grant morrison is lucifer

while eating my wawa sandwich for lunch today, i read a paper by nichols and holmes (2001) on nonparametric permutation tests, and the conclusion of final crisis (#7). it was after discarding the wrapper and finishing my coffee that i realized: i couldn't decide which of the two was harder to understand. when did comics stop being about good guys punching bad guys?

alack

one of the students in my class was in need of a note-taker ($7.15/hr), so i sent an e-mail around asking for a volunteer. the first response came in 35 seconds, and in the time it took me to send another e-mail saying that the vacancy had been filled, i received 13(!) more.

mentioning this to laura over dinner, i was informed that people do not sit in front of their laptops fingers poised to reply to incoming messages, but now have devices known as Blackberries from which electronic correspondence can be received and responded to as if by magick, that in fact, more penn students than not now own them. o brave new world! was't not just last year that the Blackberry was something that one might bake in Pie, or eat with a Light Sprinkling of Sugar?

happy cny

1. yes, the happy niu year joke was funny the first time.

2. not so much the next 952 times.

3. no, i'm not celebrating. i'm actually pretty terrible at cooking any asian food more complicated than stir-fried x, and going to a chinese restaurant like we did 2 years ago just makes me sad.

4. but yar, y'all have a good one; i'll be eating pizza and watching house

new blood

among the crop of people selected for admissions interviews this year: the other housemate (!) and another singaporean (!!) who i know (!!!) (and, incid., who you probably also know if you're one of the humans crowd). kinjal and i agree that we have passed the point of statistical improbability in terms of # people from one small nation state in a department of 45 grad students, and are actively pursuing investigations into an international conspiracy.

i've been looking forward to virtuality for a long time now, and have begun to sense that my mounting excitement for the project is going to be met equally with crushing disappointment. it's just too good to be true: peter berg directing and ron moore writing/producing, starring clea duvall, with an absolutely fascinating premise. possibly the most interesting part of the story is that the problem on the fictional mars mission is one that is being researched for real in our lab as nasa prepares for its 202x manned trip to the red planet. the problem being, if you're lazy to click on hyperlinks and read, that we're not sure of a group of people can survive living together for almost 2 years on board a spacecraft without having some sort of psychological breakdown.

(and you thought we just studied sleep.)

so line this one up behind dollhouse as another show that fox will probably stab to death in their effort to lose friends and alienate people. i predict a november 2009 post lamenting its untimely death. maybe i'll go compose my letter to sci-fi begging for a inter-network pick-up right now.

the advisor brought up today that i should start thinking about post-graduation plans. but, i wanted to protest, i only just got here. which at times seems true, and at other times seems not true at all.

thursdays in general are exhausting -- it's the end of the week, and i have to spend 3 hours doing TA work for my advisor, then another 2-3 hours in a seminar on fmri data analysis. i'm not getting a grade for the seminar, but it's pretty hardcore and involves staring at squiggles and graphs until everyone is cross-eyed, so that all i want to do by the time i get home is eat hot pockets and go to bed.

inauguration

1. is d major the official key signature of hail to the chief, like, if it's not played in that key it doesn't count? for that matter, what about national anthems? is their actual key signature important, like how there are geometrical specifications for country flags? i googled the lyrics to hail to the chief this afternoon and discovered that they were written by walter scott:

Hail to the chief, who in triumph advances,
Honored and bless'd be the evergreen pine!
Long may the tree in his banner that glances,
Flourish, the shelter and grace of our line.
Heav'n send it happy dew,
Earth lend it sap anew,
Gaily to bourgeon and broadly to grow;
While ev'ry highland glen,
Sends our shout back again,
"Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho! i-e-roe!"

Ours is no sapling, chance-sown by the fountain,
Blooming at Beltane, in winter to fade;
When the whirlwind has stripp'd ev'ry leaf on the mountain,
The more shall Clan Alpine exult in her shade.
Moor'd in the lifted rock,
Proof to the tempest shock,
Firmer he roots him, the ruder it blow;
Menteith and Breadalbane, then,
Echo his praise again,
"Roderigh Vich alpine dhu, ho! i-e-roe!"

Row, vassals, row for the pride of the Highlands!
Stretch to your oars for the evergreen pine!
Oh, that the rosebud that graces yon islands,
Were wreath'd in a garland around him to twine!
O, that some seedling gem,
Worthy such noble stem,
Honor'd and bless'd in their shadow might grow!
Loud should Clan Alpine then,
Ring from her deepmost glen,
"Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho! i-e-roe!"

2. "We will restore science to its rightful place." Hell, yeah, you will.

3. No more Dubya! You know in the Avenue Q finale where they say "George Bush...is only for now". What are they going to sing tonight?

4. Some people have asked me, and no, I didn't care quite enough to actually be there. Almost though.

about halfway through all the king's men and actually enjoying it more than i thought i would. has anyone else in our set read this? i'm thinking poach. here's a passage i liked:

...I stood there and felt like God-Almighty brooding on History.

Which must be a dull business for God-Almighty, Who knows how it is going to come out. Who knes, in fact, how it was going to come out even before He knew there was going to be any History. Which is complete nonsense, for that involves Time and He is out of Time, for God is Fullness of Being and in Him the End is the Beginning. Which is what you can read in the little tracts written and handed out on the street corners by the fat, grubby, dandruff-sprinkled old man, with the metal-rimmed spectacles, who used to be the Scholarly Attorney and who married the girl with the gold braids and the clear, famished-looking cheeks, up in Arkansas. But those tracts he wrote were crazy, I thought back then. I thought God cannot be Fullness of Being. For Life is Motion.

(I use the capital letters as the old man did in the tracts. I had sat across the table from him, with the unwashed dishes on one end of it and the papers and books piled on the other end, in the rom over across the railroad tracks, and he had talked and I had heard the capital letters in his voice. He had said, "God is Fullness of Being." And I had said, "You've got the wrong end of the stick. For Life is Motion. For --"

(For Life is Motion toward Knowledge. If God is Complete Knowledge then He is Complete Non-Motion, which is Non-Life, which is Death. Therefore, if there is such a God of Fullness of Being, we would worship Death, the Father. That was what I said to the old man, who had looked at me across the papers and fouled dishes, and his red-streaked eyes had blinked above the metal-rimmed spectacles, which had hung down on the end of his nose. He had shaken his head and a flake or two of dandruff had sifted down from the sparse white hair ends which fringed the skull within which the words had been taking shape from the electric twitches in his tangled and spongy blood-soaked darkness. He had said then, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." And I had said, "You've got the wrong end of the stick."

(For Life is a fire burning along a piece of string -- or is i a fuse to a powder keg we call God? -- and the string is what we don't know, our Ignorance, and the trail of ash, which, if a gust of wind does not come, keeps the structure of the string, is History, man's Knowledge, but it is dead, and when the fire has burned up all the string, then man's Knowledge will be equal to God's Knowledge and there won't be any fire, which is Life. Or if the string leads to a powder keg, then there will be a terrific blast of fire, and even the trail of ash will be completely blown away. So I had said to the old man.

(But he had replied, "You think in Finite terms." And I had said, "I'm not thinking at all, I'm just drawing a picture." He had said, "Ha!" The way I remembered he had done a long time back when he played chess with Judge Irwin in the long room in the white house looking toward the sea. I had said, "I'll draw you another picture. It is a picture of a man trying to paint a picture of a sunset. But before he can dip his brush the color always changes and the shape. Let us give a name to the picture which he is trying to paint: Knowledge. Therefore if the object which a man looks at changes constantly so that Knowledge of it is constantly untrue and is therefore Non-Knowledge, then Eternal Motion is possible. And Eternal Life. Therefore we can believe in Eternal Life only if we deny God, Who is Complete Knowledge."

(The old man had said, "I will pray for your soul.")

i've been thinking the past few days about the MP set on fire business, and have come to the conclusion that it was both horrible and deeply hysterical at the same time. i don't suppose i need to elaborate on horrible, but when i say hysterical, i mean that independent of any ill feelings i may have towards our police state. that would be kind of cruel, even for me. what i mean is this, there's something inherently funny about violence that involves setting other people on fire; it invokes cartoon images of daffy duck with his hair alight, or strong bad's children's book. it's violence of the wile e. coyote variety, and strangely enough, it gives us the first licence to think about it as something other than an act of violence.

once granted that license, one begins to realize that this fire-starting had far more symbolic value than (for example) if a meat cleaver had been taken to the guy, think: flag burning, sodom and gomorrah. really, the form of the act spoke almost as loud as its nature, and, even if unintentionally, made it more than just an act of malice or madness. it gave people an image, one of those pictures that speak a thousand words, that grow to become something larger than the event itself in the minds of people who care to mull over it.

sandwich

imagine you're making a sandwich with two spreads in it (say peanut butter and jelly).

so you take 2 slices of bread out of the bread bag, call them A and B, where A is the top one.

now you have four surfaces on which to put on 2 spreads right? call them A1, A2, B1, and B2, where the '1' surfaces were facing the top of the bag. which would you use?

so i've observed people doing this, and most of the time, you get folks spreading peanut butter onto A1, putting that slice somewhere else, spreading jelly on B1, and then putting the two slices together.

this is clearly not the best procedure. A2 and B1 are the slices with exactly the same shapes, so what you should do, to avoid peanut butter/jelly on fingers while eating the sandwich, is to flip slice A before spreading peanut butter on its lower side, then flip it back to recreate the sandwich.

this is a particularly worrisome problem towards the end of the loaf, where the size tends to taper off more significantly, and A1 >> B2.

now, i admit that i'm working with a very small sample of data, and it could be that all the smart people reading this blog do this automatically. do tell me if you do.

what i want to do, though, is set up a small booth in houston hall with a sign that says MAKE A SANDWICH FOR RESEARCH: $5, and get people to (a) make the sandwich, and (b) report their gpa.

i have no idea where i'd publish this if there were a difference.

the why of things

man on wire is about phillippe petit, famous funambulist, and his wire-walking stunt across the twin towers in 1974. (it's a brilliant movie about an unbelievable caper, and i highly recommend you go and see it if you have not.) once he was back on terra firma, reporters naturally besieged him, and the big question they had for him was: why did you do it? petit angrily points out to us the absurdity of the question -- there is no why! -- and his point is very well taken. there are two reasons, i suppose, why the "why" is absurd: first, there is no possible cost-benefit analysis to a stunt so far beyond imagination, and second, we don't even have the proper language to deconstruct the deed. just as deconstructing aesthetics largely ruins beauty, so does any attempt to understand petit's act diminish it to something less than what it truly was. there was no "why". there was just the act.

***

now, in training to give therapy, one of the lessons we learn is not to ask "why" questions. whys encourage speculation, fabulation, post-hoc rationalizing, and chase away, sometimes forever, the actual truth. human beings are very bad at whys, we're biased, we find illusory correlations between things. we need rules of cause and effect to make sense of the world, but our rules are general and overextended. add to that the dreadful fallibility of memory and the inevitable schematizing, and what you find is that whys are about as useful as invisible money. we're different from the psychodynamic therapists that way -- we're told that we don't need reasons to fix problems, just a clear picture of thoughts, and actions, and you know, i think i believe in that.

***

while science is about finding whys, psychology isn't really a science, and i save myself from some nasty sprains over the philosophy of causality by just not caring about it. i've seen philosophy of science majors argue till they're blue in the face and hurl kant and hume and popper at each other like nuclear warheads, and i'm awfully glad i get to stay out of it. i'll tell my little research stories and do my therapy uncaring of reasons and chickens and eggs. this is why i've always liked the humanities -- they let the whys be, and in that small corner of the discourse, at least, there is peace.

(if the slightest hint of math is intolerable to you, please don't read on.)

1. i'm doing a meta-analysis for my quals. you know this.

2. a meta-analysis is a quantitative compilation of studies within a topic area; this is superior to a qualitative compilation because (a) one avoids bias in study selection (everything goes in), and (b) the result is a definitive answer as to whether a given treatment has a significantly greater effect than 0 (as opposed to: "findings are in conflict, and more work needs to be done in this area".)

3. this is all very nice in theory.

4. in practice, looking in 4 textbooks gives you 6 different formulae for every step of the analysis you have to do.

4.1. there are many steps.

4.2. why can't statisticians agree with one another.

(4.3.) they do, says the housemate, but only after they get tenure.

5. the problems right now are numerous, but there are two big ones. first of all, there is no agreement whatsoever among anybody as to how to calculate sampling variance. the idea is this: each study is weighted by a coefficient that represents the error due to sampling from a random population -- the larger the study, the greater the weight. i strongly suspect that the differences between all the formulae i've accumulated are extremely subtle, and will make no difference to the final result, but having honed my anal-retentiveness to a razor-sharp point over the last 5 years, i shall endeavor to find out. big problem #2 is even more troublesome: i have a mix of between-subject and within-subject designs in my analysis (between = experimental group/control group; within = everyone does everything and each subject is his own control). apparently, and i only just found this out, there are different equations for the two types of studies, and conversions are necessary before everything can be combined. specific problem: calculating effect sizes for between subjects studies is easy, and in fact can be done with a few button presses right here. within-subjects designs, however, are trickier, because the error term is not clear. a bunch of people recommend that one uses the variance of the change score, which is fine in theory except that who on earth reports that in a manuscript, and i'd rather tapdance naked in perelman quad than email sixty billion labs to ask them to give me that data. so...how? use the pooled variance? use the post-treatment variance (ugh). i hate practical solutions when i just know there are pretty ones out there.

6. excel is serving me well, and minz, if you're still reading this, you will be pleased to know that pivot tables are too (finally).

why is it that young americans find it so hard to keep their places of residence tidy and free of food debris? also: is there some magic switch that turns on when they get married where suddenly kitchens and bedrooms become immaculate and stay that way? i just don't understand it. if you ask me, people should be given ferocious beatings for leaving crumbs and pasta sauce smears on the counters and the stoves, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY BELONG TO THE PERSON YOU'RE LIVING WITH AND NOT YOU.

cormac mccarthy

almost despite myself, i have to say that i enjoyed all the pretty horses, and would voluntarily read another of CMC's books at some point in the future. here's how it ends:

The desert he rode was red, and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.

having a shiny new bar open up a block from my place is either going to be the best or the worst thing to happen to me during my grad school career. dogfish head on tap! it's obscenely crowded now, even on weeknights, but once the hullaballoo dies down christian and i have plans to take it by force and make it the psych grad student go-to. here's to hoping the crack dealers don't move in like last time. we got a corner table last night, and i was excited that oyster po' boys were on the menu, except they weren't, because they were actually oyster mushroom po' boys. i really need to go to new orleans some time. i find it hard to understand how oysters tolerate deep frying; it just feels like they should get tough or limp or just generally explode on contact with hot oil, but i suppose there's some magic in the batter or a similar chemical miracle. i'm sure all of you went through this phase, but when i was younger i was convinced that deep fried ice-cream was Impossible, like perpetual motion or cold fusion. i've also never bought into the idea that everything is Better deep-fried, despite three years in the south, although my belief in the theory that everything is better when wrapped in bacon has yet to be disproved.

sonnet on the death of mr. richard west

i have one patient in particular who always makes me think of this thomas gray sonnet; sadly, i think that sharing it with him is probably a distinctly bad idea.

In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,
And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire:
The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
Or cheerful fields resume their green attire:
These ears, alas! for other notes repine,
A different object do these eyes require.
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
And new-born pleasure brings to happier men:
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;
To warm their little loves the birds complain.
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,
And weep the more because I weep in vain.

last night, i had what can only be described at a clinical psychologist's anxiety dream. in it, i was walking down locust walk, heading for one of our clinical seminars, when i ran into our DCT. hi, i say, how was your sabbatical (she just got back from one). good, she says, very good. good, i say, what's the topic for today's seminar. ah, she say, well i figured the 3rd-year students need more experience working with kids. kids? yes, kids. in fact, what i want you to do today is talk to kids about Difficult Subjects.

we head into solomon b35 and alyson and daniel and co. are there, and she starts handing out these 3x5 cards with words on them in thick black marker: DEATH, SEX, etc., and we each get one, and she says, ok, we'll be watching you from behind the double mirror. the dream ends with me in the treatment room together with a dozen six-year old kids staring at me with big black eyes like in the omen, and that was it. most unpleasant. i definitely preferred the ones where it's the a levels and i haven't studied.

i was feeling especially perky today, and ran almost 8 miles in the gym while watching chinese women attempt to play billiards on espn. i stopped mostly because i was beginning to feel something unusual, a feeling like hunger but not, sort of a...depletion, i guess, but with none of the unpleasantness or stomach-growling of real hunger. it was sort of primal, what hunger must have felt like in the days when when our ancestors went chasing after quadrupeds with big knobby clubs. the brother and i were discussing the other day whether animals feel hunger in the same way that we humans do, and i'm (still) inclined to think that the answer is no, that what we think of phenomenologically as "hunger" is mostly anticipation of the hedonic value of our modern, over-enriched diet, whereas what animals feel is more this other thing, a simple drive to go and find food.

anyway, i showered and ate a muffin and felt extremely satisfied and warm and a little bit sleepy. i think i should try and do one long distance run a week. i've tended to psych myself out before attempting anything more than 5 miles, but really, i don't find it that bad at all once i'm actually running, especially on warmer days when i get to go along the schuylkill or wherever and not stare at the damn distance counter on the treadmill all the time. perhaps i'll even invest in gel packs.

here's a problem. when i blog about work, i'm afraid that i'm going to be really boring, so i become flip, and skim the surface of issues, and generally do a piss-poor job of saying anything at all. on the other hand, i don't say a lot about what i do outside of work either, for a number of reasons. among them: while hanging out with friends at bars is fun, i didn't think that it made for magnificent entertainment for me to write about it on here; i don't feel that this is the place for movie reviews beyond the occasional "you may not have heard of this, go see it now"; i need more hobbies and more of a life anyway.

i've mulled over this for a while now, and looked a bunch of other regularly-updated blogs that i enjoy reading, and have reached the following conclusion: the only way to blog well is with gusto, and about everything, because, as i've always maintained, nothing is really uninteresting, there's just uninteresting writing, and i hope that if you've stuck with me for the umpteen years i've been writing on here that i at least pass that basic test. also, weirdly enough, i find that the periods of life when i've blogged the most are also the times when i've been inspired to do more interesting things, so that writing begets action which begets more writing (somewhere right now a therapist is penning a book about this).

so, that's the plan, and we'll see if it sticks. now, everybody go watch synecdoche, new york, it's the best movie that's come out this year.