american

i was eating dinner alone today after work -- salad with cold roast chicken, corn, black beans, croutons, hard-boiled egg, russian dressing -- drinking a glass of white wine (durbanville cab sauvignon '01), and reading the new yorker, when i was suddenly overcome with a feeling of how american the scene was, like something out of a nora ephron movie, the quintessential bleeding-heart liberal moment. very disturbing. i need to go listen to some j-pop or something now to cleanse myself.

the su-lin/minz/von gang have been badgering me for years now about the saffy books, how i have to read them, how people in remote amazonian villages have read them and pass the stories down to their kids, etc., so i finally caved and ordered a one-penny (w/o shipping) copy from amazon to see what the fuss is all about (the penn library doesn't have the books. would you believe that?) i tried to get the relatively adult-looking cover, but ended up with the hodder edition which is scintillatingly pink and very hideous. this now means that i cannot read the book anywhere except in my room under thick sheets with the door locked, which i will do tonight after the amazing race and if i can finish prepping for my client tomorrow.

***

in other news, obama was at a rally yesterday not 7 blocks from where i live. i was tempted to go, but a phone call to the other housemate, who was there, convinced me that the nearest i could get to the stage would be about a block away.

i realize now that this isn't actually very exciting, and stop.

although my heart does go out to anyone who may have lost half their life savings in last week's hurly-burly, i feel that it's only fair for me to comment that it was one of the very few times in my life when i was glad that i have no real money to speak of. given how much (unintended) gloating i've had to endure over the years from friends and acquaintances, i find it only just that i take a moment to revel in this bear market, at least until i discover i have run out of funding/don't have a job.

the other housemate is busily studying for his GREs, which means that the house is redolent with the smell of coffee, and every so often i reach behind the cushions or underneath the couch and pull out a flashcard that says PULCHRITUDE or ELEEMOSYNARY or FURFURACEOUS. oh, how i hated that exam. you would think that living with two grad students for a year would be a severe disincentive to anyone considering jumping into this particular hell, but apparently, we're paragons of mental well-being, or something. also:

still not working on my quals

the closest equivalent that science-type people have to minz/fadiman's handshake game is calculating our erdos number. according to wikipedia (the fount of all knowledge):

In order to be assigned an Erdős number, an author must co-write a mathematical paper with an author with a finite Erdős number. Paul Erdős is the one person having an Erdős number of zero. If the lowest Erdős number of a coauthor is k, then the author's Erdős number is k + 1.

although technically applicable only to mathematicians, the fact that natalie portman has one (apparently 7, not 9) makes me feel entitled to at least try calculating mine. the problem: unlike six degrees of kevin bacon, there is no convenient way of doing this. obviously, it goes me, the advisor, and from there probably to one of the two-process model papers he's collaborated on, those being the only vaguely math-y things he's done, but after that it's mist and fog.

in any case, the game can now be played with connecting me to famous psychologists through co-authored publications. people i'd like to try off the top of my head: miller, beck, rogers, lacan, zimbardo, james (??). i understand this is a bit of a cheat because i've published, like, nothing, but i'll count my upcoming neuroethics paper with martha and that will at least give me more than 2 launching points.

i note, with some small measure of dismay, that nothing of great interest happened this week. thomas and i went to hear neil gaiman do a reading of his new book; it is more stardust and less american gods, which is a good thing. he did a very funny q&a, and i have now promised to not diss him quite as much in casual conversation, and focus more on the fact that he has his not-uncommon moments of brillance. (last complaint: no spoilers on whatever happened to the caped crusader. boo.) on thursday, sarah palin did not make a jackass of herself. on friday, there was capogiro and nodding head and being bored to tears by baseball (again). could someone out there please give me a satisfactory explanation as to why they like baseball?

anyway, you're bored by things like that, so let's write about something else. i have a new theory that practically anything tasty can be made even tastier by transforming it into a casserole. i tried reuben casserole for the first time last week, and much as i love reubens, reuben casserole = win. mexican torta casserole > mexican tortas. turkey, cranberry, sweet potato and stuffing casserole > thanksgiving dinner (i'm not even kidding). why? -- because casseroles are liberating. they're not weighed down by tradition. you can put all kinds of extra layers of tastiness into them and there are no purists to cry foul. also: everyone loves bubbling cheese.

thomas and i sat at home with beer on friday night and watched the first presidential debate, the most distressing part of which was mccain stating that he would cut funding for things like studying the dna of bears in montana. you know, his point about wasteful spending is well-taken, or at least, taken, but that was a particularly poorly-chosen example (surely there are conservative basic scientists out there somewhere. you at the back?) i think last night more than ever i felt that mccain is just methuselah old -- alluding to russians in afghanistan cuts both ways; there's a fine line between experience and decrepitude, particularly from the vantage point of someone under 35. also, old politicians don't seem to me as eminent as old academics; i think this is something to do with the cyclical nature of history. what was it that one philosopher quipped: that the only thing we learn from history is that we don't learn anything from it? i guess that's what cheapens the experience argument for me -- what's going to be important in the (quite clearly unpredictable) future is going to be discovered accidentally, fortuitously, and by a leadership willing to take chances on LHCs and wireless electricity and the investigation of near-death experiences. and yes, bears in montana as well.

From Under the Net, Iris Murdoch

I used to talk a lot with Dave myself about abstract things. I was pleased, when I first got to know him, to hear that he was a phillosopher, and I thought that he might tell me some important truths. But somehow we never seemed to get anywhere, andmost of our conversations consisted of my saying something and Dave's saying he didn't understand me and my saying it again and Dave's getting very impatient. It took me some time to realize that when Dave said he didn't understand, what he meant was that what I said was nonsense.

...

Dave does extramural work for the university, and collects about him many youths who have a part-time interest in truth. Dave's pupils adore him, but there is a permanent fight on between him and them. They aspire like sunflowers. They are all natural metaphysicians, or so Dave says in a tone of disgust. This seems to be a wonderful thing to be, but it inspires in Dave a passion of opposition. To Dave's pupils the world is a mystery; a mystery to which it should be reasonably possible to discover a key. They key would be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some eight hundred pages. To find the key would not necessarily be a simple matter, but Dave's pupils felt sure that the dedication of between four and ten hours a week, excluding university vacations, should suffice to find it. They do not conceive that the matter should be either more simple or more complex than that.

instead of reading about meta-analysis

A limerick fan from Australia
Regarded his work as a failure:
His verses were fine
until the fourth line

dissertation tip #9: DO NOT BE ANYWHERE NEAR AN INTERNET CONNECTION WHEN READING STATISTICS TEXTBOOKS

have decided that the second part of my qualifying exam should be a meta-analysis, and have begun the long and dreary process of actually learning how to do one of them. it's been about a year since i've had to think about the nuts and bolts of statistics, and this time i'm without expert help and staring alone at a very thick and daunting textbook. math really should be done by someone else.

in one of the most alan ball-esque moments of my life to date, i was sitting with some friends in the bar above abyssinia last night when this random woman stumbles along into our conversation, a conversation which rapidly turns to her recent experience in a japanese art/porn museum where the final exhibit was snow white being eaten out by one of the seven dwarves while the others looked on with various expressions of curiosity and disgust. which one? i found myself asking, while simultaneously not wanting to know the answer. she thought about it for a while. it wasn't bashful, she concluded, because he was standing to the side and being a prude. sleepy was...asleep. beyond that, she had no clue. also: the whiskey and soda i ordered came in a tall and very unsophisticated glass, everyone in the room was either an artist or a musician, and there was a very large styrofoam tarantula hanging from the ceiling above five feet above our heads.

neither distrito nor table 31 had good enough food to justify the prices they charged. the general consensus about distrito is that it's nice to have around as a symbol of gentrification in west philly, but that none of us would go there would a meal again. maybe for their margaritas, which were admittedly yummy, but $8 for two miniscule carnitas tacos, not so much. table 31 had their prix fixe restaurant week menu, which was decent i suppose, but unimpressive enough that i wouldn't go back for anything more expensive. the only truly memorable part of the meal was the little mound of peanut ganache that came on top of my "pbj" (a raspberry-peanut butter bar), which was highly reminiscent of the hua sheng hu in the dessert shop i like on purvis street. i think i'm getting to the point where i'd rather go back to places i know i like rather than potentially blow the scarce money i have on things that may be terrible; i know that salento and friday saturday sunday make me quite happy, and i don't go to nice restaurants often enough to soften the blow of having a bad meal.

lamarck all over again

so my one very large complaint about spore is this; back in the bronze age when we were all taking introductory bio and learning about xylem and frangipanni and doing bark rubbings, it was drilled into our heads (not in these exact words) that evolution is not teleological, that blind selection accounts for genetic variation and environmental pressures are what change allelic frequency, i.e. there is no watchmaker, evolution does not "improve" species, etc. now, this may be self-evident for most of us, but i warrant that most of the people you pass on the street will have at best a foggy idea of this concept, and at worse completely misguided lamarckian (or worse) notions. this is bad. what is worse is that spore, a game that purports to be true to principles of evolutionary biology, inadvertently (and completely necessarily) perpetuates these misconceptions by implying that there is a watchmaker (you), and that evolution is goal-driven (to progress to the next stage). i think i'm just going to spend all my time in space so i don't have to think about this horror.

(speaking of space, you can read about gliese 581 for your nerd info of the day).

had our first supervision for this year's clinical practicum. i've heard from friends in other therapy practica that they got thrown in the deep end with patients (borderline pd!) from session 1; the CBT prac is apparently gentler and kinder, and staffed by people who make delicious homemade salsa out of molasses and peaches and poblanos grown in their own backyard. we don't get clients till next month, and only a few at a time so we get to spend less time making phone calls and writing reports and more time making sure we're actually being, well, therapeutic.

otherwise, the semester has been slow in picking up speed -- not having to teach and take 3 classes has made a huge difference in my weekly schedule, and i'm still adjusting to the fact that i have much more time now to do work i should be doing rather than work i have to be doing. discipline is the watchword. must knuckle down and start work on quals.

a poor beginning

we were talking in class today about how there is a significant negative association between levels of fish consumption in society and levels of violent crime (read about it here), which seems to be linked specifically to omega-3 fatty acids. was immediately reminded of course of the silly science research whatsits we did in sec 3 (wasn't it bong and von who were looking at omega-3?), and how mine in particular had no scientific merit whatsoever, being completely devoid of any kind of statistical inference. it occurs to me that even as a means of getting feet wet, the SRP was for many of us a pretty lousy excuse for research, especially compared to the opportunities a*star is providing to kids in short trousers nowadays to do eastern and western and whatever-have-you blots. (here! use our million-dollar machines! oh wait, BONDED!!) thinking back, i realize my cynicism wrt science probably increased severalfold just because of SRP alone, making it a double, nay, treble wonder that i sit here now worrying about structural equation modeling and how on earth i'm going to get it done with my dataset.

more interesting than heat death

so against my better judgment, i've decided to buy spore. hell, it's early in the semester, and it's been a while since my last cycle of indulgence and regret. in case you've been chained up in your basement for the last few years, spore is sim everything, the last in the logical chain of god games, and supposedly faithful to the principles of evolutionary biology. you start off manipulating unicellular organisms, then creatures, then civilizations, then colonize space and control everything. pretty neat.

the brother and i were discussing a few weeks ago, well, where does will wright go from here? and the answer we came up with was this: Sim Sim, a game about programmers of god games, where you control your own maxis-like company, provide facilities, income, have "inspiration" points, market your games, and so forth. ultimately, you aim to grow the company to the stage where its employees create their own version of Sim Sim within the game, thus setting you down the road of infinite recursion. then of course, you could make Sim Sim Sim, in which you control a character who purchases and begins playing Sim Sim, at which point you might walk in on yourself playing the game in the game, thus creating a sort of grandfather paradox, and perhaps destroying the entire fabric of space-time in the process.

anyway. if you've got it as well, share your creatures with me.

consolation

if life were a college class, everyone would get an incomplete.

tokyo pictures (iv)

edo-tokyo museum





tsukiji fish market was closed for the summer holiday, which was one of the few sad things about the trip. we had a lot of great sushi anyway, so there was that.



and finally, hachiko the dog statue

Atlantic City, NJ

i've never been to vegas, but this is supposed to be close. what to say about AC that's original? not too much. think neil gaiman or michael chabon writing about quintessential america and you pretty much have the idea: gaudiness glorified, the only thing too loud is silence etc. the housemate unembarrassedly brought his camera and took shots from the roof of caesar's hotel, a bit much even for me. i finally got to see the real boardwalk and park place and all the rest of them, which was strangely cool. i'll never outgrow geekhood.

dinner: all-you-can-eat, of course; we all took turns insisting that it was part of the definitive supererogatory experience until we realised that no one was actually dissenting. closed our eyes and picked one of the 29 places that had proclaimed themselves the best buffet in town, and the housemate had dessert first, and alyson picked at things, and i had too much mashed potato. buffets make me so ill, but i can't stop going to them. i want to go to vegas right now and gain 20 pounds.

casinos. i always tell myself that i'm never one for gambling, not a risk-taker etc. and then find out that i am. surprised anew. or at least -- that i enjoy it, different perhaps from actually wanting to take risks, hedonic value vs rational desire. the tables have $10 minimums, which for a grad student = "would you like some ramen with your ramen? for the next 8 years?", but we sit down anyway and ss bleeds away $100 and then we go and play video poker, and i try and do a lot of sums in my head and fail. there is plenty of winning and losing and at one point a slot machine mysteriously gives me a lot of money for no particularly good reason, but at the end of the night, i think we're pretty much down, except that we've had lots of free white russians.

and to end on a super-geeky note: go read about the kelly criterion, and be a little more educated.

cultural prostitution

as much as i disliked better luck tomorrow and finishing the game, i assure you that i will hate ping pong playa about ten million times more.

oh wait, i'm not going to watch it. well, that solves that problem.

tokyo pictures (iii)

after an extremely long and warm walk through the nakamise dori, we landed ourselves in an even warmer okonomiyaki restaurant (sometaro) where we sat cross-legged on tatami mats and gulped down ice tea and sweltered. the mother didn't care too much for the place, but i've wanted to cook my own yakisoba onnahotplate all my life, so *raspberry*

for neuroimage

i'm just about done with my third (fourth if you count the cheating internet one) paper -- have given it over to hy for fact-checking, following it which it goes to the senior authors to be mutilated beyond recognition. i hear that the advisor actually edits pretty heavily on the occasions when he actually gets round to reading the paper. let's see whether this will be one of those times.

i've been working in geoff aguirre's lab for the past couple of days because it's one of two places on campus where i can get access to a software package i need, and the other is IRCS (ugh). it's interesting and notable to me that geoff himself seems to spend a fair bit of time in the room working with his (i think) post-docs, being jocund and affable and imparting nuggets of wisdom, and it almost makes me wish i had a young, enthusiastic advisor. almost -- i do realize on a little bit of reflection that i'd probably go mad working for a young advisor almost immediately. the ex-boss is about the limit of what i can endure.

new treadmills

the gym closed for the weekend and reopened with spanking new equipment, including shiny new treadmills that don't creak and bounce around and sound like they're going to explode. also: touch screens. Also: a place where you can hook up your ipod so that you can access your playlist on the touch screen. ALSO: the option to watch videos from your ipod. if you know me, you know where i'm going with this -- i sense that running is going to be a lot more pleasant this year.

semester the fifth

i have one more seminar to take, which i will, grudgingly. no teaching, though, which is a blessed, glorious relief -- grading is just the devil, and not really as gratifying as you would imagine.

we're getting to the stage where what i'm doing resembles what a phd student is actually supposed to do -- what we're not supposed to do is freak out over admin and write papers about things so far out of our field that even a cross-eyed umpire would call it and drink five cups of coffee so that we can work into the early hours of the morning deciphering the illegible handwriting of our kids.

to accomplish: a paper off for review within the next 2 weeks, enough work on a chapter to get second-author billing, try to make my patients happier, or at least not so sad, and get going on the meta-analysis i want to do for my quals. or at least 3 out of 4 of those. or 2.

tokyo pictures (ii)

gonpachi (yakitori restaurant)


appetizer at gonpachi


giant gold parsnip




the mother, looking at snacks


probably the most dog soft toys you'll every see in one place (also my current wallpaper)

tokyo pictures (i)

this is the map we consulted when hopelessly lost on our first day there (looking for our ryokan). i still don't know what the cat represents.



maybe him



onigiri



a supposedly traditional japanese garden, less well-tended than one might expect.



non-traditional garden



meiji jingu shrine. was a bit underwhelmed by the shrine, possibly because i was v hot and not in right (reverential) mood

bloody americans

i thought i was done with sorting out british from american idioms, but when i spoke of marc c and his advisor getting along "like a house on fire" last night at dinner everyone thought i meant exactly the opposite of what i did. which, ok, at a table full of grad students -- not so cool. someone needs to teach people in this country how to speak english.

philadelphia

three of the five people who used to occupy my office are now gone, and only one new person has come in -- this gives me a huge luxury of space, as well as a sense of deep loneliness during working hours. jared is forever off at the hospital or in some mysterious quarter hammering away at his dissertation, which leaves me and the strange new guy who always seems to be doing something on his iphone (how many functions does that thing have?) -- he has not spoken two words to me in the last three days despite my friendly overtures.

i guess it's a big contrast from the ex-lab as well, which was all gregariousness and happy lunches; in the lab here people are old and serious and sad, which i shall have to accustom myself to again. more hanging out with the grad students i guess -- if anyone is reading this, tropic thunder on saturday?

Tokyo, Japan

There will, eventually, be lots of pictures, because those tell the story far better, and frankly I'm too overwhelmed by life to write anything of substance.

I managed to steal a few days of actual vacation from my vacationless summer to go with the mother to Tokyo. For the longest time, I had been feeling embarrassed about the fact that I’d transited through Narita Airport more times than I could remember without ever actually stepping on Japanese soil, and this seemed a fine chance to remedy that.

The experience was, as one may expect, exhausting, but in an entirely good way, a lot of tearing around and navigating the byzantine subway system in order to take in everything we possibly could. What won me over: the people (sort of), the sights (yep), the food (definitely), but above all, the fact that the place was culturally honest, the polar opposite of Tijuana, like what you would expect japan to be, but unostentatious and real. Also: I've never seen so much manga in my life. If only I could read it.

Photos to follow.

we've established by now, i think, that i blog very little while i'm in s'pore.

the summer's gone, i have my data, i've eaten way too much for my own good, and it's time to return. every new year that starts in grad school brings a little more assurance and a lot more fear, the fear because: i have less and less excuse for not being competent, i need more and more desperately to produce good work, and the time is fast approaching when i need to figure out what happens After.

for now: i'm awfully glad i pulled off this stunt -- 24 subjects in 2 months is no mean feat, and to be able to hang out with old friends afterward was just as special.

ok. back to the old snark.

so apparently everyone on earth already reads xkcd or something, but anyway.

while most of the food that delifrance sells is pretty uniformly shit, i do confess an unnatural liking for their cheese pastries, which i've been addicted to since, like, the beginning of time. now that i'm back in the ex-lab i seem to eat them with unconscionable frequency on the excuse that i'm only going to be here a little while. this is not good at all; i am past the age where i can eat calorie-laden buttery things all the livelong day. as minzhi suggested to me earlier in the year, i need a jar of nibbly hamster pellet-like things that are composed of fiber and sawdust and can be grabbed by the handful; that, or dwarf bread.

speakee english

at the 'opera in the park' performance in the botanic gardens on saturday, the emcee proudly announced about 17 times that they were soon going to be putting up turandot, final 't' vocalized and aspirated. at first it was just kind of weird and funny, but by the end of the show none of us were convinced any more that the 't' actually was silent, and had to go and look up just to make sure. solomon asch's findings in action!

also:

the brother: so what does quanto e bella translate to? "when is the girl?"
me: that's a bit metaphysical.
the other brother: "how much is the girl?"

because computers do all the heavy lifting, data analysis always seems somewhat miraculous to me. you throw a whole lot of numbers into a program, there is mysterious rumbling, and then, deep thought like, an answer gets spit out. particularly compelling with imaging data is the fact that you get colorful blobs, but really that just makes me mistrust the invisible process even more. 4-dimensional matrix calculations by hand, anyone?

inflation

ice coffee is now $1.10...have i been gone that long?

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

due to a gag order, i'm forbidden to provide specific details of what i was doing across the causeway; i will, however, post the requisite picture of me in front of the petronas towers, and say that it is much more impressive in real life than in the movies.

also, there were root beer floats, and random people speaking pig latin.

started work in the ex-lab (no, for the last time, i'm not back on vacation). things weren't as weird as i thought they might be -- i was a bit afraid that it would be like overstaying my welcome, or like one too many trips to the buffet table -- but almost everyone's new and it's refreshing to know that the obligation to work is entirely my own. the scanner is new and shiny, and i have a bigger desk than before, and have to make huge important decisions that will change the landscape of science itself (not really).

met minz for lunch. two lunches actually: i was ravenous and her tiny fish burger left a lot to be desired, so we went scampering off to satisfy prata cravings immediately afterward. i am warned that once we become almost-colleagues this may be a regular occurrence (first-lunch, not second), and that i have to be socialized so as to treat her in a proper gentlemanly way (snerk). on the one hand, the tenor of our relationship has long been established, and it would be a shame to change that. on the other, she did present me with a set of coasters with quotations about coffee on them, one of them being:

Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring. ~~Balzac

which is awesome, and earns maybe 2.5 days of gentlemanliness. i shall keep a running tally.

sg

fs tells me i'm not to remind him that this place exists, but it's going to be hard pretending i'm in nicaragua.

i'm back. i managed to get on one of the northwest planes without the small individual video screens, and the sound stopped working on the common screen halfway through the bucket list. does morgan freeman die in the end?

will be in malaysia over the weekend.

i'll be out of here shortly, but first, a song that makes me think of airline terminals and jet lag, and the melancholy of international air travel. have a great summer if i'm not where you are!

If you hate the taste of wine
Why do you drink it until you’re blind?
And if you swear that there’s no truth and who cares
How come you say it like you’re right?
Why are you scared to dream of God
When it’s salvation that you want?
You see stars that clear have been dead for years
But the idea just lives on

In our wheels that roll around
As we move over the ground
And all day it seems
we’ve been in between the past and future town

We are nowhere, and it’s now
We are nowhere, and it’s now

You took a ten-minute dream in the passenger seat
While the world it was flying by
I haven’t been gone very long
But it feels like a lifetime

I’ve been sleeping so strange at night
Side effects they don’t advertise
I’ve been sleeping so strange
With a head full of pesticide

I got no plans and too much time
I feel too restless to unwind
I’m always lost in thought
As I walk a block to my favorite neon sign
Where the waitress looks concerned
But she never says a word
Just turns the jukebox on
And we hum along
And I smile back at her

And my friend comes after work
When the features start to blur
She says these bars are filled with things that kill
And you probably should have learned

Did you forget that yellow bird?
How could you forget that yellow bird?

She took a small silver wreath and pinned it onto me
She said this one will bring you love
I don’t know if it’s true but I keep it for good luck

(bright eyes: we are nowhere and it's now)

memorial day

some belatedly-uploaded photos from the memorial day cookout at jared's. by the bye, i've been very remiss with the 2-year-old promise of more photos on this stupid blog, which i will work very hard on changing. i permit you to scold me severely if i continue to default.

alyson, steven, nuwan and eranda

(weird)nick, eranda, alyson

grace and waldo

morning glory

while sabrina's cafe still is the undisputed champion of brunch in philly, and rx holds a special place in my heart, i would highly recommend morning glory, which has the fattest, fluffiest, most gorgeous biscuits i've eaten in my life. get there early, though -- kinjal and i waited almost an hour to get a table, a good part of it (unfortunately) in the rain. (for a full review and pictures, go here)

there was a mini-conference at penn yesterday at which i presented some of my results -- the last major thing before i leave this place on monday for my summer of fretting and anxiety. the talk went well, and i was settling down to enjoy the rest of the proceedings when some effing jerk of a doctor came over to me and started asking a whole bunch of questions obviously designed to expose the ignorance he must have thought i had. while it is true that many people nowadays are doing fmri work with no clue of the limitations of the methodology, i'm well beyond being one of those people, and seriously resented the implication. i've mentioned recently that respect is the currency of academia, and i feel that for all the suffering i've been through to get here i should be given a little bit more of it, absence of letters after my name notwithstanding.

the after-conference was great -- drinks at la terrasse, apparently known to all but me as LT, thus reestablishing one of the more peculiar motifs in my life. dr. sb got a bit tipsy and started bitching about lab members present and gone. our lab has a very unusual history -- our PI used to be the famous martin orne, who did a lot of the pioneering (and highly controversial) research on hypnosis and false memory. events in the 70s and 80s leading eventually to the advisor's takeover apparently involve deceit and betrayal worthy of the great soap operas, but all that history is highly secret, and guarded closely by mysterious elderly people in our lab who are still on the payroll even though they don't do any work. it's all highly thrilling, and every once in a while i get a small tidbit, which i squirrel away in memory for the day i publish my shocking expose. incid: someone should print out this entry so that if i'm found dead in a gutter somewhere one of these days justice can be sought.

we had more beer. R(s)ODPFBSE appeared, then happy hour ended and we decided we would much rather drink jared's tequila than buy $6 beers. plus: he now has molds for making ice shot glasses, which are so awesome i almost feel i shouldn't be writing about them. the housemate ended up tagging along, and (weird)nick and laura and christian. and we stayed out till pretty late, and ended up outside the cvs singing irish songs at 2 in the morning and somehow not being killed.

the unfortunate truth

i saw some rather amusing data today that suggests that scientists only actually read 20% of the articles that they cite in their papers, this discovered by tracing citation errors as they're transmitted through the literature. i freely admit here that i'm probably one of the culprits, although i'll also say in all honesty that i try to at least have a copy every paper i cite (and read the abstract). also, i'm certainly batting more than a .2 average. give me a few more years though...

the recent study that came out my lab(s) has been all over the news the past couple of days...here's the cnn video if you're interested.

(the media, as I'm sure you've guessed, has completely trivialized the findings, not to mention put up horrible and inaccurate brain pictures, but c'est la vie).

John Horgan:

There are moments when I teeter on the edge of belief that nature cares. The occasion may be mundane. I may be raking leaves of a gray fall day, drinking a glass of wine with my wife, Suzie, on our deck at sunset, waiting with my son and daughter at the end of the driveway for the morning school bus to arrive. Gratitude wells up in me as a kind of yearning, as strong as hunger or sexual desire. I want to thank someone, something, for all that I have ...(Yet) a God who deserves thanks for my good fortune, I had to remind myself, also deserves blame for the misery of countless others. Thanking this God for all I have would be obscene. I would be saying, in effect, "Thank you, God, for not screwing me like you've screwed all those other poor bastards.

after watching iron man and the new indiana jones with jared and co., i think i can safely conclude that summer movies just aren't the same without the passing of snarky comments, and having someone's fingernails in my flesh at each cheesy line uttered.

today

i sat at the the bar all alone for fifteen minutes waiting for my friends and sipping scotch, and for a fleeting second felt like humphrey bogart in casablanca, just before ilsa lund walks in.

i'm done with clinic hours for the year, and would just like to wrap up by saying that it was, in many ways, what i expected. scary, primarily; i don't think any of us really felt like we knew what we were doing until fairly late in the year, and the supervisor was not one for positive feedback and support. but many other things too: moving, and sad, and life-affirming, evidence otherwise unobtainable that for all the blackness in this cold world, people still struggle on and claw their way inch by inch towards whatever redemption may be given them.

i think this is because there's something very powerful about sharing stories, and really, in the short time i've had with each client this year, that was one of the key things i had to get people to do. so i've listened to many raw, true stories, told by people who knew we were ethically bound to never pass them on, and being in that assessment room, listening to those narratives, not holding them in judgment, has been one of the most real things i've ever had to do, and i almost felt sometimes that i didn't want to taint them by writing them down, generating a report, diagnosing, arranging the clutter and mess into something organized and meaningful. that was my least favorite part of the job: interpreting. no, nothing compared to the moment, the struggling with words, the tears and the closeness. in my life so far, i don't think anything else has ever been quite so true.

if you have several hours to kill (this is good for wasting time surreptitiously in the office, but you didn't hear it from me), may i recommend alter ego (based on real psychological principles!)

the last time i saw han, we were cooking dinner, and discussing the human genome project, and generally feeling that those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end, and so forth. a very long 4 years have passed since then, during which time he moved to missouri for grad school, and i suffered through my trials and tribulations, and we sent messages to each other on AIM once a year saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY and MERRY CHRISTMAS and HOPE YOU'RE WELL and other such platitudes.

so han's in town now to see his brother graduate, and duke WH and i met him for dinner and drinks at nodding head and schubert's symphony in c major* at the kimmel center. he's hale and hearty and completely the same as he ever was; plus ca change, etc. i miss duke. penn's having its reunions now, and everything's red white and blue balloons and fight songs and hugs and misty eyes, and that's helping none at all.


* schubert was very turquoise, very controlled. it was christoph eschenbach's last concert here, and in true american hypocritical form, everyone stood and clapped for him for a million years even though they all hated him when he first arrived. another reason to be filled with self-doubt here; you never know when people truly think you're good, or if they're just filled with the occasion.

the housemate successfully defended his master's thesis on wednesday, which was a cause for much rejoicing and a trip to marigold, where they have tiny portions of very delicious food at exorbitant prices. i was assured, however, that all produce is purchased locally, from to farm to your plate, etc. highlights included some most excellent ham ("wigwam") in an eggs benedict-like creation, chicken liver pate on brioche, and sublime poached salmon.

classes: done
grading: done
clinic: one more bloody report to write
research: more or less never-ending. having to worry about the the summer project i'm running in the ex-lab is wearing, and it doesn't help that there's no one else to worry with me about it. i need to stop, and do some reframing. i need to feel...like this is exciting, and not just intensely scary. i need to feel that, if nothing else, in a few weeks i'll be able to get prata, and hang out with people, and possibly get a little sleep.

a plug for a new documentary by the other housemate's friend, which looks utterly gorgeous and is most worthy of your attention.

so i have, finally, watched citizen kane, and now know the significance of why rosebud was his sled. one small candle. if you haven't watched it yet, i'm going to spoil the story for you here (sorry) because it's the whole point of this post. in brief: charles foster kane is abandoned by his parents, is reckless and controversial and bipolar, grows an yooge newspaper empire, is rich beyond his dreams, marries several times, builds xanadu, retreats into his pleasure dome, and dies uttering the single word 'rosebud'. which, as we have said, was the name of his sled when he was just a little boy, asking his mother 'what will i be?' what does a man profit if he gain the whole world but loses his life, etc.

because this really is an archetype for this kind of story, it started me thinking, and contrasting it with all the research that says that really, the moral of such tales is not true. rich people don't have any more existential crises than poor people; there's no necessary correlation between wealth and the sort of shylock misery that's portrayed in these stories. and the same thing goes for people who go chasing rainbows and waterfalls and breaking themselves apart for the things they call dreams -- they don't necessarily end up happy; sometimes you get right back, coehlo-style (ugh) to where you began, and find that what you were chasing wasn't what you really wanted.

yet the rainbow-pursuing life is painted as the ideal, and i think that's because it's such a dominant narrative, so readily accessible in people's minds. it's not that the other stories are not there -- think sally in forrest gump, or emile hirsch in the recent (and wonderful) into the wild*, in which, yes, it is your prerogative to give away all your money and go live as an eremite in alaska, but most of the time when you do that you waste away and poison yourself on inedible berries.

but that's not the story that sticks with people; the two dominant narratives are citizen kane, and jeff bridges in lebowski: be rich and lose your soul, or be picaresque, and paint with all the colors of the wind, and really be true to yourself, and live a glorious, irresponsible life. which brings me to the point, and the issue that minz and i were discussing a couple of days ago, which is that just because we're doing what we want to do doesn't mean that our lives aren't fricking hard. happiness, self-actualization, both of those are unrelated to the daily grind, and (i painfully admit), doing "meaningful" work does not give you a leg up to achieve either of them. and i apologize if i have to say this a hundred different times in a hundred different ways on this blog, but this really is one of the very central things to me, and it helps me if you ponder it, and understand, and remember.


* please do yourself a favor and go see this movie if you haven't. if for no other reason than to see that emile hirsch can actually act, and that the person who persuaded him to do speed racer is truly trying to screw up his career. also, if you went to see speed racer, i don't want to know about it

from last night's house (4x14):

EVAN
They told me I have an autoimmune disease, like lupus or sarcoidosis.

HOUSE
That's what we're here to find out

EVAN
You really as good as everyone seems to think you are?

HOUSE
You really as miserable as everyone seems to think you are?

EVAN
I just want to do something that matters.

HOUSE
Nothing matters. We're all just cockroaches. Wildebeests dying in the riverbank. Nothing we do has any lasting meaning.

EVAN
And you think I'm miserable?

HOUSE
If you're unhappy on the plane, jump out of it.

EVAN
I want to, but I can't.

HOUSE
That's the problem with metaphors; they need interpretation. Jumping out of the plane is stupid.

EVAN
But what if I'm not in a plane? What if I'm just in a place I don't want to be?

HOUSE
That's the other problem with metaphors...yes, what if you're actually in an ice-cream truck, and outside are candy and flowers and virgins? You're on a plane! We're all on planes. Life is dangerous and complicated and it's a long way down.

EVAN
So you're afraid of change?

HOUSE
No, you're afraid to change. You'd rather imagine that you can escape instead of actually try, because if you fail then you've got nothing. So you'll give up the chance of something real so you can hold on to hope. Thing is, hope is for sissies.

i know it's terribly wrong that i take so many of my life lessons from tv and the movies, but can you really disagree when hugh laurie says something like that to you?

made paella in commemoration of the mother being in spain -- it's true; the burned bits at the bottom of the pan are indeed the best part.

department of complaints and (slight) melancholy

1. an article came out today in nature neuroscience by someone i know (a singaporean) reporting very exciting findings on pre-conscious neural activity (an extension of the ben libet/dan wegner experiments, but with a sophisticated and very cool new method). this meant a whole day spent in moping and jealousy and talking to minz and daniel for comfort, as well as agonizing about the fact that no one else would really understand why this was causing me so much grief.

2. today was the last day of classes. the semester on the whole has been unkind to me -- too much time spent doing utterly useless classwork, and grading exams, and being accosted by stupid-ass undergraduates. i've also come to accept that i'll probably never be steady and competent, and need to have a brilliant idea fairly soon if i want to have a career, or not starve.

3. also today: ben and jerry's free cone day. every other fellow in the line was a homeless person, which made me feel extremely depressed. not because homeless people disgust me or anything -- i'm rather fond of buying them sandwiches -- but because there something just totally antithetical to the spirit of free cone day about that happening.

4. once you start reading nutritional information, you pretty much can't eat anything.

murderous rage

i swear to god, if i get one more piece of spam entitled "order a phd"...

(as roy clark sang)

Yesterday, when I was young,
The taste of life was sweet as rain upon my tongue,
I teased at life as if it were a foolish game,
The way the evening breeze may tease a candle flame

The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned,
I always built, alas, on weak and shifting sand,
I lived by night and shunned the naked light of day,
And only now I see how the years ran away

Yesterday, when I was young,
So many happy songs were waiting to be sung,
So many wild pleasures lay in store for me,
And so much pain my dazzled eyes refused to see

I ran so fast that time and youth at last ran out,
I never stopped to think what life was all about,
And every conversation, I can now recall,
Concerned itself with me, and nothing else at all

Yesterday, the moon was blue,
And every crazy day brought something new to do,
I used my magic age as if it were a wand,
And never saw the waste and emptiness beyond

The game of love I played with arrogance and pride,
And every flame I lit too quickly, quickly died,
The friends I made all seemed somehow to drift away,
And only I am left, on stage to end the play

There are so many songs in me that won't be sung,
I feel the bitter taste of tears upon my tongue,
The time has come for me to pay,
For yesterday, when I was young

Surprisingly poignant: One Sentence. On a similar note, check out Duke's Me Too blog.

smashing pumpkins

fantastic

oh cp can it be 10 years ago please

Muppet Danny Boy

just like old times

From Peace On Earth, Stanislaw Lem

Professor Tarantoga is of the opinion that people need two things. First, an answer to the question "Who is responsible?" and second, to the question "What is the secret?" The first answer should be brief, obvious, and unambiguous. As for the second, scientists have been annoying everyone for two hundred years with their superior knowledge. How nice to see them baffled by the Bermuda Triangle, flying saucers, and the emotions of plants, and how satisfying it is when a simple middle-aged woman of Paris can see the whole future while on that subject the professors are ignorant as spoons.

primary

if you're in pennsylvania, you should be voting instead of reading this blog you irresponsible bum.

i've developed what i think is called bruxism from the stress of grad school, and have to do exposure therapy on myself 18 times a day to make sure that i still have teeth by the time i graduate. i can recognize the triggers: presentations, having to run review sessons/teach classes, in-class exams, and, after all this time, clinical supervision. i don't know how much the working people get this, but it's a horrible feeling to be constantly judged; loving the work is not the same as loving assessment, and the assessment, it never ends.

had my committee meeting in the morning, in which geoff and martha took turns ripping my study design into itty bitty pieces, and then setting those pieces on fire. even though this was precisely the reason i wanted them on my committee in the first place, it still hurts when it happens. in much, much better news, i finally summoned up the courage to ask if i could use the review paper i wrote as part of my qualifying exams, and the answer was that i most definitely can, which significantly reduces the amount of ass-busting i need to do next year. round of drinks for everyone!

dan dennett gave a talk in the evening on memes and cultural evolution -- he has taken richard dawkins famous idea and run with it, perhaps a little too far. in the very first place, i'm not sure i accept the strong form of human exceptionalism, and without that piece i just can't buy into cultural evolution superceding and overriding genetic evolution. i'm willing to be persuaded though -- i'm sure that von knows a lot more about the topic than i do, and perhaps we shall discuss the particulars some day soon.

thomas managed to snag tickets for yesterday's taping of the colbert report in zellerbach -- it's the first time they've brought the show on the road, and they're here to cover the primaries (april 22nd) and be generally awesome. i wouldn't say that i was the world's hugest fan of stephen colbert before this, but i do love seeing the stuff that happens behind the scenes on tv shows, which explains the one time i suffered through the who wants to be a millionaire taping in singapore with fs, in which we try our damndest to provide the wrong answer every time they polled the audience (it failed.)

even with pre-ordered tickets, the line for admission began at 4 pm, which meant i had to invent an excuse to get out of class early. i normally would have no qualms about this, but our 2-5 class on mondays is ethics. you can go figure that one on your own. anyway, i chose to live with the guilt, and we joined the line, and ate big oversweet almond cookies, and enjoyed the spring sunshine. with the metal detectors and whatnot, it took about 2 hours to get inside. the circular daily show desk had come on the trip from new york, but everything else on the set was custom-made, including a colbert report kite, and a fake 18th-century escritoire complete with quill.

they had a not-very-funny comedian warm us up, and then after a million years stephen came out and answered a few questions while not in character ('have you had a cheesesteak yet?'). he's not altogether unlike his onscreen persona, just...less so? i think it's the voice that makes him. anyhow they started taping, and the first surprise was that the show is edited together pretty much on the spot -- WYSYWIG. he did a duet of the star-spangled banner with penn alum john legend before the cold open. michael nutter and chris matthews were guests, and it was let slip that both michelle obama and hillary were going to be on later in the week, which kind of sucks balls, since we had a choice of which day we wanted to go on. there was a lot of frantic rewriting during the breaks, and i fell even more in love with the job of tv writer, which is on the list of careers i'll pursue if i drop out of grad school (somewhere just after selling beach umbrellas in koh samui).

it was a pretty cool evening, something different from going home to read endless journal articles anyway. more like those, please?

i have saved percy 3 long enough, and can take it no more.

with the semester winding down, the undergrads have begun their extended pre-summer/graduation festivities, which seem to consist of dunking, free concerts, and a lot of beer pong. also: not going to class, which annoys me far more than it should.

as i was explaining to norah the other day, you either get to complain about the amount of work you have or take four-day weekends, but not both. that's the ivy league sense of entitlement -- not that life shouldn't be hard, but that life should be easy yet have the facade of being hard so they can complain about it. it's the exact same deal with asians fighting the overachiever stereotype. i was watching better luck tomorrow* the other day; its protagonist is the top-scoring asian kid who makes the basketball team, experiments with coke and runs with a bunch of hooligans who go around scamming other rich californian kids. in other words: i have to attempt to wreck my life so that i can lament about how stereotypes have ruined me. i just have very little sympathy for that kind of thing, although i allow that it might be a part of adolescence, and try and muster up kindness towards its perpetrators in that way.

* despite the good reviews, i also thought it was a pretty terrible movie in general.

we're having a rash of really good lecturers come along: first christoff koch who talked about the neural correlates of consciousness, and now steven pinker, who was guest lecturer at an award ceremony for students of exceptional talent (not me). the room was full of non-science types, so he had to give a somewhat non-technical talk that was not terribly informative but highly entertaining. he's recently turned to studying innuendo and swearing, and led off byspeaking about the FCC's uproar over bono saying "fucking brilliant" on live tv in 2004, an act of miscreancy that provoked conservatives to present this bill to the house of representatives:

To amend section 1464 of title 18, United States Code, to provide for the punishment of certain profane broadcasts, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That section 1464 of title 18, United States Code, is amended--

(1) by inserting `(a)' before `Whoever'; and
(2) by adding at the end the following: `(b) As used in this section, the term `profane', used with respect to language, includes the words `shit', `piss', `fuck', `cunt', `asshole', and the phrases `cock sucker', `mother fucker', and `ass hole', compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).'.

hysterical. i just love watching people getting their knickers in a twist over this stuff, mostly because it doesn't do an ounce of good anyway. (for the true dregs of what america has come up with, check out the parents television council.) plus, they don't get to watch dexter, which is the awesomeness, and in which the word 'fuck' is used in ways you would never have imagined.

at the end of FNL 2x08, when landry turns himself in, there's this song by sea wolf playing in the background: "well I woke up this morning/and I made a resolution/
I said: never going to sing another sad song again./I decided I'd admit it/I'm not an intellectual/Though the words never come easy unless I'm singing them/And the hills that I was born in will never leave me/No matter how hard I try." it's really quite lovely, and yet another reason to adore the show, and be constantly grateful that it's been renewed.

some days all i want to do is make lists: places to see before i die, books i read in primary school, people i know but have not seen for more than 5 years, bands i would like to see perform live, scientific theories i think are both aesthetic and have genuine merit, times i've broken the law, restaurants i'd like to eat in, songs whose lyrics i can recite perfectly, secrets, times i've wanted to just let go and scream, ice cream flavors, NCAA basketball champions since 1939, rich people who don't deserve to be, days when i've woken up in the morning thinking: "today is going to be a good day", things i would not do for a million dollars, people who i would like to shake until their teeth rattle, monuments, museums, saints, airports i've been in, nights without sleep, canteen uncles and aunties, movies filmed in hawaii, presents that truly meant something to me, times in my life when i stopped and took a deep breath and actually saw the world for what it was and was still grateful to be alive, songs in A minor, gyri, brands of deodorant, bridges, sources of deep and indelible embarrassment, movies i like because i like them and not because other people do, five things i would ask for if stranded on a desert island, people in my CMC platoon, subatomic particles, things worth living for, things worth dying for.

funnily, pineapples have figured in my life for the past 3 days -- thursday: as a motif in chungking express, friday: as a snack during the battlestar galactica season 4 premiere, and saturday: at a fake luau that the hawaiian housemate rounded us up to attend. said luau was filled with undergrads, and the few of us who went all felt like we were 58, and i had to call fs midway through for solace.

Learned Hand, on voting:

I don't know how it is with you, but for myself I generally give up at the outset. The simplest problems which come up from day to day seem to me quite unanswerable as soon as I try to get below the surface... My vote is one of the most unimportant acts of my life; if I were to acquiaint myself with the matters on which I was willing to risk affairs of even the smallest moment, I should be doing nothing else, and that seems a fatuous conclusion to a fatuous undertaking.

John Searle, on constructing social reality:

If, for example, we give a big cocktail party, and invite everyone in Paris, and things get out of hand, and it turns out that the casualty rate is greater than the Battle of Austerlitz -- all the same, it is not a war; it is just one amazing cocktail party.

check out the gorgeous website of per se in new york, where i will dine at least once when i am not poor.

kinjal just got back from a one-week trip into the rainforests of costa rica, a remarkable act of daring considering that her qualifying exams are less than a month away. a week without e-mail or cell phone contact at any time of the year seems inconceivable to me now, but i'm always open to accomplishing the impossible. she looks so refreshed that i've almost convinced myself that it's something i need, what with exhaustion threatening to overcome me so much of the time.

i'm taking our required ethics class now, which has put me to thinking about priest-penitent privilege and its various ramifications. even in the old days, this was one of the things that always made me a little uncomfortable -- that priests are legally obliged to uphold the seal of the confessional no matter what the crime. in the united states, the clergy are the only people for whom this applies -- secrecy is mandated even in cases of reported child abuse or homicidal intention. for now this is only changing at the state level, but when, as will happen, the matter reaches the the supreme court, a decision either way is going to be serious business. one way, child abusers go free, the other, the church is forced to ante up its parishioners' souls. this sounds a bit like a false dilemma, but i think it's nearer the truth than you might suspect, and certainly something to think about if you're of a religious persuasion.

i've had a thing for walter moers for a while now, but i have to say that the city of dreaming books is probably his best novel to date. particularly because of the section on booklings and orming. booklings are cycoplean creatures who live deep in the catacombs under Bookholm, and devote their lives to memorizing the complete works of an author after which they're named. i don't know how this was accomplished in the german, but in the english translation (of the german translation from zamonian), the booklings' names are anagrams of the names of real-world authors. thus: Perla la Gadeon:

Hear the loud Bookholmian bells --
brazen bells
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
how they screamed out their affright
Too much horrified to speak,
they can only shriek, shriek...

and Bethelzia B. Binngrow (an albino bookling with a watery red eye), among many other delightfuls. this guy here has compiled a list of all of them -- i confess that there are a few which escape me, but i haven't given up yet.

things that made me unhappy this week

1. horrible undergraduates (now and forever)
2. 450 pages of reading
3. uncooperative custard (why didn't you set?)
4. wvu 73 duke 67

spring break's over. my aim for the next 6 weeks: have enough time to eat and sleep.

(st. paddy's day was fun, though. no green beer, but hookahs at byblos made up for that.)

ok, so you know this one, but i've never blogged it, and it speaks to my feelings quite well.

       The Stranger Within My Gate

The stranger within my gate.
He may be true or kind.
But he does not talk -
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well.
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell.
We do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.

The Stranger within my gates.
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control -
what reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
May repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least they hear the things I hear
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf - And the grapes be all one vine
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

               Rudyard Kipling

wallet

i found a louis vuitton wallet outside the gym today.

(it irks me when things like that happen. if i ever lose my wallet, especially in west philly, i just know that it's going to be picked up my some schmoe who will proceed to spend the cash on crack and throw everything else away. i expect that, not because i'm a cynic, but because of statistics; there are just more schmoes than non-schmoes. it's the asymmetry that irritates me. if you're the kind of person who would not return a wallet you found on the street, then you're not going to be as annoyed when no one returns yours, because that's your worldview -- you would have done the same. on the other hand, if you're the kind of person who wouldn't think twice about turning in a wallet, you're unhappy even if you are aware of the odds, because others are not doing unto you as you would have done unto them. there's an inherent unfairness which doesn't get rectified, unless you believe in karma, in which case i have some tea leaves i'd like you to read.)

anyway, i searched the wallet to try and get the name and address of its owner, and found two things of interest: (1) a licence to carry firearms, and (2) a handwritten note from his girlfriend saying (among other things) that they had won a significant amount of money in the lottery, and that she was giving him the ticket so that he could go claim the winnings. ok. no lottery ticket in the wallet, though, which fortunately relieved me from a rather terrible moral quandry. (honestly, what would you do if you found a wallet with a ticket worth, say, half a million dollars in it? isn't that the kind of thing that only happens in movies? which reminds me, a simple plan is a pretty good film on just that subject.)

the next thought that crossed my mind was: this is a little suspicious. who writes notes like that? and where else would you keep a lottery ticket besides your wallet? the situation was beginning to resemble hornstein's famous experiment*, where they left wallets with letters in them (from a "previous finder") all around new york to see whether similarity between previous and current finder led to a greater likelihood of a wallet being returned. the wallet was right outside pottruck, the amount of money in it was about right, and it seemed like the perfect manipulation to make you less likely to return it (less cognitive dissonance because: "bah, he doesn't need the money anyway.") i was about two blocks away from the gym by the time this occurred to me, and i considered going back to look for an undergraduate surreptitiously taking notes across the street in an unmarked van, but by that time i was hungry and very near the curry shop and decided that i was being ridiculous.

over briyani, i considered this further. if i really did believe that the whole affair was a setup, should i keep the money? i've done lab experiments before that involve the dictator game, which i'll let wikipedia describe because i'm tired of typing.

In the dictator game, the first player, "the proposer," determines an allocation (split) of some endowment (such as a cash prize). The second player, the "responder," simply receives the remainder of the endowment not allocated by the proposer to himself. The responder's role is entirely passive (he has no strategic input into the outcome of the game). As a result, the dictator game is not formally a game at all (as the term is used in game theory). To be a game, every player's outcome must depend on the actions of at least some others. Since the proposer's outcome depends only on his own actions, this situation is one of decision theory and not game theory. Despite this formal point, the dictator game is used in the game theory literature as a degenerate game.

This "game" has been used to test the homo economicus model of individual behavior: if individuals were only concerned with their own economic well being, proposers (acting as dictators) would allocate the entire good to themselves and give nothing to the responder. Experimental results have indicated that individuals often allocate money to the responders, reducing the amount of money they receive. These results appear robust, Henrich, et al. discovered in a wide cross cultural study that proposers do allocate a non-zero share of the endowment to the responder.

i can tell you that the feeling of wanting to share the money is very compelling, but knowing the literature has completely hardened my heart, and on the two occasions i've had to play this (both times i was the proposer, luckily, enough), i kept everything (which is the normative thing to do). wouldn't this be an analogous case if i believed it were an experiment? i re-read the note, and looked through the rest of the wallet (business cards, check card, health insurance, supermarket discount card), and decided that if it were fake, it was nevertheless very convincing. ah, well. the powerball jackpot is at $275 million this weekend. maybe i'll get in on some of that action on my own.

* you need to have APA subscription to access the full article, unfortunately, but e-mail me if you want it.

insult

From U.S. News and World Report:

Overrated Career: Clinical Psychologist
By Marty Nemko
Posted December 19, 2007

The Appeal: You'll work one-on-one with clients in a private, peaceful setting, helping them conquer their inner demons.

The Reality: Research is revealing that many psychological problems have physiological roots, taking some of the luster off traditional psychotherapy. Some psychologists end up questioning their own value. Also, people are turning toward short-term cognitive therapists or personal coaches, who focus less on analyzing your childhood and more on developing pragmatic, step-by-step plans for solving problems, moving forward, and reaching goals.

You know, it's not that I even really consider my profession as clinical psychologist (to be), but I wish he had at least gotten his facts right. It's incredibly insulting to suggest that psychodynamic therapy is all that clinical psychologists know how to do -- it's probably one of the things I'm going to end up not knowing how to do. And who does he suppose provides CT? ExRP? Interoceptive exposure? Has he even heard of those things? Also, the students in our department probably know more about the physiology of mental disorders than some psychiatrists. So really, Mr. Nemko, you can take your opinions and stick them where the sun doesn't shine. That is all.

In the absence of anything interesting to say (it's spring break, and my mind has gone very soft), i'll leave you with 10 questions that you should consider so that you don't get caught off guard if you should one day have to answer them. In order of seriousness:

1) If you were given the option to be cryonically frozen after your death, but before the point of information-theoretic death (with the understanding that you'd be resuscitated once medicine could revive you), would you take it?

2) What about being a brain-in-a-jar (like in Roald Dahl's William and Mary?)

3) Uploaded onto a computer?

4) Memory enhancers that allow you to recover memories you thought were lost. Kosher?

5) If offered to you, would you take Ritalin?

6) Modafinil?

7) Undergo gene therapy to enhance your cognition?

8) Would you rather be paralyzed from the waist down, or lose all your autobiographical memories?

9) Would you agree to learn how to dissociate so as to create an alternate personality that was more assertive/congenial/diplomatic/aggressive/whatever character trait you're lacking in, with the understanding that you could switch back and forth between personalities at will (without any between-persona amnesia)?

10) If you were told, and believed, that we were indeed in The Matrix, would you take the red pill?

social psych went all the way till 7:30, by which time everyone decided that they had had it for the week. (that the undergrads were fleeing town en masse for spring break was also a contributing factor). we converged on lolita, a mexican BYOT, the T in question being tequila, of course, though not patrón as jokingly promised (boo!). there were people at the table who were not psych grad students, so the rule was instituted early that talking shop = take a shot, which led to people becoming very drunk very fast. weirdest penalty of the night given out for: "barry manilow t-shirt" (if you can tell me where that came from without googling it you get a prize the next time i see you). lolita has really good food, although in retrospect i would not have ordered the pechuga de pato (fried plantains, jicana-radish slaw), which was not really what i wanted. (steak would hve hit the spot.) the appetizers were superb: orange-ginger glazed carnitas with guacamole and pico de gallo, a soupy thing with chicken and huitlacoche (sort of like a stringy xue er), and warm, exceedingly fresh tortilla chips.

we went to a rather pathetic pyb after that, and i got the hiccups, and people starting dancing spastically. there was a live band, and they were alright until "don't stop believing", at which time i had decided that even $1 beer wasn't going to keep me there, and that i had better be reasonably sober to do my mri scans, which i discovered to my alarm were about 6 hours away. the housemate and rebecca and i escaped in a cab, and r. taught me the BEST TRICK EVER to get rid of hiccups, which is concentrate on getting your pinky fingers as close together as possible without letting them touch. and then it was 2, and then i had to get up, and i did my stupid experiment hung over, though fortunately no one noticed.

run #9

we discovered a big dark spot on the structural MRI of one of our subjects, about the fourth time this has happened to me since i started doing this kind of research. i've come to understand that these funny patches are nearly always benign, but having to go to a radiologist and wait for judgment to be passed is still a nerve-wracking experience. this time round: fatty deposits. net result: 2 hours of extra paperwork on a wednesday evening

a bunch of people weren't free to come to reading club, so we sat in elisabeth's house instead and ate homemade mapo tofu and leftover fried rice and had intelligent conversation. elisabeth is studying hebrew and arabic and other such lit-ty things, and is currently translating her way through the book of ezekiel with a small group of brave souls. they're also learning new (hebrew) vocabulary at the rate of 100 words/week, starting from the most common and working their way down. (me: "what is the most common word in the bible?" her: "and.")



following which we watched the first six episodes of the tick, which is so awesomely bad that it's good. ("you know, when a tomato grows out of your forehead, it gets you thinking. what do we know about anything? life is just a big, wild, crazy, tossed salad. but you don't eat it, no sir, you live it! isn't it great?")

dissertation tip #8