more with the slapping business

yes, the reward and punishment discussion will never die. (this is posted rather belatedly.)

Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell

"Like Santa, God "knows if you are sleeping, he knows if you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good"... The lyrics continue "so be good for goodness' sake". Catchy, but a logical solecism. In logic, the song should have continued "so be good for the sake of the electronic equipment, dolls, sports gear and other gifts you hope to get but will get only if the omniscient and just Santa judges you worthy of receiving." If you were good for goodness' sake, the all-seeing Santa would be irrelevant as a motivator of your virtue." [Mitchell Silver]

...

We may shun this theme as a foundation of our morality today yet still honor it for having played a founding role in the past, as a ladder that, once climbed, may be discarded. How could this work? The economist Thomas Schelling has pointed out that "belief in a deity who will reward goodness and punish evil transforms many situations from subjective to secured, at least in the believer's mind". Consider a situation in which two parties confront each other with a prospect for cooperation on something both parties would want, but each is afraid the other will renege on any bargain struck, and there are no authorities or stronger parties around to enforce it. Promises can be made and then broken, but sometimes they can be secured. A commitment may be secured by being self-enforcing; for instance, you can burn your bridges behind so you can't escape even if you change your mind. Or it may be secured by your greater desire to preserve your reputation. You may have good reason to fulfill your side of a contract even if your reason for signing it in the first place has lapsed, simply because your reputation is also at stake, a valuable social commodity indeed. Or - and this is Schelling's point - a promise made "in the eyes of God" may well convince those who believe in God that a sort of virtual escrow account has been created, protecting both parties and giving each other the confidence to move ahead without fear of reneging by the other party.

i am old

i went to the liquor store today, and no one asked for my id.

(either that, or this is a very popular store with the undergrads.)

today was long -- too long -- and i didn't get half of what i wanted to do done. the proofs of my paper arrived yesterday and i found 5 typos in it on my first pass through that were clearly not in my original MS. aren't they supposed to just copy and paste the text into pagemaker, or whatever it is they use nowadays? maybe von with his copy-editing experience can enlighten me on what happens. anyway, i didn't have time for a second run-through, and my stupid budget information hasn't been done yet, and i would have done reading for class except that i got sucked into a bridge book that arrived for me in the mail and didn't. yes, i'm criminal. by mid-afternoon the rain was coming down in sheets, and hilary and alyson and i were stuck in the GSC contemplating pontenging sara's seminar on gender development (zzzzz). the girls' ivy league sense of honor or whatever got the better of them however (bloody harvard), so we dashed helter-skelter down locust walk and dripped into class and i covertly did the new york times crossword while people discussed bandura and transsexuals.

it should have been over after that, but there was beer sem*, and i felt a moral responsibility to listen to what some other people are doing for their first year projects. incredible, groundbreaking work seems to be the answer to that one -- not just that, but research that is interesting and thought-provoking and relevant and a bunch of other things that i'm mortally afraid that my work is not.

* yes, beer sem is a seminar. with beer.

kissinger

-- did a q-and-a last night to an auditorium crammed half with policy majors and half with ancient republican stalwarts; WH and i being just about the only people without any deep intellectual understanding of what was being discussed. this was actually almost refreshing. a group of protesters had gathered outside the venue to chant the usual anti-war sentiments and give out flyers explaining in some detail why kissinger in particular and the nixon administration in general were mass murderers who ought to have been crucified on the nearest tree 30 years ago. "you should ask him about the indo-pakistan war," someone behind me suggested to his friend. "i should," she replied. "i should ask him what the fuck he was thinking. do you think i should phrase it like that? 'what the fuck were you thinking?'"

as one might expect, many of the questions were about iraq, variations on the theme of: is it the new vietnam? the answer to that was never going to be yes, but he did draw parallels, and admit that the democratic process was never going to establish itself as quickly as the bush administration hoped (or deluded itself into thinking) it would in such a sectarian state. he said a bit about nuclear proliferation as well, and how the m.a.d. argument doesn't readily extend into a multi-player situation. there was a question about his german heritage, and whether that was ever a conflict of interest while he was in government -- being a jew in germany in 1938, it seems, did not inspire particular loyalty in him to his country of birth.

and finally, someone asked him to ask himself a question that would show off his best attributes and answer it, to which he replied as diplomatically as he could in words to the effect of: "that's a really idiotic thing to ask me to do." how nice not to have to suffer fools.

From The Gates of the Forest, Elie Wiesel:

When the founder of Hasidic Judaism, the great Rabbi Israel Shem Tov, saw misfortune threatening the Jews, it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted. Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Maggid of Mezeritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: "Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer," and again the miracle would be accomplished. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say,"I do not know how to light the fire. I do not know the prayer, but I know the place, and this must be sufficient." It was sufficient, and the miracle was accomplished. Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhin to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire, and I do not know the prayer, and I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient." And it was sufficient. For God made man because He loves stories.

they're putting up lights on locust walk, snowflakes and tinsel, the sure signs of a year drawing to its close.

to the cookie conspirators

thanks for making this a very smiley friday...butter and sugar are indeed an exceedingly good remedy for clerical and all other kinds of hell.

:)

cfn

i have been in and out the center for functional neuroimaging over the past few days trying to get the software licences i need to start doing some real research, and although i still don't have the licences, i have started to get to know some of the people who "work" down there. the inverted commas because it seems to be mostly doughnuts and coffee and online shopping and gray's anatomy watercooler chat and very little science. except for the fact that all the computers are unix machines, i think i could learn to like it there.

it's 70 outside, shorts weather in the middle of november. from mark's cafe, you can look out over the main square of perelman quad, the iconic broken button, falling yellow leaves swirling around in the wind like so much confetti. the air has been rinsed clean by yesterday's rain. someone is having office hours at the table next to mine, a curly-haired TA and an earnest african-american undergrad workshopping a paper comparing superman to jesus christ. the sunlight is bright, intense, it comes off the ledges and railings in blinding shards, and the world smells like hazelnut and toasted bagels.

my prof's housemate, in a market in china, came upon a pen of kittens. she played delightedly with them for a good long while before finally giving in, calling the stall owner over and pointing to the one she wanted. whereupon in one fluid motion, the stall owner reached into the pen, broke the kitten's neck, put it in a plastic bag and handed it to my prof's housemate to take home.

in other news, it rained all day today, and my shoes are sodden.

election day

-- started with me being in clerical hell and sticking staples into myself as i attempted to collate >1500 pages of documentation into 18 neatly organized packages. was rescued by one of the kindly senior lab administrators, who informed me that we pay undergrads and work-study students to do that kind of thing. aha. i was reminded of the conversation i had with hilary the other day -- i was telling her in a wistful, semi-serious sort of a way that i wouldn't mind having an undergrad to do my fmri preprocessing for me, and she was all: why not? you should ask your advisor. i have an assistant. and i was like: oh!, and she was like, yeah, we're real people now! which was funny, but also a little true, and a little scary.

anyway, during clerical hell, a. came online for a while and was sympathetic, minz came online and was not, and then i had to run away to a terribly disorganized meeting, then to stats, which was good today, and funny. grabbed soup and ran back to the lab. all along locust walk were people harassing other people to VOTE BOB CASEY, and BE A RESPONSIBLE CITIZEN, and so on. both casey and rick santorum are kind of feh, but in any case, judging from the circus american politics has turned into the whole world is probably going to hell in a handbasket fairly soon, so who really cares?

edited an 11-page subject screening questionnaire, then dashed back to class and was comatose for about two hours while everyone else discussed infant-caregiver attachment. checked the results (nothing to see yet), went to fresh grocer, bought cranberry sauce, and then home to do laundry and reading and pray for the american map to light up blue, blue, blue.

powers

i've been meaning to write something lengthy about the echo maker for simply ages, but the impetus has gone, so i'll just say a few short things. for starters, it was very unlike his other books. fs called me a few weeks ago to complain about how all powers' characters speak in exactly the same bombastic way -- this has vanished entirely in EM, along with a lot of the delightful syntax and wordplay. also (mostly) gone: the way he uses the central motif as a resource for imagery in the narrative (the musical metaphors in time of our singing i think are the prime example of this, but i know he's done it in most of his other books).

because the technical bits in the book all had to do with neuroscience, i could actually follow along quite well, and that was a bit of a problem. not because he got anything wrong - his research as always was impeccable - but because there was a lot of pleasure to be had from his novels in not knowing exactly what he is talking about (in gain and gold bug variations especially), and being able to enjoy the prose on the level of image, or even prosody (which i'm sure is part of powers' intentions).

still, i enjoyed the story, and the ending especially, but it was not a typical example of a powers book. i only hope the stylistic changes were just for this novel (and i can see why he might have done that) and not a permanent switch because of laziness or something. i was going to offer to lend it to people, but, erm, i guess not. get your own?

there was a halloween party last night in the hangout house. i think that most people didn't really have their heart in it, what with it being 5 days after halloween and all, but at least it was sugar and human company. costume roll call: white trash, blue man, lampshade, peasant, bob dylan, robert smith (from the cure), chinese empress, pregnant swiss goatherd (i think), A CATCH, cowboy, punk rocker, fairy godmother and borat. there was pumpkin ice cream and apple cider (both good), and a lot of being carried in a tide of people from room to room. grad school parties are so much more muted than undergrad ones. i think there's a shared understanding (which no one can openly admit to) that everyone needs to be in a fit state to do work the next day, and so a tacit, nash-equilibrium level of craziness is arrived at, a compromise between wasted and just sad. someone needs to quantify this phenomenon. a noticeable bunch of people were plain missing -- i strongly suspect that they decided to go see borat: cultural learnings of america for make benefit glorious nation of kazakhstan without me, in which case i will be mad.

surfacing to say

thursday was still bad, because of unearthing myself from the reading backlog, but friday was better, and had a talk by luiz pessoa (not bad), time for the gym with daniel (better) and the prestige (v. good...christopher nolan has such a twisted mind).

dissertation tip #2

having spent 8 hours on an exam on monday-tuesday, most of today writing a bloody horrible paper, the weekend nowhere in sight, and reading backed up by about five days, i'm ready to declare this the first Grad School Week From Hell. i'm on the verge of going to read the catcher in the rye again, just so you have an idea of how bad.

anyway, i was handed up dissertation tip #2 today, from ANON, who told me:
MAKE SURE THAT THE MOST SENIOR AND RESPECTED PERSON ON YOUR COMMITTEE HAS THE LEAST IDEA OF WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT.

from the apa website, for the teachers (or do they tell you this in nie?):

Sometimes, we aren't looking to divine someone's overall personality or intelligence based on a first impression; we simply want to know how good they will be at a particular skill or set of skills, like teaching. Tufts psychologist Nalini Ambady has found that students, for example, are surprisingly good at predicting a teacher's effectiveness based on first impressions. She creates these first impressions with silent video clips of teachers--clips she calls "thin slices."

In a 1993 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 64, No. 3), Ambady and a colleague videotaped 13 graduate teaching fellows as they taught their classes. She then took three random 10-second clips from each tape, combined them into one 30-second clip for each teacher and showed the silent clips to students who did not know the teachers. The student judges rated the teachers on 13 variables, such as "accepting," "active," "competent" and "confident." Ambady combined these individual scores into one global rating for each teacher and then correlated that rating with the teachers' end-of-semester evaluations from actual students.

"We were shocked at how high the correlation was," she says. It was 0.76. In social psychology anything above 0.6 is considered very strong.

Curious to see how thin she could make her slices before affecting the student judges' accuracy, Ambady cut the length of the silent clips to 15 seconds, and then to six. Each time, the students accurately predicted the most successful teachers.

"There was no significant difference between the results with 30-second clips and six-second clips," Ambady says.

In a later experiment in the same study, she cut out the middleman--the global variable--and simply asked students to rate, based on thin-slice video clips, the quality and performance of the teachers. Again, the ratings correlated highly with the teachers' end-of-semester evaluations. Ambady also replicated her results with high school teachers.

Of course, one could argue that the true measure of a teachers' effectiveness is not what their students say about them, but how much those students learn. Ambady, acknowledging this, has tried to measure whether students actually learn more from teachers who give a first impression of effectiveness.

In an as-yet-unpublished study, she videotaped groups of five participants, one of whom was randomly assigned to be the "teacher." The teacher spent time preparing a lesson, and then taught students a mathematical language in which combinations of letters represent different numbers, as in 10=djz or 3=vfg. The students took a test at the end of the lesson to measure their knowledge of the new language. Then, as before, strangers watched 10-second video clips of the teachers and rated them on the same variables as in the first study. The thin-slice ratings of teacher effectiveness, Ambady says, significantly predicted students' performance on the test.

"Students learned more from teachers who were seen in the thin slices as having the qualities of a better teacher," Ambady says.

I went with a bunch of random Catholics to Amy Berg's Deliver Us From Evil, the single most horrifying documentary I've seen since the stupid Silent Scream they inexplicably seem to show every secondary school kid in Singapore. (Did they even give us the pro-choice argument back then? Seems terribly imbalanced to have graphic images of feet being sucked out of a uterus on the one hand and just...words, if that, for the other side. I guess showing us someone being raped probably isn't kosher in the classroom though.)

Deliver Us From Evil is about the recent child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, and in particular about Fr. Oliver O'Grady, who engaged in pedophilic acts in various dioceses (dioceze?) in California from the 70s to the 90s. O'Grady was allowed to continue abusing children unchecked because Archbishop (now Cardinal) Mahony kept transferring the priest every time an incident got reported, promising families that he would not get to work with children again, and essentially perpetrating a cover-up on such a horrific scale that it boggles the mind.

Almost all of the film consists of interviews -- with the victims, their families, lawyers, and scholars -- as well as archive footage of deposition hearings. There's almost no editorializing, and no real need for it either. If anything, the even-handedness probably adds to the horror of the experience. Victims and family members break down in sickening long takes. When one father talks about how his five-year-old daughter was raped, in their house, by someone they trusted with all their being, I could have puked right there in my seat.

O'Grady himself speaks a lot. The priest is mild-mannered, unremorseful, and, most terribly, reminds me of the Irish priests I have known since I was young. Superficially, because of the accent, but also in his mannerisms and personality. Obviously I'm not drawing any other kind of comparison, but you can imagine how everything hit me that much harder because of the similarities.

About halfway through the film, Amy Berg gets a psychologist to try to piece together a psychodynamic theory of why rates of child abuse are so high among the Catholic clergy. Her theory (and you might have heard this): because seminarians have to enter the religious life at such an early age, their psychosexual development is essentially stunted in adolescence, which causes them to perceive younger people as their sexual peers. Also (and I find this a little more suspect, although the deposition interviews would suggest that, at the very least, the superiors involved in O'Grady's case felt this way), from the Church's point-of-view, since all sexual acts outside of marriage are sinful, pedophilia, adultery and masturbation are all in the same basket of wrongness. Which is why the Vatican sees fit to allow priests who are child abusers to go on serving -- it's just not bad enough in their eyes to warrant their removal.

If all this is true -- and I'd need more than theories and anecdotal evidence to believe it -- then the Church needs psychologists, stat, as well as some sort of impetus for reform.

So. If this movie ever makes it past the media censors in your fascist country (unlikely), make every effort to go and see it. It's kind of shattering, though, so be warned. Then, after that, talk to me about it, because it's a kind of a crappy thing for Catholics to have to face, and although it's not going to dent my faith, it certainly makes me feel uneasy about the Church as an institution, and humanity in general.

i am ashamed to report that, after just 1.5 months of cooking, i have been reduced to the method of:

* look in fridge
* assemble everything that's about to go bad
* throw in big pot
* call it dinner

(I enjoyed this...because I would like to think that Jesus (and Peter) really were kind of like that.)

From The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis

"And now, Rabbi," Andrew asked, "where do we begin our military life?"

"God," Jesus answered, "took earth from Nazareth and fashioned this body of mine. It is therefore my duty to begin the war in Nazareth. It is there that my flesh must commence its transformation into spirit."

"And afterwards we'll go to Capernaum," said Jacob, "to save my parents."

"And then to Magdala," suggested Andrew, "to get poor Magdalene and put her in the ark too."

"And then to the whole world!" shouted John, pointing to the east and west.

Peter heard them and laughed. "I'm wondering about our bellies," he said. "What'll we eat in the ark? I suggest that we take along only edible animals. Goodness gracious, what use have we for lions and gnats?"

He was hungry, and his mind and thoughts were on food. The others all laughed.

"All you can think about is dinner," Jacob scolded him. "We're speaking here about the salvation of the world."

"The rest of you have the same thought I have," Peter objected, "but you won't admit it. I say frankly whatever comes into my head, whether good or bad. My mind goes round and round, and I go round and round with it. That's why the gossips call me Windmill. Am I right, Rabbi, or am I not?"

Jesus' face brightened into a smile. An old story came into his mind. "Once upon a time there was a rabbi who desired to find someone who could blow the horn so skillfully and loud that the faithful would hear and come to the synagogue. He announced therefore that all good horn-blowers should present themselves for an audition. The rabbi himself would choose the best. Five came - the most skilled in town. Each took the horn and blew. When they all had finished, the rabbi questioned them one by one: 'What do you think of, my child, when you blow the horn?' The first said, 'I think of God.' The second: 'I think of Israel's deliverance.' The third: 'I think of the starving poor.' The fourth: 'I think of orphans and widows.' One only, the shabbiest of the lot, stayed behind the others in a corner and did not speak. 'And you, my child,' the rabbi asked him, 'what do you think of when you blow the horn?' 'Father,' he answered, blushing, 'I am poor and illiterate and I have four daughters. I'm unable to give them dowries, poor things, so that they can get married like everyone else. When I blow the horn, therefore, I say to myself: God, you see how I toil and slave for you. Send four husbands, please, for my daughters!' 'Have my blessing,' said the rabbi. 'I choose you!'"

Jesus turned to Peter and laughed. "Have my blessing, Peter," he said. "I choose you. You have food on your mind, and you talk about food. When you have God on your mind, you'll talk about God. Bravo! That's why men call you Windmill. I choose you. You are the windmill which will grind the wheat into bread so that men may eat.

stole wh out from the library for lunch today in houston hall, which is the second worst place to eat on campus after au bon pain. in 30 degree weather, though, propinquity starts becoming a serious consideration. he's starting his clinicals soon, and is saying precisely the same things that jh was a couple of years ago, chiefly that he's afraid he's going to kill someone. i'm starting to think that med students really mean this, and it's not just one of those things that they say. way back in combat medic course, we used to joke about screwing up cases quite a lot, and yet somehow, i don't think left us any less prepared. a lot of us did end up facing patients in fairly critical condition, and it didn't matter that we were flip about things in ulu pandan, all that mattered was that we believed it could happen. so: to WH, and all clinical folks out there (and eventually, to myself, when i have to start dealing with people who want to leap onto the train tracks): worrying about it probably doesn't change a thing (or, to look at it another way, no one's going to die in the OR because you didn't worry enough). groucho marx, i think, had the idea, when he famously said: "afraid? me? a man who's licked his weight in wild caterpillars?"

today, i decided that instead of doing my seminar reading i would much rather watch dave gorman's important astrology experiment.

yes

getting something straight in my head

One of the biggest circularities in sleep research, and the reason why it is far more popular among biologists than psychologists, is that many behvaioral studies end up saying, essentially, that sleep deprivation causes people to become sleepy. This is not revolutionary news, and people recognise that, and yet under different guises they say it again and again.

Why? The problem is this: when one studies how sleep deprivation affects cognition, behavior and performance, the fact that subjects are sleepy is mostly an irrelevant phenomenon. Performance declines for two reasons -- (1) because you're cognitively impaired, and (2) because you just want to sleep. The first is interesting because it's related to some physiological ceiling, a biochemical battery that needs to be "recharged"; the second is far more fundamental, the basal parts of the brain telling you that the first thing is happening, and that it's time to give up the ghost. Theoretically, one could be asleep, but still technically capable of functioning fine -- if one were awake.

Schizophrenia is a good analogy. Schizophrenics are often cognitively impaired - on certain tests of memory and executive function in particular -- but that impairment often goes undetected because it is completely masked by the fact that these people have lost their marbles. It's extraordinarily difficult to study brain function in very low-functioning schizophrenics, precisely because their putative cognitive deficits are convolved with the whole kit and caboodle of their other problems, including things like: "Do you even understand the instructions to the damn test?"

In the real world, of course, this doesn't always matter. If you fall asleep at the wheel, no one cares if you could potentially have been attentive had you been awake, you're still wrapped around a tree. Falling asleep trumps everything else. In other situations though -- say pulling an all-nighter before a big presentation, or flying the red-eye to a business meeting -- the two things get pulled apart: you haven't slept, but you're aroused enough that you're not likely to nod off in front of the board of directors. Those are the interesting scenarios, and those are the data that a lot of groups fail to capture and explore.

hmm...henry kissinger is coming to speak next month.

dissertation tip #1

today in the grad student center victor introduces me to rene, also in the history department, and in the throes of his dissertation. he has a deck of cards, and we randomly play a few rounds of blackjack while he offers us advice on how to write a thesis. and since that's something that i guess i will have to do in the not-too-distant future, i thought i'd jot down everything that i learn about that in this blog, so that when the time comes i'll have a veritable treasure trove filled with the experiences of penn students before me.

thus, dissertation tip #1 is:
ANY THESIS CAN BE IMPROVED BY ADDING ":THE BIRTH OF A NATION STATE" TO ITS TITLE.

cont'd

so to understand the reason for this little pilgrimage, you have to know that the mother was born and spent most of her childhood in guyana, and has frequent bouts of nostalgia for her time there, and particularly for the food. and if you've spent any significant amount of time away from home (or, if you want to avoid that loaded word, from your country of origin), you'll know how powerful the craving for familiar food can be, and also how contagious that craving can be. 21 years of hearing about guyanese food has had quite an impact.

Queens, NY

after making (d~)(a~) promise that she would do a philly trip one of these days, i hopped on the 'a' train and sat among the crazies for 45 minutes while we trundled towards liberty avenue. got off right at the end of the line, at lefferts boulevard, or 118th, and there i was, in little guyana, which is, well, "da place in NYC where all of da people from guyana n trinidad are livin".

the area spans about 20 city blocks of liberty avenue, maybe more, but by the time i got to 132nd it looked like i was heading into the ghettoes so i turned back. as soon as i got off the train, what immediately caught my attention was how people were speaking, which is: exactly as the maternal grandmother used to (and the mother still can. kind of. this is the "tentacular" voice, tm cp, and the reason why once upon a time he asked her to read zora neale hurston. but that's a different story. don't die, cp.)

so, chattering west indians, general atmosphere of commerce and gaiety, and, as hoped for, plenty of food. a lot of it, unfortunately, was produce, and i didn't think that bringing slabs of uncooked fish with me back on the chinatown bus would make me particularly popular. so, as per instruction, i bought:

* tennis rolls - which look just like ordinary bread rolls, but are sweet and coconutty and full.
* cheese rolls - which are what you would expect
* lamb black pudding. it's criminal, by the way, how the british fry black pudding. that's just...no. this example was quite good, although it somewhat strangely had rice grains in it.
* casareep - made from cassava extract, and used for cooking lots of things that i can't make.
* potato balls - which are also what you expect, and something that fitzie should strongly consider for his b'day celebration. recipe: potatoes, mash, batter, fry.

finally, i grabbed this:



a somewhat unremarkable roti and curry, despite the mother's insistence that it's the best thing since sliced bread. the bottled coconut water that you see in the corner, though, was special, and also frighteningly expensive. oh well. it good fe yu dawta.

---

the bus ride back was awful. don't travel by apex, ever. it was like riding down the highway in a giant toilet, and i swear to you that the russian couple behind me were making love in the back seat.

anyway, this is the first step to shaking off the intertia of the past two years: i'm willing to move my ass further away from my apartment than koch's deli in an attempt to find food and culture. it's a good sign. a few more months, and i'll be calvin trillin, or something, just you wait.

a burning question answered

the burning question: would i travel three-and-a-half hours and more than 100 miles on vague and possibly misinformative directions to an unfamiliar area of the united states for food.

the answer: yes.

manhattan, NY

the chinatown bus seemed like just about the cheapest way to get into new york from here, so i booked myself an 8 a.m. ticket for sunday morning. in a departure from my usual habit of being comfortably early for things, i arrived at the corner of 11th and arch at 7:58, and was faced with a terrible dilemma as i passed the wawa: do i stop and risk missing the bus, or suffer caffeine headaches for the 2 hours it will take to get into manhattan? i went for the coffee. i assembled the coffee in record time. i ran out of the wawa. and...i know i'm prone to hyperbole, but i literally made the bus 10 seconds before it pulled away. this was a very big achievement so early in the morning.

there's a reason chinatown bus tickets are so cheap -- the bus interior smelled like dried fish and star anise and semen. the ticket guy was a very dubious vietnamese dude who did not seem to understand the concept of an e-ticket, until a gang of us who had bought tickets online essentially told him that we weren't going to pay him again, and that he could take his luddite sensibilities and stick them you-know-where.

the journey to manhattan from philadelphia takes you over the benjamin franklin bridge, and into jersey suburbia, jiffy lubes and cracker barrels, then onto the highway bypassing trenton and new brunswick, the trees this time of year turning all their beautiful colors. it's a little over an hour-and-a-half to the NJ turnpike, not an uncomfortably long ride at all, and with good music on the ipod practically nothing.

i was a little early for (duke)ailian, which was fortunate because that meant i could go to mass, where there was a v good sermon on suffering, and why it is necessary, and why most people, if they are completely honest with themselves, will realise that it's mostly suffering that made them the person they are. i was reminded of thomas murray, who also would not have traded all of his suffering for anything in the world. it's a good lesson, but one of the harder ones. possibly one of the hardest ones. (the reading, incid, was mark 10, where the james and john want to sit on jesus' right and left in glory. also incid., while i would usually write about any new church i go to, the one last week in atlanta was very unforgettable, and full of old people. this one -- st. theresa's on the lower east side, has a large hispanic community, and gorgeous singing -- a lot of the time the organ just dropped out and left the choir to its own devices to harmonize with the congregation, and the congregation didn't drop the ball, and the choir nailed all the sevenths and ninths and seconds and other gospelly-type harmonies).

(duke)ailian called at 11-something, and we agreed to meet on west 4th and 3rd ave, which meant i had time to duck into one of the chinatown bakeries and finally buy a couple of lian rong mooncakes, $1 each. i ate one, and got on the subway, and it was really good so i ate the other one.

we ended up in a thai restuarant, where i finally got (d~)a~ to spill the whole story of how she ended up where she is (she was, actually, BONDED, but did something very naughty and immoral and should be roasted on a spit somewhere in the n-teenth circle of hell). anyway, it was a lovely story, except now of course she has to live with the devastating guilt of sin on her conscience while going to broadway plays and operas every weekend while earning four times as much money as she was. how one looks oneself in the mirror after such a misdeed i just don't know.

after pad thai we migrated to a cafe down the road (i'm sorry, i absolutely wasn't paying attention to names today), for cannoli and rum babas and cafe latte, and it was nice sitting there watching the saner portion of NY flow in and out, and chatting about american corporate culture and traveling and the eternal-suffering-of-phd- students-for-pitifully-little-reward. i kid, though. this is reward enough.

i still haven't got to the answer to the burning question, because rum babas, though nice, were not what i went to NY for, but i'm going to write that bit tomorrow and backdate, so come back in a while.

blogger was bad for a few days, so it's fortunate those days were rather boring.

thursday

finally got round to trying the falafel expert who sits himself over from qdoba on 40th. $3.25 buys a fat pita sandwich stuffed with falafel, baba ganoush, assorted greens and hot sauce. ingredients v fresh.

friday
did the take-home midterm for our pro-sem while chatting on msn with e. and justin. went 2 blocks down to the chinese takeaway, and in the five minutes they were filling my order it began to rain. heavily. it's not amusing when that happens.

ran.

evening: sat in bucks county and finished last temptation. it's in many ways less provocative than the movie, but that may purely be because of the medium. i'll have to think about it a little more.

saturday
watched battlestar galactica 3x04 twice, the second time with ron moore's podcast commentary on, both times in utter amazement at how good this show is, and how they keep topping themselves episode after episode. (ron moore on the podcast: if we don't win the fucking sfx emmy this year, i swear to god...)

ran.

cooked pork chops, oven-baked fries, and a very lousy can of peas. no more green giant for me.

it's nice being back in my apartment, but it was even nicer because the echo maker, which had its release date pushed back a couple of weeks, was waiting in my mailbox for me when i got back.

cont'd

tuesday

15.1. the weather is miserable in the morning. i grab coffee from a sketchy vietnamese grocery store on the way in to the morning. when i place my order, he has to bring out, from the back, cream, stirrers and cup holders, which makes me wonder how long it's been since he's actually sold coffee at his establishment.

15.2. nevertheless.

16. i have a nice long talk with dr. larson-prior, who works in wash u. in st louis with marcus raichle (of default-mode network fame). i'm somewhat heartened to hear that the their group has suffered all the practical difficulties of simultaneous eeg-fmri that we did back last year - chief among these silly things like subject discomfort. it's amazing how people who make eeg caps stoutly refuse to consider that human beings are going to be wearing them. we bitch gleefully about engineers, and it's a lot of fun.

17. there were meetings, but i'll skip over those.

18.1. at the end of it all, i have a couple of hours to kill before i have to make my way to the airport.

18.2.1. 3 days before, su-lin says, via e-mail:
take pictures please of any gwtw memorials or associations?

18.2.2 and i reply:
there is a margaret mitchell museum along the shuttle bus route that I can
try to take a picture of as it zips past. I think you know this, but I've
never read gwtw, or watched the movie. i've looked at it once or twice and
always thought: god, this is going to be really boring, and put it back
again.

18.2.3. and su-lin says:
I know. I think you have to be a twelve year old girl, and I suppose you've
never had that experience. is there a peachtree street?

(and there is, and i'm on it, but also half the streets in downtown atlanta are some variation on peachtree street, so this is a bit of a cheat).

18.2.4. and i reply:
But cp has read it and I'm assuming he was never a twelve-year-old girl. (I
hope)

18.2.5. and su-lin says:
no he hasn't, he's seen the movie. I think anyway. in any case only
because of the movie, she sniffs

take a picture of peachtree street please -- lots of action takes place on
peachtree! aunt pitty's house was on peachtree street and scarlet lived
there (: is it the main street, or something? but please do; a picture of
a street sign would be great (: julian under street sign (like tom!) also
can

(and so there is a movie, which su-lin will get shortly).

18.3. the further upshot of this is that i spend the couple of hours in the margaret mitchell house and museum, which is 990 peachtree street, a brick-and-mortar building where mm and john marsh once lived. anna, who has a most gorgeous southern accent, takes us around, and we view such artifacts as the Actual Icebox used by mm, and the Actual Typewriter with which gwtw was written (doubtful).

18.4. mm was apparently sceptical about clark gable being able to play the role of rhett (and it is completely untrue that the part was written for him. for that matter he was extremely nervous about taking the part because it required him to do things like cry, and act).

18.5. at some point i actually have to read this book.

and that's about it. my flight was delayed 3 hours, first because of weather, then because they couldn't find us a pilot, but this was stupid airtran so it's hardly surprising.

two days to fall break!

cont'd

monday

11.1. it transpires that jiat has never before eaten a krispy kreme donut, so at my insistence we pick up a half-dozen from the grocery store, along with a bag full of red delicious apples. together with orange pekoe tea, that's breakfast.

11.2. needless to say, he loves them.

12. nobel laureate paul greengard is one of the day's featured speakers. he has published over 2000 peer-reviewed papers over five decades, mapped out innumerable neurotransmitter signal transduction pathways, and fully described the actions of DARPP-32, (which is the molecule that ultimately makes you happy when you take cocaine, pot, MDMA, caffeine, and other such lovely substances). a large chunk of neuroscience exists today because of this guy. he's also the most lucid octogenarian i've ever seen, and delivers an extremely technical talk clearly and with panache (and even manages to slam the republicans a few times).

13. by 4 i'm fairly exhausted. i shlep back to the hotel and force myself to run on the treadmill for half-an-hour to make up for a very bad weekend full of bacon and grease.

14.1. dinner is with scott h.'s group from my old duke lab. it's at the globe, a ten-minute walk through drizzle and fog, and when i get there i discover that i don't really know anyone, except the ex lab person who's the reason i was invited.

14.1.1. (and jamie, but i think he thinks i'm an idiot so that doesn't count)

14.1.2. (kevin pelphrey, my old advisor, and an inspirational up-and-coming expert on autism, has begged off the conference for the second year in a row. it's sad -- i haven't seen him for ages.)

14.2. i'm seated between scott, who is very scary, and sarah, who looks like jeanne tripplehorn.

14.2.1. which means the evening starts off extremely awkwardly, in the way of trying to find something, anything in common to talk about.

14.2.2. we go through the obvious things in about eight-and-a-half seconds.

14.2.3. it's kind of like two quadruplegics trying to play frisbee.

14.2.4. the waitress performs a flying save by coming round to ask if we want any drinks. i order a grey goose dry martini post haste. between them, scott and david manage to order about half the wine list.

14.2.5. the martini is large, chilled to the perfect temperature, and has three (3) fat olives in it.

14.3. the food starts arriving. the appetisers are a very good sign of things to come -- chorizo-stuffed dates, asparagus, haricot verts and mushrooms in a light tempura batter, hummus, and calamari. the dates are so good that we order another 2 plates.

14.4. i finally manage to uncover the fact that sarah's work revolves around decision-making, something i can talk about, and we're off to the races. we have both started work by this point on the cabernet blanc, and suddenly everything is very funny, and we take a left-turn off the highway of decision-making to talking about whether women watch football exclusively because the uniforms show off players' asses.

14.5. the main course is brilliant - pan-fried cod with gnocchi, pancetta, parsnips and dates. i love the way cod flakes, and how it has a little bit of a bite without being a steak. the gnocchi is subtly sweet, neither mushy, nor too chewy, and has the slightest suggestion of a skin. the parsnips and the dates make the dish exciting without being overwhelming. my (limited) experience in expensive restaurants here has generally been that the food is not worth the price, and i'm glad that i've finally found somewhere where that's not the case.

14.6. sarah spills her water. i switch from white to red. one half of the table is discussing the duke lacrosse incident and the other is telling pedophile jokes.

14.6.1. pedophile joke #1:
what's so good about twenty eight year olds?
there are twenty of them

14.6.2. pedophile joke #2:
how do you know when it's bedtime in the jackson household?
it's when the big hand touches the little hand.

14.6.3. and so forth.

14.7. dessert is quince and apple cobbler, piping hot, with marsala ice-cream.

14.8. i think this was paid for on a duke department credit card, so i'm completely remorseless. after all, i have to start recovering our $200,000 from somewhere.

cont'd

sunday

6. jiat wakes up at 3 in the morning and potters around. i think the curse of my existence is that every single person i have to share a room with while traveling must have intractable jet lag (jiat lag...heh. *slaps self with a rubber glove*).

7. cliff saper is one of the featured speakers today. if you're starting in the field of sleep, his are among the first papers that you would read - he's figured out the neurobiology of the transitions from sleep to wake, and from REM to nREM, and all in the last 10-15 years. it's pretty awe-inspiring. he blazes through his speech like a chipmunk on amphetamines, and i bravely try to keep up with him while scrawling notes on my little pad. ink flies. paper tears. looking back over my scratching, i have no idea what any of the abbreviations stand for.

8. outside, there is capoeira.

9.1. we rendezvous at the cog neuro social – this is the ex-boss, jiat, geoff (whose hostel burned down last year), and the same three RAs who tagged along at the last conference to the Exorbitantly Priced Yet Entirely Mediocre French Meal. the social is disappointing; last year there were personalities like randy buckner, this year it's PRC grad students who hang around in large chinese-speaking clumps eating all the potato chips.

9.2. we make a quick exit and head for dinner. vickery's is a wonderful pub four metro stations away from the conference center, far enough away that it's not overrun by starving scientists. (also, for the GWTW lovers, it says on that webpage that "We called the place Vickery's after Margaret Vickery, for whom the house was built. Until the late 1970's, Margaret lived in and operated an antique and fabric shop in the house. Rumor, based on facts, has it that Margaret Mitchell used to visit Margaret Vickery for hours on end (in part because she liked Margaret Vickery and because she hated her own house up the street). Speculation has it that a great deal of "Gone With The Wind" was written in that house.") as it turns out, the theme of the evening is one of my favorites: R(s)ODPFBSE, and we start work on the sierra in earnest. the menu is pretty inspired for a bar: starters include grouper fingers, calamari in what tastes exactly like bottled thai chili sauce, parmesan artichoke dip with assorted dipping things, and fried green tomatoes with arugula and feta cheese (the best i've had since joe's crab shack in miami 3 years ago). i order the seared ahi tuna sandwich with wasabi mayonnaise and fried plantains, and it's v good: the tuna exactly how it should be, which is slightly blackened on the outside, succulent and raw about half a centimeter from any given surface. more pints of beer materialise, and i do an atkins and toss out most of the bread from my sandwich. jiat orders the grits without even knowing what grits are, and for the LAST TIME EVER, they're made of GROUND CORN so STOP ASKING. geoff cannot stop talking about orexin hypocretin. the ex-boss sits there looking very pleased that he has people from 4 labs sitting with him at one table, and who can blame him, i'd like to have an empire some day too.

9.3. jiat and the ex-boss depart at 10-something. the rest of us sit around for a while feeling rather bloated and talking about our various post grad-school plans (some of which are v exciting, but which cannot be discussed here. i don't have a plan at all, by the way, in case it sounds like i do. i just want to get through my midterms next week.)

10.1. after a while, we head back to the uiuc guys' hotel, and, as they say, hang. lucas starts doing somersaults across the bed, and i warn him that someone i know got a prolapsed invertebral disc doing just that, but he doesn't listen, and then geoff joins in, and it's like: ok people, we have had too much to drink.

10.2. so of course the next natural thing to do is to go out to a bar.

10.3. vortex is a mere three blocks away. it's horrible, and smoky, and the waitress is a pincushion of body piercings. we're joined somewhere along the way by a villaneuva student who does interval timing in rats, a north indian postdoc who looks like a jew, and one other random woman who is somebody's girlfriend, but whose i can't quite figure out.

10.4. people order strange drinks like pumpkin pie and beer cocktails. if beer before liquor makes you sicker, i would imagine that doing them at the same time is probably an even worse idea. but that's just my conservative side talking.

10.5. the random woman turns out, embarrassingly enough, to be a fifth-year psych grad student at penn. we've been to at least two socials together, but just never met. we finally get introduced, and naturally start complaining about how badly department unity sucks.

10.6. the bar kicks us out at some point, and i manage to get back to the hotel without getting accosted by too many homeless people. i really want to read tim powers, but two pages in i find that i'm passing out, and call it a night.

sfn 2006

Atlanta, GA

0.1. conversation with the brother, several months ago.

me: so i'll probably be going to atlanta in october on this conference. anything exciting there?
the brother: there's the coke factory.
me: the coke factory?
the brother: yeah, the coke factory.
me: as in...where they make coke?
the brother: none other.
me: anything else?
the brother: not really.
me: that doesn't sound very exciting.
the brother: dude. people go on pilgrimages to see the coke factory.

0.2. again, skipping over the technobabble.

1.1. on the plane today, i realise that i've acquired the art of talking to caucasian strangers (a) of my own volition, and (b) without bile flooding my oesphagus. it is a giddy, vertiginous feeling. after all these years of having my privacy assaulted on american public transportation, i can finally turn the tables. i practice on the matronly woman sitting next to me, and go on the offensive so succesfully that i make it through the entire conversation without the word 'singapore' once passing my lips. this is cause for massive celebration.

1.2. we make it into georgia on time, and i hop onto the marta which brings me to the hotel. the train is packed solid with neuroscientists. it's surreal. l leave my suitcase at the hotel and get on a very pink shuttle bus.

1.3. atlanta is honest. there are hardly any suspicous back alleys, or roads that let you out somewhere other than you think you should be. the prominent landmarks keep you oriented. it's a prep school boarder with his pockets turned out and palms up: no contraband here. the sun sluices down as we turn into centennial park drive and up to the conference center, and we de-bus into a gorgeous fall day.

2. the BIRN project aims to improve the (pitiful) state of neuroinformatics by promoting multi-center sharing, improving data availability, so allowing studies far larger than what have previously been possible. some of my old duke profs from biac - most prominently greg mccarthy - have been the leaders in the parts of this project to do with fMRI, and the first data is beginning to be published. the collaborators are quite the who's who in fMRI research -- UC Irvine, Duke, U. Minnesota, Harvard, Chapel Hill, UCSD, UNM, UCLA, Stanford, Iowa and Yale -- and they have put together incredible projects requiring subjects to fly to each of these centers so that inter-site and inter-subject variation can be compared. i'm impressed, but waiting by the poster like a puppy dog for a treat does not cause any of the big names to materialise, so i skulk off to get coffee instead.

3. i run into harlan fitchenholtz, who was my TA for the fMRI lab at duke. he actually remembers me. i must have been a real nuisance back in the day.

4. by 4 my brain is throbbing, so i grab CNL-jiat, who had kindly agreed to share a room, and we go to explore the city a bit. the olympic park is rubbish, and i don't understand why people have fallen so much in love with it. we walk, and it's office bank office bank, and my laptop weighs heavier on my shoulder with each passing minute.

4.1. shall we look for the coke factory? i ask.
why? asks jiat
to get coca-cola, i say.
you can get coca-cola in singapore, says jiat.
but bottled in KL, not from the coca-cola yuan2, i say.

4.2. we go back to the hotel.

5.1. the hotel is tremendous. superlatives fail me when i first see the room. it's not even a room, it's a suite: it has a kitchen with stove, microwave and everything, a personal study room, 2 walk-in closets, a washing machine, a tumble dryer and medieval spanish art on the walls. for a while, i just stand there, like a manga character with the little trickle of drool working its way down from the corner of my mouth.

5.2. it feels like it has to be a joke, or a dream, but it's not. it must be karma. i've stored up so many points from staying in ratty dilapidated hellholes that finally, kismet just had no choice but to put me here, at least this once. i am going to enjoy every last second that the lush carpet is beneath my feet.

philadelphia has used up its last warm days for this year, but i'll be flying south tomorrow for a conference in atlanta, so it's a few more days of late summery goodness for me. i'll try to be outside at least a little bit so i can enjoy it.

and finally:

#39 - Related to #38, those moments you have with certain people where you realise that neither of you is wearing a mask, or saying what is "appropriate", where all the bullshit everyday falseness falls away, and you get to know two people a little better: the other person, and yourself.

and

#40 - From Howard's End - E.M. Forster

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

(Final notes: I did this as a personal exercise to see what I would come up if forced to think of 40 things that do make me happy. I wanted to see how many of them would be trivial, and how difficult it would be. And I wanted to be grateful for, and pay a little more attention to some of these things (the non-trivial ones, anyway, eggplant parm probably has more rapidly-declining marginal utility than a lot of the other stuff), and not take them for granted.)

irb application update (iv)

met with my advisor yesterday to discuss the proposal. i understand that it's pretty common in the uk, but this was the first time i'd ever had my work looked over by someone while i was in the room. it was kind of hair-raising, particularly because i could tell when we were coming up to the paragraphs that i had pulled out of my ass. fortunately, the stratagem of having Big and Numerous figures worked well. it's a piece of advice i have to leave to posterity.

additions required: a "Data Management" section (wtf?), and two consent forms; revisions: several typos and the disaster that i chose to call the "statistics" section. sigh.

addendum: matthew 22: 23-33, KJV

23 The same day came to him the Sadducees, which say that there is no resurrection, and asked him,
24 Saying, Master, Moses said, If a man die, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother.
25 Now there were with us seven brethren: and the first, when he had married a wife, deceased, and, having no issue, left his wife unto his brother:
26 Likewise the second also, and the third, unto the seventh.
27 And last of all the woman died also.
28 Therefore in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? for they all had her.
29 Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.
30 For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.
31 But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying,
32 I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.
33 And when the multitude heard this, they were astonished at his doctrine.

more god is dead

paul bloom came to speak today as part of an ongoing series of neuroethics talks. i've followed his work in an on-and-off kind of way over the years, mostly because he's a very compelling writer (and you should, if you get the chance, read descartes' baby, which is excellent), so of course i had to go.

bloom's central thesis is that human beings have an innate sense of dualism (in the sense of cartesian dualism) that allows us to understand and appreciate the conceit of works like kafka's metamorphosis or freaky friday, even though there is obviously no real-life precedent for these happenstances. further to that, he believes that this dualistic sense arises very early in development. i'm not fond of developmental psych (you can go and harass doscas for that), but suffice it to say that there have been bunches of experiments done where simple cartoons are shown to babies of "helpers" and "hinderers" (little animated shapes that either help another shape up a slope or push him down), and babies like the helpful guys (showing that they understand intentions and goal-direction even at 9 months of age).

where he goes from this premise is a bit more interesting. he claims that because laypeople see the mind as being divorced from the brain, they (sorry, not 'we' this time) have seen what has come out of neuroscience research over the past decade as astounding news. that you can actually see bits of the brain light up in an mri scanner when you're thinking of something is incredible -- simply because it's such an entrenched belief that mental processes need not have physical correlates. in actual fact, this ought to be the most natural thing in the world. cognitive faculties, behavior and personality can change after brain insult, and many mental disorders result in (or are caused by) abnormalities in cortical structure -- mind is inextricably tied to brain, and yet most would completely disregard this evidence and cling to the familiar -- and very comforting -- belief that the two are separate and dissociable.

so far, so good. now, the inevitable conclusion (for a lot of psychologists and neuroscientists) after accepting all this is that god is dead -- if we reject cartesian dualism, we reject the idea that we have a soul, and god is subsequently meaningless/non-existent (take your pick). although we accept dualism as a heuristic (and this is because it is so deeply ingrained, through evolutionary processes, bloom argues), it is not actually true. (incidentally, as an aside to this, we can segue nicely from here into jy's thesis about torture, because now when it comes to how we treat each other "sentience" becomes irrelevant as a moral arguement against corporal punishment and all that matters is whether an organism can suffer. but that's a different story). nothing survives us after death, but because it so unacceptable for us to think that, we cling to our intuitions because they make us happy (or invoke pascal's wager, take your pick).

there are numerous unappealing ways to squirm out of this, one of which is matthew 22, the catholic doctrine, which i accept (reluctantly, because i do find it gross). philosophers have said it all over the past few centuries, but suffice it to say that personally, considering the mind-brain problem in isolation, i believe that cognitive function, or the "mind", has to be lumped under the package of accidence, and that ones essence, or soul, must not contain this. yes, this leads to a whole lot of vexing questions about the resurrection, or what we are "like" in heaven, but honestly, it's a lot better than bringing down the whole house of cards that is christianity (the best explanatory paradigm, imho, for matters of faith, on which psychology has no bearing). and really, who the heck knows what the second coming is going to be like anyway?

(sorry for the terrible writing.)

From How the Light Gets In, M.J. Hyland:

Rennie Parmenter is waiting for me in the counselling room. It's a small room upstairs where the dormitories are. It has no window, a round table in the centre, two chairs, a small heater, and a box of tissues on the floor. Rennie is short, has greasy red hair, and is wearing a loose woollen v-neck jumper without a t-shirt underneath.

When I sit down, Rennie gets up and slams the door shut.

'Oopsie,' he says. 'Sorry. There must be a blizzard outside.'

I wonder if it's still snowing and whether I'll get to go out and walk around in it. I've never walked in snow before. This will be my first white Christmas.

Rennie talks to me for what feels like hours. His vocabulary is pretentious and annoying.

When I say, 'You use a lot of very big words,' he doesn't realise I'm being sarcastic and says, 'Well, you see, I like to think of myself as a member of the wording class. That's my little joke. Perhaps you might see yourself in the same way one day, but you'll need to value yourself a lot more than you do right now.'

'I see,' I say.

He tells me his life story and a heap of information I don't need to know. He tells me that he visits every Tuesday and Thursday, without ever breaking for lunch. This business of not eating lunch might explain his bad breath; the bad breath a person gets from not eating.

'Gosh,' I say.

Rennie is bursting with gormless good intentions, proclaiming - when his life story is done - that it's time for a 'nice two-way chat'.

I am being 'briefed' for my 'new journey' he tells me, as he leans forward.

'So,' he says, 'I wonder to myself...how did pretty young Louise with the big IQ get herself into this mess? How did a capable sixteen-year-old girl manage to turn herself into an alcoholic?'

How could such an idiot be a counsellor? What kind of moron thinks that there's a rational explanation for all human behavior? What kind of fool thinks that perversity can be explained? It's obvious. I felt like garbage for one reason or another and drank to make myself feel better even though it could ruin my chance of escape. What's so hard to understand about that?

I would like to kick him in the shins, but instead I turn what has happened into a story with a tidy beginning and middle and end, throwing in all kinds of motivations for my behavior. He seems happy with this version of events, especially when I talk about my behavior being motivated by a deep need for approval and acceptance.

I tell the story without blaming anybody but myself, except that towards the end I make the mistake of saying that Margaret is a smothering kind of individual and that the house was riddled with rules and that maybe has made some of my behavior worse.

He pounces on this comment as an excuse to launch into what Lishny has warned me is Rennie's famous How many people are at this table? routine.

'Okay, Louise,' he says. 'So you're in a terrible mess. Let's logically analyse the real cause, shall we?'

This is so ludicrous I'm even more amazed that I don't kick him.

'Sure,' I say.

He gets up from his chair and opens the door.

'I can hear Gertie downstairs in the kitchen,' he says, waving in that general direction. 'Is it her fault that you're in this mess?'

'No,' I say, 'It's not her fault.'

He shuts the door and sits down. 'Okay. Well then, is it my fault?' (he puts both hands on his chest, one hand crossed over the other as though he's Jesus Christ lecturing an apostle).

'No, it's not your fault,' I say.

'All right, then. How many other people are sitting at this table, Louise?'

'There's one other person sitting at this table.'

'Correct,' he says, his buttocks flying off the seat with all the excitement. 'And is that person Louise Connor?'

'Yes it is.'

'And is she a person who points the finger at other people for her own faults?'

'No, she isn't.'

He nods his head and swallows something that isn't food. 'Then you are ready to accept that you have nobody to blame but yourself.'

Rennie leans even further across the table. His face is too close to mine; a breathy claustrophobia. I have to move back in my chair to escape him. Oblivious to the effect of his breathing on my face, he remains in this thrusting forward position and wipes the table own with the sleeve of his sloppy jumper.

The impression this gesture creates is that he intends to have me lie down on my back across the table for some dubious, and possibly naked, examination.

'Well, are you ready to accept this? Are you willing to accept this adult responsibility for your own actions?'

'I am,' I say, remembering Lishny's warning that this is the only way to make the interview stop.

Rennie stands up. 'On that basis I think we can make real progress.'

He comes around to my side of the table, and rests his hand on the top of my head like an amateur priest at a dry christening.

'Perhaps you'd like me to leave you alone for a moment to think through what we've talked about, all right?'

'Okay,' I say. 'Thank you very, very much.'

#38 - Compliments, but only the real ones (and I'm good at telling).

the ex-boss got into town on saturday and brought edsel and i out for dinner at fuji mountain, where there was excellent tea and soba and a platter of sushi that barely fit on the table. he had just come from a hike through the bucks county trails -- hiking, he claims, gives him an endorphin high -- and was all rubicund and bursting with joie de vivre. this is funnier if you actually know him (kc: don't tell), but i swear to you that his life runs like that car (mercedes?) commercial with people being born when they're old and moving backwards through time. as i've said before, when i retire, my recreation is going to be completely sedentary and utterly luxurious.

it was a comfortable dinner. we even managed to not talk about work most of the time (edsel being there helped), although i'm not sure that the slash-and-burn tactics of landowners in indonesia was that much of an improvement as a post-prandial conversation topic. i enjoyed myself though. i always perceive that meetings with the ex-boss will be a lot more awkward than they actually are, and i think there are two reasons why this might be. first, he has Opinions. second, i've been culturally programmed to mistrust older people in general and older people in positions of power in particular. this is not even a once bitten twice shy thing, just a deep ingrown sense that as long as you are someone's subordinate, sooner or later that person is going to get you. one of the many reasons why i need therapy.

edsel and i walked back after that, over the schuylkill, while i tried to find out as much as i could about green cards and non-resident employment, meeting on the way a slobbery and too-friendly labrador, a mysterious hooded figure, and a discombobulated, sweaty and possibly drunk russ, who thought i had no right to be outside his apartment at 11 p.m. on a sunday evening.

#37 - Warm, fresh, fluffy towels

ever since signing up as a society for neuroscience member, my junk mail has been very interesting, things like CELL-TITER-GLO - The Perfect Assay!, and COUNTDOWN TO COMFORT - SOF-TOUCH ELECTRONIC PIPETTES. a surprise every day.

first friday

yesterday was first friday, which, if you're too damn lazy to click on my links, is when all the art galleries in olde city throw open their doors and lay out the wine and brie so that cretins like us can flock around like flamingoes and pretend to be cultured and haute. when it comes to art, if you drew a straight line from poser to aficionado, i think i would be somewhere two whiskers right of the median (and this is after adjusting for chronic low self-esteem. some people, by the way, like to look at things another way and say that there is no line, only an unmarked circle, a perfect democracy in the realm of critical appreciation. a theory i don't buy into, partly because the pretentious part of myself wants to believe that we don't all have one vote, and partly because if it does turn out to be true the heads of humanities scholars everywhere will explode into a million tiny pieces). six of us went - grace, daniel, wife of daniel, ewa, min and me, which is more than you might expect from a bunch of scientists (corrected for 'presence of free sangria', though, you get your p < .05).

i was most taken with the very first gallery we went into: this one had a series of paintings and sculptures that took elements of oriental art - calligraphy, sansuiga, bijinga - and re-interpreted them with strong lines and garish colors. it sounds a lot cheesier than it was, and i think that was because the artist was sensitive to the fact that "everyone" does that kind of things nowadays, and so stopped worrying about the idea being cliched, and focused on actually creating the art. also for sale: exaggeratedly slanty-eyed, obese ronaldmcdonald figurines holding placards saying 'SUPERSIZE ME'. i would have bought one but for the fact that they were $800 each.



next: "modern" "art" (read: canvas with two vertical stripes on it that sets you back $499)

then, a gallery with variations on a theme of people fellating one another (free beer).

then: a lot of very cool sculpture up for auction, including a purple sponge:



and a turtle on a mound:



not pictured: exploding squirrel, pile of dead canaries and an assortment of 70s memorabilia on roller skates.

---

(two more random cool shots that didn't go anywhere else)

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after the art, we walked up and down market street for ages rejecting restaurants left and right for being too ritzy, before settling on a persian place with hookahs, farsi magazines, and what seemed like an entire staff of lesbians. we all had kabobs, and strong tea, and we talked about the templeton foundation and paul bloom who is coming to speak next week and mindfulness mediation. and min and i tried to piece together the story of hou yi for the edification of the white people (while mourning the mooncakelessness of the occasion).

and then we went to the science of sleep, which, for the last time, despite my dissertation topic, is NOT A DOCUMENTARY, but a movie by michael gondry, who is awesome.

#36 - Long walks with no destination

to sheepishly remove later if wrong

er, zhong qiu is today, yes? have a happy one!

something i have learned

having a poll on my blog makes me feel like i'm 12.

series 4

after hunting for several days, it looks like a tip-off from su-lin will allow me to keep my life. get them from her -- she will be the conduit.

it's been more than a month, and i still feel there are a ton of things i need to buy (and not enough money to buy them with). which reminds me: i was at alyson's place with a bunch of people over the weekend (she's another first year), and her apartment is like something out of the jetsons with the billion-inch mounted plasma tv and the fiberglass countertops and the dishwasher that washes Everything All At Once and the le Corbusier sensibilities. sure, it's tiny, but who really cares when you have dolby surround sound. anyway, i was stoic, because this is all part of coming to terms with my hand-to-mouth existence - one of the twelve steps - and it's perfecly OK. and before the month is out, i shall have a kitchen table, and can stop dropping poppyseeds all over my desk every time i eat a bagel.

#35 - Appealing packaging (This is why I would never buy a pirated DVD).

update (iii)

26 pages. sat at my desk typing furiously for 3 straight hours, then 1.5 hours of multiple regression (zzz), then chinese takeaway and another 4 hours banging away at the keyboard. i have another 150 pages of documentation that gets snipped off from old protocols and tacked like a giant tumour onto the end, then references and i'm going to call that a first draft. it took 500g of caffeine to get through today, but it was oh so worth it, and i'm pleased. so pleased that i let myself leave the lab early, deposited my stipend check, and bought a red delicious to munch on as i walked home. in any case, it was 80 outside today, and beautiful, and you can't be unhappy on a day like that.

i caved and went to the penn bookstore where i read half of wintersmith. i still don't love the tiffany aching books as much as i do the guards ones, but it was funny and good and full of nac mac feegles.

and, in other news, i discovered the book of bunny suicides

Wintersmith comes out tomorrow. I know I really shouldn't, but I confess right now: the temptation will prove to be too much, and that will be another afternoon/evening spent not working. My ruin is nigh.

irb application update II

11 pages, 13 with figures. i have to find a good place in van pelt where i can sit down and write. the cafe tables wobble as i type, the study carrels are too depressing, and the undergrad study areas have people walking in and out and yakking away on their cell phones and making general nuisances of themselves. as for other places, the other green line is too comfy (and i want it to be associated with reading fun things), and home doesn't work as i thought it would (the siren song of downloaded tv shows is too, too strong).

notes to self:
- add more figures, especially ones that take up lots of space
- at some point, the statistics section has to be written, so it may as well be soon
- blogging about it is not counted as progress

ignore if you hate math

-- and help me if you can.

say i have a function that is composed of (a) a sinusoidal component, (b) an increasing linear trend, and (c) gaussian noise. i don't want to make any assumptions about the phase of the sine wave, but i do have a definite value of its frequency.

i) how do i remove (a) from the function so that i can plot some sort of regression line through the residuals (and thus estimate (b) and find the variance of (c)).
ii) what's the easiest program in which i can do this calculation in large batches (say 120 datasets)?
iii) if i want now to say that the function is composed of a small number (n; say 1< n <4) of sin/cos waves + (b) + (c); is there an inverse fourier decomposition that works sort of like principal component analysis (in that it removes only the n waves of lowest frequency) while leaving the linear trend (and whatever other noise) intact?

(i'm not sure i expect to get any answer for this, but there can be miracles.)

#34 - Amazon.com and all accompanying goodies (especially free shipping and $0.99 used paperbacks)

#32

(With apologies if you know this story)

When I was 8, our family, and a group of other Catholics, mostly strangers, went on a trip to Medjugorje, in the former Yugoslavia (I think it falls into Bosnia now, but it may be Herzegovina). I suppose that for most of the adults it was a pilgrimage, but when you’re in Primary 3, the spiritual gains are incidental, and the primary force that hits you in a place like that is wonder. I had been to Europe, of course, but I think this was the first time in my life I felt like I was going someplace truly foreign: somewhere rural, somewhere with a polysyllabic name, somewhere where other the kids in school had never gone or even contemplated going.

We were put up, with a few other people, by a Bosnian family who spoke precious little English. My room had no adjoining bathroom, and every morning I had to scurry out with bare feet on the freezing cold ceramic tiles of the balcony outside so I could brush my teeth and get ready for the day. We always had to get up early – breakfast was served and cleared away punctually and remorselessly, and daily Mass dictated the schedule for the morning. We went in summer, and I remember the weather being gorgeous, day after day, riotous amounts of sunshine beaming through cool, unsullied air. On the way to church, we picked hawthorn berries, and ate them, first delicately, being city-slickers, then with more gusto when by the second day no one had keeled over. On the way back, the roadside food stalls would have opened, selling their hybrid Italian-Eastern European cuisine – lots of tomato dishes and pizza with an entire garden on it. And at night, our host family cooked for us – we always began with chicken noodle soup and unbelievably fresh bread, followed by an entrée – fish, or pasta – and a simple sweet. The meal was wholesome, and good, and very communal: lots of talk and laugher, or beaming from the parties who didn’t speak the language.

Mass, as I said, was daily, and the services at St. James not truncated like what we’re used to, but full-blown affairs. Some days we even went twice. It’s funny, but the more time I spend in church, the less impatient I am to leave it – or maybe it was because at the time there was nothing much to leave it to, except for my books and word searches (there certainly weren’t any other kids along on the trip). We climbed Mount Podbrdo – where the apparitions of the Virgin Mary reportedly occurred – and Mount Krizevac, where villagers had erected an impressive twenty-foot concrete cross. There was nothing else up those hills but treacherous terrain and the offerings of pilgrims, silence, and an aura of the sacrosanct. Climbing them was tough-going for an eight-year-old, but being at the top, even amidst all that nothingness, was strangely worth the ascent.

I’ve written all of this down because Medjugorje is one of the places I go in my mind when I need a bit of solace. It’s odd – I can’t be confident that I was happy while I was there – in fact I have rather little recollection of my emotional experience of the pilgrimage – and yet revisiting the place in memory does give me a sense of profound well-being. So – it gets to be #32, and as a bonus, I’ll tell you that #33 was this other, more recent trip to Redang, which I often think about, particularly things like SAFETY IS AT YOUR OWN RISK, and kayaking with the Other Brother on the most perfect day imaginable

:)

my paper has been accepted! *happy dance*

flying spaghetti monster

so brilliant it hurts.

irb application update

six single-spaced pages for the actual proposal, lots of italics for stuff that i'm not sure of, and big yawning gaps for things TBD and F[somebody's]NAP and suchlike. and a fugly .tiff file that needs a lot of work, but which got thrown in there because putting in figures means you've been Hardworking. addenda: descriptions of tasks, platitudes such as HIPAA, the canned version of why MRI scans won't fry your insides, or why PSG won't plant false memories in your head while you sleep.

there's a preliminary meeting tomorrow where all this junk (hopefully) gets assembled into some sort of a coherent structure. on the one hand: yay; on the other, i know that massive rewrites are coming up, and also at least a dozen things that i've missed/ignored. a working draft by friday is not happening, and i have reading to do for tomorrow, and i've just spent an hour on skype not to mention ten minutes typing out this incredibly uninteresting entry.

additions

yes, the poll idea may be a very stupid one, and i'll pull it if it gets boring, but in the mean time the lure of cute little radio buttons was irresistible.

it struck me at dinner today (nara: good japanese food -- uni even! -- but pricey) -- i can actually have interesting conversations with the other first-years in my department. and not just about psychology, also on topics that i could never, ever hope to talk about with so many other people (excluding you guys, and you, and you, and also you). the disconnect that i sometimes experienced at duke -- where i felt so culturally different from a lot of my classmates, particularly the americans -- that's disappeared...and i think (perhaps because of being more mature?) we have all tacitly tarred that over with the culture of being interested in each other. i can't even begin to tell you how excited this makes me, because getting along with random people, i've learned how to do that, but sitting down with someone and weaving a tapestry, playing a duet, knowing not just the chords but the harmonic possibilities: that's something you don't often find, and something you learn to treasure.

red tape

the first draft of my project proposal is due next friday, so It officially Starts. the honeymoon was nice, though, and longer than expected. the accelerator gets stepped on in psychology not because of reading (unlike in the humanities), but because of the logistics of working with human subjects -- U.S. institutions in particular make you jump through an infuriating number of hoops before you can so much as lay eyes on a human volunteer (we have the nazis to thank for this, by the way). i am glad, though, that it's not reading that i'm going to be crushed by -- vic tells me that he burns through about 600-700 pages of text a week, and although i'm sure that minz will tell me this is not uncommon, it is nonetheless staggering and not a thing i'd particularly relish doing.

the first-year project is due in may '07, which is a pretty short time, particularly for a multi-day imaging study. i foresee: 2-3 months for planning/back-and-forthing on the IRB and 3 months for data collection, minus the christmas break, which leaves frighteningly little time for analysis and writing. all this for a study that will likely not even be publishable because we will not yet have enough subjects for a random-effects analysis at the end of it. this is rather frustrating -- i'm used to having the peripheral bureaucratic annoyances kept to a minimum so that i can focus on the actual data, but penn apparently believes in such irrelevancies as "sharing equipment" and "ethics".

it is rather discomfiting when bits of the city you live in start blowing up.


the temperature crept its way down into the 50s today. for all its promise of good insulation, this apartment keeps in no heat whatsoever. this probably means that somewhere down the road, there will be a slice of time before the day central heating comes on in which staying indoors will be intolerable. (not that i'm unaccustomed to this.)

in any case, this was incentive to stay in the lab for most of the day, where i was good and read all my perfusion papers, even though i didn't understand half of what i was reading. i think i need to sit down with someone who knows this stuff and just spend an entire day asking him questions, because right now i'm sure that misconceptions are sprouting in my head like toadstools after rain. geoff aguirre or john detre would be nice, but i will settle for lesser beings as long as they know what they are talking about.

i was in the kitchen today chopping vegetables when it suddenly occurred to me that the last time i had done that i was being ordered around by su-lin amidst general chaos. chopping is not usually my job, but i was early to that dinner. my hands had smelled of onions for days after that -- i don't know if this happens to everybody, but no matter how much i wash the odor lingers with extraordinary tenacity. it stayed with me on the plane ride, and only disappeared a day or two after i arrived here, a frail olfactory filament dissipating with exquisite slowness as i made my way around the world.

#31 - Without a doubt, the Internet: for its ridiculous cornucopia of free entertainment, for putting infinite space in a nutshell, for being the enchanted place.

From The Rural Life, Verlyn Klinkenborg:

A conscientious journal keeper is really the natural historian of his own life. His model is the amateur naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers like Gilbert White or collectors like George Eliot's Camden Farebrother. It often seems as though science in this century has little use anymore for amateur observers of this kind, that science has grown too institutional, too complex, to value the private watcher of a small patch of ground. It seems that way too when it comes to our own lives. They're cross-referenced, indexed, cataloged, and witnessed by the public and private institutions whose job it is to tabulate and codify us. Even the task of introspection has been jobbed out to the professionals. A personal journal in our time comes to seem less like a valuable cache of perceptions than a naive recitation of symptoms that the wroter lacks the authority to analyze.

But many of the great journals - I think especially of Samuel Pepys' seventeenth-century diary and James Boswell's eighteenth-century journal - are not marked by self-consciousness. They're marked by a dogged absence of self-consciousness, a willingness to suspend judgment of the journal itself, if not of its author, in order to keep the enterprise going. The value of Pepys's diary and Boswell's journal is the world they depict and only incidentally the depiction of their authors. Their journals weren't read until long after the authors had died. Both men wrote for an audience of one. Judging by my own fragmentary journals, that's one too many. It's not enough that I should be dead before anyone else reads them. I should be dead before I reread them myself.

#30 - Bach

Sleeping Beauty problem

Sleeping Beauty agrees to take part in an experiment in which the following things take place.

Sunday:
Researchers give Sleeping Beauty a drug that puts her to sleep. They then flip a fair coin.

Monday:
Sleeping Beauty is woken up. She is then adminisered a memory-erasing drug and put back to sleep, (without any memory of being awakened).

Tuesday:
If the coin flip came up tails, Sleeping Beauty is woken up again, and again put back to sleep.

Wednesday:
Sleeping Beauty is woken up, and the experiment is over.

When Sleeping Beauty is woken up for the first time, what should her degree of belief be (as a fraction) that the coin toss came up heads?

(If you care, you can check out current opinion on the answer here, and here, and finally here.)

can i just say, von, that i really very much envy your gastronomic adventures -- there is unbelievably good food in center city, or so i am told, but i will have to take it on faith until i find some rich patrons (now accepting applications).

in case you have not done so already

you should, indeed, go here, and click on it. it reminds me very much of the time when the other brother and i were trying to come up with lyrics for "there is a whiteness in god's mercy".

justifying my decision (to myself) (again)

there was a cookout today next to hill house, mostly singaporeans, but also free food, so it was a tough decision. my wallet won. a couple of first-year grad students were also there, so we stood baking under the sun (the temperature exploded into the 80s today), eating half-cooked hamburger and discussing why in heck we wanted to spend five years of our lives studying our own miserable quarks in the vast cosmos of scholarship (most probable answer: we're sad). victor is a history major, studying the spread of islam in china in the 19th and 20th centuries, and KS is in computer science, dealing with the mumblemumblesomethingartificialintelligencehebbianlearning- neuralsomething, and how to represent that algorithmically, and why deep blue is not blue, and whether robots will one day take over the world, so the conversation was desultory, its only real nexuses being traffic laws in manhattan (or lack thereof), why a*star sucks donkey balls, and episcopalianism.

it is comforting to know of people who made the same decision as i, and the more people i get to know the more comforting it is. it is funny what one will do to mitigate the sense of loneliness -- not physical loneliness, mind you, because i have met more people here in three weeks than i thought i would -- but the loneliness of being different, of being forced to belong on other people's terms. and the very fact of knowing that there are other people who left behind home, employment, familiarity to come here validates that decision in a way, and the more similar the person is to me, the greater the validation. this may seem ironic when you read this over -- is that not the very definition of belonging on someone else's terms? -- but the distinction is subtle -- the first instance being "me defined as grad student in the psychology department", and the second being "me defined as someone rejecting the well-travelled road of career, rat race etc.". the second, of course, being the critical decision (and thus, the point of commonality with victor and KS), and the first its logical, necessary but entirely incidental consequence.

so akeelah and the bee has restored my faith in how awesome laurence fishburne is, the matrix parts ii and iii notwithstanding. cp: how was othello?

it continues to amaze me that there is such a wide variety of quite decent food within a three block radius of my apartment. on 42nd and chestnut is a place called kabobeesh, a converted american diner that now sells fairly authentic tandoori and naan. admittedly, there could have been more meat, but it was the real stuff, and at $9, enough for two meals. next to it is a little indian minimart type thing that has such wonders as curry powder, gaulb jamun, frozen roti, basmati rice, maggi stock cubes, and horlicks. also: about eight shelves of bollywood vcds, which interested me not.

in other news, my kitchen looks more like a kitchen now, in that it actually has food in it, and things with which i can cook said food. this is good news for my body, which has probably doubled in sodium content since i got here, despite my best efforts. (how do americans not die at the age of 25?) i also am the proud owner of my first ever potato peeler (su-lin will attest to the fact that i had never used one before that last party with the gumbo and "fried""chicken"), which i will use with gusto, once i have some potatoes.

for su-lin:

the new ben and jerry's flavour is turtle soup, and i had a scoop while thinking of you. chocolate turtles!