if you have an hour or so to spare, drop by a bookstore and read eat when you feel sad, by wunderkind zachary german. the book is about one robert and the utterly normal things that happen to him -- he goes to parties, eats chinese food, listens to music, checks his email. all of this told in the sparest of language; i'm not sure if there's a sentence with more than one clause in the novella. it feels very gimmicky at first, but after a while you realize that it works, and once you buy into the conceit the rest of the book becomes pretty enjoyable, and even funny in a salingeresque kind of a way at times. it's not literature, i don't think, but it does capture how it feels to be lonely among people, and manages somewhat to use the cadences and rhythms of the facebook generation to pretty good effect.

i think it's pretty much established at this point that dissertating is (a) running my life, and (b) causing me to have nothing of particular interest to say here, so i'll kind of go quiet for the next few weeks until things are done. the defense date, in case you don't know yet, is 4/21, after which i'll collapse somewhere for a while and then rejoin the land of the living. wish me luck!

the dissertation is 120 pages long, and growing fast, and time is getting away from me like so many slippery eels. i am doing an experiment on productivity in which i spend each day of the week writing in a different location to see if there are significant differences in pages written associated with where i work. my only conclusion so far is that being in the lab is especially bad, because all i end up doing is eating chocolate and playing sporcle and endlessly checking e-mail. i'm somewhat glad that i hate facebook, or that would be the real end of everything.

i've been writing in the library since 1, and now it's 3:10 and i think i'm going out of my mind. a completely random person popped up on my msn, and out of sheer boredom i started chatting with him(?*) about his recent deployment in iraq. it's really uncomfortable talking to vets -- either they don't want to give details about their tour, in which case i'm convinced they have PTSD, or we end up talking about how they had to carry their buddy's arm/leg back to base to the tune of anguished screams**. anyway, point being, i've never been big on random internet connections a la omegle/chatroulette, but clearly writing a thesis eventually makes you engage in all kinds of behaviors and experience all kinds of things, including but not limited to: hallucinations/depression/mania/anxiety/delusions of grandeur.


* we need new pronouns for the internet age. putative him. phim?
** actually almost not kidding here -- i had a patient recently who, well, never mind.

after 3 years, i'm still not quite sure of what to make of students who come literally crying to me when they get a B+

the check for my NYT puzzle came in. i realize that this is the first thing i've sold in my life, as well as the first money i've actually made in years, which is sort of at once delightful and horrifying.

important discoveries of this week:

1) planets revolve because of the conservation of angular momentum from the point of their formation. i feel like this was a piece of vital scientific knowledge that was completely skipped over in primary school/secondary school/jc/college. or i was asleep on that day. the brother and i were actually trying to work out the answer to why the moon doesn't revolve when a random girl on the street came up to us and said: "are you talking about physics?" in a slightly excited tone of voice. true story. i wouldn't suggest you use it to pick up girls though.

2) the lowest freezing point of salt/water solution is -21.1 degrees celsius.

3) the reason that d minor is "the saddest key" of all is apparently because it's in the dorian mode, which yields a subjectively darker sound. i'm quite curious as to why that should be, and i think i know some people in the department who can answer that question. d really is a sad note though. it's sort of purplish-blue.

have been reading about how determinists have put us a lot of scientists under the spell where we believe that free will cannot possibly exist because all causation is bottom-up: billiard balls that bounce around at the atomic and subatomic level and determine chemistry, biology and ultimately behavior. i kind of held that erroneous view for the longest time, and then the compatibilists came along and kind of persuaded me otherwise, but this book has been the first to convincingly argue for the existence of top-down causation -- that system-level entities can have effects on their constituent parts. if you free your mind a bit, that thesis isn't really all that huge of a revelation, yet the watchmaker's world is such an alluring metaphor that i've managed to hold on to it through about 5 years of (independent, unguided) study on the topic. i suppose if dennett had been a little bit clearer in his books, i might have shed the idea sooner, but i sometimes find it hard to follow his logic.

in other news, it snowed another 2 feet, and everything was cancelled today.

Difficulty: * (out of 5)

it ended up snowing about double of the promised 9 inches, which is to say more than i've seen in my time in philadelphia, which is to say a whole damn lot. have been cooped up in the house all day except for the hour i spent making sure the driveway and sidewalk were passable, and i'm already starting to feel a little stir crazy.

in other news, my plos one paper just came out, and you can, if you're so inclined, read it here

we're due for another 9 inches of snow here this weekend. thanks, punxsutawney phil. i miss going outside and reading a book while the cute japanese-american kids run around like in empire of the sun. except for the getting shot to death part, of course.

the comic book shop that used to sit on 41st and locust moved recently. i never used to get particularly good service from them at the best of times, so it was some reluctance that i agreed to let them mail me my books from their new location. as it turns out, my fears were not unfounded, as they have now gone 3 for 4 weeks in screwing up my order, this last week sending it to the wrong address. as i was saying to the brother, it doesn't seem like mailing someone a set of comics every week should be a terribly daunting task for a business. all i want are 1) all of the books i've ordered; 2) none of the books i haven't ordered 3) sent to me, and not my neighbor across the street. apparently, this is Too Much To Ask. fortunately, what should be opening in the location vacated by this store, but...another comic store. what are the odds. i gleefully called today to cancel my old order.

You Got Served

having attended a breakdancing competition for the first time in my life yesterday, i thought i would have something interesting and enlightening to say about the subculture. turns out, i really don't, so you get to watch this clip instead.

dissertation bits and bobs

1) is there any actual difference between 'disserting' and 'dissertating'? per the oed, one is "affected", and the other is "unusual", which makes me laugh for some reason.

2) DISSERTATION TIP #10: IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DISSERTING AND DISSERTATING IS, JUST KEEP WRITING, AND QUICKLY.

3) i need to figure out who to dedicate the thing to. i suppose one's parents is the done thing, but it would be nice to be funny. i mean, if no one's actually going to read it anyway, i may as well dedicate it to the flying spaghetti monster.

4) actually, speaking of no one reading it, i wouldn't mind having one (1) kind and brave non-expert volunteer to proofread it for me once i have a final draft. it will be a horrifying experience, but i'll buy you steak.

5) dimidium facti qui coepit habet

i wish

-- that the whole of life had the equivalent of a trash-collection service, where you leave all your crap out in bags in the morning, and by evening time it's gone.

on saturday, we went to karina's for mediocre pasta, good conversation, and a somewhat interesting incident where a middle-aged lady passed out at the table next to ours. the facts, from what i could gather, were these: that she was completely unresponsive (i would estimate GCS at 6-7); the loss of consciousness lasted about 10 minutes, upon which she woke up not even realizing that she had been out; she had taken a clonipine about an hour before; that she had had a glass or two of wine; that she had no history of diabetes. so what was it? one more thing i'll never know. theories?

***

in other news, if you like graphic novels, or even if you don't, i recommend the superlative daytripper, by fabian moon and gabriel ba, a 10-issue mini-series that explores the key episodes in the life of one fictional obituary writer brás de oliva domingos. excellent stuff, and you won't be collecing them till you're in a retirement home.

We Can Rule You Wholesale

a couple days ago, i opened up a new word document, and named it dissertation.docx, which in itself was an anticlimax. it sat there empty for a bit while i played sporcle, and then i wrote the cover page, with [TITLE] where the title should go, and then i spent the rest of the day writing acknowledgments, which was fun but pretty useless as far as actual progress goes.

nyt

thanks to von for shouting out my nyt puzzle yesterday. you can get it off his link if you have any interest, but if not (or after you've done it), i'd just like to point out that it set a somewhat interesting record (scroll down to near the bottom).

edited to add the java applet:

Difficulty: *** (out of 5)

forwarded by the ex-boss

semester the eighth

it would be nice if something that looked like a dissertation appeared in my hands by may this year. it doesn't even have to say anything too deep, just be big, and impressively bound. to accomplish this, it would be nice if students/patients/supervisors could all keep really quiet, and make very few demands. is there a muse of academic writing? if there is, i need their effigy as well for my desk, post-haste.

belated new year stuff

a day late, but who's counting these years? happy 2010 -- a year in which once again i resolve to blog more and not keep thoughts and feelings inside like dill pickles.

in the gym two days ago, they were playing (of course) prince's party like it's 1999, which really does bring one back. on new year's eve 1999 i was wearing green and watching people pressed together like preserved fish as they pretended to themselves that the next year decade century was going to be better, should auld acquaintance be forgot etc.. and then someone killed himself by jumping of the top of lucky plaza, which was, i suppose, a poor beginning. celebrating the passage of time is highly overrated.

to further remind me how much time has passed, von swept into town yesterday with a bag full of chapatis, and we both immediately realized how old we were and spent the next 48 hours eating and drinking almost constantly. there were a lot of potatoes of the mashed and very-buttery variety, and i may have converted von to single malt.

and new year's eve saw us shivering by the river for the most bizarre fireworks display ever. it was drizzling, and there was a light mist over the river, and after the first salvo of pyrotechnics smoke hung in the air in a thick cloak as if over a civil war battlefield, and the rest of the show was a lot of sound and fury with only the occasional shower of sparks from a roman candle nearer to the water. by the end of the show, it had drifted over the audience, nearly triggering several asthma attacks, and sending people scurrying back into the bars for more beer, and remembering, and forgetting.

My first published puzzle; Difficulty * (out of 5)