the fall-to-spring academic year has a tempo completely different from the january-to-december academic year we grew up with. both are pragmatic, but the american system has stronger parallels to a narrative, a sense of beginning, middle and end. and, as eliot once said, the end is the beginning, the sending-forth; but the beginning for many people is also a kind of end: of imagining life will always be the same, of the wish that home is forever, and that the people you love will never change.

i was going to stay at home and lounge around reading today, but by 10 being alone in my apartment was making me think of drug suicides and motorcycle emptiness, so i went to my lab to surf amazon.com and fiddle with my conference abstracts. summer is here, and the undergrads are gone. we had a farewell lunch for them yesterday on the penthouse level of brb: baked ziti and stromboli and a large ebony-and-ivory cake ("CONGRATULATIONS, SENIORS!"). people come and go so often in modern life. we must come into contact with tremendous numbers of people compared to humans just a few generations before us, and they appear and disappear with frightening suddenness. i wonder if that doesn't put a lot of stress on us psychologically. if you count up all the fake 'how are yous', over the days and weeks, that has to take a toll.

From The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski:

A common procedure, when there is room of course, is to put one's finger on the top of a book and pull gently against the headband to rotate the book in its place until its top corner projects out enough from the other books on the shelf for it to be grapsped and removed. Martha Stewart Living does not approve: "Never hook your finger over the top of the spine." The problem with doing so is that it can lead to broken fingernails or, perhaps worse, to torn book bindings. As a nineteenth-century "handy-book" warned, "Never pull a book from the shelf by the head-band; do not toast them over the fire, or sit on them, for 'Books are kind friends, we benefit by their advice, and they reveal no confidences.'""

i was looking through what i'd written over the past few months and figured it was time for a short break from wordy expositions. so, just for a change, here are some pictures of flowers:

first things first:



right. binding costs $2.95 a pop at campus copy -- not morbidly expensive, but enough to give pause. bribery and impression management: the hidden underworld of graduate school. i'm not even kidding: the next thing i have to worry about is what kind of coffee the people on my committee particularly fancy, and whether or not pistachios are appropriate. maybe some boston creams? i hear that too fussy is no good, but then aren't all distractions from the actual product beneficial to the cause? how can they see with sequins in their eyes?

but yes: it's over, for now.

i found myself with about an hour to kill before my presentation today (!), so i went into the bookstore and read the first few chapters of douglas hofstadter's i am a strange loop, which was entertaining but completely antithetical to what i believe in a number of ways. his stand, which seems to resemble that of many philosophers of neuroscience nowadays, is that the vertical integration of neuronal, systems and cognitive theories is neither possible nor desirable. i say: nonsense. inconceivable at the present moment, maybe, but so were bullet trains a hundred years ago. the gestalt of consciousness from matter, the explanation of how that occurs lurks in the interstices, the sticky places that neuroscientists and psychologists alike are wary of exploring. and i shall control myself here by not talking too much about fools rushing in, but you know what i mean*.

and then came the presentation, which was shit, and has convinced me that i need to make a bullet-pointed script before i go into my defense on the 15th. the difficulty is that all of our committees have one "outsider", someone with no background in the subject material, and so we have to pitch the talk at an appropriate level while still hitting all the high points. this was impossible to do on the fly, as i discovered, and i'm glad i had the opportunity to look like an idiot among other grad students before i did so in front of my advisor.

* and to be fair, his point is that we can all live and read good books and smell the coffee without understanding the (sub)atomic world, which is true, and cheerfully anti-reductionist, but also immensely unsatisfying.

rant

if i get the question "what practical significance does your research have?" just one more time there's going to be a chainsaw massacre in the department. do people not know that asking that is taboo? the brother and i had this conversation, like, 2 years ago, and he was an undergrad at the time -- you would have thought that grad students would have figured this out by this stage in their lives. you just don't get to ask that. my work has no external or clinical worth, and that's just how it is, and i'm certainly not going to "frame it in a larger context" in my paper. or, if you really must have a story, 150 years down the road bioengineering and neuroscience are finally going to be wed, and all this information about neuroanatomy and physiology will be used to build fully functioning artificial brains capable of interfacing with machines, and then we'll have cylons who nuke the planet and send the vestiges of humanity into outer space, and that's the practical significance of my work. there.

"clinical research", i think, was created to ease the guilty consciences of people who have realized, and are petrified of the fact that science is a societally acceptable brand of onanism. you play in your own little sandbox, and spend taxpayer's money, and feel smart because no one else knows what the hell it is you're doing, and it's ok. and then there are a few ways things can go -- you can justify it to yourself by using the tongue-in-cheek cylon argument above, who can say where the road goes? all we can do is what we can do. or the monkeys on typewriters argument -- with enough scattershot science we're bound to find the Universal Theory of Everything sooner or later. and finally: my research has "clinical relevance", which is intuitively admirable, but rests on about a billion assumptions about the whole enterprise, the least of which is hume's is-ought problem. it's a guilt complex, i'm telling you, like people who bring their paychecks home every month and then scream about how the money is tainted because they had to work for The Man.

besides, if human advancement is both an offshoot and a stimulator of research, and modern pathology/discontent/whatever is at least partially a symptom of human advancement, you now have a self-referential loop, where the clinical researchers are both fixing, and contributing to the self-same problem. Which means that the net advancement afforded by these people is at most slightly above 0 (and possibly negative). so now you have people spending money to do little more than assuage their own guilt. moral of the story: all these stupid studies of whether caffeine is good or bad for you, comparing CBT and IPT ... i'm not even saying don't do them, but at least own up to the fact that research, like almost everything else you can choose as a career in life, is done mostly for selfish reasons. and the reason that we get paid less than what we're "worth"* is not that we're martyrs burning ourselves at the stake for the cause of future generations, but because it's rewarding -- and if you believe that economics has got it right, more personally rewarding than a corporate career. but there's the rub -- it is rewarding. so there you have it. my work is pure, and hopefully one day it will be beautiful too. and i'll feel good about it, no justifications or practicality necessary.

* yes, whole new can of worms, but let's hold to present, and not utopian ideals of worth for now

8 days. it doesn't necessarily help that i'm surrounded by overachievers who are voluntarily turning in their projects early. whatever happened to solidarity in at least pretending that you're dying?

---

i have one last section to go, a bit that is proving very hard to write. it has to say, approximately, the following:

* i don't believe my results one bit because they are as reliable as the saharan dunes
* not that there was anything i could have done about it
* it's the effort that counts

---

the undergrads are beginning to move out. i see them when i emerge from my lab/ apartment, which is seldom, and feel sort of hollow. it's been one academic year, fall and spring, and i knew at the beginning that it would feel like no time at all, and it did.

---

stats final on tuesday, mock defense of my project on thursday, last-minute panic from friday-monday interspersed with heavy drinking, kinko's, running around campus to turn everything in by 4:55 pm, and then more heavy drinking, and possibly poker. and then much blogging about everything i learned this year, which was a lot, and not all to do with factor analysis. can't hardly wait

On Growing Old

Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying;
My dog and I are old, too old for roving.
Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying,
Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving.
I take the book and gather to the fire,
Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute
The clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire,
Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet.
I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander
Your cornland, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys
Ever again, nore share the battle yonder
Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies.
Only stay quiet while my mind remembers
The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.

Beauty, have pity! for the strong have power,
The rich their wealth, the beautiful their grace,
Summer of man its sunlight and its flower.
Spring-time of man, all April in a face.
Only, as in the jostling in the Strand,
Where the mob thrusts, or loiters, or is loud,
The beggar with the saucer in his hand
Asks only a penny from the passing crowd,
So, from this glittering world with all its fashion,
Its fire, and play of men, its stir, its march,
Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion,
Bread to the soul, rain when the summers parch.
Give me but these, and though the darkness close
Even the night will blossom as the rose.

John Masefield

12 days. i wish i had a t-shirt i could walk around in that says this is graduate school. you know, there are exaggerations, and jokes (thank you, minz, and other people, for thinking of me), and false bravado, but there's no honest way of disguising the fact that this is hell. i wake up, i drink 2 cups of coffee, i don't even really stop for lunch (food just seems to happen, somehow -- i'm not dead, so clearly nutrition must be coming from somewhere), and the rest of the time i'm just submerged in this thesis, or studying for my statistics finals, or being bombarded with e-mail. the weekend was fantastic, admittedly, but i'm 48 hours into the week, and it was only a couple of hours ago i realised it was tuesday. and when i go to bed, in the early hours of the morning, i dream of microsoft excel.

singapore day

Manhattan, NY

I went. I wasn't going to -- the project is due in 2 weeks, and there is a lot left to be done -- but I was feeling really burned out and incapable of working through Saturday. Also, they flew Makansutra hawkers in to cook -- PSA complex bak kut teh, Adam Road Nasi Lemak, Casuarina Road Prata -- so even though I didn't admit it to myself there was no real hope of resistance.

Besides, I figure that it's time to start healing, to start being a little bit more sanguine about my cultural identity crisis. Not that I see myself ever endorsing what we are told is "Singaporean". I don't think I'll ever not being at harsh odds with a culture so simultaneously false, hypocritical, conservative and smug. The critical thing for me, now, is to not be angry, because, really, it's not a fault. Some people are hurting, but on balance, from a purely utilitarian perspective, the vast majority of Singaporeans are getting what they want, and loving it. Where in the world don't some people hurt?

It's not a fault, it's a cultural, collective, and conscious decision, and anger does nothing because I'm getting angry not on behalf of anyone, but at the idea that people would want to live that way, much the same way you feel frustrated at a child for not understanding something that is patently obvious to you. It doesn't even have to be painful, or pitiable, or worthy of scorn. It's just...if anything, it's small. It's like...take all the rhetoric and propaganda and economic success and realise that it's all just one thing, one idea. Everything -- HDB estates, National Service, flag waving on August 9th, Phua Chu Kang, bringing satay to Wollman Rink on a sunny day in April -- for the purposes of "feelings towards Singapore" it's all quintessentially one thing, and if you can see it that way then the issue takes on manageable proportions, because now you're not getting angry with 4 million people and 40 years of public policy, but a solitary idea that vanishes in comparison to the infinity of everything else. Better still, the idea itself is circular: this is my country, this is my flag, this is my future, this is my life. Singapore is Singapore, in the way that God told Moses "I am what I am" at the burning bush. When you define a thing as "everything that you could possibly want", it's a necessary truism that you won't want anything else.

So now, as you can see, New York and the Ivy League are part of Singapore -- and I say this almost literally, because I'm not talking about the physical places, but the concepts of what they are. All borders nowadays are ideological anyway (which is why no matter where I live I'll not be Singaporean; the ethos does not encompass me). So we lined up in what may as well have been Adam Road, to all intents and purposes, and got our nasi lemak, and I called Von who was disbelieving, and anyway late to go build his table. There was a goody bag with a Bread Talk voucher ("for when you come home") and a packet of rubber bands in it, which I actually need rather urgently (the rubber bands, not the flosss). And Wong Kan Seng, and a million gay performers on stage, and finally both Kinjal and I bumped into someone we knew with the small world anthem running in an endless midi loop through my head as i nodded and smiled.

We met up with Grace and her brother for dinner much later on, after a failed trip to Serendipity Cafe (1.5-hour wait. Did you know that Kate Beckingsale was in that? It's scary how I have absolutely zero recall of that movie even though I remember with perfect clarity the details of the day I went to see it.) Grace was in town to watch Kevin Spacey on Broadway, and we had a nice normal conversation and drinks. Which brings us back to why I don't want to be angry -- because it's very tiring, and vexatious, and I talk about my frustration in 15 billion ways on this blog and to people and nothing ever comes of it, when most of what I want in life comes with nice normal conversation and drinks. The issue has been talked to death, and I'm tired of it -- and yet there's so much more, miles to go before I sleep, the quest to calmly, impartially ask: Why? Why did this single idea work so well? Why were you in Central Park that day?

the usual disclaimer: if entries are sparse, i aten't dead, just overworked.

Etiquette

The Ballyshannon foundered off the the coast of Cariboo,
And down in fathoms many went the captain and the crew;
Down went the owners--greedy men whom hope of gain allured:
Oh dry the starting tear, for they were heavily ensured.

Besides the captain and the mate, the owners and the crew,
The passengers were also drowned excepting only two:
Young Peter Gray, who tasted teas for Baker, Croop & Co.
And Somers, who from Eastern shores, imported indigo.

These passengers, by reason of their clinging to a mast
Upon a desert island were eventually cast.
They hunted for their meals, as Alexander Selkirk used,
But they couldn't chat together--they had not been introduced.

For Peter Gray, and Somers too, though certainly in trade,
Were properly particular about the friends they made;
And somehow thus they settled it without a word of mouth--
That Gray should take the northern half, while Somers took the South.

On Peter's portion oysters grew--a delicacy rare,
But oysters were a delicacy Peter couldn't bear,
On Somers' side was turtle, on the shingle lying thick,
Which Somers couldn't eat, because it always made him sick.

Gray gnashed his teeth with envy as he saw a mighty store,
Of turtle unmolested on his fellow-creature's shore.
The oysters at his feet aside impatiently he shoved,
For turtle and his mother were the only things he loved.

And Somers sighed in sorrow as he settled in the south,
For the thought of Peter's oysters brought the water to his mouth.
He longed to lay him down upon the shelly bed, and stuff:
He had often eaten oysters, but had never had enough.

How they wished an introduction to each other they had had
When on board the Ballyshannon! And it drove them nearly mad.
To think how very friendly with each other they might get,
If it wasn't for the arbitrary rule of etiquette!

One day when out a hunting for the mus ridiculus,
Gray overheard his fellow man soliloquizing thus:
"I wonder how the playmates of my youth are getting on,
McConnell, S.B. Walters, Paddy Byles, and Robinson?"

These simple words made Peter as delighted as could be
Old chummies at the charterhouse were Robinson and he!
He walked straight up to Somers, then he turned extremely red.
Hesitated, hummed and hawed a bit, then cleared his throat and said:

"I beg your pardon--pray forgive me if I seem too bold,
But you have breathed a name I know familiarly of old.
You spoke aloud of Robinson--I happened to be by.
"You know him?" "Yes, extremely well" "allow me, so do I".

It was enough: they felt they could more pleasantly get on,
For (ah, the magic of the fact!) they each knew Robinson!
And Mr. Somers' turtle was at Peter's service quite,
And Mr. Somers punished Peter's oyster beds all night.

They soon became like brothers from community of wrongs:
They wrote each other little odes and sang each other songs;
They told each other anecdotes disparaging their wives;
On several occasions, too, they saved each other's lives.

They felt quite melancholy when they parted for the night,
And got up in the morning soon as ever it was light;
Each other's pleasant company they reckoned so upon,
And all because it happened that they both knew Robinson.

They lived for many years on that inhospitable shore,
And day by day they learned to love each other more and more.
At last, to their astonishment, on getting up one day,
They saw a frigate anchored in the offing of the bay.

To Peter an idea occurred. "Suppose we cross the main?
So good an opportunity may not be found again".
And Somers thought a minute, then ejaculated "Done!
I wonder how my business in the City's getting on?"

"But stay," said Mr. Peter: "when in England as you know,
I earned a living tasting teas for Baker, Croop and Co.,
I may be superceded--my employer thinks me dead!"
"Then come with me," said Somers, "and taste indigo instead".

But all their plans were scattered in moment when they found
the vessel was a convict ship from Portland, outward bound;
When a boat came off to fetch them, though they felt it very kind,
To go on board they firmly but respectfully declined.

And both the happy settlers roared with laughter at the joke,
They recognized a gentlemanly fellow pulling stroke:
'Twas Robinson--a convict, in an unbecoming frock!
Condemned to seven years for misappropriating stock!!!

They laughed no more, for Somers thought he had been rather rash
In knowing one whose friend had misappropriated cash;
And Peter thought a foolish tack he must have gone upon
In making the acquaintance of a friend of Robinson.

At first they didn't quarrel very openly, I've heard;
They nodded when they met, and now and then exchanged a word;
The word grew rare, and rarer still the nodding of the head,
And when they meet each other now, they cut each other dead.

To allocate the island they agreed by word of mouth,
And Peter takes the north again, and Somers takes the south;
And Peter has the oysters, which he hates, in layers thick,
And Somers has the turtle--turtle always makes him sick.

W.S. Gilbert

25 days left. the combination of sleep deprivation and a carousel of aimee mann on the ipod is bringing me to the verge of hallucination during my waking hours. my first task of the day was to boil 6 eggs and 3 pounds of potatoes; this turned out to be the most exciting event in a day full of misregistered images, bad-tempered baristas, and grey drizzly skies.

in the tradition of camilla parker bowls:

shout-out

-- to the other brother, who is going to boston college once he finishes his national servitude/slavery/sycophancy/[insert joke of choice here]. congrats! (even though you read this blog once every two years).

(minz: i know it's early, but let it be said that i'm putting it upon you to show him what there is to see.)

In case you've ever wondered how the date of Easter Sunday is calculated, you may edify yourself here. Quite interesting! Especially, the "April 19 is the mode" fact:



Happy Bunnies Day!

30 days. the data is all in, now it's a question of making something of it. i had 4.5 hours of class in the afternoon, by the end of which i was alternately doodling, dreaming of puppies, and doing the pavlicek bridge quiz -- anything to not have to think about linkage methods in cluster analysis. fridays this month are brutal.

during the break, the present for one of the birthday boys arrived at the department office, necessitating some misdirection and skulduggery as ewa and i smuggled the 4' by 2.5' by 2' box to a suitable hiding spot. i love how amazon ships their stuff in containers that are at least 16 times the size of the product. we had a little debate as to how ewa was going to get the present to the party, and not one graduate student suggested opening the package to see the size of the actual damn thing; instead, we wrestled with the box all the way to the trolley stop, and held up rail traffic for several minutes when it jammed in the doors.

it was a bread maker; the other, more manageable gift the talking heads brick, and the cake was actual several dozen Symbolic Cupcakes with depictions like the sri lankan national flag and "positive psychology" (don't ask). daniel managed to make an appearance, despite his busted leg, and traitor joe, on rotation back from princeton. i ate too many mini-pappadums. the theme of the night was the 80s, and there were too many leotards, and a vigorous, overlong debate about whether lynyrd skynyrd was 70s or 80s (if you think the answer to that is obvious, try another one: pac-man. unquestionably 80s, right? but no! the arcade version first appeared in 1979. point: decades are no longer defined by years). there was also too much discussion of work and research, and you could sense people frantically trying to get drunk to put a stop to that. and still: just before i left at 1, i overheard a conversation about randomized controlled trials, and the problems associated with.

i don't believe we moved house and i wasn't even there.

anyway. from if not now, when, primo levi:

"I studied various things," Mottel replied smugly. "I also studied the Talmud, and you know what the Talmud says about women? It says that you should never speak to a woman that's not your wife, not even in sign language, now with your hands or your feet or your eyes. You mustn't look at her clothes, even when she isn't wearing them. And listening to a woman sing is like seeing her naked. And it's a grave sin if an engaged couple embrace: the woman is then impure, as if she had her period, and she has to cleanse herself in the ritual bath."

"All this is in the Talmud," asked Mendel, who hadn't spoken before.

"In the Talmud and other places," Mottel said.

"What's the Talmud?" Piotr asked. "Is it your Gospel?"

"The Talmud is like a soup, with all the things man can eat in it," Dov said. "But there's wheat and chaff, fruit and pits, meat and bones. It isn't very good, but it's nourishing. It's full of mistakes and contradictions, but for that very reason it teaches you how to use your mind, and anyone who's read it all --"

Pavel interrupted him. "I'll explain what the Talmud is to you, with an example. Now listen carefully: Two chimneysweeps fall down the flue of a chimney; one comes out all covered in soot, the other comes out clean: which of the two goes to wash himself?"

Suspecting a trap, Piotr looked around, as if seeking help. Then he plucked up his courage and answered: "The one who's dirty goes to wash."

"Wrong," Pavel said. "The one who's dirty sees the other man's face, and it's clean, so he thinks he's clean too. Instead, the clean one sees the soot on the other one's face, believes he's dirty himself, and goes to wash. You understand?"

"I understand. That makes sense."

"But wait, I haven't finished the example. Now I'll ask you a second question. Those two chimneysweeps fall a second time down the same flue, and again one is dirty and one isn't. Which one goes to wash?"

"I told you I understood. The clean one goes to wash."

"Wrong," Pavel said mercilessly. "When he washed after the first fall, the clean man saw that the water in the basin didn't get dirty, and the dirty man realized why the clean man had gone to wash. So, this time, the dirty chimneysweep went and washed."

Piotr listened to this, with his mouth open, half in fright and half in curiosity.

"And now the third question. The pair falls down the flue the third time. Which of the two goes to wash?"

"From now on, the dirty one will go and wash."

"Wrong again. Did you ever hear of two men falling down the same flue and one remaining clean while the other got dirty? There, that's what the Talmud is like."

Palm Sunday. We had a visiting priest talk about how suffering is meaningless without Christ's passion, an argument that I strongly dislike, for 2 primary reasons:

1) I'm not sure it's true. "Meaning", as we usually think of it, is probably a human creation anyway, and non-religious people can (and do) find all sorts of meaning in their suffering if they choose. One could even make up an evolutionary story -- suffering is "meaningful" because those who suffer the least incur the fewest fitness penalties etc.

2) Even if it is true, it makes an assumption about the causal direction -- that is to say, it's equally reasonable to say that maybe religion only exists because suffering does. This is the Stark and Finke argument, essentially -- we believe, and invest in belief, as advance payment for the mitigation of suffering on earth. It's then utterly necessary (and, the skeptics would say, very convenient) that our suffering is arbitrary and orthogonal to the strength of our belief, because otherwise, there would no longer be any need for this external and inscrutable source of meaning to exist. Thus, at the very best, religion and suffering are symbiotic -- if we could directly negate our suffering with good acts, if there were any correlation whatsoever, there would be no need to appeal to (a) (G)od for our lives to make sense.

It's very clever really, because here you have one piece of evidence that can be used -- equally convincingly -- both for and against the existence of God. Not that you would ever hear this coming from the pulpit, but I thought I would share.