1. it's 4:37, tuesday afternoon, and more than anything else, i just want to be out of the office right now.

2. the mother left for CM last week. she's back on wednesday night with the other brother, and i'm looking forward to that because the house has been intolerably quiet in the mornings and i have no one to watch arrested development with at night.

3. in a scintillating burst of efficiency, i managed to finish a large chunk of my christmas shopping over the weekend. this was no mean feat -- i do tend to think rather hard about what to buy for people, and dither.

4. no more night shift - back to regular schedule till february at the earliest. it was definitely fun while it lasted.

5. word to su-lin on the bonuses.

in my mailbox today:

two cadbury flake bars, and two large blocks of dairy milk chocolate, in a plastic bag, unaddressed. highly strange. should i eat them, or is someone trying to poison me?

working nights does have its plus points. i've been pottering around town with cp and justin and making up for lost coffee, cake and book time -- it's not quite the same as skipping lectures to go to holland v but it will do.

*

one thing i did not foresee: people start looking at you...differently when you tell them that you do shift work. askance? i guess i see the associations, but it's a bit unenlightened to be a slave to such stereotypical views, no? my mom's friend, whom we met for coffee today, suggests that when they follow up by asking me what i do, i should tell them that i'm a bartop dancer, and that i get lots of tips. i must say that i'm tempted.

Currently reading:
The Discovery of Slowness - Sten Nadolny

just saying

no, you can't have prostrate cancer, even if you are bedridden

on saturday, there was a life-sized stuffed pooh bear in the office. today, he was gone.

words that aren't #1

mantrap (v.)
e.g. "procedures in event of lift breakdown and mantrap"
cf. womantrap, dogtrap etc.

because 2.5 years isn't enough

you know, i'm not very sure that cp poor lamb is quite appropriate, considering that said 'lamb' is pes c9l2 and excused just about everything short of taking shallow breaths. but then again, i'm probably bitter because the gahmen has apparently caught up with me as well, and is summoning me to return my exit permit (yes, i kept it) next week. brr. how long after that do they call you up for ict?

Question:

Is Borshch soup supposed to have potatoes in it?

overnight

-- in the lab for the first time on Thursday, looking after a veteran volunteer who has been through four of our studies. Being here at night is more pleasant than I figured it would be, mostly because a chunk of the time isn't actually spent working (Yeah, and those backdated entries just wrote themselves).

happy turkey day!

if you have something to give thanks for, do.

if you don't have anything to give thanks for, you're probably in the civil service.

7.08

i was trying to explain to someone on im what a moo point is, and managed to locate the original exchange:

Joey: All right, Rach. The big question is, "does he like you?" All right? Because if he doesn't like you, this is all a moo point.
Rachel: Huh. A moo point?
Joey: Yeah, it's like a cow's opinion. It just doesn't matter. It's moo.
Rachel: Have I been living with him for too long, or did that all just make sense?

heh.

neal stephenson

Finished Quicksilver. Don't really see why people are raving over it. It's not terribly elegant, and granted, while it is clever, I've since given up on authors who are smart but don't have much else to show for it (cf. Salman Rushdie). The problem now is that books 2 and 3 are sitting at home, and I guess I do have to finish them seeing as book 1 wasn't terrible. This is how I kill myself.

home. backdated entries to follow.

Penn

Philadelphia, PA

Ok, so Columbia? That's how you put a university in a city.

Spent most of the morning with JJ in radiology talking about labeling planes and positioning issues in ASL, and trying to sell our new experimental idea to him as a check that we're not being complete morons. He liked it. I hope he wasn't just being polite.

Was brought up to see David Dinges (aka The Man Himself tm WC) at 11, only to be shooed away by his PA because he was already triple-booked for the slot. Rebooked appointment for 2 pm, then cleverly went and bought myself chicken fajitas stuffed to bursting so that I could spill salsa all over my t-shirt.

2 pm: Ultra-brief meeting with DD: TMH, details unpublishable, ask me if curious. Short tour of sleep lab. The rest of the day was round the campus on my own and perched in Starbucks with gingerbread and latte trying to write.

And in the evening there was beer.

Greyhound ride

-- from DC to Philadelphia with Simon and Garfunkel in my head and Take 6 on the iPod; sunset in Baltimore, and only a phone number on a half-torn piece of paper for when I get there. That's living.r

cont'd

wednesday

24. nothing much happens really.

25.1. h.y. has us for dinner, and his wife and kid tag along. i spend the entire journey to silver spring listening to their one-year-old daughter telling me that "we're going to go mum-mum". what starts out as "precocious" quite quickly degenerates into "annoying as all hell". but you know how i feel about kids.

25.2. it's "chinese" again. the restaurant is zagat-rated, and i'm beginning to think that that's a sham. (am i right von?)

25.3. the more i eat, the more i realise that all i really want is a $2 bowl of lor mee with heaping amounts of garlic, vinegar and chili.

25.4. on the journey back, h.y.'s daughter is still of the opinion that "we're going to go mum-mum". i try to disillusion her, but she's most adamant.

26. i don't win the lottery.

cont'd

tuesday

17.1. the boss wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to go for a run.

17.2. dissatisfied with just that, he also makes a bloody twenty-minute long-distance call back to singapore to make absolutely sure there is no possible way i could still be asleep.

18. i sit in on jamie and michelle's presentations. i worked with them back when i was in biac, so even though i'm not really into social cognition any more i go out of a sense of loyalty. the talks are good.

19. there's not much else in the way of neuroscience for the day.

20. the boss grabs me to explore chinatown. everything is tacky to the nth power. we eat in a little hole-in-the-wall place that's supposed to be one of the best bargains in washington dc. admittedly, for $4.95, the bowls of noodles are big - it's quite frightening to think how much msg goes into each one though. we also have duck that is 100% skin, and vegetables that have been boiled into submission.

21.1. i've been worrying about accommodation for when i visit penn for a while now (actually, since a week before, when i asked cp if we still know anyone there (answer:no)). things get a little worse today when i find out that rooms near the school are either (a) taken, or (b) cost $200++++ a night.

21.2. i e-mail the ssa. one edward wee replies to say that he'll ask around. his email signature is the ocs creed. my hopes flag.

21.3. my boss rescues me. i'm going to be shining his shoes for the rest of my life. his very first ra is a penn grad who's still working there and who lives right on the outskirts of campus. things are put into motion.

22.1 at the drugstore, while looking for chapstick, i decide on impulse to buy a powerball ticket. 8 20 28 37 54 and 24

22.2 the odds against winning, incidentally, really suck. 1:146,107,962? i mean, come on.

23. house is on. the week's episode is, coincidentally, about drugs and performance enhancement. i rediscover the fact that hugh laurie really is awesome. do you still have season 1, su-lin?

(tbc)

cont'd

monday

13. the boss wakes up at 4:30 to go for a run

14.1. we meet stefan and geoff for lunch. geoff's a student in ucl who did a short internship in our lab over the summer. he paid his own way to sfn, and managed, in a week when accommodation was booked more solid than bethlehem at yuletide, to find a room in a cheap-ass international hostel. this would have been totally great except for the fact that it burned to the ground on sunday night. he got out in time and managed to rescue his passport, but the rest of his stuff was in cinders. this should not really be amusing, but somehow, it kind of is.

[i go conveniently deaf as fs tells me that there's a lesson to be learned here]

14.1.1. apparently his stuff would have been ok, except that the firemen had to hack through the floor of his room to get to the flames, which meant that everything upstairs ended up very much not.

14.2. a very deep discussion of ica and artifact removal ensues. i give up about 10 minutes in and start meditating on a far more engaging issue: if lost is such a crappy show, why is it still consistently #5 in the nielsen's, and, more importantly, why am i still watching it?

14.3. stefan leavs to give his presentation. geoff and the boss and i get lunch. i have "chinese" "food".

15.1. the ethics of cognitive enhancement sounds like it will be a great talk, and it is, even though there is no mention whatsoever about the recent issues with dope tests in the acbl

15.2. the speaker is thomas murray. he talks about how immeasurably difficult it is to talk about ethics when it comes to cognition, because (a) we don't yet have a good framework for where the lines should be drawn, and (b) whether cognitive enhancement is "right" is highly situational (no one's going to crucify you for drinking coffee before an exam, for example)

15.3. he ends with an incredibly sad story. his daughter was murdered a few years ago, and he talks about how (obviously) that cut to the bone. he goes on to tell us about this drug for ptsd victims that lessens the subjective feeling of trauma -- and how, for all the money in the world -- he wouldn't have taken it if he had been offered it at the time, because the pain - though agonizing - was necessary to honour the memory of his child. that dulling it would somehow have been robbing himself of all-important, healing grief. my granite heart is moved, just a little bit.

16.1. dinner with geoff, josh, h.y. (a singaporean psychiatrist working in nih) and two random grad students/freeloaders. it's supposed to be a lab outing, but it really isn't. my boss asks me to book the place. steakhouses call out my name, but i resist mightily.

16.2. we end up in a very decent seafood place (i'll pop the name in here when it comes to me). it's the first ok-ish meal i've had since landing, and i tuck into my crabs with gusto. there are also $5 martinis and plenty of chardonnay, and i don't even care that some people at the table think that singapore is the BEST. PLACE. ON. EARTH.

16.3. it's a very good advertisement for why i should be intoxicated, like, all the time. i'd get along so much better with everyone.

16.4. we walk back to the hotel. geoff has managed to get one of his colleagues to let him crash at his hotel room. we pass the capitol, splendidly lit, and take about a zillion pictures, most of them slightly out of focus.

(tbc)

cont'd

sunday

8. the boss wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to go for a run.

9.1. the nearest church is four blocks away. everyone at mass is
(i) italian-american
(ii) above fifty years of age and
(iii) dressed immaculately

meanwhile, there's me, cowering in a corner in yellow timberland shirt and levis jeans. for the second time in as many days, buddhism's appeal ratchets up a notch.

9.2. the sermon, as it usually is in the weeks running up to advent, is highly eschatological. this does not help matters one bit.

10. back at the conference, i strike up a conversation with someone from tononi's lab. we have a fascinating discussion about sleep spindles. i actually learn something. somewhere in hell, a snowball thinks: 'wow, this must be my lucky day'

11.1. we have dinner with ex-lab-josh, denise park, three of her RAs, and two other random people. e-l-j started on his phd in uiuc a couple of months ago, and has already acquired (a) an american accent, (b) the suggestion of a goatee and (c) intellectual airs.

11.2. denise spends 20 minutes talking about her bichon frises (bichons frise?). the conversation turns towards various gastronomic catastrophes that people have experienced in china and other places that serve cat.

11.3. we discuss christopher guest and john berendt. no one has actually been to savannah.

11.4. i have the duck pate, swordfish, and orange cake. it's adequate, and once again, i'm awfully glad that i'm not paying.

12.1. somewhere in all this mess, i manage to squeeze in the walking tour of dc. i've done this before, but with company, and i do like rambling about on my own. the weather is impossibly beautiful for november - after a point i don't even need a jacket. i walk the triangle that has vertices at the capitol, the washington monument and the white house (ridiculous security there, even though dubya was out of town).

(tbc)

a little bit of something very cute

aww

They cancelled Arrested Development. That sucks so much I can't even find the words. Sob. I shall go don midnight.

(Edited on 17/11 to say that it hasn't been cancelled yet -- they reduced the ep. order to 13. Basically, it's on ALS. I'm going to write a strongly worded letter.)

the conference

Washington DC

0.1. backdated, obviously. my boss has been breathing down my neck for the past 5 days, and i've been loath to blog.

0.2. i'll try to get through this with a minimum of technobabble, because that's just boring (for you, anyway).

saturday

1.1. in the grand tradition of american excess, the convention center is beyond huge. 30,000 neuroscientists coverge on it early morning, and miraculously, there are not only no traffic jams, but there's enough coffee for everyone. talk about your five loaves and two fishes.

1.2. and i mean huge. they use the main hall to test jumbo jet turbines.


2. i almost immediately run into my boss hobnobbing with allen song, a genius who apparently keps turning down multi-million dollar grants because he likes duke so much. or something. he gave us a lecture on mr physics once which went so far over our heads they couldn't even catch the pitch in the stands. i tell him as much. he does not remember me.


3. there's FREE INTERNET access everywhere. they've covered the convention center with one enormous wi-fi dome so powerful it extends two blocks in every direction outside the building. i say a silent prayer of thanks to the gods of technology


4.1. the poster displays cover an area about the size of two football fields, but only about an eighth of that is cognitive neuroscience, and of those only a fraction of studies involve fMRI/EEG/simultaneous fMRI-EEG/TMS etc. I talk to a bunch of people in d'esposito's lab to try and be cool by association even though I don't understand what they're saying half the time.

4.2. when it comes to the occasional molecular study i've been asked to go to, i'm even more overmatched. if college has taught me one thing though, it's how to nod and look intelligent even when lost in a fog of ignorance.


5. i have lunch with this one girl from scranton university. scranton is a jesuit school, as you may be aware, and she's the one person i've talked to in my life who's heard of the atom-sized college that the brother attends. i'm inwardly pleased.

5.1. she puts mustard on her fries, which i find exceedingly weird.

5.2. coincidentally enough, she's also applying to do grad school in clin psych in the university of pennsylvania.

5.3. her undergraduate thesis involves removing goldfish telencephalons to see if that evinces changes in their startle response. she's first author. i try to act nonchalant, but the green-eyed monster does a tapdance behind my eyes. i resolve to get my name on a paper - any paper - by next year march.

5.4. fine, june.


6.1. the dalai lama is the keynote speaker. he's simply adorable. i suddenly want to become buddhist all over again.

6.2. he says that he would have become a scientist had he not opted for the religious life. he speaks of wonderment and proof, of how religious teaching must bow to science if the evidence is irrefutable, but that science must respect ethics as well. he struggles with the english (there's a translator offstage who helps him through the difficult bits), but the points are made. there is much figurative hem-touching.


7.1. dinner is meatloaf. it's expensive, and kind of sucks, but my boss is paying so i stay quiet as a mouse.

(tbc)

i aten't dead, although a combination of circadian cycle offset and coffee withdrawal conspired to give me caffeine headaches at 3 in the morning (and an interesting dilemma, if you get my drift)

anyway, it's 9, and i'm full of sausage egg and cheese, and it's time to go and learn something and try not look too much of a fool.

FREE INTERNET

one can never resist blogging from FREE INTERNET. it's a fact of life.

ok. to the other side.

if i end up sitting beside of one of those ****ing americans who just can't shut their mouths for trying, i have my story all planned out. it's the kelly story: i'm the illegitimate love child of a vietnamese prostitute off to america with a faded twenty-dollar bill in my pocket to look for my long-lost identical twin. using this story has two conceivable benefits over the truth. one, my seatmate may actually shut up in bewilderment. two, s/he may be a dot com billionaire and shower me with riches unimaginable.

time for a nap.

more social psych

stanley milgram, (in)famous creator of the yale electric shock experiments, is also, incidentally, father of the small world phenomenon, which you can read about here.

also, while we're on the subject of "six degrees of separation", stockard channing* is set to leave the west wing along with dule hill and richard schiff. what's with the exodus? the show's actually getting good again.

* (who gets five stars out of five)

as always, i had a difficult time deciding what books to bring on the plane, but it shall be john banville's the untouchable, which i just pulled out of nlb, book i of the neal stephenson trilogy, which has been sitting on my shelf since the last expo book fair*, and the david foster wallace of which i have about 50 pages to go.


*su-lin knows this story. i found the system of the world and the confusion among the various piles of fiction, but, in exactly the same way that they never have book i of soseki's i am a cat on the library shelves, quicksilver was nowhere to be found. i eventually got it half off at this weird place i don't even remember the name of, and - here's the part where su-lin laughs at me- i got it in the wrong size. they have big and small versions of the paperbacks, and now i have a mismatched set which sits most awkwardly on my shelf mocking me every time i look at it. curses.

why good people do bad things

Here's a good review article on power and evil. (Zimbardo, by the way, has done some pretty amazing experiments, and is still teaching at Stanford. This addressed to the one who is there: go for his talks!)

old, but good

away on friday

had a bit of a kerfuffle over which suitcase to bring, but all that's sorted out.

if you want anything brought back, speak now, etc.

I need a copy of The Last Temptation of Christ, and it's banned in Singapore?! I'm deeply vexed. *throws it on the shopping list for next week*

(Harvey Keitel gets 8 stars out of 5)

fare thee well

evans has retired, and the two rj teachers rustled all of us up yesterday to get him a farewell dinner. this was supposed to have been a surprise, and would have been had jianyi not blurted in the middle of rashidah's hari raya party. anyway, that attempt at sabotage was ruined, and we were all at the restaurant rather nicely on time, except for yen who had to attend her grandmother's birthday party.

a couple of minutes before evans arrived, i was asking cp if it wouldn't be a bit nerve-wracking for him, what with not having seen most of us for so many years and not even remembering who we are. as it turns out, i don't think i had any recollection of what our old dynamic was when i was his student. cp constantly tells me about how much we mythologize him, and after last night i guess i have to agree. not that he's just another teacher - he always was larger than that, and that i remember - but neither is he the gentle porcupine of sardonicism that i've replaced him with over the years as the real memories faded.

there was lots of sake and good food (thanks su-lin, i've now fallen madly in love with bacon-wrapped enoki mushrooms), and conversations about rj 2005 that were a lot more interesting to listen to than usual. then there was repairing to a bar down the road for more sake and edamame and more talk of medea and larkin and the crying of lot 49 and british thespians and ecclesiastes and students protesting about being made to do dickens (never in our day!) and where all of us are, and where we are going.

so thanks to you and you for cobbling the outing together, and may-the-wind-be-at-your-back to the one who's headed back to suffolk. not all is vanity, no matter what the bible says.

From A Compact History of ?*, by David Foster Wallace

The trouble with college math classes - which classes consist almost entirely in the rhythmic ingestion and regurgitation of abstract information, and are paced in such a way as to maximise this reciprocal data-flow - is that their sheer surface-level difficulty can fool us into thinking we really know something when all we really 'know' is abstract formulas and rules for their deployment. Rarely do math classes ever tell us whether a certain formula is truly significant, or why, or where it came from, or what was at stake. There's clearly a difference between beign able to use a formula correctly and really knowing how to solve a provlem, knowing why a problem is an actual mathematical problem and not just an exercise

* this is an infinity sign, but blogger does not like it.

bake shop

I didn't even know that Singapore had stores that specialise in baking supplies till today, but Phoon Huat & Co. down Bencoolen Street has a pretty nice selection if one is in need. Ingredients are cheap, even if you don't want industrial-sized bags, and, importantly, they have molasses, which otherwise are not to be found except at Tierney's where they cost $6 a bottle.

background

you can complain all you like about the color hurting your eyes - i'm not going to change it. it conveys incarnadine perfectly.

i saw chocolate cheese in the store today. it looked singularly gross.

cookies again

a colleague called in a favour -- she's one of those churchey types, headed off on a mission trip, trying to raise some cash. their plan: sell cookies, several thousand of them, and she wanted me to share some recipes with her and walk them through the process. i denied my ability to teach. she insisted. she came over and we made a batch of chocolate chip cookies - neither chewy nor brittle nor soft, but something, well, completely different. Saleable, fortunately, so she took the sample and the recipe and did some sums and figured that she could make 5 of them for 20 cents and sell them for 2 bucks.

which reminded me of su-lin's bakery-opening aspirations and set me thinking, for the umpteenth time, why not?. there's margin for error in the food industry, you can afford some missteps, i reckon, and there are all those entrepreneurial-whatever-funds that the gahmen has, and, really the only excuse is inertia. that's the only excuse. i want to admit it and move on with life.

4 months in

-- and i'm settled, if not mildly content. i know that many of you think that i'll just never be really happy here, but i think i at least sink into the mediocrity as well as the next person. entropy will not be denied.

going into a week of leave

first order of business: repaying sleep debt

for the volunteers who come and stay overnight, i've tacked up slumber song, by sassoon:

Sleep; and my song shall build about your bed
A paradise of dimness. You shall feel
The folding of tired wings; and peace will dwell
Throned in your silence: and one hour shall hold
Summer, and midnight, and immensity
Lulled to forgetfulness. For, where you dream,
The stately gloom of foliage shall embower
Your slumbering thought with tapestries of blue.
And there shall be no memory of the sky,
Nor sunlight with its cruelty of swords.
But, to your soul that sinks from deep to deep
Through drowned and glimmering colour, Time shall be
Only slow rhythmic swaying; and your breath;
And roses in the darkness; and my love.

more cookies

attempted cookies with oats, no flour, and ended up with something that tasted really good but stuck unyieldingly to the bottom of the pan. i had a feeling they wouldn't work from the get-go, but having never been failed by a recipe before, pressed on ahead. such regret. i shall trust my instincts next time.

nobels

So it's Pinter this year. Well-deserved.

I was reading about Kahneman's work the other day, and have been showing it about ever since as an example of how winning the Nobel prize can just be a matter of expressing obvious truths in elegant ways.

Prospect theory, Kahneman and Tversky's brainchild, has to do with how we make decisions under conditions of risk and uncertainty. It begins with the observation that expected value theory does not explain a lot of real life behaviour - for example, if you walked up to an average person on the street and offered them either (a)$49, or (b) a coin toss where he could win $100 if the coin comes up heads but nothing if it comes up tails, most people would choose (a), this despite the fact that (b) offers the better expected return.

The point: value is not equal to utility - and risky decisions are weighted by the utilities we associate with their various outcomes. Humans have a fairly predictable set of risk attitudes that colour our decisions. We overweight low probabilities and underweight high probabilities; in other words, we are risk seeking for low-probability gains and high-probabiliy losses, and risk averse when we stand a good chance of winning something, or a low probability of losing. On top of this, we are in general loss averse, we need a far greater amount to compensate us when there is the potential that we may lose something we already have.

Thus, the cornerstone of prospect theory is the one equation:

V (x,p) = v(x).w(p)
where v measures the subjective value of the consequence x, and w measures the impact of probability p on the attractiveness of the prospect.

After which you're off to the races. Neat.

A couple of years ago, I had a few conversations with Justin about the wisdom of buying Toto (or any lottery ticket for that matter), and why playing a negative expectation game still felt like it might not be an irrational decision. And -- with no prior knowledge of Kahneman's work -- we constructed, verbally, a pretty good approximation of what (in theory) he would say (i.e. that the utility of having a 1 in 4 million chance of winning 1.5 million dollars can be more than the utility of having 1 dollar, even in a repeated game situation)

It pleases me that we thought of that, and that it's important, and I admire how prospect theory has been constructed because it articulates so cleanly all the ideas about value and utility that have been swimming around in my head for a while now. This has to be the first time a mathematical model has given me a warm tingly feelnig inside. More people need to win Nobel prizes for things like that.

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Ig Nobels (ii)

the chemistry prize was apparently awarded to two UMn researchers who showed that people swim as fast in syrup as they do in water. heh.

Ig Nobels

From Nature:

Ig Nobels hail world's longest-running experiment

...John Mainstone of the University of Queensland in Aistrlia accepted the physics prize for the 'pitch-drop' experiment started back in 1927 by the prize's co-winner, the late Thomas Parnell. It shows that an ostensibly solid tar derivative can behave like a liquid, forming drops at the rate of about one every nine years.

Shortly after arriving at Queensland in 1961, Mainstone found a curious piece of equipment tucked away in a cupboard. He had unwittingly stumbled across Parnell's experiment, by then three decades old.

Parnell, Queensland's first physics professor, had taken a sample ofpitch, heated it, and placed it in a funnel. He hoped to show that this appparently solid substance - britle enough to shatter on impact - has fluid-like properties. Sure enough, the material did form drops, albeit at an exceedingly slow rate. Its viscosity, Mainstone and his colleagues calculate, is 100 billion times that of water.

It is hard to know what motivated Parnell, but Mainstone suspects it had to do with the quantum revolution - the idea that "things are not what they seem" - that had overtaken physics. "This was his way of showing there are strange things in classical physics too," Mainstone surmises.

The experiment has attracted a cult following, he says, yet it also raises some serious scientific questions. No one knows, for example, how each drop actually detaches. Mainstone believes that fibres supporting the drop in its final stages become unstable and fall catastrophically, but this hypothesis is unconfirmed.

Part of the problem is that in the experiment's 78-year old history, no one has seen a single drop fall. That's not surprising, says Mainstone. "We're talking about a descent of a few centimetres, lasting a tenth of a second, that occurs just once a decade." The last drop, which fell in November 2000, should have been recorded on a webcam, but technical problems intervened. "We'll have to wait until next time, which could be 2010 or later," Mainstone notes.

There is enough pitch left to sustain the experiment for another century, he estimates, and he hopes it will continue, despite the constant battles he has waged with the "philistines" who believe the experiment wastes precious time and space. Mainstone's labour of love, along with Parnell's pioneering work, were recognized in 2003 when the Guinness Book of Records named the pitch-drop experiment the world's longest-running laboratory experiment. The Ig Nobel prize, which Mainstone shares with the late Parnell, provides further recognition.

...

Mainstone is a great believer in the Ig Nobels, and not just because of his award. Science has become a "rat race", largely as a result of the pressure to compete for grant money, he claims, adding that it's important to get a break from that sometimes. "When we cease to see the amusing side of science, it's all over," he says.

Steve Nadis

i am to start shadowing one of the clinical psychologists in sgh in december, possibly january. he also teaches a class, and has invited me to join that as well. it is a step forward - a hard-earned one - nothing comes cheap when what you're chasing is in all probability a castle on a cloud.

at least my intolerance for the general slowness of progress diminishes. (glass half-empty: perhaps that's also a sign of waning ambition.) i used to be convinced that i would suffer massive internal hemorrhaging if i didn't get a phd before age 30; now it matters so much less. one day at a time, right?

mid-october. tempus fugit. did september even happen?

random things that don't quite qualify as whole posts, or even significant news:

* things at work have been routine for the past two months, thus the accelerando of perceived time. more days than not i eat out and get home late, and weekends get gobbled up by chores and admin and restoring my sanity with wine and song. cue my favorite steinbeck quote: from nothing to nothing is no time at all.

* dukegabe's patience in getting the singaporean class of '04/05 together is inexhaustible. he'salso one of those people you kind of don't really want to meet until you do. on the agenda: various juicy things about people breaking up and finance chiefs making egregious errors of judgment during interviews. journalists are right up there on the waiting list for hell.

* does anyone want to go to any oktoberfest events while it's still oktober? i like beer and sausages. very vimesian.

* there's a new cd/dvd store (gramophone) in the basement of scotts next to the rotiboy. i thought i'd advertise for them because they had monty python and the holy grail and priscilla queen of the desert, both cheap, both dvds i'd been looking for for ages.

Currently reading:
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst

booker

so ishiguro didn't win. had a disagreement with the mother over whether, in his book, kathy is making the best of a bad situation, or if she is just using her power as narrator to camouflage her disgust and feelings of futility. must go reread.

from a random woman's magazine:

"Any of us would hate to have our future happiness placed upon another person. It relinquishes the power to make ourselves happy, rendering us quite useless. To be needy leaves us women in a highly volatile situation. Even sadder, a male scrape goat at whom we can point fingers and exclaim, 'I'm not happy because he's not!' In this day and age, we would like to think ourselves more self-sufficient than our 60s Doris Day apron touting counterparts.' (sic.)

From Today, 7 Oct 2005:

Longer life span calls for longer protection

"From actuarial statistics, about 30 percent of males and 40 percent of females at the age of 55 are expected to live beyond 82. This proportion is expected to increase. Many people decide to invest in a life annuity as it offers better protection against living too long."

Excellent.

question

if anyone knows why they stick the little sharpened chopstick things into potted plants, could you please tell me the reason. i've narrowed the possibilities down to horticultural or superstitious. or, as someone i know suggested, "because the neighbours put so i also put lor".

corpse bride

-- was not quite as good, i think, as the nightmare before christmas. the jokes felt worn, and you kept getting the feeling that you would much rather be seeing johnny depp than his claymation effigy. liked the dog, though.

Currently reading:
Have Mercy On Us All - Fred Vargas. (Indeed)

my boss has asked me to check out mri made easy, an interactive dvd narrated by someone who sounds suspiciously like stephen fry, to see if it's useful as a teaching tool. the 'easy' part is a little bit of a lie, but the writers try their level best to persuade you that it's so. "as you may remember from school," the narrator says, "a proton is etc.", and just as you glow with pride at remembering introductory science they hit you several seconds later with the bloch equation. physics is evil.

i mentioned to cp to other day that i watch a couple of shows with my mom every week (rome and arrested development, and six feet under before it went off air). strange that we should both like these, i grant you, and stranger still in that the hbo shows are pretty adult, not really the stuff of mother-son bonding (one would think more along the lines of the radio programs minz and her dad listen to). even AD gets naughtier by the week. moms, i think, will always see their kids as being about nine years old, no matter how old they are. my mom tells me that when she was still living in england her dad used to make them cross the road if he saw anyone ahead of them making out. they'd also have to change the channel to the news every time anything remotely sexual came on. just one generation, and look what remarkable strides we've made.

acquired* and finished thud! over the weekend. after all these years, i find that on the whole i still enjoy the vimes novels much more than any of the others. by nature of the mystery format they seem so much more coherent and better thought out, and if you don't love nobby and colon and carrot and sybil and vimes and all the rest of them there really isn't any hope for you.

* with great difficulty, i might add. nlb, though shiny, is quite useless when it comes to stocking new pratchetts.

in my mailbox yesterday

"...the talk will start at 2:30 sharp, please be puncture..."

minor gloat

the boss is in delhi and my subject is awol so i get to blog as much as i want today. also: we are going to brewerkz later for an impromptu and completely self-organized brainstorming session, so to all those who are stuck in the office: neener neener neener

ow

i fell asleep in an awkward position a couple of nights ago and woke up with all the nerves in my upper arm in full rebellion. three days and a zillion ibuprofen later it still hurts and i'm beginning to wonder about impingement and the like. certain movements are ok, but when i try to lift a glass or type on a keyboard i feel like absolute death. i hope they don't have to amputate.

i almost forgot to blog a whopping big thank you to cp for presenting me with this gift last week, a surprise so perfect that words do not suffice.

it's actually there!

ImOscar.com

(if you're still not watching arrested development, please go and kill yourself now. and take ray romano with you.)

emmys

everybody loves raymond for best comedy? lost for best drama? ugh. pass the bottle over here.

(silver lining: geoffrey rush won. and TAR.)

mid-autumn

* gaudy as the displays at the lantern safari (on till 25 sept at chinese gardens) were, you still have to marvel at the effort needed to construct and light up several hundred cloth-and-wire dinosaurs. throw in fireworks and hanging displays, and you have yourself at least one-sixteenth of a spectacle.

* between durian ice-cream mooncakes and power rangers lanterns, i'm going to say that as far as zhong qiu jie goes, tradition is strictly optional. enjoy the lights, everyone!

caudate

the one in the brain, people, the one in the brain!

today: definitely the first time i've told someone they have a nice caudate

lunch today was at a new place across the road, a self-titled "xiao long bao zhuan mai dian". given the number of places in singapore where you can get very decent xiao long bao/shui jiao/guo tie, it's difficult to expect anything too much from new restaurants of this ilk; if not for its proximity to outram i wouldn't have thought twice about ever eating there. complaints first: the food came in portions so miniscule that i ended up spending much more on lunch that i normally would because of the amount i had to order. that grouse aside, i would recommend the zha jiang mian, as well as the gui hua tang yuan, which was a bit like drinking a garden (literally - my soup came with numerous bits of flower floating in it. didn't gerald durell describe something similar?). nothing was over-salted/sugared, and well, i would have been quite happy if i hadn't been so hungry after the meal. unfortunate. perhaps i'll give it one more chance in a few weeks.

a colleague mentioned this morning how, in his younger days, his friends would devise methods to get themselves into clubs without paying the cover charge. simple manual transfer of the uv stamp from hand to hand didn't work, because that inverted the logo, so they learned to use a credit card as a tool for lifting off the ink and transferring it cleanly. eventually, they graduated to carving homemade stamps from potatoes - whole sets of them to match the one the club happened to be using for the day. i was quite impressed, i must say. labouring over dishonesty is not easy.

cookies

soft ones are easy to do, and brittle ones, but to get them in between - chewy on the inside with a crisp border - is an art i have not yet perfected. my mom suggests an apprenticeship with su-lin.

while i was doing a scan today, fs messaged me to tell me about the unveiling of the ipod nano. was struck by the desire to run out and buy one immediately. 0.27 inches! i need to go conjure up $450

expressions of mirth, divers

overheard a discussion on the mrt yesterday on the ridiculous overuse of 'haha' in short messages (e.g. haha i agree haha u shld tell her u said that haha she will never speak to u again haha dinner tonite?). ditto with 'heh' and 'lol'. everyone's guilty to a greater or lesser degree; the real question is why we do it. the fear of misconstured sarcasm i can perhaps understand...but it's more than that.. it's almost like people experience a deep-seated anxiety that every time they do not say haha/heh/lol it means that they have been emotionally devastated by the preceding comment and are about to forsake the relationship with the other party forever.

i'm going to try and break the habit, mostly because i'm getting annoyed with myself. 'haha's in IM/SMS will henceforth be kept to a minimum...and it doesn't mean that i hate you.

chuffed

-- at how virus proof OSX is. all those wasted years wrestling with NAV internet security pop-ups.

while browsing through nature a couple of days ago i came across a brief review for uncle petros and goldbach's conjecture. ever mr. soh's bunny rabbit, even after all these years, i checked the book out of nlb and finished it in a couple of sittings yesterday. as a novel it was nothing too special; it did, however, spur me on to read a little more about goldbach's conjecture, which states that every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of 2 primes. the problem is 250 years old, and it is, to date, unsolved, despite the publishers of uncle petros offering a million dollar prize for a proof in 2002.

i enjoy how such simple statements can spawn the exorbitantly complex proofs that they do. once upon a time, before my brain died and i started punctuating and spelling completely at random, i downloaded andrew wiles' proof of fermat's last theorem to see if i might understand anything of his argument. (i know. we were young then.), that was around the time i *almost* embarked on a second major in mathematics (bet you didn't know that), the time before better sense prevailed. what i enjoyed most about the wiles paper, i think, was just having it on my desk. while it sat there i owned it -- on some level at least -- even though (to me) not a word or symbol within it made sense.

note to self

don't be an idiot.

Currently reading:
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith

be thou my vision

one of yesterday's hymns. celtic tunes are gorgeous.

there was an all-female poetry slam happening at the orchard library this afternoon while i was settling down with cappuccino and paperback -- it turns out that this is similar in all respects to a normal poetry slam except that

(a) one is obliged to use the word "vagina" and/or "clitoris" once each poem and
(b) at least one reference to suicide during the course of your reading is an absolute must

seriously, though, it was a little disturbing how angry most of these people's stuff was, all "fuck the establishment" and "let's go get high" and "what the hell am i doing here anyway?". the particular problem with angst-ridden locally-written verse (aside from the fact that it's, well, cliched), is that even on the off-chance the poet actually has experienced something to warrant their anguish no one is going to believe them. the ready set of images from american pulp fiction that one can call upon - smoldering cigarette butts, stale black coffee, shiners behind sunglasses - make it so easy nowadays to portray yourself as the struggling abused artist that even the real mccoys have to work to get their cred, never mind ntu students here.


it's unfortunate. if the poetry isn't great you should minimally believe the sentiment, but even that's a stretch in this lousy place. and i do kind of feel for them; it's almost like i wish they really did have an opportunity to suffer, so that even with all the wrong words, they still might be able to say something genuine and right.

yes, one should not laugh at elderly men who are hard of hearing, and one especially should not laugh at colleagues who are losing their voice trying to get elderly men who are hard of hearing to understand them. but.

mornings

have been needing to get up earlier to get to work in time for my morning subjects -- which means that i get grumpier and grumpier as the week wears on. thursdays: definitely dark skies.

i'm probably just all too infatuated with the hollywood schema of a weekday morning - bright sunshine streaming through french windows, waking up to the smell of a hot breakfast, time to read the headlines. reality is no match: groping for the snooze button in darkness; forgetting to shave; munching on oreos while marching towards the mrt. two more months of this, at least -- and to think that my wake-up time was one of the few reasons i didn't envy the teachers.

death to productivity

thanks to this cool mac widget i can now blog discreetly through a text window in the bottom left corner of my screen while all the time appearing to be hard at work. excellent.

choonping

-- you are blogging again! see how many marvellous things are coming out of this su-lin debacle!

sfn (ii)

quite surprised, actually, that i was chosen, considering i've only been around for a couple of months. still, no complaints, and already i find i'm looking forward to (a) seeing some of my duke professors again, (b) the weather, and (c) bagels. life is tough without bagels.

grammar police (ii)

henceforth, not herewith. sigh. it's a long, hard life.

sfn

ooh...i'm getting to go to the sfn conference in washington in november...would anyone like to drop by?

grammar police

fs mentions that i meant "herewith" and not "heretofore" in the post below, and he is entirely correct. oops. oh well; at least i can't be corrected by my students.

also auden

The Average

His peasant parents killed themselves with toil
To let their darling leave a stingy soil
For any of those smart professions which
Encourage shallow breathing, and grow rich.
The pressure of their fond ambition made
Their shy and country-loving child afraid
No sensible career was good enough,
Only a hero could deserve such love.
So here he was without maps or supplies,
A hundred miles from any decent town;
The desert glared into his blood-shot eyes;
The silence roared displeasure: looking down,
He saw the shadow of an Average Man
Attempting the exceptional, and ran.

The Novelist

Encased in talent like a uniform,
The rank of every poet is well known;
They can amaze us like a thunderstorm,
Or die so young, or live for years alone.

They can dash forward like hussars: but he
Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none think it worth to turn.

For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must
Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just

Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.


                                           W.H. Auden

admittedly

-- my reaction was pure schadenfreude, but i am thoroughly unrepentant. it's been a long week.

(su-lin, on the phone: omg! i'll never refer to myself in the third person again! i am heretofore i!
me: shouldn't that be su-lin is heretofore i?)

can you milk a whale?

catachresis

remember the teacakes? well i just glanced over the I/S restaurant review for spizzico, the opening line of which reads:

Hankering for fulsome Italian cuisine, in an unassuming homey space?

very unfortunate. one really shouldn't use words one does not know the meaning of.

Attempted to read:
M/F - Anthony Burgess. I know when I'm in over my head; the introduction says that the novel is a riddle though..interested Minz?

Currently reading:
A Gun For Sale - Graham Greene

perhaps i'm being a smart-aleck by admitting this publicly, but i always knew where the word 'foolscap' came from

*runs away and hides*

From The Trick Is To Keep Breathing

Other people. Other people interest me. How they manage. There are several possibilities.

1. They are just as confused as me but they aren't letting on.
2. They don't know they don't know what the point is.
3. They don't understand they don't know what the point is.
4. They don't mind they don't know what the point is.
5. They don't even know there are any questions.

The first is too paranoid. Paranoia is a joke. I will not be a joke, Rejected on the grounds of unpalatability. The second unlikely: it rests of the unpleasant assumption that other people can't work out what I can work out. Since modesty is a becoming trait in a woman, I reject the second. The third is interesting and enviable but gets things no further forward. One can hardly unknow something, ie I am in no position to alter the facts. The fifth makes me lonely and is rejected on the same modesty clause as postulation 2 (see above.)

That leaves me with the fourth.

From The Trick Is To Keep Breathing:

Preparation for the Doctor
A short exercise lasting anything up to forty minutes.

[The surgery is blue. The patient stands while the doctor scratches his neck, sits, rifles through pieces of paper. Some of the pieces of paper fall and he picks them up, sighs, grins tightly to himself, scratches the back of his neck with his ring finger then looks up.]

DOCTOR:
Sit. [Pause] So how are things what's new who are you anyway?

PATIENT:
I'm tired and I still need somebody to talk to. I need to get less angry about everything. I'm going nuts.

DOCTOR:
Don't tell me how to do my job. Relax. You can talk to me. I made a double appointment so we can have twenty minutes. Go ahead. I'm listening.

PATIENT:
What can I say that makes sense in twenty minutes?

DOCTOR:
Try. You're not trying. You're looking for something that doesn't exist, that's why you're not happy. Look at me. I'm under no illusions. That's why I'm in control.

PATIENT:
How can I be more like you?

DOCTOR:
That's not what I meant. That's not what I meant at all. Envy is a destructive emotion. Besides I had to fight hard to get to feel like this. I'm buggered if I'm giving away the fruits of my hard work for nothing. You must tell me how you are.

PATIENT:
I don't seem to know how I am except bad. There's nothing there but anger and something scary all the time. I don't want to get bitter because it will ruin my looks.

DOCTOR:
Maybe a hobby would help. Facetiousness is not an attractive trait in a young woman.

PATIENT:
I know I know. I can't help myself.

DOCTOR:
OK. We'll try these green ones for a change. And step up the anti-depressants. Don't drink or drive. Make an appointment for a few days time and try to be more helpful in future.

While I try to imagine him shouting the last bit, he comes out of the surgery and takes in a little boy with a huge stye on one eye. Maybe he guesses I sit out here rehearsing.

IMPATIENT:
OK let's talk straight. You ask me to talk then you look at your watch. What am I supposed to take from that? This whole thing is ridiculous. Can't you send me to someone who's paid to have me waste their time? You don't know what to do with me but you keep telling me to come back. And stop sending that woman to see me. All it does is make me guilty and secretive.

DOCTOR:
Look, this is reactive depression. I don't see that sending you to a specialist will help things. Talk to your family if you can't talk to me.

IMPATIENT:
I have no family.

DOCTOR:
Don't be melodramatic.

laws of nature

was in the canteen today with a few of the lab folks, and the topic of conversation turned to whether sociology is, indeed, a load of bunk. this arising because none of the sociological studies we could think of could even pretend to have any explanatory power in the real world. for example, someone mentioned that her friend, for a senior thesis, wrote a qualititative description of the lives of transexuals in prison, in the hopes of showing that the common factor linking incarceration and the desire for a sex change is a need for rebellion against social norms; this argument would have been far more persuasive, of course, were it the case that the incidence of transexualism is higher in jails. it is, in fact, lower.

social sciences, fuzzy as they are, still ought to be grounded in scientific logic. i shudder when people talk about "descriptive science" (these people are, on the whole, lawyers). if i were a sociologist, i think i would study the multifarious corollaries of murphy's law, for instance, the inverse rule of glass-filling in restaurants, which states that how quickly your water glass is filled is inversely correlated with (a) how full your glass is, and (b) how badly you need the water. now that's something that can be quantified. i'd even make nice little scatter plots. hell, i'd probably be able to spin an entire phd out of it.

fall TV

-- more new dramas that look interesting this year than last (though last year really was slim pickings).

Hard to tell whether Surface is going to be fantastic or really suck. Of the several supernatural-themed dramas premiering it's the only one that has my attention at the moment. Part of its credibility, I admit, comes from the fact that it's on NBC.

HBO's Rome I have blogged about.

Prison Break has buzz and Wentworth Miller. That's good enough for me.

Reunion looks like it could be intriguing, despite my premonition that it won't be picked up for a full season order. Thing is, with the exception of Mathew St. Patrick I don't think I've seen any of these folks before. Playing the same character over the course of 20 years sounds challenging; I hope they can act.

I might also watch Invasion if I have the time.

Not much reality to speak of, and with the exception of AD I think I may not watch any American sitcoms ever again. Pilots aside, I'm going to soldier on with the somewhat disappointing Lost, if for no other reason than to mock it mercilessly on Internet forums. Veronica Mars, renewed by the skin of its teeth, is of course on the yes list. Alias for Lena Olin. And I think that about covers it. (Considered starting House since Su-Lin made me watch an episode but just can't bring myself to like procedural drama, no matter how glib the main actor.)

finally got round to checking out the new library. fiction shelves still largely denuded, but even from the remains you can tell that the collection is decent. unfortuantely, the place itself is not at all reminiscent of the old stamford road library - or any of the other nlb branches for that matter - and i think that was, perhaps, a misstep. i like there to be a certain measure of uniformity in things. horrible as galilee sometimes is, at the very least you can peg having a coffee there as part of the library experience, and even the rest of the branches without galilees have a certain je ne sais quoi that make them feel similar somehow. maybe it's just that buildings need time to collect history and acquire their essences or something, but for the moment, i'm distinctly unimpressed.

Currently reading:
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing - Janice Galloway

the previous discussion arising because it transpired that someone else in the lab calls you2 tiao2 "oilsticks" with no trace of mockery.

(one can see how in this respect at least i kind of fit in)

the kind of thing von thinks of

someone from the lab recalls the time about a year ago when a professor from the prc visited the lab, and people were trying to translate 'general linear model' for him. one of the suggestions: 'jiang1 jun1 heng2 mo2 xing2'. heh.

last night: after getting conned (once more) at alley bar with cp and cp's friend and jianyi, we ended up walking through oxley road to en japanese dining bar down mhmd. sultan, where we ordered half the menu and two bottles of sake and settled in to converse about possible holiday destinations and whether or not i'm a civil servant (i'm not). on the former: it seems that a bunch of us are interested in cambodia/vietnam. whether or not this is actually going to happen remains to be seen -- taking leave is a trickier affair than i imagined before i started working. office politics can really stomp on your vacation plans.

(i didn't even get to go to japan because of quitting the-place-which-can't-be-named. not that i'm really complaining)

by the way, the food in en is really spectacular -- go for the okinawan dishes, particularly the pork belly which has about twice as much fat as lean. what's that you say? well at least i'll die happy.

Currently reading:
Aloft - Chang Rae Lee

got the ibook. does apple have a copyright on the particular shade of white they use on all their machines?

bbq 2: electric boogaloo

at last, the weekend. still no mac.

while not exactly one of the great levellers, office bbqs do help bring people towards the median, and for that i was grateful. i've been feeling a little stupid since starting this new job -- particularly when people start talking about physics and statistics and math. the only academic environments i've been in thusfar have been full of people who are paid to build you up, to tolerate incompetence for the grander purpose of learning, and it turns out that in the real world there are incorrect answers and stupid questions and bad data and just plain pressing the wrong bloody button.

anyway, bbq. the highlight was a three foot salmon marinaded with lemon, salt absolut and very little else. surprisingly, it was perfect. also: steak, lamb shank, three-month old crab sticks (largely untouched), portobello mushrooms, various peppers, potato salad, mixed-leaf salad, vegetarian fried rice. marshmallows, but only for the non-vegetarians, because they apparently have gelatin in them (au revoir, numinousness). the best part, though, was that everyone was so full of sake that (a) it didn't matter to me that other people occasionally talked about work, and (b) other people were able to feign interest when i didn't. therein lay the levelling.

charlie and the chocolate factory, consensus opinion

freddy highmore: much improved. helena bonham carter: eternally perfect.

backdated

I have, for once, a reasonable excuse for not blogging; my Dell Inspiron, trusty companion for four years and in three continents, has committed suicide. All things considered, it lasted a very long time (I thought that the backpacking would kill it off for sure) – full marks to Dell.

Onwards and upwards. I’m thinking of getting an iBook as a replacement. Three (immature) reasons really:
1) I'm sick of the blue screen of death
2) Apple products have always appealed to my aesthetic sense,
3) I get a discount if I order it through the workplace

A little afraid that 12.1" will be small for video; worst comes to worst there's always the desktop for that though.