the latest

perishing, slowly.

the major reason for the lack of updates this week was having to grade 240 midterm exams. sadly, i don't even have any funny quotes from them to share with you, since it's mostly graphs and figures and regurgitation.

(although i do have kids who think that universal time is anchored, in order of increasing preposterousness, in new zealand, the atlantic ocean, the north pole, and 'the stars'.)

also trying to get the paper from my research last summer sent off to JOCN, probably to be summarily rejected.

grades for cash

i read in the student newspaper recently that there are now websites where you can actually bet on whether or not you'll get an 'A' in a class you're taking (large, undergrad classes only). this system seems extraordinarily vulnerable to corruption: poor grad student TAs + desperate undergrads + this system = recipe for disaster.

a few awesome things

speaking of cognitive enhancement, i'm ready to get excited about richard powers' new book, generosity: an enhancement, which i hear is on this very topic. fall 2009!

also: i thought the first episode of dollhouse was rather good, although tahmoh penikett looked a bit like a fish out of water.

also: is tim burton's alice in wonderland ever going to have a trailer? michael sheen as the cheshire cat is bringing me quite close to rapture even without one.

i saw one of those ads about heart disease come on tv today, the ones where they say that tell you how many people die of heart conditions every minute and how dreadful it is and how we should give lots of money to research so we can prevent that. now, it's not occurred to me before, but isn't that kind of rubbish? in the first place, statistics like that -- surely nowadays with however umpteen billion people we have on the planet talking about x number of people dying every minute is sort of misleading. also -- and i don't have the figures -- but aren't high death rates due to heart disease a sign of affluence? i mean, you have to die of something, right? isn't it more desirable for people to be dying of heart disease at 80 rather than TB at 15? or am i the crazy one here?

prospective weekend each year is a cold reminder that another academic year is almost gone. to be honest, i was kind of bored by the proceedings this time round, have developed a tolerance for eagerness and the passage of time. as in -- the newness is exciting, but no longer for me, and while i appreciate the thrill of transition, the unknown will-i-or-won't-i-get-in, i know that i can't have that any more; all i can do is eat reuben sandwiches and drink beer and feel gray and wise. the good thing about having an experience is that you've had it; the bad that you can only have that precise experience exactly once.

cognitive enhancement, haxxorz, and the pleasure machine

i have been interested for a while now in cognitive enhancement, and why some people find certain forms of enhancement more acceptable than others. for instance, taking beta blockers to calm ones nerves before a concert recital is generally considered ok, whereas taking ritalin before an exam is not. there are several variables that may explain this, and i'm not going to get into each of them, but i think one of the more interesting of these is the perception that certain drugs alter ones essential self more than others. that is to say, the intuition is that the concert pianist is using the drug to allow her "true" ability to shine through, whereas the student is adding something to his "natural" talent that he does not rightfully possess. as a corollary, there are certain abilities that one can and should work towards in order to "deserve" them, and others where popping a pill and circumventing the work is absolutely kosher.

this is a rather cool theory, which brings to mind a number of other thought experiments (e.g. what about genetic enhancement? if you have it in a test tube from birth, is that "cheating" as well?) what i really want to talk about here, though, are haxxorz*. now, i don't play a lot of online games, but enough to know that hax are rife in most of them, and that in a small but significant number of cases are used to break a game entirely. i'll use mario kart wii here as an example, because i've played it a bunch on nintendo wifi, and have used it as a vehicle for similar discussions i've had with the brother and justin. also, you presumably know the point of mario kart wii. it's racing. you know, where you try and go faster than the other guy.

so people have haxed this game in a number of ways, giving themselves infinite items, but also cheating so that their finish time registers as .001 seconds no matter when they actually finish. in other words, no matter what happens, they win, end of story. now, if they did this for the sheer hell of doing it (or, for the lulz, as it were), i could at least understand the psychology behind it, but after careful observation, i've concluded that some people do it because they actually want to win that way. this may seem trivial, but think about a real-world example. if you could take a pill which would allow you to go out tomorrow and win an olympic gold medal in the 100m sprint (but only that, you don't have superhuman speed otherwise), what would it be worth to you (assuming every knew that you took the pill)? the answer, of course, if $0.00. and yet some people spend hours of their time online doing this. i think this constitutes some real and interesting evidence that for some people, the value of winning does not arise from the presence of competition. i would like to find these people and stick them in a scanner asap.

final thought experiment, which you may have heard of: you can hook yourself up to a pleasure machine, in which for the rest of your (real) life you live out a simulation of a perfectly ideal and pleasurable existence: would you do it? for all the same reasons mentioned above, most people perceive this as "cheating", and would not. you may feel that way too. i'm not so sure, though -- authenticity seems at least somewhat overrated, and for all you know, we're in the matrix already, in which case, the joke's really on you if you don't plug in and go enjoy that bottle of scotch.

k. back to real work.


*urban dictionary:

Noun, Plural; a group of people with an unfair advantage over others. Also an insult used in online gaming used against players who possess more skill than the competition. negative conotation.
"F'in n00b HAXXORZ!!!!"
"ZOMG u HAXXORZ no wai!"

a very large group of us descended on abyssinia last night, including some of the first-year students who haven't made an appearance since the beginning-of-the-year party. there was no beer, and i had an extended conversation with e. who tried to make luo po gao but could only find turnips and rice flour and none of the other ingredients that go into it. also, i'm pretty sure (although correct me if i'm wrong) that you have to wrap the cake in some kind of cloth before you steam it, in a manner similar to suet pudding. e. has also been hired by our lab to help the russians translate a particular psychometric scale into russki, something i find highly suspect, because (a) aren't there bilingual people in russia? (b) this is one of those top-secret things involving astronauts being sequestered in fake space capsules at the bottom of the tunguska river, and (c) shouldn't russian cosmonauts* have to know english anyway in order to communicate with the americans who are on the mission with them?

i trailed along with some people who were going to second dinner at a pizza place because they needed to carbo load for a 20-mile run, and we had beer and dina ordered the grossest buffalo wings in the history of civilization, and we discussed whether they teach you what to do if you absolutely have to puke while scuba diving (think about it). for future reference: carbo loading should not involve large quantities of melted cheese. finally, it was off to oxford marc's place for education on how to be british, and do british things the right british way god save the queen jolly good show pip pip cheerio and all that rot. there were scones, and cream, but not devonshire cream because philadelphia sucks like that, and for the last time i refuse to say it like it rhymes with bone, and i don't care how many funny looks you give me. yes, you too STARBUCKS BARISTAS. ARE YOU DOING A PHD?? there was also port and harrods bristol cream sherry and little devices to drink from which are supposed to make you cultured**, and all in all, it was a nice way to end the week.

oh, and:
1) happy birthday, von
2) if you've watched this week's battlestar galactica (blood on the scales), go back to the miniseries and watch the first scene in the CIC with gaeta and adama, and marvel at how far the show has come.


* incid, ever since watching armaggeddon, i have the ridiculous but unshakeable notion that every russian astronaut looks exactly like peter stormare.

** i remember saying a long time ago that i would put more pictures up here, and once again i have failed in my promise.

i agreed to take on another project due right around when my quals are on the principle that if you're already in hell, you may as well just burn. at least i can honestly say that i've had a productive week -- the manuscript on the data i collected last summer is almost complete, my admin is perfectly up-to-date, and my meta-analysis...well, let's not talk about my meta-analysis.

restaurant week got extended into this week, thanks to the good old recession, which i am beginning to love ever more*. laura and kinjal and i made a go of tequila's, which was fabulous, and has one of the most interesting drink menus i've seen. the alma blanca, "Siembra Azul Blanco infused with habanero, Domaine de Canton, essence of aloe vera,
pineapple juice, fresh corn, herb saint, rimmed with a hibiscus-rose salt", was strong, complex and tasty, and i almost had another except for needing to come home to read about functional ROIs (zzzz).

also: real snow, at last!

* did anyone see that denny's was offering free breakfasts today? pity there isn't one nearer here.

misallocated resources

so i made a big thing of mac and cheese for the house the other day, discovering as i was halfway through that i didn't have enough sour cream for the amount of macaroni i was cooking. it wasn't really a lot under, so i let it slide and added a bit more milk instead, and it came out tasty as usual. it did get me thinking though, because with certain recipes, there is very little wiggle room with the quantity and proportion of ingredients, whereas with others it's pretty hard to botch the job unless you're really way off and add a tub of salt to the lamb stew or something.

i admit that i know little to nothing about gastronomic science, but following on from that observation, it seems that there must be a way to ascertain a some kind of variance component associated what each ingredient is doing to a dish (including any interactions it may have with other ingredients), so that you get some kind of a beta coefficient for changes in flavor, mouthfeel, etc -- this would also presumably have some sort of a temporal dimension (how fast it's added, at what point in the preparation). this could all go into a gigantic multiple regression (or perhaps some sort of canonical equation if you want to take into account that taste is not objective, and that there will be an element of interaction between product and taster), which would then tell you the exact amount of X (ceteris paribus) one would need to create the perfect macaroni and cheese, a process that could be iterated until one had a complete and flawless recipe.

meanwhile, the people with the supercomputers continue to use to them to calculate larger and larger prime numbers. talk about misplaced priorities. i think perfect mac and cheese would be one of the most awesome creations of humanity ever.