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.