very nearly missed a bus because of a miscommunication cum fubar, jumping on in the nick of time only to find that the only remaining seat was a spare tyre right at the back of the vehicle. the only real consolation was chalking it up to cultural experience, and we suffered sore asses for about half the journey before finally procuring a seat and polishing off an L.A. times sunday crossword in record time (SOCLE: a plain square block higher than a plinth, serving as a pedestal for sculpture, a vase, or a column).

while belize city was sleepy and half-deserted, san ignacio seems to have quite a bit more life; in its center, a cluster of hotels and hostels, some restaurants and mini-marts, a few agencies selling tours to the ruins and caves, and, mysteriously, a large branch of Courts, just in case you feel like buying an ottoman to take home as a souvenir. i have complained before about tijuana; this is nothing at all like that. it feels like a small town trying to be something more. it feels like a community dealing with the fact that progress inevitably marches in only one direction, and instead of either fighting it or embracing it, has tried to deal with it entirely on its own terms. i will have something more to say on ecotourism when i write about going to the caves, but i'll foreshadow that discussion a little bit by saying that the people of san ignacio are trying -- successfully, it seems -- to accept that they are a tourist destination without purposively trying to be one. there's internet access but no souvenir shop. you can't always get what you want, and no, the customer is not always right because you're not a consumer, you're a visitor. and surprisingly, it's a very refreshing role to play, a role both humbling and ennobling.

The town

we checked into marta's guest house -- v. comfy rooms, and then took a rather bumpy cab ride out to the botanical gardens for a little hike. pictures!





next up: the economics of banditry, and the brother and i both give our takes on some mayan ruins we visited, so don't forget to hit that link for another (probably funnier) perspective.

belize city, belize

so yeah, as i said, crossover. the brother and i in a foreign country together. etc. am in belize now blogging from a highly dubious connection which may go at any moment, so pictures, as always, will come later. also, you have probably already missed part I from your slovenliness, so please go here to learn about why you should not get drunk and start beatboxing on a plane.

it's apparently not tourist season, which is what we wanted, but also means that a lot of places in the city are (more) deserted (than usual) and pretty scary after dark, which comes sooner than you think. on the way to dinner, we encountered george the coconut seller, a wiry dark-skinned fellow standing opposite the MIRAB, and had a conversation that started as one might expect (when did you get into town? how long are you here for? what are you going to do?). then quickly devolved into: obama may be better than bush, but he's still only one motherfucker*, and one motherfucker can't change the world; there is a higher power, whether you call him god, allah or whatever, names are merely a culture construction, all religions are one, and so forth. the sun began to set, and we chatted, and got a free coconut each from george, who took his time hacking each one open in between bouts of his epistemological soliloquies. afterwards, the brother commented that his philosophy was somewhat rastafarian, but a quick wikicheck shows that most of those dudes believe in a named God: jah, so i guess in the words of madness, george was one step beyond.

the coconuts weren't very good, though.

* we too, got addressed this way mulitple times; the brother and i figured that it's just a term of endearment.

View from Martha's Guest House

The city from across the bay

To the lighthouse

>

Food stalls (mostly closed). Bought tacos from one and didn't die!

now that the brother and i have both gone to a home game that the phillies have lost, i'm prepared to start accepting payment from diehard fans who want the lim family to stay away from their ballpark.

(don't tell them i'll do it for free. i really hate baseball.)

speaking of the brother, the two of us will be going on a little jaunt together for the first time since, i dunno, ever, which means (and make sure you follow the directions!) our first blog crossover. now you have to read MORE WORDS than ever before. mwahaha. ha.

*goes to pack*

gest

minzhi informs me that, as i suspected, i am an ignoramus, and quite possibly Past my Prime as well.

lazed around in the morning playing online bridge with justin, finished the nyt crossword in 3:50 (yes!), then went to meet thomas at mizu for lunch. tom finished his major areas only to be dropped right into matlab hell by his advisor, so i'm thankful that mine often forgets that i exist. he's also trying to sell an out-of-tune grand piano for $550, cash-and-carry, so if you're in the market, act now!

am consciously taking time off because i was in the lab the entire weekend grading exams. never thought much about this when i was an undergrad, but grading errors on final exams don't get picked up because students generally don't get to see their scripts, and i'm 100% sure that there are at least a couple of errors (probably clerical) somewhere in the monstrous stack of 237 papers on my desk. i suppose it's just ill fortune if that happens to be you; you know what they say about Time and Chance. also, dear BBB, thanks for not giving me any money this semester to hire graders/proctors. you guys are a******s.

incid: ran a reliability analysis on the midterm/final grades. r = .372, p < .001, fwiw.

i'm not sure how i got through this much of my adult life without reading any muriel spark: the prime of miss jean brodie was the most wonderful book i've read in a long time, (possibly because i was imagining evans reading it out loud most of the way through). bits to quote: too many, but here's just one of them, for my own pleasure:

This was the first winter of the two years that this class spent with Miss Brodie. It had turned nineteen-thirty-one. Miss Brodie had already selected her favorites, or rather those whom she could trust; or rather those whose parents she could trust not to lodge complaints about the more advanced and seditious aspects of her educational policy, these parents being either too enlightened to complain, or too unenlightened, or too awed by their good fortune in getting their girls' education at endowed rates, or too trusting to question the value of what their daughters were learning at this school of sound reputation. Miss Brodie's special girls were taken home to tea and bidden not to tell the others, they were taken into her confidence, they understood her private life and her feud with the headmistress and the allies of the headmistress. They learned what troubles in her career Miss Brodie encountered on their behalf, "It is for the sake of you girls - my influence, now, in the years of my prime.'

has anyone seen maggie smith in the 1969 version? i'm a little scared to netflix it in case i get taken in the rapture 5 minutes in.



in other news: mauled by both the saturday and sunday crossword this week. don't know why i've never before seen the word GEST (def: a deed or exploit). zao ju, anyone?

the final talk in the neuroethics series this year was given by robert sawyer, who read a bit from his book, and talked about consciousness, penrose and hammeroff's wacky microtubules theory and how flash forward (starring john cho!) has been ordered to series, and may possibly be awesome, unless it's like lost, in which case it won't. if you have to choose one of those links to go to, do quantum consciousness; it's worth it. not the world's biggest sci-fi fan here, but i think i'm persuaded enough to read www:wake, and possibly calculating god. book reports shortly.

got the last percy book in the mail today, actually surprising myself because I had pre-ordered it a long time ago. "better than deathly hallows" is the standard I'm holding it to.

kryptos

was reading a wired.com article today about kryptos, a sculpture by james sanborn that sits in one of the courtyards in CIA headquarters, made more famous by the execrable dan brown book that shall not be named. the sculpture contains a four-part cipher, of which three parts have been solved; one remains uncracked after 17 years. so yes, this is where my geek quotient bursts through the roof and keeps right on going, but i find the whole deal fascinating and terribly romantic, especially since the first three messages have been quite lovely. particularly:

message #3, paraphrased from the diary of howard carter, discoverer of king tut's tomb:

Slowly, desparatly (sic.) slowly, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker, but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. x Can you see anything? q

(the answer to which is: 'yes, wonderful things', thought to be a clue to decrypting the final piece of the code)

while recrunching some data, i starting meditating a little bit more on why the puzzle should appeal to me so, and i figure that one of the reasons is this: it's incredibly complex, and brilliant minds working on it for the better part of two decades have not yielded a solution, but unlike the other gordian puzzles of nature scientists work on, this one has a solution that a living somebody knows. so if our faith is that in Nature there is an answer, kryptos is our deliverance story, the sure sign, noah's rainbow, the parable that reaffirms our faith in the Truth being Out There.

and, for interest, the unsolved section:

?OBKR
UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO
TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP
VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR

abd

yes, i do have the privilege of writing a dissertation. it seems almost masochistic to celebrate this fact, but such is the human condition.

the defense itself began somewhat unpropitiously. i had originally booked a room in the psychology building for the meeting, as is the custom, but geoff's needing to call in threw a spanner in the works as it's almost impossible to get cell phone reception in the lousy place. on wednesday, my committee chair had suggested her office, which i originally thought was rather a good idea -- if one is to go through these antediluvian customs to get a phd, one may as well go the whole hog, and isn't this how they did it in the old days? none of this conference room crap, certainly. in any case, when i got there, there was no one to be found, and only after several minutes of dashing up and down stairs did i finally locate my chair, who was in the pantry reading my papers for the first time. o, to have tenure. we kind of said fumbling, awkward things to each other for a bit, and then she said that her office was kind of a mess, should we hold the defense in the pantry, to which i had nothing in particular to say -- frankly, she could have suggested the verandah, or vaduz, liechtenstein as the venue at that point and i would have acquiesced. i left her with coffee and cake to finish the perusal of the manuscripts which i had just spent the better part of nine months working on, and went to find sympathy from daniel, or the other housemate, or whoever i could find. who i eventually did find is committee member #1 from my master's thesis defense (different committee), who gaily started telling me stories about the people who failed out of her program when she was a phd candidate, and what a total misery that experience was*. so that was quite the morale booster. i went back upstairs, and people were filing into the pantry for a birthday party, so that rather nixed that idea, and we went back to my chair's office carrying coffee and cake and trailing packets of sweet 'n' low all the way down the stairs. there was no flat surface in the room not covered with paper, and then the advisor showed up, and i couldn't find a place to sit, and then i got kicked out of the room anyway because what's more delightful than being talked about behind your back. i went outside, and sat on the stairs, and discovered that the walls of the ccn are so thin that i could hear everything that was being said anyway. norah the student receptionist was there, and said 'that was quick', and i said that it had only just started, and she offered to put on some music so that i didn't have to listen to myself being talked about, and we had radiohead for a while as she ate her gyro and i tried to keep my heart in my chest. i got called back in. geoff was on the line. questions, most of them actually pretty easy -- in fact, the biggest problem was that geoff's line was rather bad, and half the time i think i was answering the questions that i wanted to rather than those that were actually being asked. fun bits: citing studies in my answers as i went along. terribly nerdy, but i still think it's cool as hell. it was over quick, and as i said, it was good news, and then the advisor and the chair sat and gossiped about university politics for an hour.

so, one more thing to go at penn, the big 'D' word, but before that, lots and lots of BYOBs in the summer, and a few trips, and hopefully not dying of swine flu or the like. speaking of which, if swine flu is a concern for you or your family, get the facts here: www.doihaveswineflu.org


* when alyson was defending her master's thesis, at the bit where one gets kicked out into the hallway, she was sitting there stewing with anxiety when dr. goldstein, one of the clinical supervisors in our program and kindliest man ever, came lumbering down the hallway, asked her what was going on, then sat down, gave her a hug, and said that everything was going to be all right. boys need hugs too!