st. patty's day. by 2 pm, drunk, green-shirted people ("RUB FOR GOOD LUCK") were already staggering around UC, and lines were forming outside the blarney stone and smokey joe's. i got into a rather brief and pointless discussion with a colleague about what st. patrick actually did to be canonized, pointless because neither of us knew anything beyond the fact that he's either the patron saint of ireland, or beer, or both (wiki tells me that he may have driven the snakes out of ireland and resurrected some dead people).

we declined the mid-afternoon drinking and went to eat at the newly-reopened samosa on 13th and walnut. the service was terrible -- one gay waiter who wrote our orders down, repeated them (2 mistakes), disappeared into the kitchen, reappeared 5 minutes later to repeat the order again (2 more mistakes), and then proceeded to bring out the wrong appetizers. fortunately, this meant they were free, and also very good. the vadai was unusually crunchy, although i will give them the benefit of the doubt and say that the novelty was intentional. the pakoras won points for not tasting like they had been fried in three-day old oil. coconut chutney and thin but flavorful vegetable curry came on the side. the indian/sri lankan people, ewa and stephen had dosa with various permutations of fillings, i got the bangan bhurta with naan, and alyson to my disappointment ordered a lasagna (but i am good at swallowing my tongue nowadays, and proceeded to do so with great enthusiasm). i snitched bits of dosa while waiting for my food to appear (it took ages), and regretted not ordering it -- i think it's their specialty, and only $4.95. my naan turned out to be hot and fresh and light, but the curry was very non-descript and completely uniform in texture. oh well. i do want to go back to try the prata at some point.

it was still early, and people had not decided if they wanted to brave the pubs, so we adjourned to naked chocolate for sweets and making stephen suffer because he had given them up for lent. they had new cupcakes, and a four-foot chocolate bunny. now that i've been there a bunch of times, i think i'm ready to say that i don't like naked as much as bakerzin (sic) or even (glug) TCC, notwithstanding the 1.5 million schoolkids who seem to pack the latter places 24/7. and, since it's going to be spring (4 inches of snow on thursday!), i'm officially ready to move on to capogiro as being my dessert place of choice.

we eventually decided that we should just go back to the hangout house and play poker, so that we did. as it usually happens, the one person who had never touched a deck of cards in her life (who will remain unnamed) cleaned almost everyone else out, leaving stephen and myself to slug it out for second (drowned by the river twice, don't ask. does anyone know where the terms flop, turn and river came from? i'm sure von knows the answer.) a lot of white russians floated in from the kitchen, which led to a few eastern european jokes and someone confessing that they were almost named "nadine". i'm glad that the mother and the father decided on good, sensible names for all of us; i don't think i would ever have recovered from romulus, or henry.

there's an article recently published in science going around the lab with some very interesting findings on sleep and memory consolidation. these guys made their subjects play a matching game with a 6x5 array of cards before they went to bed (turn over pairs of cards to try and find matching ones), and asked them to memorize the positions of the cards for the following day. while they were doing this, they squirted a rose-scented aerosol at them to form a stimulus-context association, and then put them to bed. the experimental group got rose aerosol puffed at them during periods of slow-wave sleep (the deepest kind), while various control groups got no puffing during the task, no puffing during their sleep, puffing during REM and so forth. the group that was puffed at during SWS performed significantly better than all the controls (and i would say, looking at the numbers, that they were practically as well as statistically significant).

now, while this is very cool from a scientific standpoint, just think about the real-world implications. the task isn't so far removed from things you actually need to do -- i would say if you were comparing performance on it to, say, studying for an exam, you'd find that it's a pretty valid instrument. and think how easy it would be for an engineer to rig up something for make use if this information at home. all you need is a simple 8-electrode eeg system hooked up to a custom-made glade air-freshener doodad so that it spritzes the scent of your choice in your face every time it sees delta waves. then, inhale huge amounts of that scent while you're studying, and go to bed. instant memory boost! the marketing potential is staggering. why don't i ever come up with experiments like that? i want to retire at 35 too.

From On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt

Wittgenstein once said that the following bit of verse by Longfellow could serve him as a motto:

In the elder days of art Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part For the Gods are everywhere

The point of these lines is clear. In the old days, craftsmen did not corners. They worked carefully, and they took care with every aspect of their work. Every part of the product was considered, and each was designed and made to be exactly as it should be. These craftsmen did not relax their thoughtful self-discipline even with respect to features of their work that would ordinarily not be visible. Although no one would notice if those features were not quite right, the craftsmen would be bothered by their consciences. So nothing was swept under the rug. Or, one might perhaps say, there was no bullshit.

It does seem fitting to construe carelessly made, shoddy goods as in some way analogues of bullshit. But in what way? Is it the resemblance that bullshit itself is invariably produced in a careless or self-indulgent manner, that it is never finely crafted, that in the making of it there is never the meticulously attentive concern with details to which Longfellow alludes? Is the bullshitter by his very nature a mindless slob? Is his product necessarily messy or unrefined? The word shit does, to be sure, suggest this. Excrement is not designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted, or dumped. It may have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case certainly not wrought

The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who -- with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth -- dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.

run #2

-- has begun. there are only 3 runs of any importance in a study: the first run, the second run, and the run with the one idiot outlier that you have to explain away or hide under the carpet. this last one is going to be soon in coming. the room for my subjects had been thoughtfully heated to about 110 degrees, so that was an issue for a while, but i'm getting used to pulling my weight and (per the advisor) making sure i act like i run the show. director of the thermostat, that's me.

our lab is in the process of acquiring a new mr-compatible eeg system. simultaneous eeg-fmri experiments to date have been, on the most part, hopeless, for a number of technical reasons i'm not going to go into, so this is no low risk investment. i'm actually quietly pessimistic about the whole endeavor, but (a) this has nothing to do with my thesis, and (b) it's not my money being spent. in an exact repeat of my first days in the ex-lab, hengyi sent me a gopher e-mail asking me to lend them my head, which meant a morning looking at the inside of the scanner bore and the rest of the day walking around with conductive paste in my hair. this turned out to be unexpectedly gratifying; pan-clinical was right after, and the first thing hilary said to me when we were done was that my hair looked really good. now, people who know me know that i don't really give a crap about styling my hair, so this was like george w. bush receiving a compliment about his penetrating insights into how to fight the global war on terror. i would have dismissed it as facetiousness, except that dr. sb said exactly the same thing a few hours later, and we all know about lightning and striking twice. there were a few mad moments of temptation, but i came home and washed my hair, and will not be spending several hundred dollars on gritty electolyte gel because (a) it costs several hundred dollars, (b) it's a really stupid idea, and (c) i have too many weaknesses already to add vanity to the bottom of the list.

i woke up today and decided that spring break ought to have at least one day of actual break in it, even for graduate students. so i went to the mall and bought new shoes.

i met adrian in the break room at lunchtime today making a ketchup sandwich. he must have caught me staring because he immediately looked sheepish and explained that he had intended to go out to buy deli meats but had run out of time. embarrassment all around, and then i pulled the shasta-and-her-meatless-cheeseburger story out from the collection of old stories that really shouldn't be told anymore, and we both laughed nervously, and i almost felt bad enough to run out right away and bring back a slice of bologna.

From The Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno (quoted in Paradise News, David Lodge)

In the most secret recess of the spirit of the man who believes that death will put an end to his personal consciousness and even to his memory forever, in that inner recess, even without his knowing it perhaps, a shadow hovers, a vague shadow lurks, a shadow of a shadow of uncertainty, and while he tells himself: "There is nothing for it but to live this passing life, for there is no other!" at the same time he hears, in this most secret recess, his own doubt murmur: "Who knows?..." He is not sure he hears aright, but he hears. Likewise, in some recess of the soul of the true believer who has faith in the future life, a muffled voice, the voice of uncertainty, murmurs in his spirit's ear: "Who knows?..." Perhaps these voices are no louder than the buzzing of mosquitoes when the wind roars through the trees in the woods; we scarcely make out the humming, and yet, mingled with the roar of the storm, it can be heard. How, without this uncertainty, could we ever live?

Slowly, stealthily, spring is arriving. Friday was Dianne's exam, which was intensely boring, and then glorious release into the sunshine, and spring break. I did my time at the beaches as an undergrad, but as you grow older, there's a trick you can learn so that Cancun and the like become less geographical places, and more states of mind. Spring break -- whose origins, I am old, were in Ft. Lauderdale, 1885 -- is exciting not because of the exotic escapes, but because of its position in the narrative arc of the academic year -- it's the caesura right before the final swell towards finals, coinciding with winter's thaw and the symbolic renewal of the world. Its power comes from its situation in time, and the rest is a facade. Fortunately, one doesn't have to realise any of this to get drunk and sunburned and have the time of ones life.

I picked up a copy of The Time of Our Singing from Last Word on the way home -- my third (one went to Yen and the other is god knows where) -- and spent a while just reading random bits of it and having small prosegasms. I haven't read anything new for almost 2 weeks now -- on Wednesday I abandoned studying at about 10 and picked up The Tempest, which I've reread with unhealthy regularity since J2. More recently, I've begun to think of Prospero's magic as science (per Asimov's quote), which will be my way of keeping myself honest once I publish a few papers in Nature and win the Nobel Prize. (Right.)

The evening was prospective's party round #2 (electric boogaloo), which was at Jared's place in West Philly, Crime Central. These were mostly folks in experimental psych with dull-as-ditchwater research interests. I just can't get into basic cognitive psych -- it feels so passe, somehow. Kinjal and I had made a pact to do our first Irish car bomb together (as an early St. Patrick's day thing), and the assertion that it would taste like chocolate milk turned out to be exactly correct. Between The Pogues, Flogging Molly, and Bailey's, I would say that the Irish pretty much have a monopoly on the good things in life.

Break is promising. I'll go to New York for a bit to visit (duke)ailian if she's free, and make root vegetable casserole, and write my thesis. and 300 is coming out on Thursday. And then back into my hole, and seven weeks of escalating complaints until my defense in May. But first, a pause.

unproductivity

time spent browsing through this site today: 90 minutes.

# words of thesis written: 145

(my favorites are these:

She was like celsius: has a lot of degrees and is still not employed in the U.S.
He was like a toilet seat: constantly being put down by women
He was like a water cooler: drunk at the office

and

She was like a treadmill: inclined to make things difficult)

flies like an arrow

prospectives visited us yesterday, which means that very soon i'm going to be a second-year, which is terrifying beyond all measure. the day started promisingly with a talk by marvin chun on boundary extension, and ended with a party where i tried, and succeeded, in killing a headache with vodka. i also uncovered further evidence for why sean m. is my clone, and the continuation of bad movie night is on the cards. (first up: troll)

"Scrod" was one of the answers in the NYT crossword yesterday. This was a new one to me, apparently a Bostonian thing:

(from Boston Online)

SCROD: A small, ambiguous piece of fish that never knows if it's cod or haddock. Some people claim that "scrod" is a young cod, while "schrod" is a young haddock, but, in fact, there's no difference - it's basically whatever's cheaper at the fish pier that day.

"So a guy lands at Logan and gets in a cab and says to the driver, 'Take me somewhere I can get scrod!" And the driver says, "I've never heard anyone use the pluperfect participle before!"

(cp: tell me you don't love that.)

I realise with no small measurement of disappointment that in the last 6 years, my favorite movie among the best picture nominees has only once won the prize (LotR: RotK). I liked Traffic, LotR: FotR, The Pianist, Sideways and Brokeback Mountain more than the eventual winners, and this year, that tally is going to grow when Little Miss Sunshine loses to The Departed. I blame the Republicans entirely. (This is also the implicit reason why a show like 24 gets renewed for 68 bazillion seasons while Arrested Development is ignominiously canceled in its prime).

friggin' typos...

happy new year!

we congregated for the surprise party slightly before 9. there was a superabundance of cookies, and a "birthday princess" paper tiara (no sash), and a cake that looked like it had tomato paste for icing. (one of the twins -- he lives in the same house as kinjal, the birthday girl -- nearly ruined the surprise earlier in the day by bursting in on us having lunch, high on painkillers and icing sugar, and announcing that he needed to go and buy eggs.

kinjal: but we still have a few in the fridge.
a.j.: oh! but i don't want to go all the way home.
n.j.: wawa! wawa has hard-boiled eggs.
kinjal: cold, gross ones.
a.j.: i love cold and gross! here i go!

the cake was caramel. the surprise was...more effective than these things usually are, in that the lights stayed off till the right time, and there was a minimal amount of schoolgirl giggling. after that, there was lots of chocolate, and a good time was had by all. much later on, mary (the only other chinese person there) and i started talking about CNY, and how horrible it is to spend it in a place where the crappy cultural steamroller always comes along and squashes the holiday (either that or it gets ignored entirely).

we did decide that the least we could do was eat real food, so the next day we grabbed joe from the ccn (mary's boyfriend) and one of his research assistants, and a bunch of law students, and went to chungking, where they have leng3pan2 and huo3guo1 and a hearty disdain for caucasians. it's a b.y.o.b., but we had all neglected this fact, so no o.b.s had been b.ed, and we decided to send a contingent down the road in quest of pinot grigio.

the food was good, on the most part. the honey walnut prawns were an absolute dead ringer for the salad prawns at swa garden. there was tilapia, which are apparently capable of transitive inference, which is very interesting if you're a cognitive scientist, and also shows that they are smarter than babies. the cong1you2bing3 was too greasy, and also too insubstantial, but it's usually the triumph of hope over experience that makes me order that anyway. there were various vegetarian things, and a huge tureen of suan1 cai4 tang1, and gross dumplings that would have made the baby jesus cry, especially if he had ever gone to margaret drive.

the lawyers were a more interesting bunch of people that you usually get if you put your hand in a barrel and scoop out a fistful of them. larry in particular has had quite a life -- he lived in beijing for several years (and speaks fluent mandarin) before deciding that doing a JD in china was beyond even his linguistic capabilities, and moving back to philly. he is also a big fan of chinese punk rock, which quite frankly i wasn't even aware existed. there were vague threats of karaoke, but despite the wine, cooler heads prevailed, and we were spared that particular ordeal. we didn't once have to talk about my research, which was fantastic, but between the salad prawns and talking about cate blanchett/judi dench i was also reminded one too many times of people i'm not getting to see this CNY, which was not.

nevertheless, happy pig year. be prosperous, as always, and eat without guilt. there will come a time when the goodies will catch up with you, but by then, you'll be too dead to care.

we were still suffering from the aftershocks of the snowstorm on thursday. by mid-morning, large chunks of ice were starting to melt and slide off the roof of huntsman hall, and after several near-calamities the police cordoned off a slice of the 38th and walnut intersection, backing up traffic several blocks. despite the housing laws, there was no shoveling of sidewalks in evidence, and it took me several minutes of slipping and sliding before i decided i was not going to navigate the probably-impassable stretch of road leading to my lab, and parked myself in cereality instead (stopping for an hour in the bookstore to read travels in the scriptorium, which was a lot like, but not quite as good as, the new york trilogy

i've started plugging away at my masters' thesis. i can already tell that it's going to be too long, and deadly boring, but i don't care. given that i don't actually get to choose my first-year committee, i feel that it's only fair that i get to inflict whatever i want on them in the way of writing. while working, i drink coffee until i can't, and then i grab anything nearby that's bite-sized and sugary and continue with that, until my eyes are as big as saucers and i can't physically sit still, and then i go run for an hour or till i'm exhausted. it's like the kreb's cycle writ large. i'll detox in may.

the most anti-love film we could come up with was some like it hot, a good movie, but a very poor attempt at the theme. far more unromantic was trudging through six inches of slush the entire day, and stepping into a freezing puddle that came up to my knees.

so this is richly amusing. i was talking to the mother the other day, and she told me that james cook university, one of the places i briefly considered attending in my hour of darkest desperation (you remember it), the school which informed me flat out that i had "insufficient research experience" to begin work with them on a clinical psychology phd, had the gall, the temerity to call and ask if i was interested in enroling in their masters of guidance counselling program. the mother talked to them and was completely diplomatic, which is very lucky for them, because if they had somehow got to me first it would have been a bloodbath.

snowing all day, but in my heart it's warm

battlestar galactica renewed!

i liked this little scene from danny boyle's millions (conceit: the kid talks with dead saints):

DAMIAN
St. Peter! Died A.D. 64?

ST PETER
All right, don't remind us.

DAMIAN
The money...it's robbed.

ST PETER
I know. Patron saint of keys, locks and general security, man. Including up there. I'm on the door.

DAMIAN
Is it still all right? If it's robbed? Can you still do good with it? Or should you give it back? I thought it was a miracle. But it's just robbed.

ST. PETER
Damian, listen. One day I was with you-know-who. Jesus. And he went up into the mountains and thousands of people followed him. The police said five thousand. Pfft...five thousand.

DAMIAN
Everybody knows this story. Loaves and fishes.

ST. PETER
See, I knew you'd say that. That's what everybody says ... Anyway, this kid comes up to us. About your size. His name was...no, I've forgotten. I still see him sometimes. Anyway, he comes up with these loaves and fishes. Sardines. And Jesus blesses them and passes the plate round. Now the first person he passes it to passes it on. He doesn't take anything, he just passes it on. D'you know why?

DAMIAN shakes his head.

ST PETER
'Cos he had a piece of lamb hidden in his pocket. And as he's passing the fish, he sneaks a piece of meat out, and pretends he's taken it off the plate. D'you see what I'm saying? And the next person: exactly the same story. Every single bastard one of them has their own food. And every one of them's keeping it quiet, looking after number one. But as that plate went around with the sardines on it, they all got their own food out and started to share. And then, that plate went all the way around and back to Jesus, and it'd still got the fish and the loaves on it. I think Jesus was a bit taken aback. He says: 'What happened?'. And I just says: 'Miracle!' And at first, I thought I'd fooled him. But now I see it was a miracle. One of his best. But this little kid had stood up, and everybody there just...got bigger. Do you understand what I'm talking about?

DAMIAN
Not really.

ST PETER
I'm talking about you.

DAMIAN
Now I'm really lost.

ST PETER
You're trying too hard. That kid -- he wasn't planning on doing a miracle. He was planning on anything. Except lunch. Something that looks like a miracle turns out to be dead simple.

found poem

(in my lab's bathroom -- for real!)

if you cannot be clean and neat
and not get urine on the seat
of the toilet or the floor,
please use another facility.

one man's opinion

i think samoas are the best of the girl scout cookies, but i'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

Run #1 ended, and I happily kicked my subjects out. Once they were gone, Hengyi and I started talking analysis strategies and getting excited in a geeky Chinese sort of way, and proposing about 5 additional projects that we want to start planning next week. This is why Asians are going to take over the world.

---

Also: V-Day. I was desperate to not stay at home, but everyone else was going to The Vagina Monologues, so it was a tough call. The first time I went to TVM being performed it was at Duke to support Grace and her coming out as a feminist, and I think that was entertaining more because of people in the audience desperately trying to screw themselves into their chairs during the "cunt" monologue than than the performance itself. I miss the American South. (Jared was telling me during intermission that some people in Arkansas have probably never even heard the word "vagina" emerging from someone's mouth. I advised him to buy a bumper sticker.)

You may recall my feelings about feminist poets in singapore; here, I think it's a different story altogether. The problem with Ivy League college students performing TVM to other Ivy League college students is that the audience knows about the problem on an intellectual level, and the players know that the audience knows about the problem on an intellectual level, but everyone has to pretend that no one does. Which means, essentially, that the performance is reduced to ranting and cheap laughs as everyone, especially the men, struggle desperately to feel the pain of women on a level that's at least somewhat real. It's very hard to both fully understand the problem of sexual inequality, while treating women as women, much the same way that it's very hard to understand economics and be a good businessman. Theory gets in the way of reality, and then everyone has to fight extra hard to relate to things emotionally and practically, and really, it's all downhill from there.

as you might expect, the neuroimaging group is full of people from china and taiwan, and they plot and scheme all day long, in chinese, about their grand plans to usurp the PIs and take over the department (sometimes, i'm given to understand, in the presence of said PIs). (if i do drop out of grad school, by the way, i'm going to write a pilot for a sitcom based on these machinations, sort of ricky gervais meets barry evans meets mark lee). hengyi and wenchao were having one such conversation in front of me in the scanner room this morning, and about 5 minutes in, it suddenly occured to wenchao that i could probably understand what they were saying. a spy! he says, hilariously, and i promise on my life that i won't tell, and he offers me a ferrero rocher that's been sitting in his jacket pocket for goodness knows how long.

a little later, hengyi and i started talking about post-penn plans, whether or not i intend to go back to my police state, and he suggested i join a chinese university and try and get tenure there, listing a multitude of good reasons for doing so (money! fame! resources! red dragon rising!) it's a far-out, almost inconceivable, but extremely intriguing notion. i think it would make me both successful and miserable beyond anything i've ever known.

(the scans went well, in case you're wondering.)

Run #1

-- of my study is underway. The day started at 6:30, when I stepped out of my apartment into the coldest predawn of winter so far, several degrees under zero, and the wind like icicles stabbing into my lungs. There was no one else out and about, no food trucks with steam and good food smells, and by the time I reached the hospital I was in a very miserable state. With no time to thaw, I stuttered my way through the nurses' briefing like an apoplectic, and got an A for looking like a complete idiot. So much for good first impressions.

The rest of the day was running up and down locating missing signage and battling Matlab with spears and trying to reassure The Advisor that I know what the hell is going on with this project. I sense looming catastrophe, and all because of a very simple formula: Successful Research = constant - k*number of people involved*chance each of those people will perpetrate a FUBAR. Now, (1) there are too many people involved in this project, and (2) judging from past experience, k, which is variable between but stable within individuals, = about 18,214 for me. In the ex-Boss' lab, there were very few people directly involved with data collection: me, and WC, and M____, and maybe one or two other interns that I could bitchslap around, and who didn't really count as people, so there was enough in the way of damage control to prevent the last project I did from being a total disaster. This is a whole different kettle of fish: undergraduate work-study students (OMG), pre-med interns, and nurses with minds of their own. Basically, I'm screwed.

I was supposed to meet Ewa in the Green Line after dinner to discuss the regression problems for tomorrow, but she called to cancel because SAS is still kicking her butt. I thought this was good news in terms of keeping warm, but the central heating in the apartment isn't coping too well with the weather, and cold is seeping in through the walls and floorboards, so that anywhere outside of a two-foot diameter of the radiator is intolerable. It's exhausting. I'm going to make hot tea, and not do any more work today (although I should). I picked up, at random, The Minus Man, by Lew McCreary; I'm going to crawl into bed with it, and hope that it's as good as the blurb suggests.

i do love doing groceries at trader joe's. they've really cornered the college student market, and entirely through their packaging -- looks like gourmet food, but costs no more than the stuff you find in local supermarkets. it's a simple idea that some very successful companies have managed to grasp -- if it's cheap, college students will buy it; if it's cheap and makes you feel like a rich person, college students will buy it en masse.

Punxsutawney Phil was wrong. It's going to be winter forever.

i like --

the way snow accumulates on flat surfaces, right to the edges, perfectly even, like marzipan lovingly smoothed.

grace, jared, stephen and a bunch of other people decided to go to atlantic city on a whim the other day, and were reporting their winnings/losses (mostly winnings, it seems) + massive quantities of alcohol consumed to us over chocolate satsuma cake in kinjal et al's house. everyone is earning money in every possible way, even the people in the program, who are supposed to be suffering in penury. i think that it's a matter of honor that grad students be poor, at least for their tenure as trainees, lest they shatter the morale of the other people in their department -- even if you can cheat, you don't (or you lie), to maintain solidarity, and the illusion that it's all about passion. after all these years of black-as-pitch pessimism, i'm shocked that i still think that way. this needs to be beaten out of me, soon.

the first real run of my study is next week, which means of course that it's time for everything imaginable to go wrong. the most amusing mishap, i think, was the magnetic strip on the scanner room door breaking, meaning that it swings open and refuses to stay shut. doorstops won't work -- no gap between seal and floor -- so we have resorted to propping sandbags up against the outside to keep it closed, and, when those don't work, leaning against it when the scans begin. it's all very apollo 13, except without the danger of dying horribly in space.

winter hit philadelphia with a vengeance this week. it snowed, on and off, from monday to wednesday, and as thursday dawned the temperatures dipped into negative numbers on the farenheit scale. you can tell how cold it is outside from people's postures as they walk down the road -- in temperatures that frigid there is a particular stoop to ones gait, the shoulders hunch like a pugilist. everyone is covered, anonymous. when you're outside, the world narrows to the thin slice between here and where you want to be, and all the periphery is blasted inconvenience.

---

whether or not there's truth to the myth that the cold makes you hungry, it certainly seems true for me. when i have cereal or a sandwich before i leave the house in the morning, i'm usually ravenous before 11. i have 2 unhealthy fixes for this: (1) snack, or (2) wait till 9-ish to eat breakfast, and then get something with cheese. the same thing happens when i have salad for lunch -- i love gia pronto to death, but it leaves me starving long before dinner. damn winter.

---

i'm spending a lot of time in van pelt instead of the lab. mark's cafe is quiet early in the day, abandoned by sleep-phase-shifted undergraduates until "morning" (11-1) classes let out. i think i'm being productive, at least some of the time. everything moves with such painful slowness in research that writing -- even at the lumbering pace of 1000 words a day -- seems like explosive progress. this is another one of my (multiple) grouses with people who do surveys -- mountains of data in obscenely short times, but surely there's at least some inverse relationship between utility and ease of acquisition? truth just can't be that simple to come by; there has to be sweat and tears and burning and sleepless nights.

From The New Yorker, Jan 29, 2007

Wonder Boys

The first meeting of the Athanasius Kircher Society, held in the CUNY Graduate Center, on Fifth Avenue, last Tuesday evening, was billed as a contemporary wonder cabinet. Not the least of wonders is the revival of interest in Kircher, a seventeenth-century German Jesuit priest. A human search engine, Kircher published dozens of volumes on matters both large - astronomy, Egyptology, cryptography, botany, geology, geography, magnetism, and linguistics - and small, such as the real size of Noah's Ark. Travelers from all over Europe came to see his collection of marvels and oddities in Rome, at the Museum Kircherianum.

By the end of the century, however, modern methods of scholarship had proved many of Kircher's assumptions wrong, and his reputation sank to that of a gifted charlatan. According to Anthony Grafton, of Princeton University, who spoke at the meeting, a Kircher resurgence began in academic circles in the late nineteen-seventies. Kircher's popularity is also growing among the general public, at least with a certain type of self-consciously twee New York hipster (the event sold out a month in advance), for whom YouTube is a modern-day Museum Kircherianum.

Joshua Foer, a twenty-four-year-old freelance science writer, called the meeting to order. Foer is the founder of the Kircher society, which consists mainly of a Web site that draws attention to subjects (hair museums, blind photographers, thousand-year-old pieces of popcorn) that Kircher might find inspiring. Then Grafton invoked the spirit of Kircher by reading, in Latin, a description of his descent into the crater of Mt. Vesuvius in 1638, undertaken in order to gather data on volcanism.

The first presenter was Kim Peek, the model for the Dustin Hoffman character in the 1988 movie "Rain Man." Peek has read nine thousand books, and has complete recall of the all; he can read a new book in an hour, sometimes scanning the left page with his left eye while he reads the facing page with his right. (His condition may be caused by the absence of his corpus callosum, the tissue that connects the two hemispheres of the brain.)

Peek began by asking Grafton where he lived. Princeton, the professor said. Peek informed him that the Princeton area code had been changed from 609 to 732 (almost; it changed nearby) and added, correctly, that New Jersey was ratified in 1787. The audience was then invited to try to stump the Rain Man. This turned out to be pretty easy to do. Peek didn't know the stops on London's Northern Line, but he did recall the details of the Packers-Giants championship game from 1962. There was polite applause from the audience. Kircher, in a portrait at the side of the podium, looked out at the crowd, practitioners of a kind of reverse hip - instead of being up to the minute, the point is to accumulate as much historical arcana as possible. His slight, smug smile seemed to say, "Fools! I had only books and artifacts to consult, and I knew everything. You have your Treos and your Facebook, and what do you know?"

Rosamond Purcell, another presenter, showed slides of her photographs, an eerie grotesquerie of natural-historical specimens. (She made several of these "catalogues" in collaboration with Stephen Jay Gould.) Her work conveys a sense of darkness within the scientific method; she seemed drawn to Kircher not for his contributions to science but for his curatorial interest in freaks and pathologies.

Then it was time for the world premiere of the balcony scene from "Romeo and Juliet" performed in Solresol, a seven-syllable language invented in the early nineteenth century, in which each syllable corresponds to the seven notes of the major scale.

"Fa do-re re-sol-do mi-do-do-sol?" Romeo beseeched. For sheer geekiness, this was the evening's high point.

Finally, the society heard from retired Colonel Joe Kittinger, who made the world's highest parachute jump, in 1960, from 102, 800 feet. He told a harrowing story of a seventy-six-thousand-foot jump, in which his parachute wrapped around his neck, sending him into a 140 r.p.m. spin - until, at last, the reserve chute deployed. It wasn't clear what Kittinger had to do with Kircher.

At the end of the meeting, a replica of a two-foot-long walrus-penis bone or baculum, was presented to whoever had the program printed with the words "Walrus Baculum".

"Mine!" said a man in the audience, leaping up with his program.

"All right!" Foer shouted, shaking the penis bone above his head, while the Kircherians roared.

-John Seabrook

but this, of course, is one of the big trade secrets -- the psychologist's job is not to get the client to face reality, but to embrace an acceptable and livable version of it. i don't think there is a way to cope with actual reality without going van gogh.

brick

i think that many people who read this blog will like brick; it's a quirky movie that's kind of the o.c. meets the maltese falcon, noir with teens. the closest movie i can think to compare it to is rushmore, although only insofar as both are a chimera of two completely different genres. the gimmick in brick succeeds because it's not been overused (compared, for example, to the "non-linear narrative" trick, a conceit that's so last week), and because rian johnson's script gets the tone exactly right. it's the kind of script i would like to come up with, if i had talent.

the movie opens on the corpse of emilie de ravin (claire, from lost, if anyone cares), jumps back in time to a couple of days before her murder, and then follows hard-boiled teenage detective brendan as he chases down the truth. the film is more a whydunnit than a whodunnit -- you find out long before the end who her killer is, but this isn't classic detective fiction, and the real payoff comes in the very last scene.

joseph gordon levitt plays the lead. after his 16-million-year stint on 3rd rock from the sun, i figured he was about due to fade quietly into obscurity, but between mysterious skin and this film it looks like he's carving out a pretty good niche for himself (sullen adolescent in arthouse movies no one will ever see). nora zehetner from heroes is in it, with the same two expressions she has in heroes (well, had). the rest are sort of unknowns, which is fine, because teen movies are like that, and you're so busy marvelling at the cleverness of the story that you don't even have time to notice.

dissertation tip #4

Our first research design class was on "generating research hypotheses". This is from the reading (on heuristics for doing so):

Heuristic G22 involves using some physiological prod to jolt one's thinking out of the usual ruts. Chemical stimulants might be legal and conventional like caffeine, or illegal and stigmatized like LSD. If one is to use chemicals as a jolt to enhance hypothesis generating, one should lower one's base level of the substance so that when needed it will make a difference (e.g. one should forego drinking coffee until one needs it to keep alert through an all-nighter). Instead of chemical doses, one can use behavioral prods like hyperventilation or jogger's high, or purportedly mind-altering meditation tricks, or musical backgrounds, or massed practice to extinguish responses normally prepotent in the habit-family hierarchy. Low-inhibition states such as daydreams or even night dreams may allow elusive insights to surface, as when Kekule formulated the hexagonal-ring model of the benzene molecule after dreaming of a serpent biting its own tail.

McGuire WJ (1997), Creative Hypothesis Generating in Psychology: Some Useful Heuristics, Annu. Rev Psychol, 48:1-30.

i'm in the gsc, working on the scholarpedia article the advisor wants me to write. it's incredibly hard. partly because i feel there are gaps in my knowledge of the subject that you could drive a bus through, but also partly because i only have 2000 words to work with, insanely few for a review paper. (just you watch though, when i have to do a 25000-word version for major areas in a couple of years i'll be screaming again for an entirely different reason). 2000 words means crisp, unembellished sentences, draconian standards of exactitude and the mass extermination of adjectives; also, having to find the right synonym to improve cadence rather than lazily sticking in extra words. the wordsmith in me stirs, and licks his chops.

dr. sb returned from australia bearing baskets of chocolate, including a blast from the past in the form of freddo the chocolate frog. the occasion, (as if you need one for chocolate), was an early celebration of australia day (jan 26), which is not, as you might think, the date of their independence, but the date when the bloody british came and claimed the continent as their own. as with guy fawkes day, therefore, the holiday is either a day of celebration or mourning, depending on your sympathies.

also learned today (by one, several or many):
1) new zealand is not north-east of australia
2) nor is it a part of australia, although some may wish it were.
3) the closest living relative of the dodo is the nicobar pigeon, native to south-east asia, and
4) bananas contain melatonin

martin luther king jr. day

-- is only a holiday if you can afford it to be. which i couldn't. i did have a rather nice dinner with wh, though, in which we merrily dissed the practices of clinical psychology and medicine, and decided that given increasing life expectancies and the individual probabilities associated with various diseases physical and mental, we are both almost certain to die of something excruciating and horrible.

how weird is it that stephen fry dies in v for vendetta? thanks to qi, i couldn't see him as anyone but himself for the entire movie, and when the gestapo came for him, i was like 'oh!'. maybe i don't want to see him guest star on house after all.

(yes, the movie is more than a year old and i only just watched it. it was good, though. i might buy the dvd.)

we went to dahlak, an ethiopian place, for dinner. the communal food dish was almost as large as the table, and highly reminiscent of the plastic basins that hang from hooks in void deck mama shops, down to its particular shade of blue. the curries were excellent, but, as always, not spicy enough. there was too much injera; also, it has a way of just sitting in ones stomach rude and unmoving. i suppose there is a demand in african countries for food that keeps one full. (reminded of -- q: what does a somali do with a bowl of rice? a: open a minimart)

ewa, who was with us, had just returned from poland the night before -- we agreed unanimously that her break had been the most fun, having featured pub-crawling through dublin on new year's eve. she's one of a few people doing the grad student apartment shuffle, moving across over the other side of clark park (great view), and has no furniture, so we adjourned to the hangout house and tried to be an impromptu salvation army. (net collection: one mattress, and a table broken in half; it's the thought that counts.) and then there was coffee cake, and coffee, and apocryphal stories of people who went insane in the third year of the program under their committee's unrelenting whip.

2 stories i will tell my students, when i have them

1.
--that galileo, after creating a stir by announcing that the earth was not the center of the universe and, in fact, revolved around the sun, after being told by the catholic church that this was incompatible with doctrine, after being forced to publicly recant, had, according to folklore, this to say under his breath: 'eppur si muove' -- 'it moves nevertheless'.

2.
-- that in the late 19th century, there lived a man named percival lowell, astronomer, mathematician, and founder of the lowell observatory. lowell famously believed that he could see canals running across the surface of mars, long straight criss-crossing tracts running from poles to equator. he was so convinced of this that he was able to persuade many of his contemporaries that he had seen them, and collectively, this group of scientists decided that the canals were sufficient evidence for life on mars. they named the canals. they formulated a theory that they were built because of the scarcity of water on all parts of the planet save its poles, and they thus postulated that whatever society existed on mars was both technologically far more advanced than earth, and also utopian, for how else could they facilitate such large scale planet-wide cooperation? lowell himself wrote several books on the subject, including mars and its canals, and mars as the abode of life. at the time, all this was taken with deadly seriousness; lowell was highly regarded, and pluto, in fact, was named in his memory (PL being his initials). which just goes to show, that for a while anyway, you can fool all the people all of the time.

incidentally:

(#1: knowing this helps makes sense of why h.g. wells radio broadcast scared the hell out of so many people)

(#2: if you have jstor or some other access, this is a cute paper reviewing all the details of what happened.)

i have a course with the director of the clinical program, and i think i managed to make her hate me in the very first hour of the very first class. this is an accomplishment, even for me. i've decided to just keep a very low profile from here on in and hide under the aegis of protection my advisor provides -- fortunately, he's the only one whose opinion really matters right now.

---

i'm getting to spend much more time in my lab this semester than last, and i like that. i feel a much greater affinity to the profs in my lab that the ones in the clin psych group; we talk the same language, we don't treat biological imperative as a dirty, vestigial product of our days in the trees. psychologists -- and people in general -- are far too worried that the fact that we are animals cheapens the richness of the human experience. not only is this completely unfounded, it's also highly delusional, as well as (implicitly) saying that we really would like intelligent design to be true, *pretty please*?

---

i piloted my experiment on myself, so i finally have some real data to look at it, even if it did come from my own stupid head. there's an indescribable excitement in processing the very first set of data in a study, like opening christmas presents or an unfamiliar bottle of wine. i've learned to savour it, because it's drudgery pretty much all the way after that until everything is collected, which is a long way down the road, longer than there've been fishes in the ocean, etc.

mm

A Quick One Before I Go

There comes a time in every man's life
when he thinks: I have never had a single
original thought in my life
including this one & therefore I shall
eliminate all ideas from my poems
which shall consist of cats, rice, rain
baseball cards, fire escapes, hanging plants
red brick houses where I shall give up booze
and organized religion even if it means
despair is a logical possibility that can't
be disproved I shall concentrate on the five
senses and what they half perceive and half
create, the green street signs with white
letters on them the body next to mine
asleep while I think these thoughts
that I want to eliminate like nostalgia
0 was there ever a man who felt as I do
like a pronoun out of step with all the other
floating signifiers no things but in words
an orange T-shirt a lime green awning

David Lehman

our multivariate stats professor is almost completely blind, which means he teaches the class without notes or computer aids or even writing on the board, an absolute first for me in the history of my experience with math. he also insists that we use sas, which gives you an idea of what era he's from. powerful and "flexible" (the academic f-word) as they are, i hate command line stats packages. it's not even a phobia, because i'll grunt and complain my way through matlab -- it's knowing that 95% of the time i can do whatever i need to do far more simply in spss. hopefully this is the semester where i finally outgrow that phase of life -- certainly i don't think some of the more prickly analyses i see on the syllabus are easily performed by the old faithful.

(it's a very frightening syllabus, by the way, all the stuff that i've heretofore skimmed over in methods sections of papers finally confronting me like so many inescapable gorgons. oh well. i suppose it's about time i actually know something for a change.)

cp, you are priceless. even from here, i rofl.

spring '07

-- 2.5 classes, and many sleepless nights in the lab. onward, then.

a batty man on the street today flung a quarter at me with projectile force (but, fortunately, very poor aim). i hurried on, happy to ignore him, but he called out to me 'you dropped something', and pointed at the coin, so i picked it up and went on my way. his price for missing, perhaps, and the fee for my peril.

just for the record

(because sometimes i just need placeholders for memories on this blog)

Manhattan, NY

jan 2nd: i see von for our once-yearly "meet in a different part of the globe for 3 hours" thing, which consists, in rough chronological order, of: jelly donut (levain's!), finding the restaurant we want to go to is closed, going up and down streets trying to locate another using google maps (unreliable), sapporo, onigiri, sapporo, tuna belly, sapporo, more wandering, highly pretentious dessert place with countertop that von cannot stop admiring, more wandering, enormous second-hand bookstore, home. i look forward to more of these, ahem, but you know, touch wood, salt over shoulder etc.

And #1: Most often, the winner is the guy who recognizes sciamachy when he sees it, and stops.

---

One last quote for 2006, from the insert of the latest Swingle Singers album, Unwrapped:

The last track is, appropriately enough, the arrangement with which every Swingle Singers Christmas show closes, the Japanese song Hotaru No Hikari sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne:

Hotaru no hikari mado no yuki
Fumi yomu tsukihi kasanetsutsu
Itsushiha toshi mo suginoto wo,
Aketezo kesa wa wakare yuku.

(Translation)
With the light from fireflies and the reflection from snow outside the window
We would read books for months and years;
As the years stole by
On this graduation morning we shall open the door into new years and be parted.

We were pleased to discover that in Japan the tune is widely known although the Japanese version is used in a different context. The words were orginally meant to be sung by students at graduation ceremony at the end of a hard year of study. The themes of looking back over the past and saying goodbye whilst preparing to go on to new things have meant that the song is sometimes played by restaurants as a signal to customers that the evening is over and they should go home! In Japan, it brings tears to the eyes of the audence but, whether or not we understand the precise meaning of the words, we cannot fail to be moved by its beauty.

Happy 2007!

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#2)

Graduate school is humbling, and grueling, and more daunting than almost anything else I've faced -- but right now, it's also the best thing in the world.

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#3)

-- that the world's largest organism is a giant honey mushroom in oregon covering over 2000 acres. (among many other factoids which are apparently too dull for some people)

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#4)

-- that eventually, there has to come a time when something is good enough. No, I knew this before. That it takes an incredible amount of skill to gauge the precise moment when something is just good enough, the inflection point on the curve where marginal effort meets marginal utility, when it's time to pack your bags and move on to the next thing.

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#5)

Island facts:

(1)The Faroe Islands are midway between Iceland and Norway, and are largely, though not completely self-governing.

(2) Christmas Island is not at all self-governing, and is administered by Australia, even though the country it is nearest to is Indonesia.

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#6)

rhett and scarlett don't end up together. su-lin was incredulous that I didn't know this (her: what did you think 'frankly, my dear' was all about then? me: [meekly] i thought it was somewhere in the middle?), but i would like to confess here that this is merely the tip of the vast iceberg of my ignorance about practically everything. (incid: i still have no idea of the significance of rosebud being his sled, or why kilroy was here.)

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#7)

It is possible to have an entire dinner conversation about four words. Did we ever come to a conclusion about "fearfully and wonderfully made"?

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#8)

Multiple comparisons dishonesty in science is easy, tempting, and probably rife. Let me explain. When you start any experiment, you have one, or a number of null hypotheses about the data, which you intend to reject at a significance level of 0.05 (that is to say, 1 in 20 times you will get a false positive by chance, but we consider this a small enough percentage to deem worthy of report.) Once the data are in, what often happens is that you don't find what you want, and you have to go back to the drawing board so that you haven't wasted a quarter of a million dollars. You run other regressions with plausible stories. One of them comes out significant, and you write your paper.

Now, the more tests you run on a single dataset, the higher chance you have of coming up with a false positive. There are ways of correcting for this (and if you report all the comparisons you do in a paper you have to report as well how you done the corrections), but if it's just you, sitting in the lab playing with the spreadsheet, no one has to know what you're doing. And of course, if the model is reasonable, you get published, post hoc ergo propter hoc* be damned. Now, I'm not leveling accusations at anyone in particular, but this is so easy to perpetrate that surely a great number of findings (that have not been reproduced) are just plain wrong. 1 in 10? 1 in 8? The investigation continues.

* admittedly, one should get these things right before conducting public displays of idiocy. however, see #6

From The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker:

I also liked the black Penguins because on the front page they had a biographical note about the translator that was in the same small print as the biographical note about the major historical figure he had rendered into English, a pairing that made those minor translational lives in Dorset and Leeds seem just as important as the often assassinating, catty and conspiring lives of the ancients. The Penguin translators seemed frequently to be amateurs, not academics, who had, after getting their double firsts, lived quietly running their fathers' businesses or being clergymen, and translating in the evenings - probably gay, a fair number of them: that excellent low-key sort of man who achieves little by external standards but who sustains civilization for us by knowing, in a perfectly balanced, accessible, and considered way, all that can be known about several brief periods of Dutch history, or about the flowering of some especially rich tradition of terra-cotta pipes.

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#9)

That I have a desperate need to see as much of the world as humanly possible. 6 years of bouncing around from country to country has been the primer. Cambodia was so dramatically different from anything I had really seen before that I want to be surprised more. And anyway, as the poet said, you can never go home again.

10 Things I Learned in 2006 (#10)

Ronald D. Moore is a deity.

(Also: Battlestar Galactica movie after Season 3. I nearly wet my pants.)

I was in Ewa's apartment the other day waiting as she fussed about looking for her ID (one of those drinking nights), and started flipping through one of the journals on her table. In it, I came across a review of experimental existential psychology, a relatively new branch of the discipline that deals with quantifying human behavioral responses to the five big existential concerns -- death, isolation, identity, freedom and meaning. For instance, when subjects are administered a mortality salience paradigm (What do you feel when you think about your won death?), accessibility of death thoughts increases, and, defense mechanisms (such as taking greater pains to boost ones self-esteem) concurrently kick in.

This was kind of interesting, in the way that sexy science often is, but it was only later that I figured out why it was really so appealing to me. Scientists always get slammed by the conservative and the religious for being reductionist and taking the numinousness out of everything -- well, here you have a set of emergent feelings just begging to be understood, so we can have wonder without despair, ponder the infinite without shrinking ourselves to the infinitesimal. Imagine: clinics you can go to to learn cognitive stratification - keep the abstract in your head, and go enjoy a good dinner afterwards. There's a huge market for this; just remember, I thought of it first.

there is a paucity of good dessert places in the heart of center city, which is why our department's discovery of naked chocolate not too long ago was so significant. it fancies itself upmarket, but doesn't have prices as unreasonable as i thought they would be -- for $3.50 you get a cup of hot chocolate that is small but Enough. (someone at the table next to us was having the $5 cup and kind of choking it down, so). a. had the bittersweet, and i had the spicy with chili peppers and cinnamon and cardamom and whatnot mixed in (v. good), and i had brief but very visceral flashbacks of XOXO in barcelona.



anyway. somewhere to go after movies other than bloody cosi.

(if only in my dreams)

I'll get through this, if only barely. Merry Christmas all, and may your days be merry and bright.

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

     Emily Dickinson

if you do go to watch the movie, here's a little something the mother sent to me 4 years ago that might help.

(also known as: america is not god's chosen nation, and dubya most certainly is not the next prophet of christ)

(if you're in sg, though, the film is probably BANNED, so you're spared.)

This is my song, Oh God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
Oh hear my song, oh God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.

                                                Lloyd Stone

ugh

jesus camp is a very distressing film, but at least now i understand why people like richard dawkins are so vehemently against religion in any form (and fundamentalist christianity in particular). i've come to the firm conclusion that a sort of tragedy of the commons operates with religious belief; individually, there's benefit to dumb people being religious (some moral code being better than pure hedonism, say), but put 100 million dumb people and the bible together, and you have a problem. stupidity really depresses me. time for a drink.

seth defended his dissertation today, and it was extraordinarily good -- substantive, multidisciplinary, and beautifully clear. also, he brought small triangular sandwiches, with four different fillings, and horseradish. i'm very happy for him, and also thoroughly convinced that i will never reach those lofty heights -- that everything i do will be riddled through and through with methodological flaws, that all my research will be trite and unconvincing, and that my catering will consist of stale, crusty pastries that stick to the plate and refuse to come loose.

because

-- i have been very very very good at living within my means this semester
-- i have been reasonably good at doing work when it was supposed to be done and not whining about it too much
-- i finally am done with bloody exams, and
-- it's christmas time, and there will be a guest around

i finally went into di bruno's today and picked up a shopping basket, and actually put food into that shopping basket, and paid for the food, and felt happy. cheese, and terra chips, and a wonderful farmhouse chutney with ten different fruit and balsamic vinegar and ginger and roasted garlic, and ciabatta, and gnocchi, and duck liver pate. and then i went to five guys and got one of their superb cheeseburgers, which everyone will try once they get their respective behinds to philadelphia (actually, it's a virginia thing, so maybe minz you'll have been there already). anyway, it was a very good morning food-wise, and once again i realise that, like it or not, i'm going to have to make actual money at some point, or i know not what i'll do.

i intended to stay home in the morning to study for my exam at 12, but at 9:17, lo! do i not get an email saying that there is an emergency staff meeting please attend. against my better judgment i go, and it is an utter waste of time except for the big packet of lindt chocolates that is sitting on my desk as a christmas present from the advisor. anyhow, i scurry back home, making the most of the walk by picking up a falafel expert sandwich on the way back, and then something goes wrong with the email script for the final exam, and it is delayed by 1.75 hours. it's not just airplanes these days. this scuttles my plan to finish all my work for the semester by friday 5 pm. and then go out and drink myself silly; however, i decide that the drinking myself silly part has never been contingent on anything in the past, and that grad school oughtn't change that. (besides, it was our last beer sem for the semester. except, as it turned out, the "sem" part was kind of missing).

we started at roosevelt's at around 8 -- all psych people at first, and then the random hangers-on who always seem to appear and who are different every time. the smoking ban has come into effect, so all the bars have stopped smelling like cigarettes and started smelling like fries. going into one is very disturbing, like walking into a giant steaming potato. i'd had dinner (my lame attempt at cooking bak chor mee and getting all the condiments wrong -- help?), but the craving for grease and salt set in immediately. dopamine rules us all. we had decided to do a pub crawl, but the drinks at roosevelt's are so cheap for this city that it was difficult to initiate the "crawling" bit -- when jared started settling into a burger it looked like we were there for the long haul -- but eventually credit cards started appearing and we managed to extricate ourselves from $4 whiskey and sodas. two blocks down was monkeybar, a place slightly reminiscent of somewhere in singapore that i couldn't quite put my finger on. pulp fiction was playing (on mute) -- the very last bit where sam jackson opens up marcellas' suitcase -- and when i mention the fact, it transpires that jared, who, i found out at the advisor's christmas party, shares my birthday (to the year), also has the same favorite movie that i do. freaky! i entrust alyson to order drinks, and she orders a really weird thing that looks and tastes exactly like a shot of strawberry milk.

pulp fiction finishes, and monkeybar is starting to suck a little, so we proceed to the cafe, where we get stuck in for the rest of the night. i end up being drawn into one of those "are you a neuroscientist or a psychologist" arguments, which i can never seem to win no matter which side of the fence i try to land on. i have decided that functional imagers live in a DMZ between the two disciplines. we're allowed to do our thing, as long as we don't use either of their names. it's a bit sad. of course, it's not as sad when you've had about eight drinks, so the night was good, and ended with k. and i in a cab talking about home and her brother's ORD, and half-promises of ikan bilis in the spring.

to the one who helpfully pointed me to this

the lost room was good, and not just because of peter krause. (god, i miss six feet under).

At one time most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them. Even Sarah found one Christmas that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I've grown old, the bell still rings for me, as for all who truly believe.

You know, when I first read The Polar Express (not when I was a kid, but a while ago nevertheless), I thought, like everyone else, that this thing with the bell was a sweet, poignant sentiment, an allegory for how we need to have childlike faith in this world of cynicism and doubt. Upon (much) further consideration, though, I think I have changed my mind, because the metaphor is wrong. Let me explain. The logic goes that if you believe <--> you will be able to hear the bell <--> you have childlike innocence. What, though, do you expect a bell in the real world to do? Why, ring! So, the remarkable thing is not so much that the children can hear the bell, but that the adults can't. In other words, what van Allsburg is trying to say is that when you lose your childlike faith, you lose something that "ought to be" in the normal world, which is just crap. Now, contrast this with a Peter Pan-like plot device -- say that the kids were taught how to fly instead of given a bell -- now that would work for the allegory because there's nothing abnormal about not being able to fly. I wouldn't have a problem with that, because all it would mean is that when you grow up, and can't fly anymore (metaphorically), you have to rely on (skeptical) faith in the unknown (or the unknowable). Thought about that way, the conclusion of the book as it is written becomes nothing more than a giant guilt trip -- never grow up, you'll lose a "natural" part of yourself! Coincidentally, this is exactly the kind of guilt that Christianity tries to sell people (with the "only if you have childlike faith can you get to heaven" advertisement) -- if you "grow up", (interpreted as "be rational and question your belief"), then you've lost a vital part of yourself. This is utter nonsense, and is also the reason why millions upon millions of Christians everywhere would much prefer to see their faith as that ringing bell. I can hear it, they say, I'm normal! Why can't you?

a mountain of food in the lab -- potlucks are almost grotesque in their excess sometimes -- and joy and good cheer. the advisor leaves for hawaii next week to visit his grandchildren, so i guess it's mob rule for a while. i'll finish my exam by ths saturday, monday will be running a tutorial for someone, and then after that i'm calling it quits for the year. it feels so good to say that.

slightly old news, but the rome season 2 teaser posters came out a few weeks ago -- first as just huge close-ups of the characters faces, and then, about a week later, with "graffiti" overwritten on them: mark antony is a coward, pullo is a thug, etc. v nice. i remember cp and i lamenting after the end of season 1 -- 14 months to january 2007! and now here it is and it hardly seems so long ago that we were at su-lin's place watching the pilot. ah, the dead march of time.

i had a heartstopping moment this morning when i jogged my ibook and caused it to completely shut off -- no frozen screen or spinning beachball of death, just silence, and refusing to turn on again. the only copy of my seminar paper -- due in an hour -- was on the thing, so i hurried to a power outlet muttering all manner of supplications and bargains with higher beings, and merciful heaven, it was only a battery thing, some loose connection or another. (DISSERTATION TIP #3: KEEP AT LEAST 18 SEPARATE SOFT COPIES OF YOUR THESIS.)

Blood pressure through the roof, I went to my committee meeting with the advisor and a slightly sniffly Dr. SB, and we sat there as weird people ate tuna salad sandwiches and tried to poke holes in our proposal. I was very hungry and rattled and pugnacious, especially after hearing about minz's thirty-hour ordeal in siem reap international airport, and wanted nothing more than to give snide and snippy answers; unfortunately, the advisor fielded most of the questions, and my only contribution was to stare and glower and think about lunch.

The Grand Unifying Psychological Theory of Dennis Quaid Movies

Ok. No cheating now.

Name the first movie starring Dennis Quaid that comes to mind

Ok?

---

Bala Cynwyd, PA

The advisor invited the entire lab to his annual Christmas party, which he promised me at Thanksgiving would be thoroughly Gatsbyesque, minus the dying in the swimming pool bit. This was a slight exaggeration -- there were not hundreds and hundreds of people in various states of inebriation, but there was enough food to last a reasonable-sized family till the following Christmas, so.

The first order of business for the evening was watching the Discovery fly heavenwards in a plume of fire, and then all rushing outside in the bitter cold to see if we could catch a glimpse of it (or Mars, Jupiter and Mercury, which are in some kind of weird alignment. I was going to link to an article but Google has betrayed me, and I would imagine people reading this would have heard.) Dr. SB (who is, I think, the second Australian I've met whom I really like) was extremely bitter as the neon countdown ticked down to zero, and for good reason -- she had actually been at the launch pad as a VIP when the thing was supposed to taken off a couple of days ago but didn't. I can't say I blame her. It's the kind of hair-tearing thing life usually reserves for me.

(The shuttle launch had an interesting significance for all of us, because had it blown up, my funding would have evaporated along with it, and I would not have been amused. It was a bit scary. NASA has a pretty impressive record of blowing people up.)

Then there was much partaking in beer and canapes and traditional peppermint cake, and appreciation of a professional piano player who claimed to be able to take any request, (except, apparently, for the very first one I wanted -- I Believe in Father Christmas -- which no one ever knows.) The company split into old, affluent people, and young, not-so-affluent people, and we sat around and spilled drinks on the embroidered carpets and ate too much ham. Oh, and I finally got to meet Dr. SB's husband, who works for Industrial Light and Magic, and is out in SF making lifelike tenatacles for Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World's End. Of course we had to know about that, so we heard a bit about how the sea monsters are animated and the scene where Johnny Depp comes back to life. And [SPOILER] which is significant in the second movie, because [SPOILER], and also that [SPOILER], because Geoffrey Rush is actually [SPOILER].

We were good enough not to ask for the ending though, so there.

Halfway through the evening, I started to make friends with the piano player, who is actually part-time piano tuner and part-time Congressional lobbyist. Or, he was telling porkies, which is more likely but less romantic. I got Lady Madonna, and Shall We Gather by the River, and O Little Town of Bethlehem in exchange for staying through a diatribe of Bush Sucks, and Iraq was the Biggest Mistake Ever. Oh, and I got to have the piano for 3 minutes so that I could play I Believe in Father Christmas for myself. A fair trade.

Jared and a couple of the lab people and I were thinking of going to Manayunk afterwards, but it got late, and no one really knew whether there were good bars in Manayunk, so we gave up and headed home and fantasised about double chocolate stout at Monk's. (Me: Why double? Nathan: Because there's lots of chocolate in it?). And then The Grand Unifying Psychological Theory of Dennis Quaid Movies occurred to me.

---

If you named:

Traffic: You are a yuppie executive working in a big city making obscene amounts of money. You watch about 3 movies a year, and fancy yourself to be "gritty". You have a 95% chance of suffering a major depressive episode in the next year.

Dragonheart: You live at home with your mom, and will till you are 40. During this time, you will develop at least one (1) phobia and one (1) anxiety disorder, if you have not done so already.

Great Balls O' Fire!: You are hypomanic.

The Alamo: You are terminally unhip, and in constant denial of the fact. You go to social gatherings thinking you're the life of the party, whereas everyone else knows you're just an old sad fart.

Innerspace: You're a grad student.

The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia: Wha'?? You need some help, dude.

fighting out of the thicket. the paper got written this afternoon in a spectacular 3-hour explosion of productivity, and for once it's actually not half bad, so i'm going to call it done. i'm watching this is spinal tap while waiting for jared to call so i can get a ride to the advisor's christmas party. it's the earliest of the christopher guest movies that i've seen, and although the trademark style is definitely there, he has many more concessions to slapstick than usual. or maybe i just don't have a very good recollection of guffman and best in show, seeing as i watched both of those at 4 in the morning.

why am i so obsessed with christmas carol lyrics?

thomas and i were talking about in the bleak midwinter the other day -- it's his favorite christmas song -- and i discovered rather delightedly that the words were originally written by christina rossetti. well, almost. when holst put the poem to music, he ended each verse, as you know, with a dum(2)da(3)dum(2)dum(1)dum(1), and rossetti's poem only has three stressed syllables in each stanza's final line. this means that singers have to go through all kinds of contortions so that they don't sound like idiots (in the bleak midwinter, loooooong ago etc.), and everyone does it differently (dan folgelberg: oh so long ago; james taylor: long and long ago, and so on for each verse), which means that the original intended impact of those lines gets lost. go and read the original poem and you'll see what i mean.

sara's exam just about exhausted me of the will to live, but i went to the gym and ran 4 miles and felt better. daniel didn't join me because he's off to delaware -- not driving fortunately because it's snow tonight and 10 degrees. i pulled up the christmas playlist on the ipod, and the pogues' fairytale in new york came up:

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song
'The Rare Old Mountain Dew'
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one
Came in eighteen to one
I've got a feeling
This year's for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true

They've got cars big as bars
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me

You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone
I've built my dreams around you

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas day

today was the double whammy of (a) being beaten half to death by javascript and (b) discovering only microwaveable food left in the fridge for dinner. i figured that having to study for sara's exam alone in my apartment would probably be the coup de grace, so here i am in the other green line being distracted by doo wop music and FREE INTERNET. i like the other green line. it's a little bit gross and unswept, but it is also one of those places where you feel inspired to write, or compose folk music, or take crystal meth. also, if you sit around until they close, unsold muffins and croissants get passed around for free, and the three berry muffin is excellent.

the department system for signing up for classes is such a mess. the university deadline passed us by 2 weeks ago with nary a peep from the director of graduate studies, and now all of a sudden we get an email today from the department secretary asking us to send her the list of classes we're taking. no one knows what they have to sign up for because there are all these strange and mysterious requirements that we have to fulfill, and on top of that everything worth taking seems to be in exactly the same time slot, thursdays 2-5. it's incredibly frustrating.

everyone's busy studying. i spent a large chunk of the weekend cobbling together a very poor presentation only barely held together by colorful pictures and flashing lights. give 'em the old razzle dazzle, etc. today, i fried bacon, and went for a run, and sat for a good hour reading the blog of a penn singaporean freshman (BONDED), who writes with such naivete and insouciance that it breaks my heart to think he is probably either already one of Them, or going to be.

In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them,
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.

In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne'er remember
Apollo's summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting,
About the frozen time.

Ah! would 'twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed Joy?
To know the change and feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.

                      John Keats

my monkeywork has reached the stage where i press a button and wait for 20 minutes while the computer goes off to do an inverse matrix calculation, so i got to reread city of glass for the first time in a while. i have decided that the new york trilogy is probably the only series of paul auster books that has some merit, and because i like city of glass so much now, i'm very afraid that one day i'll pick it up and realise that it's just highfalutin trash. like john irving. i think there was a period in my life where you could get me to swear on my ancestors' graves that john irving was chaucer reborn.

the horror that is next week

presentation (1); finals (2); paper (unspecified length; 1)

scott mccloud, comic book wunderkind, gave a talk at drexel today as part of his fifty states tour, and thomas, some random dude and i crossed the territorial border to go have a listen. mccloud's entire family -- wife and two daughters -- is along for the ride, and his elder daughter (13), actually introduced him before the talk (she's quite the stageperson too).

the talk was highly condensed but utterly riveting, sweeping through history, technique, form and significance in just under an hour. just the high points (for me) then. (warning: nerdy stuff ahead -- not representative of actual talk) comic books, as you may have been told before, do not live in the twilight region between prose and moving pictures, but are an art form unto themselves. this because of a few things:

1) they are the only medium where space represents time -- the tempo of the story being controlled via the frequency of frozen moments between panels.
2) there is a unique interplay of author-reader that you get in neither prose nor moving pictures -- the illustrator/author has absolute control over the mise-en-scene, while the reader has absolute control of suture.
3) they permit a synergy between image and text impossible in any other medium.

(mostly my words, thus possibly balderdash: ignore if you know better.)

thus: they are cool, and the wild optimism of the early comic book artists has finally been justified -- graphic novels have begun to deal in weighty issues and epic story arcs, and at least a few scholars are beginning to take the comic book seriously. and! now we have webcomics, which allow for multidimensional scrolling, and thus the possibility for a perfectly continuous, ultimately flexible space-time arrow. for example: pup ponders the heat death of the universe

i must say that as rubbish as some of this theory probably is, the subject as a whole is rather fascinating, and it would be interesting to read some proper literature, if there exists any. once the horror that is next week is over, i think i'll take a look.

only in berkeley could you find psychologists who sit around thinking: hm, what if we did a study on students filling in surveys while they masturbate. the actual paper that came out of this is really worth checking out -- first of all because figure 1 is probably something never before seen in a peer-reviewed journal, but more importantly because of how utterly disturbing the results are.

(it's easy to read, i promise. also, there was a big controversy about it in congress -- what are our tax dollars funding, etc. -- so in a general sort of way you might want to checkit out as well.)

james flynn is in town, and gave a talk today on his famous flynn effect, on which he has built most of his career (incid: one of the big downsides of being a chinese scientist, it's awful if you find something big and want to name it after yourself. the ng effect, for example, doesn't quite have the same ring to it). his oft-cited observation is that iq scores have risen astronomically over the past century (if you've read any of the hernnstein and murray bell curve nonsense you'll know this) -- to get an idea of how dramatic this is, the average child today would have scored higher than 97% of kids in 1900 on numerous standardized intelligence tests (and i don't know about you, but considering what the average kid is like nowadays, that's kind of frightening to me).

this gain is extremely hard to explain -- the stupid wikipedia article goes for "improved nutrition, a trend towards smaller families, better education, greater environmental complexity, and heterosis", all of which flynn shot down during the talk. his big idea, and this is apparently quite new, is that it's not spearman's g-factor that's increasing (which jibes with ones experiences in the real world, see above), but that kids are thinking differently than they used to 100 years ago. that in the early 1900s, it was far more important for children to think concretely, whereas since then, abstract and categorical thinking has become a norm and a necessity. example: what is the similarity between a dog and a rabbit? concrete answer: dogs chase rabbits; abstract answer: both mammals. and while this is probably patently obvious to any grade-schooler now, the creeping influence of scientific lingo and paradigms of thinking had not yet begun several generations ago, and people apparently just did not think in the same way.

it's a more elegant explanation than the usual gene-environment interaction hokum that biologists pull out of their ass when asked the question (which gene? a combination of many, not all of which have been identified. which environmental characteristic? go ask the sociologists.), so even though it seems at least partially faulty (don't the pre-scientific revolution staples of religion and superstition live or die by symbological thinking?), i can live with it until something better comes along. plus: he's a wonderful speaker, allergic to powerpoint and projectors in the way that professors emeritus* usually are, preferring to stand at the front of the lecture theater, wave his hands, and hold the room in thrall.

* professor emeriti?

ricky gervais is not making a third season of extras. i'm heartbroken.

When Nietzsche Wept, Irvin Yalom:

A stroll that began in sunlight and ended darkly. Perhaps we journeyed too far into the graveyard. Should we have turned back earlier? Have I given him too powerful a thought? Eternal recurrence is a mighty hammer. It will break those who are not yet ready for it.

No! A psychologist, an unriddler of souls, needs hardness more than anyone. Else he will bloat with pity. And his student drown in shallow water.

Yet at the end of our walk, Josef sseemed sorely pressed, barely able to converse. Some are not born hard. A true psychologist, like an artist, must love his palette. Perhaps more kindness, more patience was needed. Do I strip before teaching how to weaave new clothing? Have I taught him "freedom from" without teaching "freedom for"?

No, a guide must be a railing by the torrent, but he must not be a crutch. The guide must lay bare the trails that lie before the student. But he must not choose the path.

"Become my teacher," he asks. "Help me overcome despair." Shall I conceal my wisdom? And the student's responsibility? He must harden himself to the cold, his fingers must grip the railing, he must lose himself many times on wrong paths before finding the right one.

i realise that this will be funny exclusively to cp and von, but nevertheless, it's too good not to link to:

battlestar ecclesiastica (scroll down).

turkey day '06

bala cynwyd, PA

the advisor had a bunch of us over to his place in the afternoon, all the stranded international folk -- hengyi and his wife, and the basners from germany with their ebullient 2.5-year-old son. hengyi + wife gave me a ride there, my penance being that i was forced to speak chinese in the apartment, and then sit silent at the back of the car as the two of them displayed the approximate navigational capabilities of a sweet potato.

(i sort of kid. they're really nice, and i will die horribly if i don't have him to help out with my image analysis next year.)

the advisor's house is tucked away, as one might expect, in a little suburban nook, noise muted by distance, all the illusions you can afford to buy once you have tenure. it seems to be pretty much them -- their elder son has moved away, and the younger is a fratboy senior at wharton (i'm going to singapore!). (even though it's the most natural thing in the world with the benefits and everything, i'm always weirded out by this legacy business -- surely the last thing you want as a male student in college is to be having your wild-ass parties practically next door to where your dad works as a professor.)

the basners were already there, and i settled into cheese and pinot grigio (cavit, 2004) and actually getting to know my advisor as a human being. i've long suspected that he's pretty much the apotheosis of the educated liberal male, and the signs are all still there -- chief among these that what he talks about outside the lab is not work. very few things are more painful to behold than really smart people who can talk about nothing but the blade-thin sector of human knowledge that has their flag fluttering over it. anyway, talking was good, and having a little kid bouncing around with a toy godzilla while screaming in german was a more effective social lubricant than any amount of pinot grigio. also: i'd never considered it before, but dr. basner is kind of interesting. i should talk to him more in the lab.

we got through feudal systems, hairy encounters with bedouin arabs, and the scourge of the american suv before dinner was served. the kids were interrupted from turkey day football, and we sat down to the usual bounty, heaping servings of everything with gravy. the advisor's younger son made his first appearance, and the cognitive dissonance increased about three-fold -- he's the consummate frat kid, down to wanting to come to dinner in his sweatpants. i know i'm being stupid, and of course this is a cookie-cutter scene all around the country -- distinguished parents have adolescents who go to college, create mayhem, occasionally drink themselves into the ER, and then go on to be professors and businessmen and senators themselves, just like philip roth says. still, it's always mind-blowing when you have to sit there and see the process play out in front of your eyes. america really blows my mind. the advisor's son had two friends over as well, and they ate themselves into a turkey coma and went to sleep, one in front of the tv, two on the ottoman upstairs, in preparation to wake up at 11 and go out drinking. dr. basner and i agreed that those were the days (definitely should talk to him more).

coffee and pie made an appearance, and we talked about everything, rogue elephants, boxing chimpanzees in thailand, and by the time it was time to leave, i felt a lot better about the years ahead working in the lab -- things are just so much easier when you know that your PI is willing to interact with you as an actual person. many aren't; and i confess that when i took the place here, i wasn't 100% sure this was going to be the case.

(on a different note, i'm straying a lot from what this blog was originally like. too many names; too much personal nonsense. i think this page is becoming an ersatz confidante. i'm going to consciously stop doing that for a little while, and maybe password protect. let me think about it.)

anyhow -- i'm certainly thankful that i'm not a cube rat, or a ne'er-do-well, or that any of the awful things that were shaping up to happen about two years ago never came to pass. so happy whatsits, even if thanksgiving isn't your thing, and may your whatevers be however you want them to be.

holidays

it started drizzling just before lunch and still has not let up. all day, people trundled up and down campus with suitcases in tow, struggling towards buses and trains in the frigid cold. dr. detre was one of the few people in the cfn, sipping three squash soup and telling one of the pre-med stragglers about how he was the only bastard this year to not invite his graduate students and post-docs over for thanksgiving. there's a little grinch in all of us.

honestly though, turkey day is of very little moment to me -- i'm mostly glad i can sleep in. that the advisor (and his family) are having me over is a bonus -- human company and homecooked food are always nice when the campus is otherwise deserted.

confession: i do get a perverse thrill out of telling americans that i'm not going anywhere -- i guess being more or less alone and away from family on thanksgiving is kind of unthinkable for most. i even bait them.

me: so when are you leaving for thanksgiving?
random american person: this evening. how about you?
me: oh, i'm gonna be here.

and then like a snort of cocaine i relish that one awful moment of silence that comes right after that where the sentiment "oh, that's awesome" gets swallowed like strychnine as whoever it is tries to scramble out of the pit of awkwardness that (he thinks) he's just thrown himself into. it's perverse and addictive -- pretending to care about something that you don't so that you can orchestrate a situation that wins you self-pity -- perverse, but oh-so-good.

today was the first day since i've been here when the cold has been serious, no longer the half-hearted between-seasons sort of chill, but the kind that signals that the winter is coming in earnest. i was the first into the cfn, and only a few more people trickled in during the morning -- the research staff get both thursday and friday off, and i guess most of them decided to just take the whole week. it was angela and dawn and chris and i, and all of us were doing monkeywork, so we chatted about heroes and house and i did the sudoku. now that i have a couple years of experience, i can say with assurance that my research is approximately 85-90% monkeywork, the kind of tedium that anyone off the street could do -- point, click, drag -- and that that number isn't moving anywhere in the next few years (unless someone wants to be my research assistant). when i was a (very) wee lad, i used to love to play this make-believe game of 'factory', where all these playing cards got 'processed' along a conveyor belt of 'machinery' -- and funnily enough, that's the bulk of what i do now: raw data in, mindless, yet not completely automatable processes, interpretable pictures out. the developmental psychologists would have a field day with that one.

bad

(thanks to su-lin)

ian mckellen on extras, also known as, what i downloaded and watched on sunday instead of doing work.

life after alias

carl lumbly is guest starring on battlestar galactica -- not as a cylon as i had hoped, unfortunately, but still.