lat 12/15

Difficulty: **/5




I guess it was only a matter of time before I decided to make a vaguely psych-related puzzle. As you might have guessed, 49-Across was originally a Hitchhiker's Guide related clue.

of course

singapore's salad days are over

we has data

well, 2 pilot subjects anyway, dr. fnir and RA #1. primary lesson learned: it is much grosser than one might imagine watching people spit into a tube. i have a little cubic container in which to store all my samples, which means i get to happily watch it fill up day by day like a pokedex, or one of those old panini sticker albums. will be slogging it out on my own for the next month, after which we will hopefully have RA #2 and an intern, whereupon i plan to devote myself to the careful study of epigenetics, and where in NUS to get the best cup of coffee.

more burger (thanks su-lin)

all i want for christmas

randall the enamel animal

this may have come from one of you guys, but since su-lin and i were talking about it today:

best burger ever

it's been a long time coming, but i think i'm finally going to start getting data in a couple of weeks. while it wasn't surprising how long and irritating the process of getting ready for this experiment was, it didn't make it any less painful to have to go through, and has certainly answered a lot of questions (in very minute detail) about why there's such a dearth of good science here despite the best efforts of the-powers-that-be.

anyway, i think i'll be in a more forgiving mood once subjects start streaming through the door. i'm aiming to start slow and accelerate to a clip of 40 subjects a week, which may not sound like that many to a behavioral psychologist, but for someone who's done imaging his whole career (i.e. me) is like having half the CBD come through the lab each day. still, it'll be nice to have busy work for a while, filing and macros and backups and lots of numbers in neat, straight columns.

Finale, Poulenc's "Les dialogues des Carmelites"

powerful stuff.

LAT 11/9

Difficulty: * (out of 5)




easy one, with thanks for justin for inspiring the theme.

I know my soul hath power to know all things
Yet she is blind and ignorant in all:
I know I'm one of natures little kings
Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

I know my life's a pain and but a span;
I know my sense is mocked in everything;
And, to conclude, I know myself a man --
Which is a proud, and yet a wretched thing.

-- John Davies

friday night lights 5x01

(in matt's house, landry saying goodbye to matt's grandma before heading off to college)

landry: it's quiet in here
matt's grandma: yeah. it sure is quiet, honey
landry; that is the cleanest i have ever seen his [matt's] room.
matt's grandma: sure is.
landry: i miss that guy

me: SO SAY WE ALL

what's new

nearly 3 months into this job, the inventory of our lab is up to:

1) one (1) $500k optical brain scanner
2) one (1) $100 response box

and still no f***ing computers to run anything on. activities we can do with this equipment include:

a) having awesome (+/- 5 ms) reaction times while playing a first-person shooter, thus kicking all kinds of ass, or
b) a very dangerous laser-light show

there are heartfelt promises that this will resolve itself within the next 2 weeks, but if not i'm readying the picket signs.

in happier news, all the other preparation for my study is done, and once we get the PCs in and calibrated it will be, as they say, time to rock and roll. n = 300, baby. in the mean time, i've volunteered myself for a crash course in molecular genetics lab work, which will translate into one glorious week doing PCRs and blots of all directions. exciting. i think the last time i touched a pipette was in sec 4, which might also have been the time ellen turned the bunsen burner on himself and needed to be treated with aloe vera.

i miss the colbert report like nobody's business

what hath god wrought

just spent the last few days in a local conference where there was some science and quite a bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth. the latter because, despite singapore giving us 16 billion dollars a year to spend on research, we can't actually really spend it on what we want, which is sort of like giving a little girl a pony and then telling her she can only watch it through the window as it poops in the yard.

the science though was cool, and demonstrated (sort of) that once in a (very long) while, it is ok to condescend to speak of what the practical significance of ones research is. in the case of neuroscience, i give you one word: robots. if you're one of the unfortunate people who watched surrogates last year*, you'll know that science-fiction writers/hollywood hacks think that the robopocalypse is soon to be upon us, and well, they may actually be right. dr. ishiguro of osaka university, for one, has already created fairly lifelike androids/gemenoids that can controlled from anywhere in the world, so that he can use them to give a talk in poland while sipping sake in the comfort of his own home. these things are apparently so good that they no longer freak people out because of falling within the uncanny valley. in fact, they arouse extremely empathy in people, so much so that there have been plays written in japan with gemenoid roles. also, launching next year, a (rather scary) phone with a humanoid shape that wriggles and talks and will probably soon kill us all much like the baby aliens in alien

there was, of course, the usual-hand-wringing about are we playing god, and what about asimov's laws, and what about robots that create copies of themselves and go all cylon on our asses. my sense is that, much like with climate change, the dialogue on this topic is already starting way too late, that this technology is going to be upon us with a velocity unimaginable, and that (for the general public anyway), surrogates is going to be the nearest thing anyone's going to have to thinking through the ethical implications of creating autonomous systems. quite frankly, even playing with the very basic brain-computer interface devices in our lab, one gets the feeling that this shit is remarkable. i think i'm a little scared of what it's going to look like in a couple of decades.

misshapen but tasty beef empanadas

(Click to enlarge)

LAT 17/10

the applet i use doesn't let me have circles, so you may want to download the .puz or .pdf versions to get the full experiences. not too much else to say about this one, except that it was murder to fill cleanly because of the theme density. also, if you know me you'll realize immediately that 83-across was, of course, the raison d'etre of the puzzle :)

CHE 01/10

i have the chronicle of higher education puzzle today. for reasons that are somewhat hard to explain, i can't get put this puzzle on the java applet, so please head along here to grab it in across lite or pdf format. also, if you don't do crosswords regularly, you may find this one a bit of a struggle. fair warning.

puzzle notes, stop reading if you don't want to be spoiled:

*

*

*

*

*

this one went through 3 different incarnations before finally being accepted at the CHE. my original idea was to insert SIN, COS and TAN into phrases to produce wackiness: my theme set was

AC(COS)T THE GOAT
(TAN)GO FOR THE GOLD
DUTCH COU(SIN) RAGE

which every editor i sent it to uninamously agreed was just way too far to go. patrick suggested this version of the theme, and this is how it turned out. i'm not entirely sure i'm that happy with the final result; i will say though that clue-wise, the final product makes me look like i'm very erudite, which is always a good thing, and 20-Across is something i've always wanted to see in a grid.

an observation

this country needs more dive bars.

zhong qiu

there are now five of us in the lab most days: RA #1 and dr. fnir and i, and brice and a more senior person who is very nice but does't seem to figure in our research in any way. i've actually yet to sort out exactly what his role in the team is, but 2 months in it seems a rather odd question to ask. the boss is still absent most days, which gives us lots of time to toss ideas around and figure out how we can have a research program instead of a bunch of random studies, and bitch about engineers.

today, however, was tea and mooncakes upstairs with strange people from other floors who do things with turbines, which was actually a nice pause, because real work is going to start pretty soon. i'm hoping to get study approval by next week, following which it will be time to step hard on the throttle and get pilot data collected post haste. also, the optical equipment has come in, which means that one room in our lab actually looks like it can be used for science, and i want to get my finger in that pie and see if i can't learn the basics of how to run something using infra-red. i love the interval right before data collection. it's so full of promise and devoid of problems, and it totally doesn't matter that once the data start coming in they'll look horrible and i'll spend sleepless nights wishing i'd never seen them.

meanwhile, we've been spending a bunch of time trying to disabuse RA #1 of the notion that grad school is "fun", a service which was happily provided to me by seniors all over the place when i was considering applying. i strongly believe this is something that has to be paid forward -- no one should start a phd with the idea that anything other than tears and alcoholism are involved. going in with that notion is half the battle won.

trying for i think the third time to understand what string theory is and why it's such a big deal, this time by reading brian greene's the elegant universe. my essential problem, i've come to realize, is this. sure, i can accept that fundamental particles are made out of 1-dimensional vibrating strings that confer on them their respective properties of energy and mass. but what does it mean that these strings aren't made of anything else? that they're not strings of anything, but just...strings? how do you even begin to imagine or make sense of that? i mean, i'm beginning to feel like the old lady who pronounced that it was turtles all the way down, but at least we all know what turtles are.

of course, the physicists among us are all like:

interesting discussion came up today on the discussion boards about whether the word "kaffir", clued as [Type of lime] or some such is suitable for publication in a mainstream crossword. the guy asking the question had only heard the word in that context, though as some (many?) of you may be aware, it's a pretty nasty racial slur in africa. from the link:

The original meaning of the word is 'heathen', 'unbeliever' or 'infidel', from the Arabic 'kafir' and is still being used with this meaning by Muslims. The Arabic term Kafir (arab كافر) is, however, also applied to simply anyone who is not a Muslim. Portuguese explorers used the term generally to describe tribes they encountered in southern Africa, probably having misunderstood its etymology from Muslim traders along the coast. European colonists subsequently continued its use. Although it was in wide use between the 16th and 19th centuries, and not generally seen as an offensive term, as racial tensions increased in 20th century South Africa and the surrounding countries, it became a term of abuse.

well yes, came one reply, but it is a bona fide word when clued as the fruit, and if we disqualify it on the basis of its racist meaning, what happens to charlie, or slope, or oreo? doesn't the substance of the clue matter, or are some words with more than one meaning/usage just off the table entirely because one of their definitions is unacceptable? and what about the context in which the puzzle is being solved*? if we were sure that no one who may take offense would ever see it, would that make it ok?

interestingly, the community didn't reach a consensus, although the original asker ended up deciding it was safer to rework the section. was kind of an interesting point of contention though. thought i'd share.

* incid., email me to tell me if you were aware that the word is a slur; full disclosure: i only ever knew it as a lime.

i should perhaps clarify that i have nothing against engineers personally. many of them are perfectly nice people who have just chosen to study a rather unfortunate subject.

j/k.

didn't really understand what the big deal was when su-lin reported that the MRT sang at her last week, but they've started playing the horrid train-is-coming jingle along the north-south line now, and i fully agree that it's an abomination that makes me want to kill someone.

i hate stereotypes as much as the next person, but there seriously need to be more engineers who realize that machines should be designed so that real people can use them and find them useful. in contrast, i think many of the folks down the hallway want nothing more than to go the whole asimov and just have machines that use machines, and make other machines and then kill all humans and take over the world.

some days you want to listen to bach. for other days, there's this:

so after one very long and quiet month i finally have two (2) new labmates, one other post-doc and an RA, both of whom seem very nice. i'm debating the wisdom of using names, although i suppose any reasonably diligent (and nosy) individual could be now easily work out who i am and where i currently work*. perhaps for now they should be the other post-doc, and the physics RA. no, something more exciting. well, the post-doc does FNIR (functional near infra-red imaging), so he can be dr. fnir. and actually, RAs are pretty unexciting so he can be RA #1. dr. fnir just finished a phd in the states and has very similar notions to me of what a lab should be like, which is excellent because i don't think the boss quite shares that vision. it's not always about numbers, but 2 vs 1 is a comforting start. RA #1 is me 6 years ago except that he knows a lot more about neutrinos.

in other news, i had lunch today with yl's friend, who i met at the japanese film festival last week, and who is interested in music psychology, homosexuality in religion, and a bunch of other weird and wonderful things. we landed up in the horrible arts and sciences cafe where the mashed potatoes look and taste like glue, and spent a pleasant hour chatting about argentina, and using BCI to turn EEG waveforms into music, and whether graduate education is worth the peril of pursuing it (totally). not that you don't know this already, but conversations like these are what make working in academia the best thing ever.

* i tend to only use names of people who read this blog, and even then.

learned last friday that genetic alleles can now be tested for about the price of a plate of fried rice. well, expensive fried rice, but not the really expensive kind with lobster and XO sauce and each rice grain individually coated with egg. this was a rather pleasant surprise, except that i now get to go bananas with what i get to assay and run into all sorts of lovely multiple comparisons problems and spend sleepless nights inventing post-hoc rationalizations to justify my criminal behavior.

i will say (again) that worrying about budgets is something i'd really rather leave to other people. money in research is such an ugly thing: oil and water. i maintain that we need to bring back real patrons, the kind with endlessly deep pockets and a real eye for ability, and throw budgets out of the window. then -- real honesty, none of this hedging ones bets and praying to random deities for data to reach significance. no scrambling desperately for alternate explanations and splitting datasets into a billion infinitesimal pieces in an attempt to publish them all. look at me: 30 years old, and still an idealist. maybe one day soon i'll leave never never land.

DIY Negroni at The Tippling Club: from left to right, gin with lollipop, vermouth, campari, soda water

it amazes me that certain scientists here who shall remain unnamed fail to grasp the idea that experiments need control groups. i remember when this notion first truly dawned on me. it was in sec 3, when von and the crew and i were in boarding school, and we had to design an experiment, and i hit upon the cockamamie idea of playing different genres of music to bean plants to see whether it affected their rate of growth*. i know, genius right?. anyway, i was nearly at the end of the thing when i realized that i hadn't kept a no-music pot, which, on top of the facts that a) i had no idea how to do a one-way anova, and b) plants don't actually have ears, would most certainly have caused the experiment to be filed under 'u' for useless.

so, yes, we were all young once, and in a pre-post intervention design, it's a bit more complication. but seriously? an experiment without controls?

* i only admit this in public because i already have my diploma, which arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago. can't take that away from me!

have been eating quite a bit of korean food since i got back thanks to minz. i admit that i used to have a very low opinion of it in the past due to a) its seeming homogeneity and b) witnessing multiple people get food poisoning from seoul garden*, but my last few excursions have generally been pretty good. i've learned though, that i'm hopeless at remembering names of dishes...i swear the korean language has like 2 vowels and 6 consonants or something because all their words seem to run together in my mind. or, i'm just dumb (very likely).

also, if anyone wants to get a peanut-butter milkshake with me at some point, i'm (seriously) in the market.

* i know, fake korean. also: we were probably young and thought that eating half-cooked meat was manly or something.

LAT 08/13

Difficulty: *** (out of 5)




i think I came up with this theme while i was high or something, but it turned out well enough. Some notes:
* 32-Across is the first overt hint i've put in a published puzzle that I'm an academic (who else would clue it that way?).
* 43-Down was originally clued [Surfer's souvenir], but I guess that was too tricky.
* 48-Down was inspired by the housemate, who made us haupia once and enlightened me on what it was (su-lin: all is now clear; i was serious about having referenced event though).
* 51-Down was [Pattern for Poe, periodically], which I still like better :)

they've been fixing up the shielded room that we're eventually going to use for fNIR testing, which has made the whole (very poorly ventilated) office smell of epoxy or whatever stuff it is they're using to fasten the panels to the walls. in the morning this is just mildly annoying, but by mid-afternoon it feels like one has spent most of the day snorting a line of bad coke very, very slowly. there has to be some WSHA regulation against this; i really should, in fact, march myself down to the MRI scanner and investigate for neuronal cell death. who feels like a court case?

a sad state of affairs

it's 8:30 p.m. on *that day*, and i'm remarkably sober.

the puzzle java applets have been fixed, thanks to my one engineering/CS friend in the world. i can only hope the lawyers come through for me similarly when the authorities try and cart me off to jail :) applets are on the days the puzzles were originally released; links are on the puzzles page

molecular genetics

i've gone ahead and proposed to the boss that we should do this molecular genetics work i want to do, and he seems generally supportive, so hold on to your hats folks, some real actual biological work may be on the horizon. this is the psychologist's equivalent of becoming a Real Scientist, so let's hope it works out, and that i can still remember from college days how to tell a 3' from a 5'UTR.

why is it that whenever i till people that i live at home (with my mom) the automatic response is: oh, at least you don't have to do your own laundry? maybe this is just another example of me being in cultural outer space, but...aren't adults generally supposed to do their own laundry? and even if not, why is that the stereotypical advantage? i mean, just to name a few other things, there's

a) at least you can share the cost of the electric/water/phone/tv bill
b) at least you have company for dinner at night
c) at least you don't have to put up with crappy roommates

etc.

first day

so it genuinely seems that my instructions in this job are to take a bunch of money and turn it into data/papers, with 0 supervision in between. this is either thrilling or alarming, depending on how much caffeine in me at any particular time. otherwise, everything else just feels a lot like being a grad student again, except that now i have more drawers.

If you'd like to check out my published crossword puzzles, mosey along here

a sunset

pubs (not that kind)

A couple people over the past few weeks said they might like to look at some of my papers -- you can take a gander at this page if you're interested. Link is also up on the sidebar.

conned

it is of course at the very moment that i decide to start reading daredevil, a title the brother assured me had no crossovers or company-wide shenanigans, that marvel comes up with this shadowland nonsense that spans 5 months and crosses over into about 80 bazillion other titles. thanks a lot, dude. next time DC does a company-wide event i'm going to mailbomb you with .cbrs of every last issue, which knowing DC will probably come to 2.5 terabytes.

some things never change

Singapore, A Biography, p141-142:

In addition, as Singapore grew in size after 1870, it began to offer its European arrivals a considerably improved social life. Even by the 1860s, John Cameron, editor of the Straits Times, had written of a colonial lifestyle that 'may be set down as luxurious, and this to a degree that could not well be indulged at home on similar means'. The problem with this lifestyle, as Cameron went on to observe, was that it so completely lacked variety. European life in Singapore revolved around an eternal consumption of food and drink: dawn coffee and biscuits; the nine o'clock breakfast of curry and rice; tiffin-time around midday and the first glass of beer or claret; then finally more curry, wine or beer, throughout the dinner hour from six o'clock. On the completion of their working day, many younger members of the European community did 'resort to the fives-court or the cricket ground on the esplanade', while on Tuesday and Friday nights the whole community turned out for Esplanade band nights. Nonetheless, in the 1860s Cameron still yearned for a more sophisticated social intercourse as was 'usual at home, and in most other parts of the world'. It was a source of some regret to him 'that the people of Singapore so determinedly set their faces against every sort of entertainment which does not include a dinner'.

a stupid thought while passing burger king

have you ever pondered over how much of the world's supply of ketchup actually gets eaten? i mean, everyone takes more ketchup than they need for fries, and it gets left behind on fast food trays or on the bottom of those silly plastic cups they sometimes give you. or there are the last bits that you can't squeeze out of the little ketchup packets unless you're one of those compulsive people who squeezes from the bottom and rolls them up as you go, and even then. and that's if you even get round to opening the little packet in the first place -- think of the number of them that just get tossed. then there's ketchup left at the bottom and sides of the bottles in diners and people's homes, and ketchup that just molders away in pantries for decades because they couldn't resist buying 120 bottles at costco at one go. you know, i wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a 1:1 ratio of wasted ketchup to ketchup that actually makes it into a stomach. a tragic waste indeed.

even though my blog has a current readership of, like, two (2), i'd like to go ahead and put a plug out there for comics world singapore, which is not only wonderful but now also the only show in town for "western" comics since comics mart shut down. of course, my standard have been lowered a fair bit by living near probably the only comic book store in the world to not actually sell any comics at all.

Peter Brooks, Professor at Yale, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative:

Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semiconscious, but virtually unlimited monologue. We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.

NUS is like one of those escher-esque impossible staircases where no matter which way you turn you're headed uphill. also: terribly large. also: not for people with no sense of direction.

following the wisdom of those who have gone before me, i'm going to refrain from making any comments on the new workplace other than the completely neutral, lest i be discovered by online googlestalkers and taken for either being disloyal or sycophantic. suffice it to say that [                                                   ] and that, compared to the ex- and ex-ex-lab, this one is rather
[                                                                                                                                                    ]

i hate to this say this, but it's really quiet and lonely at home. i used to be so good with solitude.

***

got lost today trying to look for maxwell market. my own stupid fault really -- it's not that anything has changed all that much around there, but i tried to be clever and cut through side streets, and ended up in a hopeless muddle. i suspect that parts of my hippocampus just died or exploded over the past few years, or got annexed to learn useless stuff about neuroanatomy.

***

am reading singapore: a biography, which is good except that i could only find a hardcover edition that weighs down my bag like gangbusters.

i have been definitively spoiled by the luxury of space in our house in philly; the room here feels small, and is filled with stuff that is Not Mine. also, for the first time i'm noticing how many cars go by on the expressway, day and night -- and what a silly thing to "notice" for someone who's been a city kid all his life! -- but it was quiet in the mews, except for the ambulance sirens at night (not kidding). i suppose it will become background before long, but for now the traffic is a constant symphony, motorcycle crescendoes on top of a recurring motif of growls from the trucks and public buses. i slept with the window open last night and woke in some confusion at 6:45 to its already-furious pace, not entirely sure where i was; the sky was just turning light, i was desperately hungry, and home -- whatever that is -- was never further away.

a new chapter, a new template. sidebar won't be 100% up and running for a bit though.

back in the police state. the more times i come and go, the more life seems like one colossal joke, which i suppose is not the worst thing. have a lot of stuff to do, but everything is kind of interlaced like one giant LSAT logic puzzle where some events have to happen on certain days, some must precede others, but only on a saturday etc. also: frighteningly poor until my first paycheck comes in, which is not until the end of august. ugh.

have already begun to realize that folks here don't understand the concept of doctors who aren't medical doctors -- it's like minz's recent experience of no one knowing what an alumnus is, a hole in the web of knowledge that you can stick your finger through and wiggle. i really should have bought that phdcomics t-shirt that says DOCTOR on the front and OF PHILOSOPHY on the back. or one that just says YOU IDIOT. anyway, resolution #1 of living here is that i will save my high-blood-pressure episodes for the most dire of circumstances lest i end up being hospitalized with an aneurysm before hanukkah. to help cope, i shall hire underlings as soon as possible and make their lives a living hell. what goes around, etc.

A Farewell, Charles Kingsley

I

My fairest child, I have no song to give you;
No lark could pipe to skies so dull and grey:
Yet, ere we part, one lesson I can leave you
For every day.

II

Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever;
Do noble things, not dream them, all day long:
And so make life, death, and that vast for-ever
One grand, sweet song.

it's come to the point where i've realized that i can bring so little with me that i'm just letting go entirely, and treating it like starting anew, ala israelites in the desert. went for one last dinner with WH a few days ago and he looked absolutely crestfallen when i told him i was leaving most of my books behind, as if that was the moral equivalent of killing kittens. what i will undoubtedly end up doing is buying doubles of everything in a frenzy of insecurity, and then ruing it when i next relocate to tanzania or wherever the hell it is this stupid life brings me.

and, to you-know-who-you-are, from the power and the glory, graham greene:

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhiliaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times; even in danger and misery the pendulum swings

First Sunday-sized puzzle. Difficulty *** (out of 5)





Incid., I really wanted to get BYE BYE BIRDIE as a theme answer in here, but ended up leaving it on the cutting room floor. Alas. Still love the title though :)

not having to be in the lab every day is taking its toll on me. i hesitate to use the word withdrawal, but there it is. spent last sunday to tuesday in san antonio, where i had a ridiculously large room overlooking the alamo all to myself, and drank a lot of shiner, and gave a highly unscintillating talk to a room of very bored people. re: the alamo, always thought for some reason that it involved armies of thousands when really there were only several hundred combatants in all. weird. i blame hollywood.



oh, and philly beer week wasn't all i hoped for, but i did get my brewdog stone bashah, which will do for now.

one of the (many) things i'm going to miss when i leave is the incredible variety of beer there is in east coast cities. was telling the mother the other day that my general experience with beer before the age of 23 was that it was foul-tasting water, more or less. only over the past few years has it come to me that microbrews all over the united states and europe are making incredible, affordable stuff, next to none of which is available in south-east asia. boo.

apropos of that, philly beer week starts tomorrow, and i'm on the hunt for:

* brewdog stone bashah (apparently delicious)
* either brooklyn chocolate stout or ommegang chocolate indulgence for the mother
* stone arrogant bastard
* dogfish head chateau jiahu
* gouden carolus from brouwerij het anker (not hard to find, but exceedingly delicious)
* anything and everything from the lost abbey

come along if free!

apparently in 59 days i become an illegal alien.

graduation pictures to follow soon.

so tomorrow it's official, the chips get cashed in, and so forth. as for right now, i'm quite full of bananas foster, and thinking not of past or future, a quite satisfactory state in which to be.

the adviser referred to me in an e-mail today as dr. ___, which, aside from the fact that there are 8 days till graduation, just feels so very wrong. as i was articulating to the brother, it's like how after we graduated from ri/rj we continued to address all our teachers as mr. or mrs. x; hierarchical relationships once established feel like they should be immutable, once ones adviser, always ones adviser, etc. minz says this is very asian, and perhaps she is right, but it still feels that it's the way things should be.

in other news, i would like to make cassoulet, so if anyone has a good recipe please e-mail it to me.

vichyssoise

-- is fun to say, but even more fun to make.

i think the liminal times are often hard to get through -- all ones rhythms go out of whack, all the routines vanish, you're here, you're there, you're packing, then you're gone. i feel, simultaneously, that i should be working and relaxing, which is an excellent way to get nothing done at all.

i will say this: san fran last week was a blast, in that four guiltless days without work was something i had not had for probably almost a year. the ardbeg uigeadail featured prominently, and was delicious, and generally helped me to forget that i'm once more plummeting headfirst into the unknown.

what happened

one of the primary thoughts after getting a phd for me turned out to be: chances seem very good that for this to balance out karmically i'm going to walk out of the psych building and immediately get run over by a freight truck, or abducted by trafalmadorians. instead, there was a light drizzle, and walking uneventfully to mid-atlantic, and eating fried clams as the adrenalin slowly ebbed away.

as usual, there was drama: after my experiences with my masters thesis and qualifying exams, you would think i'd have at least one oral at penn that proceeded in a calm and orderly fashion. instead, the worst was saved for last when i learned 45 minutes before my talk that geoff had been called away for a family medical emergency, and that we may have been able to proceed at all. i've come to believe that after all these years he doesn't quite understand what a phd is, because he also sent a text message to my committee chair to "congratulate" me on being done. point of order: first you defend the dissertation, then the congratulations are due. anyway, the department secretary and our DCT, who both deserve to be canonized, spent the next hour making calls to just about every damn person in the school to figure out what was to be done*, and although there was a 20-minute span where things looked especially grim, and where i was starting to resign myself to Doom, in the end the dean came through and blessed the occasion, essentially forcing our stubborn-as-a-mule director of graduate studies to capitulate, and the rest, as they say, was gravy. well, almost -- because of the fiasco there was no time to buy coffee (thanks to the housemate for stepping up and doing that**), and by the time i actually began my talk, i wasn't no longer actually thinking about the talk at all. naturally, this meant it was one of the best talks i've given in my life. as for the private defense, i've had time to meditate on it, and have decided that it's not the kind of thing one should discuss, its contents sort of like what transpires in a confessional. like, everyone knows it happened, and that (obviously) it wasn't easy, but the actual process is -- well, it literally is a modern-day rite of passage, and like all good rites of passage should not be spoken of lest the magic flee the tribe.

it's been quite a ride. i found myself quite unexpectedly tearing up on my final slide, my acknowledgments slide, and had to take a short but very important moment as the thoughts caught up to the emotions: this much is Done, and new things lie ahead.


* none of this would have been quite as bad had the deadline for defending not been the 26th.

** no coffee = very cranky advisor. no, seriously. you don't know my advisor.

in the words of dr. seuss

"Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one."

here goes nothing.

i defend on wednesday, maybe get a phd, then go out to california on fri. after practicing the talk today, i've sort of realized that the dissertation seminar is a cross between an abomination and a farce, for the following reason: the 3 studies i've done are different enough that there's no way to either use them to tell a coherent story or adequately explain each one in the time given. the antidote, as it has been quite often in grad school, is basically to say heck it, and ride forth on a crest of assumptions and unexplained premises and glossy pictures.

much more importantly, i have yet to figure out what snacks to bring. i'm thinking the canelles from metropolitan bakery, as they are Very Tasty.

how does it feel? was what almost everyone asked me last night, and honestly, it's quite hard to say. i can tell you how it doesn't feel. it doesn't feel like when i finished my last exam as an undergrad and drove back to duke from beaufort with mamie in joy and fear. i'm not sure i would describe happiness as coming into it at all, really. it's like -- it's like in those vampire shows where the protagonist lets her vampire true love feed on her because he's dying, and then she's on death's door herself but has Saved him. or in les miserables, where eponine's been shot, and she's in marius' arms, and she's like: it's all good. or like: "o captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done". something like that. and somewhere beneath all that, you want to laugh at how silly and melodramatic that sentiment is because after it's bound and shelved, the years will bury it, as they'll bury hundreds and thousands of other theses from now until the end of history; i don't think they even last in the way that we would romantically like to believe that memories do, or love, because the specific way you thought about your little problem is for no one else to share, so that even as the knowledge may be transmitted, and may even be important, no one will ever get to experience the unique relationship between you and your ideas that formed and grew in those late nights, early morning hours.

holy *&@%^

my dissertation is turned in. and i'm freaking out just a little bit.

ok. everything gets turned in next wednesday, but i think i'm going to make it on time. there's one more figure i have to make, and some bits are too stylistically ugly for even a mother to love, but i think i'm going to make it. as i said to minz the other day, i almost don't want to look at it any more for fear that it will burst into flames (DISSERTATION TIP #11: your thesis will not burst into flames) but for now, it's there, and exists, in some form that has a non-zero chance of being acceptable to the committee.

i checked the website for doctoral candidates planning to graduate (omg) and discovered at 4:45 pm that 5 pm on april the second was the deadline for ordering regalia, which necessitated the quickest dash between my lab and the school bookshop ever, and on the warmest day of the year so far. the robes are royal blue. nyce. while waiting in line, i mused over how much i miss just browsing in a bookshop, and promised myself that doing so would go on the list of things to do muy rapido after i defend, probably somewhere after "drink lots of beer with friends" and before "go to san francisco and do bloody nothing for 4 days".

in other news, it's spring.

if you have an hour or so to spare, drop by a bookstore and read eat when you feel sad, by wunderkind zachary german. the book is about one robert and the utterly normal things that happen to him -- he goes to parties, eats chinese food, listens to music, checks his email. all of this told in the sparest of language; i'm not sure if there's a sentence with more than one clause in the novella. it feels very gimmicky at first, but after a while you realize that it works, and once you buy into the conceit the rest of the book becomes pretty enjoyable, and even funny in a salingeresque kind of a way at times. it's not literature, i don't think, but it does capture how it feels to be lonely among people, and manages somewhat to use the cadences and rhythms of the facebook generation to pretty good effect.

i think it's pretty much established at this point that dissertating is (a) running my life, and (b) causing me to have nothing of particular interest to say here, so i'll kind of go quiet for the next few weeks until things are done. the defense date, in case you don't know yet, is 4/21, after which i'll collapse somewhere for a while and then rejoin the land of the living. wish me luck!

the dissertation is 120 pages long, and growing fast, and time is getting away from me like so many slippery eels. i am doing an experiment on productivity in which i spend each day of the week writing in a different location to see if there are significant differences in pages written associated with where i work. my only conclusion so far is that being in the lab is especially bad, because all i end up doing is eating chocolate and playing sporcle and endlessly checking e-mail. i'm somewhat glad that i hate facebook, or that would be the real end of everything.

i've been writing in the library since 1, and now it's 3:10 and i think i'm going out of my mind. a completely random person popped up on my msn, and out of sheer boredom i started chatting with him(?*) about his recent deployment in iraq. it's really uncomfortable talking to vets -- either they don't want to give details about their tour, in which case i'm convinced they have PTSD, or we end up talking about how they had to carry their buddy's arm/leg back to base to the tune of anguished screams**. anyway, point being, i've never been big on random internet connections a la omegle/chatroulette, but clearly writing a thesis eventually makes you engage in all kinds of behaviors and experience all kinds of things, including but not limited to: hallucinations/depression/mania/anxiety/delusions of grandeur.


* we need new pronouns for the internet age. putative him. phim?
** actually almost not kidding here -- i had a patient recently who, well, never mind.

after 3 years, i'm still not quite sure of what to make of students who come literally crying to me when they get a B+

the check for my NYT puzzle came in. i realize that this is the first thing i've sold in my life, as well as the first money i've actually made in years, which is sort of at once delightful and horrifying.

important discoveries of this week:

1) planets revolve because of the conservation of angular momentum from the point of their formation. i feel like this was a piece of vital scientific knowledge that was completely skipped over in primary school/secondary school/jc/college. or i was asleep on that day. the brother and i were actually trying to work out the answer to why the moon doesn't revolve when a random girl on the street came up to us and said: "are you talking about physics?" in a slightly excited tone of voice. true story. i wouldn't suggest you use it to pick up girls though.

2) the lowest freezing point of salt/water solution is -21.1 degrees celsius.

3) the reason that d minor is "the saddest key" of all is apparently because it's in the dorian mode, which yields a subjectively darker sound. i'm quite curious as to why that should be, and i think i know some people in the department who can answer that question. d really is a sad note though. it's sort of purplish-blue.

have been reading about how determinists have put us a lot of scientists under the spell where we believe that free will cannot possibly exist because all causation is bottom-up: billiard balls that bounce around at the atomic and subatomic level and determine chemistry, biology and ultimately behavior. i kind of held that erroneous view for the longest time, and then the compatibilists came along and kind of persuaded me otherwise, but this book has been the first to convincingly argue for the existence of top-down causation -- that system-level entities can have effects on their constituent parts. if you free your mind a bit, that thesis isn't really all that huge of a revelation, yet the watchmaker's world is such an alluring metaphor that i've managed to hold on to it through about 5 years of (independent, unguided) study on the topic. i suppose if dennett had been a little bit clearer in his books, i might have shed the idea sooner, but i sometimes find it hard to follow his logic.

in other news, it snowed another 2 feet, and everything was cancelled today.

Difficulty: * (out of 5)

it ended up snowing about double of the promised 9 inches, which is to say more than i've seen in my time in philadelphia, which is to say a whole damn lot. have been cooped up in the house all day except for the hour i spent making sure the driveway and sidewalk were passable, and i'm already starting to feel a little stir crazy.

in other news, my plos one paper just came out, and you can, if you're so inclined, read it here

we're due for another 9 inches of snow here this weekend. thanks, punxsutawney phil. i miss going outside and reading a book while the cute japanese-american kids run around like in empire of the sun. except for the getting shot to death part, of course.

the comic book shop that used to sit on 41st and locust moved recently. i never used to get particularly good service from them at the best of times, so it was some reluctance that i agreed to let them mail me my books from their new location. as it turns out, my fears were not unfounded, as they have now gone 3 for 4 weeks in screwing up my order, this last week sending it to the wrong address. as i was saying to the brother, it doesn't seem like mailing someone a set of comics every week should be a terribly daunting task for a business. all i want are 1) all of the books i've ordered; 2) none of the books i haven't ordered 3) sent to me, and not my neighbor across the street. apparently, this is Too Much To Ask. fortunately, what should be opening in the location vacated by this store, but...another comic store. what are the odds. i gleefully called today to cancel my old order.

You Got Served

having attended a breakdancing competition for the first time in my life yesterday, i thought i would have something interesting and enlightening to say about the subculture. turns out, i really don't, so you get to watch this clip instead.

dissertation bits and bobs

1) is there any actual difference between 'disserting' and 'dissertating'? per the oed, one is "affected", and the other is "unusual", which makes me laugh for some reason.

2) DISSERTATION TIP #10: IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DISSERTING AND DISSERTATING IS, JUST KEEP WRITING, AND QUICKLY.

3) i need to figure out who to dedicate the thing to. i suppose one's parents is the done thing, but it would be nice to be funny. i mean, if no one's actually going to read it anyway, i may as well dedicate it to the flying spaghetti monster.

4) actually, speaking of no one reading it, i wouldn't mind having one (1) kind and brave non-expert volunteer to proofread it for me once i have a final draft. it will be a horrifying experience, but i'll buy you steak.

5) dimidium facti qui coepit habet

i wish

-- that the whole of life had the equivalent of a trash-collection service, where you leave all your crap out in bags in the morning, and by evening time it's gone.

on saturday, we went to karina's for mediocre pasta, good conversation, and a somewhat interesting incident where a middle-aged lady passed out at the table next to ours. the facts, from what i could gather, were these: that she was completely unresponsive (i would estimate GCS at 6-7); the loss of consciousness lasted about 10 minutes, upon which she woke up not even realizing that she had been out; she had taken a clonipine about an hour before; that she had had a glass or two of wine; that she had no history of diabetes. so what was it? one more thing i'll never know. theories?

***

in other news, if you like graphic novels, or even if you don't, i recommend the superlative daytripper, by fabian moon and gabriel ba, a 10-issue mini-series that explores the key episodes in the life of one fictional obituary writer brás de oliva domingos. excellent stuff, and you won't be collecing them till you're in a retirement home.

We Can Rule You Wholesale

a couple days ago, i opened up a new word document, and named it dissertation.docx, which in itself was an anticlimax. it sat there empty for a bit while i played sporcle, and then i wrote the cover page, with [TITLE] where the title should go, and then i spent the rest of the day writing acknowledgments, which was fun but pretty useless as far as actual progress goes.

nyt

thanks to von for shouting out my nyt puzzle yesterday. you can get it off his link if you have any interest, but if not (or after you've done it), i'd just like to point out that it set a somewhat interesting record (scroll down to near the bottom).

edited to add the java applet:

Difficulty: *** (out of 5)

forwarded by the ex-boss

semester the eighth

it would be nice if something that looked like a dissertation appeared in my hands by may this year. it doesn't even have to say anything too deep, just be big, and impressively bound. to accomplish this, it would be nice if students/patients/supervisors could all keep really quiet, and make very few demands. is there a muse of academic writing? if there is, i need their effigy as well for my desk, post-haste.

belated new year stuff

a day late, but who's counting these years? happy 2010 -- a year in which once again i resolve to blog more and not keep thoughts and feelings inside like dill pickles.

in the gym two days ago, they were playing (of course) prince's party like it's 1999, which really does bring one back. on new year's eve 1999 i was wearing green and watching people pressed together like preserved fish as they pretended to themselves that the next year decade century was going to be better, should auld acquaintance be forgot etc.. and then someone killed himself by jumping of the top of lucky plaza, which was, i suppose, a poor beginning. celebrating the passage of time is highly overrated.

to further remind me how much time has passed, von swept into town yesterday with a bag full of chapatis, and we both immediately realized how old we were and spent the next 48 hours eating and drinking almost constantly. there were a lot of potatoes of the mashed and very-buttery variety, and i may have converted von to single malt.

and new year's eve saw us shivering by the river for the most bizarre fireworks display ever. it was drizzling, and there was a light mist over the river, and after the first salvo of pyrotechnics smoke hung in the air in a thick cloak as if over a civil war battlefield, and the rest of the show was a lot of sound and fury with only the occasional shower of sparks from a roman candle nearer to the water. by the end of the show, it had drifted over the audience, nearly triggering several asthma attacks, and sending people scurrying back into the bars for more beer, and remembering, and forgetting.