boston, ma

8/29 to 9/2 to settle the other brother into boston college, which on the one hand was terribly exciting, but on the other means that it's been 8 years since i was a freshman. as burt ward famously, said: "holy senescence, batman" (ok, maybe not). photos imminent here*. BC actually has a much nicer campus than i'd pictured, and would be perfect if not for the fact that it's built on the steepest hill in new england.

the good
1. i only got mistaken as being the father twice.
2. von! it's been too long. my records say jan 2nd, 2007, so 2.5 years. too, too long. i hold you to visiting philly. there will be *ahem* tincture.
3. toscanini's. i fully understand why the boston people have blogged about it like 8 million times.

the bad
1. chastised for getting a hotel in lechmere and dragging von all the way out there to see me. (a) he offered (b) it's his town (c) i'd been to cambridge 2 days ago. note to everyone: if you're passing through here for 2 days, i will travel all over creation for you, promise.
2. took the overnight train to boston with the intention of sleeping all the way. hours of sleep = 0.
3. undergrads are yukky. it doesn't matter that they're not my undergrads; i've just been spoiled for life.

the ugly (but slightly awesome)
ran into one (1) s******rean dad who spent like an hour talking about himself and his pull with the government and how he's going to get his son out of NS and into harvard yale stanford princeton and how the super amazingness of his business acumen has made him the best and wisest and most wonderful person in the universe. this is addressed mostly to the mother as i concentrate very hard on eating a chocolate-chip cookie, and when he finally pauses for breath (the mother has literally not been able to get a word in edgewise for minutes), she looks at him, and says just one word: "Yah", in the MOST PERFECT WITHERING TONE, and i have to dive into her bag pretending to look for something so that he can't see that i'm cracking up all over the place.

* stupidly forgot to bring my camera. you would think that by now i'd have figured out how to pack a suitcase, but no.

pa

was tweaking a few figures in my MS and took a "short" break, during which i found funny farm. guess what happened the rest of the afternoon.

also of interest, the MIT mystery hunt. von: shall we form a team?

oh, and re: tincture, the seven are or, argent, azure, gules, purpure, sable and verte. if this makes no sense to you, just move right along.

sg

1) back a week, and lodged uncomfortably in the brother's old room, where it's stifling hot all day and night. the attractions and demerits of this country shift continuously depending on where i am who i'm with at any given moment. e.g.: woo!.

2) i have decided that i'm quite firmly in denial about everything, and would like it to remain that way as long as possible, preferably until death or senility. for instance, i've decided that i know longer want to think about graduation. perhaps if i do that hard enough, it will cease to be a real thing.

3) to the people who've talked to me, thank you, at least, for being sensible and wise.

lots of luscious free time this week, but precious little to blog about. was on the verge of feeling guilty for not working hard enough till i ran into christian today coming home from the gym, who said that he's basically not done any work, like, all summer, and then the feeling went away.

other stuff:

1) for our inaugural movie night this week, the brother and i netflixed wilde, whereupon he finally understood why the dvd was not to be found in the police state (BANNED, for "promoting" the "homosexual lifestyle"). once again: why was stephen fry not cast as horace slughorn?

2) i'm all for eco-friendly/sustainable farming, but our locally-grown summer squash just isn't very good. it's not meaty, if that makes any sense at all, more reminiscent of those squishy brown cucumbers that i hate (what are those called?)

3) learned from the sunday nyt crossword: LATRIA, one of the three levels of worship, the other two being dulia and hyperdulia. why do they not teach us awesome things like that in catechism? also, if hyperdulia is for the virgin mary, and dulia is for the saints, what is it called when you pray for the intercession of deceased relatives? so many important questions!

4) oh, and when i'm back this week, remind me to tell everyone at home the story of the mother and a clockwork orange, which i've refrained from reporting here at her behest.

in what may well be anti-climax of the decade, the other housemate moved out, and the brother moved in on thursday this week. this is a cause for minor celebration, as i (probably) no longer have to contend with crumbs/spills/unwashed dishes/stolen beer/unbagged trash etc etc. also, if you happen to be sharing a house with someone, please don't steal their beer. it's very uncouth. i hope one day to make a List Of Things That Are Fair Game When Put Into a Common Refrigerator: yogurt, bananas, carrot/celery sticks, etc. but NOT BEER. never beer. and especially not dogfish head aprihop.

in other news, i submitted, this week, a crossword to the LA Times, and my meta-analysis to psych bulletin. guess which possibility of acceptance i'm more excited about. (this is not a rhetorical question).

not for grad students

got a piece of spam today with the heading "Your Data Is Lost", and nearly had a heart attack.

have been watching kings, a show that started out promising but very quickly devolved into nonsense. the conceit was cool: a modern-day retelling of the biblical stories of the kingdom of israel with ian mcshane as king saul/silas and christopher egan (who?) as david. the producers also started out on the right foot, i think, by selling the show to nbc, and investing a ton of energy in art direction: everything is starkly lit and carefully crafted without having the awful glossiness and glare that the particular style often falls prey to. there are also some quite lovely moments in the pilot -- for instance, a scene where david confesses to his dying brother that the act that made him a hero (standing up to a 'goliath' tank) was not what it seemed ("everyone thinks i'm brave, but i'm not..."), prompting his brother's last words to him: "be brave now".

unfortunately, the pilot is more or less where the loveliness ends. it very quickly becomes apparent in subsequent episodes that the show has a number of fatal flaws. first, chris egan can't really act, and you can almost picture the vets of the production (mcshane and susanna thompson especially) getting increasingly frustrated with that. i mean, look at alias. lena olin, victor garber and ron rifkin combined couldn't combat the awfulness that was jennifer garner's "acting". second, the writers resort very quickly to the preposterous situations that should be reserved as last-resort ratings grabs or season cliffhangers at worst, with members of the royal family exposing themselves to deadly viruses and generally running all over creation trying to get themselves killed. i mean, c'mon. little common sense goes a long way.

which brings us to the biggest problem with this show. it doesn't seem like the producers/creators spent any amount of time thinking through how an absolute monarchy in a modern technological society would work. (or if they did, they needed better consultants. were you really short of unemployed history phds?) that was the coolest part of the show for me when i started watching -- how does this system run? unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the writers intended to go anywhere with the idea, choosing instead to spend time on pretentious symbolism, ridiculous lessons in "theology", and the cringe-worthy love affair between david and the king's daughter.

sigh. on to the next heartbreak

in the LAT crossword today

"Composer" of "Fanfare for the Common Cold": (P.D.Q. BACH)

self-diagnosis

while downloading music last night, it occurred to me that i have a very bad case of e-hoarding. what i usually do when i discover a new band is download their most popular songs, listen to the first 30 seconds of each, and move the ones i like onto some sort of current playlist. the rest of the music goes into the big slushy mess of other songs on my ipod, quite often never to be played again. every time i go through this, it crosses my mind that i should just get rid of the songs i don't want. i never do, though, not because i'm too lazy to, but because -- well, you never know when you just might want to listen to that horrible kings of leon song just one more time. corroborating evidence: i still have every single journal article, syllabus, paper and electronic assignment that i used or wrote in college, sorted by class and semester. further corroborating evidence: i have archived e-mail dating back to 1995 (!) including correspondence with A01A people i haven't see for close to a decade now. i feel like this is quite close to being a diagnosable disorder, except that within the next 10 years people are probably going to have a video recording of their entire life from birth hanging in a tiny chip around their necks, so maybe i don't have it so bad after all.

4th

since i'd hosted the thanksgiving dinner last year, i figured i may as well go the whole hog and host a 4th of july bbq as well. (with apologies to the brother -- you'd said you had plans. i thought of you!) there was a lot of meat, and a lot of beer, and nothing caught on fire that wasn't supposed to, and we managed to get a decent spot afterwards out on the parkway to watch the fireworks with sheryl crow* singing her 2 hits over and over again, so i count that as a success. speaking of the brother, i actually was going to say something rather similar to what he did, which is that independence day here is a lot more fun than back home, although ironically i often am a lot more drunk in the police state because i'm usually sitting in front of the tv downing shots of whiskey every time the ndp commentator says something from a list of pre-determined shibboleths. this is likely to be the plan this year as well, btw, so if anyone would like to join me in drinking to the clusterfuck that is our celebration of mediocrity and the destruction of the human spirit, you are more than welcome. i have a preference for jameson, but am open to suggestions.

* seriously, start naming sheryl crow songs now. despite how famous she obviously is, i defy you to name more than 5**. please don't e-mail me if you can.

** no, that one was by shania twain.

since all the hubbub of traveling and having visitors has come to an end, it's actually been sort of dull. jared and norah both graduated last month and i'm the only person left in the grad student room in the lab; i.e. having to deal with dead silence all day, every day. i think that starting from next week i'm just going to give up on the notion of going to lab entirely and work from home -- right now i'm mostly writing and preparing a few lectures, and i'd much rather do that eating honey nut cheerios in my underwear than suffering in the office. (yes. TMI.)

website of the day: cycorp, the most serious and scientifically-rigorous effort so far to create a true artificial intelligence. if you're interested at all in linguistics, semantics, cognitive psychology, computational modeling, neural nets or neurophilosophy (among the things i care to name), check it out. or, you could just be a dork and amuse yourself with the trivia game. i think one of my ultimate geek fantasies is to one day have the entire lexicon and semantic net of cyc uploaded into my brain, whereupon i'll be able to complete any crossword ever made in, like, 6.5 seconds.

and...i don't believe i actually admitted that on the internet.

*kills self*

comic-con

i was going to write a long post about this, but reconsidered because

a) you had to have been there, and
b) i was a bloody fool and didn't have a camera.

instead, i'll just write in ALL CAPS to say that I GOT TO SHAKE HANDS AND TALK WITH EDWARD JAMES OLMOS. IN THE FLESH. AND IT WAS THE MOST AWESOME THING EVER.

e-mail me if you really want to hear more gushing.

murdered by the crossword today, the highlight being "victim of terrible teasing" (TANTALUS). with __TAL_S in place, i spent ages going over words that might refer to someone who had a bad perm. also murdered yesterday by "jewish parchment scrolls put on doorposts" (MEZUZAHS), which i had never heard of in my life.

have started timing myself for mondays through fridays to check for progress.

study finis

pa

ran my final two scans on wednesday and thursday. the scan kitty is exhausted, and we have n = 31, and it's time to start tearing the stuffing out of these data to see what there is to see. jared successfully defended his dissertation on wednesday, and the advisor came up to me afterwards to say that it's all me now, which is like, great, no pressure at all. if there are no significant findings in these data, i'm seriously going to koh samui to sell beach umbrellas.

palo alto, ca

4 days in california, and i'm finally feeling like summer is here. on saturday, we drove up into napa valley on a still bright day to stare at young grapes beginning to get sugary on the vines. lunch was at bouchon, and consisted mostly of cholesterol -- pate, escargot in delicious puddles of garlic butter, and a quite-tasty boudin noir + stewed apples. the nicest thing, i think, about slow european lunches is that by the time they end, dinner is not far away.



re: wines, i still like cabs the best of all, which i think makes me young and unsophisticated. what are academics supposed to drink, anyway? i guess being able to appreciate single malts helps. we got a bottle of a delightfully complex cask-strength aberlour (a'bunadh, batch #26) on monday from beltramo's, and sat around and sipped it and felt like we were tenured. btw, i feel like starting a savings jar so i can put money towards buying beltramo's when i'm 35. they have more whiskey in that one store than in the whole of philadelphia.

apss '09 (final thoughts)

8. i sense that i will probably continue to hate conferences more and more, until i start bleeding.

9. i know that seattle is starbucks capital of the world, but 3 outlets on one block is really rather excessive. anyway, to close, here's a picture of the very first one:

apss '09 (iv)

7.1. my actual talk is on wednesday afternoon, by which time i'm so calm it's a little bit frightening. the first time i had to do this i went through most of the conference in a sort of a dissociative state; it's heartening to know that my habituation curve to the anxiety of public speaking is rather sharper than for, say, the curve for seeing therapy clients, something which i'm still not 100% comfortable doing even after a year.

7.2. matt walker is chair of the session, which is like, the biggest adrenaline rush since six flags magic mountain, 1995.

7.3.1. the first speaker who gets up acts as if it's her first time giving any talk, anywhere. seriously, it's like show-and-tell in kindergarten, where you have the grasshopper from the backyard bouncing around in an empty gerber's baby food jar.

7.3.1. it also goes on way overtime. by the time she gets done, there's like, 8.5 seconds left for questions

7.3.2. and then this guy comes up and starts ripping everything she's said to shreds, like, point by point, and every time you think it's going to end, he keeps going on and on and on. it's quite possibly one of the most fantastic things i've ever seen. she stands there, trying desperately to get a word in edgewise to defend herself, and he's just going on and on and pretty soon they're just balls out screaming at each other, and matt's like, settle down, and it just about devolves into a complete melee.

7.3.3. these are the moments you live for.

7.3.4. when it comes to my turn, i practice, for the first time, actually giving a talk instead of just saying the words, which is really all i've been able to do till now. powerpoint is such a crutch. i need to work on having slides with no words at all on them. that would be awesome

bainbridge island, wa

took a little break from the conference to wander around one of the offshore islands. there was a lot of nothing on this particular one, but we did get a rather spectacular view of the city:





and, as promised, llamas (for sale!):

apss '09 (iii)

5. monday is boring, except for $3.50 martinis complete with the world's most delicious pimiento-stuffed olives. i am not a martini purist. i will drink mine with good vodka, and whatever proportion of vermouth the bartender sees fit to mix in. if this happens to ruin my friendship with anyone, so be it.

6.1. the advisor gives a talk in a symposium where he spends a fair amount of time talking about my work.

6.2. for some reason, this makes me feel extremely uncomfortable.

6.3. squirming, etc.

6.4. at the end of the talk, someone gets up to ask a question about a data slide that i gave to the advisor about 24 hours before i left philly. of course he doesn't know how to answer it, and to my acute horror, he confesses that one would have to ask me to find out.

6.5. this is exactly the kind of dumb thing that happens in academia all the time; people jump the gun on presenting unchecked data from one grad student, and suddenly it becomes the Word, and people everywhere are using it as evidence for their own claims. not what's said, but who says it.

6.5.1. as a corollary: if it's in the science section of the newspaper, it's almost certainly not true.

apss '09 (ii)*

4.1. sunday is 'trainee day', where graduate students gather and listen to one another talk non-stop about how all the work their advisors have made them do, and persuading themselves that they actually wanted to do it in the first place.

4.2. in order to get anyone at all to attend this, they get the people who have won travel awards and hold the checks ransom till the end of the day.

4.2.1. sneaky bastards.

4.2.2. we're each made to sign up for four sessions, plus a lunch thing where somehow i've been pressganged into giving a talk to a room full of people who don't care about or understand my work.

4.2.3. i suppose the speakers could have been worse. at the very least, there was matt walker, who i'm trying to schmooze up at every available opportunity in case i want do a post-doc in a state where i can actually buy single malt scotch. his talk teaches me a number of things, the most important of which is British Accents FTW.

4.2.4. lunch is awful. my talk goes ok though. i have by now firmly decided that the most unimportant part of giving a talk is its actual content. this is probably not a revelation to anyone who does a lot of public speaking, but i personally get a lot of mileage out of very small things. stepping out from behind the podium for one. you can be quaking in your shoes, but as long as you get out from behind that podium, people immediately assume that you Know What You're Doing.

4.2.4.1. most of the time, i still don't know what i'm doing.

4.2.5. the best part of the day is when this prof from wash. u. stands up and gives us the skinny on how to handle the final years of grad school. he basically says what i've suspected all along, which is: grab all the data you can get your hands on, write it up, stick your name on the front, and claim the paper as yours. i can't remember if i wrote about our little authorship mess a while ago, but the advice basically confirms what i suspected, which was that i was too nice, and was lucky that the advisor was looking out for me. never again.

4.2.5.1. also that experiments mostly don't work, and that you just have to get over it, which is possibly the most depressing thing i've heard all year.

* feel free to insert sleepless in seattle jokes anywhere, i got tired of them the moment i heard where the conference this year was going to be.