cognitive enhancement, haxxorz, and the pleasure machine

i have been interested for a while now in cognitive enhancement, and why some people find certain forms of enhancement more acceptable than others. for instance, taking beta blockers to calm ones nerves before a concert recital is generally considered ok, whereas taking ritalin before an exam is not. there are several variables that may explain this, and i'm not going to get into each of them, but i think one of the more interesting of these is the perception that certain drugs alter ones essential self more than others. that is to say, the intuition is that the concert pianist is using the drug to allow her "true" ability to shine through, whereas the student is adding something to his "natural" talent that he does not rightfully possess. as a corollary, there are certain abilities that one can and should work towards in order to "deserve" them, and others where popping a pill and circumventing the work is absolutely kosher.

this is a rather cool theory, which brings to mind a number of other thought experiments (e.g. what about genetic enhancement? if you have it in a test tube from birth, is that "cheating" as well?) what i really want to talk about here, though, are haxxorz*. now, i don't play a lot of online games, but enough to know that hax are rife in most of them, and that in a small but significant number of cases are used to break a game entirely. i'll use mario kart wii here as an example, because i've played it a bunch on nintendo wifi, and have used it as a vehicle for similar discussions i've had with the brother and justin. also, you presumably know the point of mario kart wii. it's racing. you know, where you try and go faster than the other guy.

so people have haxed this game in a number of ways, giving themselves infinite items, but also cheating so that their finish time registers as .001 seconds no matter when they actually finish. in other words, no matter what happens, they win, end of story. now, if they did this for the sheer hell of doing it (or, for the lulz, as it were), i could at least understand the psychology behind it, but after careful observation, i've concluded that some people do it because they actually want to win that way. this may seem trivial, but think about a real-world example. if you could take a pill which would allow you to go out tomorrow and win an olympic gold medal in the 100m sprint (but only that, you don't have superhuman speed otherwise), what would it be worth to you (assuming every knew that you took the pill)? the answer, of course, if $0.00. and yet some people spend hours of their time online doing this. i think this constitutes some real and interesting evidence that for some people, the value of winning does not arise from the presence of competition. i would like to find these people and stick them in a scanner asap.

final thought experiment, which you may have heard of: you can hook yourself up to a pleasure machine, in which for the rest of your (real) life you live out a simulation of a perfectly ideal and pleasurable existence: would you do it? for all the same reasons mentioned above, most people perceive this as "cheating", and would not. you may feel that way too. i'm not so sure, though -- authenticity seems at least somewhat overrated, and for all you know, we're in the matrix already, in which case, the joke's really on you if you don't plug in and go enjoy that bottle of scotch.

k. back to real work.


*urban dictionary:

Noun, Plural; a group of people with an unfair advantage over others. Also an insult used in online gaming used against players who possess more skill than the competition. negative conotation.
"F'in n00b HAXXORZ!!!!"
"ZOMG u HAXXORZ no wai!"

a very large group of us descended on abyssinia last night, including some of the first-year students who haven't made an appearance since the beginning-of-the-year party. there was no beer, and i had an extended conversation with e. who tried to make luo po gao but could only find turnips and rice flour and none of the other ingredients that go into it. also, i'm pretty sure (although correct me if i'm wrong) that you have to wrap the cake in some kind of cloth before you steam it, in a manner similar to suet pudding. e. has also been hired by our lab to help the russians translate a particular psychometric scale into russki, something i find highly suspect, because (a) aren't there bilingual people in russia? (b) this is one of those top-secret things involving astronauts being sequestered in fake space capsules at the bottom of the tunguska river, and (c) shouldn't russian cosmonauts* have to know english anyway in order to communicate with the americans who are on the mission with them?

i trailed along with some people who were going to second dinner at a pizza place because they needed to carbo load for a 20-mile run, and we had beer and dina ordered the grossest buffalo wings in the history of civilization, and we discussed whether they teach you what to do if you absolutely have to puke while scuba diving (think about it). for future reference: carbo loading should not involve large quantities of melted cheese. finally, it was off to oxford marc's place for education on how to be british, and do british things the right british way god save the queen jolly good show pip pip cheerio and all that rot. there were scones, and cream, but not devonshire cream because philadelphia sucks like that, and for the last time i refuse to say it like it rhymes with bone, and i don't care how many funny looks you give me. yes, you too STARBUCKS BARISTAS. ARE YOU DOING A PHD?? there was also port and harrods bristol cream sherry and little devices to drink from which are supposed to make you cultured**, and all in all, it was a nice way to end the week.

oh, and:
1) happy birthday, von
2) if you've watched this week's battlestar galactica (blood on the scales), go back to the miniseries and watch the first scene in the CIC with gaeta and adama, and marvel at how far the show has come.


* incid, ever since watching armaggeddon, i have the ridiculous but unshakeable notion that every russian astronaut looks exactly like peter stormare.

** i remember saying a long time ago that i would put more pictures up here, and once again i have failed in my promise.

i agreed to take on another project due right around when my quals are on the principle that if you're already in hell, you may as well just burn. at least i can honestly say that i've had a productive week -- the manuscript on the data i collected last summer is almost complete, my admin is perfectly up-to-date, and my meta-analysis...well, let's not talk about my meta-analysis.

restaurant week got extended into this week, thanks to the good old recession, which i am beginning to love ever more*. laura and kinjal and i made a go of tequila's, which was fabulous, and has one of the most interesting drink menus i've seen. the alma blanca, "Siembra Azul Blanco infused with habanero, Domaine de Canton, essence of aloe vera,
pineapple juice, fresh corn, herb saint, rimmed with a hibiscus-rose salt", was strong, complex and tasty, and i almost had another except for needing to come home to read about functional ROIs (zzzz).

also: real snow, at last!

* did anyone see that denny's was offering free breakfasts today? pity there isn't one nearer here.

misallocated resources

so i made a big thing of mac and cheese for the house the other day, discovering as i was halfway through that i didn't have enough sour cream for the amount of macaroni i was cooking. it wasn't really a lot under, so i let it slide and added a bit more milk instead, and it came out tasty as usual. it did get me thinking though, because with certain recipes, there is very little wiggle room with the quantity and proportion of ingredients, whereas with others it's pretty hard to botch the job unless you're really way off and add a tub of salt to the lamb stew or something.

i admit that i know little to nothing about gastronomic science, but following on from that observation, it seems that there must be a way to ascertain a some kind of variance component associated what each ingredient is doing to a dish (including any interactions it may have with other ingredients), so that you get some kind of a beta coefficient for changes in flavor, mouthfeel, etc -- this would also presumably have some sort of a temporal dimension (how fast it's added, at what point in the preparation). this could all go into a gigantic multiple regression (or perhaps some sort of canonical equation if you want to take into account that taste is not objective, and that there will be an element of interaction between product and taster), which would then tell you the exact amount of X (ceteris paribus) one would need to create the perfect macaroni and cheese, a process that could be iterated until one had a complete and flawless recipe.

meanwhile, the people with the supercomputers continue to use to them to calculate larger and larger prime numbers. talk about misplaced priorities. i think perfect mac and cheese would be one of the most awesome creations of humanity ever.

grant morrison is lucifer

while eating my wawa sandwich for lunch today, i read a paper by nichols and holmes (2001) on nonparametric permutation tests, and the conclusion of final crisis (#7). it was after discarding the wrapper and finishing my coffee that i realized: i couldn't decide which of the two was harder to understand. when did comics stop being about good guys punching bad guys?

alack

one of the students in my class was in need of a note-taker ($7.15/hr), so i sent an e-mail around asking for a volunteer. the first response came in 35 seconds, and in the time it took me to send another e-mail saying that the vacancy had been filled, i received 13(!) more.

mentioning this to laura over dinner, i was informed that people do not sit in front of their laptops fingers poised to reply to incoming messages, but now have devices known as Blackberries from which electronic correspondence can be received and responded to as if by magick, that in fact, more penn students than not now own them. o brave new world! was't not just last year that the Blackberry was something that one might bake in Pie, or eat with a Light Sprinkling of Sugar?

happy cny

1. yes, the happy niu year joke was funny the first time.

2. not so much the next 952 times.

3. no, i'm not celebrating. i'm actually pretty terrible at cooking any asian food more complicated than stir-fried x, and going to a chinese restaurant like we did 2 years ago just makes me sad.

4. but yar, y'all have a good one; i'll be eating pizza and watching house

new blood

among the crop of people selected for admissions interviews this year: the other housemate (!) and another singaporean (!!) who i know (!!!) (and, incid., who you probably also know if you're one of the humans crowd). kinjal and i agree that we have passed the point of statistical improbability in terms of # people from one small nation state in a department of 45 grad students, and are actively pursuing investigations into an international conspiracy.

i've been looking forward to virtuality for a long time now, and have begun to sense that my mounting excitement for the project is going to be met equally with crushing disappointment. it's just too good to be true: peter berg directing and ron moore writing/producing, starring clea duvall, with an absolutely fascinating premise. possibly the most interesting part of the story is that the problem on the fictional mars mission is one that is being researched for real in our lab as nasa prepares for its 202x manned trip to the red planet. the problem being, if you're lazy to click on hyperlinks and read, that we're not sure of a group of people can survive living together for almost 2 years on board a spacecraft without having some sort of psychological breakdown.

(and you thought we just studied sleep.)

so line this one up behind dollhouse as another show that fox will probably stab to death in their effort to lose friends and alienate people. i predict a november 2009 post lamenting its untimely death. maybe i'll go compose my letter to sci-fi begging for a inter-network pick-up right now.

the advisor brought up today that i should start thinking about post-graduation plans. but, i wanted to protest, i only just got here. which at times seems true, and at other times seems not true at all.

thursdays in general are exhausting -- it's the end of the week, and i have to spend 3 hours doing TA work for my advisor, then another 2-3 hours in a seminar on fmri data analysis. i'm not getting a grade for the seminar, but it's pretty hardcore and involves staring at squiggles and graphs until everyone is cross-eyed, so that all i want to do by the time i get home is eat hot pockets and go to bed.

inauguration

1. is d major the official key signature of hail to the chief, like, if it's not played in that key it doesn't count? for that matter, what about national anthems? is their actual key signature important, like how there are geometrical specifications for country flags? i googled the lyrics to hail to the chief this afternoon and discovered that they were written by walter scott:

Hail to the chief, who in triumph advances,
Honored and bless'd be the evergreen pine!
Long may the tree in his banner that glances,
Flourish, the shelter and grace of our line.
Heav'n send it happy dew,
Earth lend it sap anew,
Gaily to bourgeon and broadly to grow;
While ev'ry highland glen,
Sends our shout back again,
"Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho! i-e-roe!"

Ours is no sapling, chance-sown by the fountain,
Blooming at Beltane, in winter to fade;
When the whirlwind has stripp'd ev'ry leaf on the mountain,
The more shall Clan Alpine exult in her shade.
Moor'd in the lifted rock,
Proof to the tempest shock,
Firmer he roots him, the ruder it blow;
Menteith and Breadalbane, then,
Echo his praise again,
"Roderigh Vich alpine dhu, ho! i-e-roe!"

Row, vassals, row for the pride of the Highlands!
Stretch to your oars for the evergreen pine!
Oh, that the rosebud that graces yon islands,
Were wreath'd in a garland around him to twine!
O, that some seedling gem,
Worthy such noble stem,
Honor'd and bless'd in their shadow might grow!
Loud should Clan Alpine then,
Ring from her deepmost glen,
"Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho! i-e-roe!"

2. "We will restore science to its rightful place." Hell, yeah, you will.

3. No more Dubya! You know in the Avenue Q finale where they say "George Bush...is only for now". What are they going to sing tonight?

4. Some people have asked me, and no, I didn't care quite enough to actually be there. Almost though.

about halfway through all the king's men and actually enjoying it more than i thought i would. has anyone else in our set read this? i'm thinking poach. here's a passage i liked:

...I stood there and felt like God-Almighty brooding on History.

Which must be a dull business for God-Almighty, Who knows how it is going to come out. Who knes, in fact, how it was going to come out even before He knew there was going to be any History. Which is complete nonsense, for that involves Time and He is out of Time, for God is Fullness of Being and in Him the End is the Beginning. Which is what you can read in the little tracts written and handed out on the street corners by the fat, grubby, dandruff-sprinkled old man, with the metal-rimmed spectacles, who used to be the Scholarly Attorney and who married the girl with the gold braids and the clear, famished-looking cheeks, up in Arkansas. But those tracts he wrote were crazy, I thought back then. I thought God cannot be Fullness of Being. For Life is Motion.

(I use the capital letters as the old man did in the tracts. I had sat across the table from him, with the unwashed dishes on one end of it and the papers and books piled on the other end, in the rom over across the railroad tracks, and he had talked and I had heard the capital letters in his voice. He had said, "God is Fullness of Being." And I had said, "You've got the wrong end of the stick. For Life is Motion. For --"

(For Life is Motion toward Knowledge. If God is Complete Knowledge then He is Complete Non-Motion, which is Non-Life, which is Death. Therefore, if there is such a God of Fullness of Being, we would worship Death, the Father. That was what I said to the old man, who had looked at me across the papers and fouled dishes, and his red-streaked eyes had blinked above the metal-rimmed spectacles, which had hung down on the end of his nose. He had shaken his head and a flake or two of dandruff had sifted down from the sparse white hair ends which fringed the skull within which the words had been taking shape from the electric twitches in his tangled and spongy blood-soaked darkness. He had said then, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." And I had said, "You've got the wrong end of the stick."

(For Life is a fire burning along a piece of string -- or is i a fuse to a powder keg we call God? -- and the string is what we don't know, our Ignorance, and the trail of ash, which, if a gust of wind does not come, keeps the structure of the string, is History, man's Knowledge, but it is dead, and when the fire has burned up all the string, then man's Knowledge will be equal to God's Knowledge and there won't be any fire, which is Life. Or if the string leads to a powder keg, then there will be a terrific blast of fire, and even the trail of ash will be completely blown away. So I had said to the old man.

(But he had replied, "You think in Finite terms." And I had said, "I'm not thinking at all, I'm just drawing a picture." He had said, "Ha!" The way I remembered he had done a long time back when he played chess with Judge Irwin in the long room in the white house looking toward the sea. I had said, "I'll draw you another picture. It is a picture of a man trying to paint a picture of a sunset. But before he can dip his brush the color always changes and the shape. Let us give a name to the picture which he is trying to paint: Knowledge. Therefore if the object which a man looks at changes constantly so that Knowledge of it is constantly untrue and is therefore Non-Knowledge, then Eternal Motion is possible. And Eternal Life. Therefore we can believe in Eternal Life only if we deny God, Who is Complete Knowledge."

(The old man had said, "I will pray for your soul.")

i've been thinking the past few days about the MP set on fire business, and have come to the conclusion that it was both horrible and deeply hysterical at the same time. i don't suppose i need to elaborate on horrible, but when i say hysterical, i mean that independent of any ill feelings i may have towards our police state. that would be kind of cruel, even for me. what i mean is this, there's something inherently funny about violence that involves setting other people on fire; it invokes cartoon images of daffy duck with his hair alight, or strong bad's children's book. it's violence of the wile e. coyote variety, and strangely enough, it gives us the first licence to think about it as something other than an act of violence.

once granted that license, one begins to realize that this fire-starting had far more symbolic value than (for example) if a meat cleaver had been taken to the guy, think: flag burning, sodom and gomorrah. really, the form of the act spoke almost as loud as its nature, and, even if unintentionally, made it more than just an act of malice or madness. it gave people an image, one of those pictures that speak a thousand words, that grow to become something larger than the event itself in the minds of people who care to mull over it.

sandwich

imagine you're making a sandwich with two spreads in it (say peanut butter and jelly).

so you take 2 slices of bread out of the bread bag, call them A and B, where A is the top one.

now you have four surfaces on which to put on 2 spreads right? call them A1, A2, B1, and B2, where the '1' surfaces were facing the top of the bag. which would you use?

so i've observed people doing this, and most of the time, you get folks spreading peanut butter onto A1, putting that slice somewhere else, spreading jelly on B1, and then putting the two slices together.

this is clearly not the best procedure. A2 and B1 are the slices with exactly the same shapes, so what you should do, to avoid peanut butter/jelly on fingers while eating the sandwich, is to flip slice A before spreading peanut butter on its lower side, then flip it back to recreate the sandwich.

this is a particularly worrisome problem towards the end of the loaf, where the size tends to taper off more significantly, and A1 >> B2.

now, i admit that i'm working with a very small sample of data, and it could be that all the smart people reading this blog do this automatically. do tell me if you do.

what i want to do, though, is set up a small booth in houston hall with a sign that says MAKE A SANDWICH FOR RESEARCH: $5, and get people to (a) make the sandwich, and (b) report their gpa.

i have no idea where i'd publish this if there were a difference.

the why of things

man on wire is about phillippe petit, famous funambulist, and his wire-walking stunt across the twin towers in 1974. (it's a brilliant movie about an unbelievable caper, and i highly recommend you go and see it if you have not.) once he was back on terra firma, reporters naturally besieged him, and the big question they had for him was: why did you do it? petit angrily points out to us the absurdity of the question -- there is no why! -- and his point is very well taken. there are two reasons, i suppose, why the "why" is absurd: first, there is no possible cost-benefit analysis to a stunt so far beyond imagination, and second, we don't even have the proper language to deconstruct the deed. just as deconstructing aesthetics largely ruins beauty, so does any attempt to understand petit's act diminish it to something less than what it truly was. there was no "why". there was just the act.

***

now, in training to give therapy, one of the lessons we learn is not to ask "why" questions. whys encourage speculation, fabulation, post-hoc rationalizing, and chase away, sometimes forever, the actual truth. human beings are very bad at whys, we're biased, we find illusory correlations between things. we need rules of cause and effect to make sense of the world, but our rules are general and overextended. add to that the dreadful fallibility of memory and the inevitable schematizing, and what you find is that whys are about as useful as invisible money. we're different from the psychodynamic therapists that way -- we're told that we don't need reasons to fix problems, just a clear picture of thoughts, and actions, and you know, i think i believe in that.

***

while science is about finding whys, psychology isn't really a science, and i save myself from some nasty sprains over the philosophy of causality by just not caring about it. i've seen philosophy of science majors argue till they're blue in the face and hurl kant and hume and popper at each other like nuclear warheads, and i'm awfully glad i get to stay out of it. i'll tell my little research stories and do my therapy uncaring of reasons and chickens and eggs. this is why i've always liked the humanities -- they let the whys be, and in that small corner of the discourse, at least, there is peace.

(if the slightest hint of math is intolerable to you, please don't read on.)

1. i'm doing a meta-analysis for my quals. you know this.

2. a meta-analysis is a quantitative compilation of studies within a topic area; this is superior to a qualitative compilation because (a) one avoids bias in study selection (everything goes in), and (b) the result is a definitive answer as to whether a given treatment has a significantly greater effect than 0 (as opposed to: "findings are in conflict, and more work needs to be done in this area".)

3. this is all very nice in theory.

4. in practice, looking in 4 textbooks gives you 6 different formulae for every step of the analysis you have to do.

4.1. there are many steps.

4.2. why can't statisticians agree with one another.

(4.3.) they do, says the housemate, but only after they get tenure.

5. the problems right now are numerous, but there are two big ones. first of all, there is no agreement whatsoever among anybody as to how to calculate sampling variance. the idea is this: each study is weighted by a coefficient that represents the error due to sampling from a random population -- the larger the study, the greater the weight. i strongly suspect that the differences between all the formulae i've accumulated are extremely subtle, and will make no difference to the final result, but having honed my anal-retentiveness to a razor-sharp point over the last 5 years, i shall endeavor to find out. big problem #2 is even more troublesome: i have a mix of between-subject and within-subject designs in my analysis (between = experimental group/control group; within = everyone does everything and each subject is his own control). apparently, and i only just found this out, there are different equations for the two types of studies, and conversions are necessary before everything can be combined. specific problem: calculating effect sizes for between subjects studies is easy, and in fact can be done with a few button presses right here. within-subjects designs, however, are trickier, because the error term is not clear. a bunch of people recommend that one uses the variance of the change score, which is fine in theory except that who on earth reports that in a manuscript, and i'd rather tapdance naked in perelman quad than email sixty billion labs to ask them to give me that data. so...how? use the pooled variance? use the post-treatment variance (ugh). i hate practical solutions when i just know there are pretty ones out there.

6. excel is serving me well, and minz, if you're still reading this, you will be pleased to know that pivot tables are too (finally).

why is it that young americans find it so hard to keep their places of residence tidy and free of food debris? also: is there some magic switch that turns on when they get married where suddenly kitchens and bedrooms become immaculate and stay that way? i just don't understand it. if you ask me, people should be given ferocious beatings for leaving crumbs and pasta sauce smears on the counters and the stoves, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY BELONG TO THE PERSON YOU'RE LIVING WITH AND NOT YOU.

cormac mccarthy

almost despite myself, i have to say that i enjoyed all the pretty horses, and would voluntarily read another of CMC's books at some point in the future. here's how it ends:

The desert he rode was red, and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.

having a shiny new bar open up a block from my place is either going to be the best or the worst thing to happen to me during my grad school career. dogfish head on tap! it's obscenely crowded now, even on weeknights, but once the hullaballoo dies down christian and i have plans to take it by force and make it the psych grad student go-to. here's to hoping the crack dealers don't move in like last time. we got a corner table last night, and i was excited that oyster po' boys were on the menu, except they weren't, because they were actually oyster mushroom po' boys. i really need to go to new orleans some time. i find it hard to understand how oysters tolerate deep frying; it just feels like they should get tough or limp or just generally explode on contact with hot oil, but i suppose there's some magic in the batter or a similar chemical miracle. i'm sure all of you went through this phase, but when i was younger i was convinced that deep fried ice-cream was Impossible, like perpetual motion or cold fusion. i've also never bought into the idea that everything is Better deep-fried, despite three years in the south, although my belief in the theory that everything is better when wrapped in bacon has yet to be disproved.

sonnet on the death of mr. richard west

i have one patient in particular who always makes me think of this thomas gray sonnet; sadly, i think that sharing it with him is probably a distinctly bad idea.

In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,
And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire:
The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
Or cheerful fields resume their green attire:
These ears, alas! for other notes repine,
A different object do these eyes require.
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
And new-born pleasure brings to happier men:
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;
To warm their little loves the birds complain.
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,
And weep the more because I weep in vain.

last night, i had what can only be described at a clinical psychologist's anxiety dream. in it, i was walking down locust walk, heading for one of our clinical seminars, when i ran into our DCT. hi, i say, how was your sabbatical (she just got back from one). good, she says, very good. good, i say, what's the topic for today's seminar. ah, she say, well i figured the 3rd-year students need more experience working with kids. kids? yes, kids. in fact, what i want you to do today is talk to kids about Difficult Subjects.

we head into solomon b35 and alyson and daniel and co. are there, and she starts handing out these 3x5 cards with words on them in thick black marker: DEATH, SEX, etc., and we each get one, and she says, ok, we'll be watching you from behind the double mirror. the dream ends with me in the treatment room together with a dozen six-year old kids staring at me with big black eyes like in the omen, and that was it. most unpleasant. i definitely preferred the ones where it's the a levels and i haven't studied.

i was feeling especially perky today, and ran almost 8 miles in the gym while watching chinese women attempt to play billiards on espn. i stopped mostly because i was beginning to feel something unusual, a feeling like hunger but not, sort of a...depletion, i guess, but with none of the unpleasantness or stomach-growling of real hunger. it was sort of primal, what hunger must have felt like in the days when when our ancestors went chasing after quadrupeds with big knobby clubs. the brother and i were discussing the other day whether animals feel hunger in the same way that we humans do, and i'm (still) inclined to think that the answer is no, that what we think of phenomenologically as "hunger" is mostly anticipation of the hedonic value of our modern, over-enriched diet, whereas what animals feel is more this other thing, a simple drive to go and find food.

anyway, i showered and ate a muffin and felt extremely satisfied and warm and a little bit sleepy. i think i should try and do one long distance run a week. i've tended to psych myself out before attempting anything more than 5 miles, but really, i don't find it that bad at all once i'm actually running, especially on warmer days when i get to go along the schuylkill or wherever and not stare at the damn distance counter on the treadmill all the time. perhaps i'll even invest in gel packs.

here's a problem. when i blog about work, i'm afraid that i'm going to be really boring, so i become flip, and skim the surface of issues, and generally do a piss-poor job of saying anything at all. on the other hand, i don't say a lot about what i do outside of work either, for a number of reasons. among them: while hanging out with friends at bars is fun, i didn't think that it made for magnificent entertainment for me to write about it on here; i don't feel that this is the place for movie reviews beyond the occasional "you may not have heard of this, go see it now"; i need more hobbies and more of a life anyway.

i've mulled over this for a while now, and looked a bunch of other regularly-updated blogs that i enjoy reading, and have reached the following conclusion: the only way to blog well is with gusto, and about everything, because, as i've always maintained, nothing is really uninteresting, there's just uninteresting writing, and i hope that if you've stuck with me for the umpteen years i've been writing on here that i at least pass that basic test. also, weirdly enough, i find that the periods of life when i've blogged the most are also the times when i've been inspired to do more interesting things, so that writing begets action which begets more writing (somewhere right now a therapist is penning a book about this).

so, that's the plan, and we'll see if it sticks. now, everybody go watch synecdoche, new york, it's the best movie that's come out this year.

so ends 2008.

last night on the train i was reading about the voluntary human extinction movement, an organisation whose members believe that "the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species...us". the notion is refreshing -- psychology is almost by definition a tediously anthropocentric discipline, and i think it's good for me once in a while to forget the ways in which humans are special and meditate on the many other ways in which we are not. i always think that p.d. james got it wrong in children of men: that the prospect of human extinction, voluntary or otherwise, will not ultimately be terrifying, but after a short while will be humbling, and finally, liberating. not having to think about legacy or posterity seems to me one of the best ways to live in the now, a path to contentment all to easy to stray from.

anyway, make nice plans for 2009, but not too many of them. i'm going out now to get wasted. happy new year!

have decided that in order to be a single malt aficionado, i have to possess more than one bottle of single malt -- my collection doubled yesterday with the purchase of an ardbeg 10yo, which i only found after poking through about 10 stores on the lower west side. pennsylvania, as think i've mentioned before, only has state-licensed liquor stores, which means glenlivets, macallans, and a whole host of other undrinkable shit. i would dearly love to get my hands on some stuff from this list, although that probably involves actual trips to the distilleries and spending more money than i have in my bank account. fine, it would be nice to lay eyes on them, for a start, or for a multi-millionaire in deerstalker and tweed jacket to have me over for tastes and genteel conversation.

the time since the brother arrived seems to have passed very quickly, and now we're facing down the new year. i think it would be nice next year to do more -- 2008 was mostly more of the same, and not really in a good way. what i had to say on my blog this year seems less generally interesting than what i did from 2006-2007 as well, and it would be nice if that changed.

we did our mid-year patient clean out today, getting rid of our more treatment-resistant cases, which is simultaneously awesome and sad. even though we got into this practicum knowing that we're not going to actually cure many of our patients in the time we have, it's hard to not have the expectation that they'll end up happy, grateful. that attitude, though, is just one step removed from the naive "why can't they just try harder to be happy?" line of reasoning -- for many patients, even therapy isn't enough. in the end, something gets us, for most people, it's heart disease, cancer, the common things, but for some, it's depression, and somehow, that feels less ok. less ok, because there's that niggling illusion that the patient just didn't want it enough, or worse still, that the therapist wasn't persuasive enough, that someone in that alliance didn't try. when drugs don't work, it's a lot harder to place blame; with therapy, there's always someone to point a finger at, and no matter how much you tell yourself that there is no "fault", it was not a matter of "trying", the feeling, the very human feeling that somewhere things screwed up: that's something that lingers, and is hard to chase away.

the brother got in on wednesday night, flight delayed a mere four hours, so all that's left is the adjusting. there's nothing like colliding umvelts to jolt you out of routine; i really feel that all that's old is new, that perceptions stale and dormant now seem fresh and alive once more. what we tell our patients is true, that thinking about something and doing it are very often not the same experience, and no amount of anticipation of this change is quite going to match the reality of it playing out.

cp: i note with tears in my eyes that we will not be able to watch the latest keanu reeves masterpiece the day the earth stood still together, my solace being that he will continue to make similarly bad movies for a longer time than i'll take to finish my degree (i hope.)

i was on the treadmill on saturday when i got what i think is my first truly ingenious idea of grad school. my ridiculous paranoia on being scooped prevents me from detailing it here (i know i'm crazy), but i will say that it costs no money and potentially answers a very interesting question (plus gets me one study closer to being done with these sisyphean labors). the "no money" part is critically important, but i'm hoping that it's good science as well.

*

with the brother arriving in two days to start school here, the next big change to our uber-complicated family situation is here. the other housemate's lease doesn't run out till september, but it looks like we might be living together for the first extended period of time since forever come fall. it seems strange to even have to make an issue about this, but mine is a strange life.

*

it's prompted other thoughts. i have known this for a while, but now, this winter is the first time i've felt, deeply, that things are truly never going to be the same again, that ever more i'm going to have that shao xiao li jia lao da hui sensation when i go back to singapore. everything seems a very long time ago, receding fast. i guess at the same time, though, i'm less afraid of the consequences once it does happen; once you're out of the gravitational field of normalcy and others' expectations, you're free to float as far into outer space as you care to go. i need more waterwheels and train rides through europe in my life. can i graduate yet?

more fun in the old days

Kollar et al. (1969) in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 126(4) pg 73 --

At 168 hours [of sleep deprivation] one of the subjects (R.S.) experienced frightening visual hallucinations while in the darkened psychophysiology laboratory. He screamed in terror, pulled his electrodes off, and fell to the floor sobbing and muttering incoherently about a gorilla. He was conforted and reassured by one of the investigators and questioned in detail about the experience. In essence, his hallucination had recapitulated night terrors, which he had had repeatedly as a small bpy. During the next psychophysiological test period he began to experience the same hallucinations and bolted from the subject room. Thereafter he proudly reported that he had "licked" his problem.

as the culmination of the seminar i'm taking this semester, our prof packed us off to a correctional facility to have a look-see and speak with the inmates about their experiences and rehabilitation. i'm glad to report that this was more educational and less scary than it sounds -- if you imagine a straight line between fox river and oswald state penitentiary, we're talking way over on the left side in terms of shanking and sex slavery (i think). i must say that i was probably more scared going into the locked wards of imh, though i was somewhat more tender at the time. also in uniform, though, so perhaps it balances out.

ugly pink exterior, lots of electronically-operated doors sliding slowly open and shut, each door with its own big orange sign: HOLDING CELL 12, SALLYPORT 2. long, wide, strange-smelling corridors. also, according to the sergeant who accompanied us, lots of technology that doesn't work -- id tags that don't scan, a fancy drug detector on the fritz -- and a registrar's office that would be right at home in, oh, 1978; filing cabinets wall to wall and not a PC in sight. this was the stuff we actually got to see; i shudder to think of the disorganization that lies beneath. fortunately, my cynicism re: such affairs peaked circa 1999, and these things neither surprise nor disturb me any more. we released someone early and they went out and murdered you? oops!

we got to speak with a group of a dozen or so of the inmates who were part of a drug treatment program (it was never clear to me what precisely any of them were serving time for, and none of us found it appropriate to ask. is there prison etiquette? someone needs to write a book on this.) most of the answers they gave us were of the for-the-bible-(or-in-this-case-my-parole-officer)-tells-me-so variety, but then again, what can either side offer in a situation like that but platitudes? incarceration is just one small part of a system that shits on you if you're one of any number of things -- poor, uneducated, black -- but that's not a card anyone at the table was willing to play.

did i feel sorry for them? wholeheartedly yes. i've blogged at some length about neuroethics and the law; in summary, i'm in full agreement that punishment should be utilitarian but not retributive since broken mind = broken brain. what this means, sadly, is that no one really deserves to be in jail, they just need to be. and, to complete the argument, the real tragedy is not the steady, inexorable influx of people into the prisons, but the fact that as humans ourselves we can, and must, think of these people as individuals instead of statistics.

i know this is a rather strange way to think -- let me end on a less confusing (though just as depressing) note. the drug "treatment" program that these folks were in seemed to hang almost entirely on the premise that if one changes ones mind, and has sufficient willpower, life will get better. this is the perfect recipe for recidivism, and entirely out of whack with what we've learned from psychotherapy research over the past 50-or-so years. if you're an alcoholic or a crackhead, willpower just isn't enough; what you get instead is guilt and self-blame when the "changing-ones-mind" deal doesn't pan out. and as wonderful as the social workers and the platitudes are, one could not help leaving the place more than a bit despondent, with the sense that things are as they were in the beginning, and that they forever shall be, in saecula saeculorum.

outstanding questions

* how come the death of superman and captain america got national media coverage, while no one cares that batman is dead and DC has cancelled half of his related ongoing series?

* what do you do with eight million pounds of leftover turkey?

* i would like to see equus...anyone else want to go?

* is it an absolutely terrible thing to put red wine in pancake batter? it sounds prety awful to me.

* bruce campbell: awesome or so last week?

thanksgiving

as i suspected, the meat thermometer was useless; either that or i was getting it into all the wrong places. nevertheless, the turkey was juicy and cooked through, and did not end up on the floor, and all the side dishes came out at approximately the right time, and i only burned myself a little bit once. what remained at the end was a feeling of satisfaction that i haven't felt in a long time -- not that this earns me anything like the rank of domestic goddess, but it is something to make other people full and happy and not alone when they otherwise may not have been; it also beats last year's experience in a dive bar by quite a bit.

d-1

i started to make stuffing and realized that i had not bought any spring onions; that, and the decision to add sausage means that i have more or less defiled the mother's (the maternal grandmother's!) recipe. mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. still, it tastes more or less like what i'm used to, and the house now smells rather good. i also spent a long time stewing fruit and talking with the housemate about random effects models, a queer combination if i have to say so myself.

*

the other housemate has gone back to ohio, which means i don't have to put up with football on the big tv all the time. yay!

*

have invested in a meat thermometer. i suspect that this is somewhat akin to buying beauty cream -- same outcome, reassurance that you did "everything you could". the bird sits in my fridge, thawing, and gives me small panic attacks every time i go to get a glass of water. no dinner rolls.

*

von messages me today to tell me, airily and nonchalantly, that he is hosting dinner for 23, and criticizes my menu choices for being "traditional" and "white". isn't that exactly the point? we flee from past oppression by being able to coolly and unironically do the very things that most typify those who have oppressed us. also, i really fraking like cranberry sauce, ok?

thanksgiving d-3

i decided that since i'm going to be in town for thanksgiving this year, i'd give back for all the times people took pity on my poor family-less ass by having the other left-behind grad students for dinner. i didn't really think this all the way through before making the invites, and am now seizing with panic at odd moments of the day and waking up sweating from dreams of inedible turkey and salmonella poisoning. does anyone have a good recipe for glaze? i started cooking yesterday in fright, making a quite-passable green bean casserole that did not start with mushroom soup -- su-lin warned me a few years ago against ever making things that have canned soup in the recipe, and i've taken the advice to heart. did the pilgrims eat green beans at harvest time? i wish i knew more about agriculture than i learned from the omnivore's dilemma. the more i think about it, the more i feel compelled to make about 8 more side dishes than i should, just because i'm sure they'll come out right. you can't mess up potatoes. (ok, you can mess up potatoes, but those were the old days.) i need to introduce so much food to the table that you can't find the turkey. i need an avalanche of bread rolls. either that or i'll invest in about 12 bottles of wine so that even if everything sucks no one will care. wine, and i'll bust open the good scotch i've been saving, and dim the lights, and put on tupac very very loud.

the elevators in our building have not been terribly efficient at the best of times, but at some point last week they (accidentally?) got set to "wheelchair access" mode, which keeps the doors open for 2 minutes every time they stop, and renders functionless the "door close" button. as one might expect, this has resulted in dozens of people milling in the lift lobby for half the morning before they can get upstairs to their offices, not to mention the extreme awkwardness of having to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers for what feels like hours before finally getting to ones floor. today, however, was different, because the elevators have now decided to ignore their passengers' instructions entirely, so that one seems to have an equally likely chance of going up or down no matter what button one presses before finally being let off at a completely random floor. unfortunately, the humor in this situation lasts a much shorter time than one might think.

half of the department was at the abct (association for behavioral and cognitive therapists) conference this week, making it a lonely and boring one on top of the rain and gloom. it didn't help that the conference was literally held in disneyworld -- i mean, weren't they going to at least pretend that actual work was going on? on thursday i made myself even more depressed by sitting in the office reading the wiki page for epcot and daydreaming about sipping harvey wallbangers poolside under sunshine and cloudless skies. the reality: sifting through the eight billion papers that have now formed mountainous piles on my desk to find the ones with the info i need.

there was the newness of becoming a third-year student, and having to give real therapy, and the historic election, but now that things have settled down i find that i'm a slow grinding war of attrition with my work, at one of those points where all past accomplishments seem futile and the future rises like an escarpment, the summit out of sight. i need to come up with one more good project, and soon, before the money runs dry, but i have no idea what to do -- i'm a little sick of imaging, the bigger questions i have are still intractable, and doing something unrelated to sleep at this point is probably tantamount to career suicide. i feel like i need a week or two off to just stop, and think, and halt the slow descent into panic.

i passed the 1000th-article mark for my meta-analysis some time on thursday, and have probably read the abstracts for more than half of those. i'm reminded of my rather painful time doing literature searches in NIE, except that then i was actually getting paid somewhat more than i am now (ouch). the tedium of this project has also finally convinced me that our qualifying exams are terribly designed -- any collaboration is disallowed, while in the real world no one does any science on their own. thus, one demonstrates not competence but the willingness to be beaten up by the system, a trait that we've arguably already shown by applying to grad school in the first place.

still waiting

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

~~ Pablo Neruda

marvel at the awesomeness that is smugopedia

i don't think anyone who reads this blog particularly cares about baseball (von? grace?), so you probably don't know that the phillies are one game away from winning the world series for the first time since 1980, and that the excitement in the city is reaching fever pitch. game 5 -- the deciding game -- began on monday, and was called at the bottom of the 6th because of rain with the score tied at 2-2. it rained yesterday as well (mercifully, or house would have been pre-empted, and i would have stomped around all night unhappily), but the teams are in business and playing the remaining innings now. i think christian and co. are out in a pub somewhere, but my plan is to avoid riots and drunkenness and getting trampled to death (i was in ten stone/bard's last thursday after game 2 and was already getting a little nervous). also: have never really understood the appeal of a sport where 98% of the time nothing very much happens. i tried to get daniel and stephen to explain the attraction before supervision on monday, and we got into a discussion about strategy and designated hitters and whatnot, and i came away feeling educated but like i still don't really care. i do, however, like hot dogs and beer, so maybe i'll tag along to a regular season game next year if anyone's going.

in other news, batman RIP + the movie franchise have made me decide to start buying comics by the issue again, so well done grant morrison and christopher nolan.

who would be a good robin in the 3rd batman, if, despite all of christian bale's protestations, there is one

sean faris: 9/10
joseph gordon-levitt: 7.5/10
ben barnes: 6.5/10
shia labouef: 0/10
zac efron: -∞/10

having to give therapy -- and having to get supervision for it -- is a completely different matter from simply doing assessment and diagnosis, an exercise where you see a person a few times and never have to deal with them again. therapy is unpredictable, taxing, and above all, terrifying on many different levels -- am i messing up the patient's life? am i saying stupid things on tape? do my colleagues and supervisor think i'm an idiot?

what ends up happening, therefore, is an exercise where, as you're trying to help the client, you're simultaneously giving therapy to yourself, trying to superimpose a framework of cold reason over the emotional chaos. the reality, hard to believe, is this: the client believes you're a real psychologist, which in itself is a huge effector of change; everyone thinks they've said stupid things on tape, and sometimes you actually have, but it's not a big deal; everyone is afraid that they look like an idiot without thinking anyone else in the practicum actually is one. and training in therapy is just that: saying these things over and over again to yourself until you believe them, so that you can focus on the client instead of your panicky, useless thoughts. terror is incredibly unproductive. i hope i get over it soon.

saffy

von tells me that he's not on the hilary mckay bandwagon after all, so i excuse him, with apologies. with some sadness, i confess that i don't really see what the fuss is about either, and will beg off reading the rest of the series in preference for delights such as Y: The Last Man, which i highly recommend to one and all.

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.