i am slightly embarrassed to admit that i'm addicted to angry birds.

lat 12/15

Difficulty: **/5




I guess it was only a matter of time before I decided to make a vaguely psych-related puzzle. As you might have guessed, 49-Across was originally a Hitchhiker's Guide related clue.

of course

singapore's salad days are over

we has data

well, 2 pilot subjects anyway, dr. fnir and RA #1. primary lesson learned: it is much grosser than one might imagine watching people spit into a tube. i have a little cubic container in which to store all my samples, which means i get to happily watch it fill up day by day like a pokedex, or one of those old panini sticker albums. will be slogging it out on my own for the next month, after which we will hopefully have RA #2 and an intern, whereupon i plan to devote myself to the careful study of epigenetics, and where in NUS to get the best cup of coffee.

more burger (thanks su-lin)

all i want for christmas

randall the enamel animal

this may have come from one of you guys, but since su-lin and i were talking about it today:

best burger ever

it's been a long time coming, but i think i'm finally going to start getting data in a couple of weeks. while it wasn't surprising how long and irritating the process of getting ready for this experiment was, it didn't make it any less painful to have to go through, and has certainly answered a lot of questions (in very minute detail) about why there's such a dearth of good science here despite the best efforts of the-powers-that-be.

anyway, i think i'll be in a more forgiving mood once subjects start streaming through the door. i'm aiming to start slow and accelerate to a clip of 40 subjects a week, which may not sound like that many to a behavioral psychologist, but for someone who's done imaging his whole career (i.e. me) is like having half the CBD come through the lab each day. still, it'll be nice to have busy work for a while, filing and macros and backups and lots of numbers in neat, straight columns.

Finale, Poulenc's "Les dialogues des Carmelites"

powerful stuff.

LAT 11/9

Difficulty: * (out of 5)




easy one, with thanks for justin for inspiring the theme.

I know my soul hath power to know all things
Yet she is blind and ignorant in all:
I know I'm one of natures little kings
Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

I know my life's a pain and but a span;
I know my sense is mocked in everything;
And, to conclude, I know myself a man --
Which is a proud, and yet a wretched thing.

-- John Davies

friday night lights 5x01

(in matt's house, landry saying goodbye to matt's grandma before heading off to college)

landry: it's quiet in here
matt's grandma: yeah. it sure is quiet, honey
landry; that is the cleanest i have ever seen his [matt's] room.
matt's grandma: sure is.
landry: i miss that guy

me: SO SAY WE ALL

what's new

nearly 3 months into this job, the inventory of our lab is up to:

1) one (1) $500k optical brain scanner
2) one (1) $100 response box

and still no f***ing computers to run anything on. activities we can do with this equipment include:

a) having awesome (+/- 5 ms) reaction times while playing a first-person shooter, thus kicking all kinds of ass, or
b) a very dangerous laser-light show

there are heartfelt promises that this will resolve itself within the next 2 weeks, but if not i'm readying the picket signs.

in happier news, all the other preparation for my study is done, and once we get the PCs in and calibrated it will be, as they say, time to rock and roll. n = 300, baby. in the mean time, i've volunteered myself for a crash course in molecular genetics lab work, which will translate into one glorious week doing PCRs and blots of all directions. exciting. i think the last time i touched a pipette was in sec 4, which might also have been the time ellen turned the bunsen burner on himself and needed to be treated with aloe vera.

i miss the colbert report like nobody's business

what hath god wrought

just spent the last few days in a local conference where there was some science and quite a bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth. the latter because, despite singapore giving us 16 billion dollars a year to spend on research, we can't actually really spend it on what we want, which is sort of like giving a little girl a pony and then telling her she can only watch it through the window as it poops in the yard.

the science though was cool, and demonstrated (sort of) that once in a (very long) while, it is ok to condescend to speak of what the practical significance of ones research is. in the case of neuroscience, i give you one word: robots. if you're one of the unfortunate people who watched surrogates last year*, you'll know that science-fiction writers/hollywood hacks think that the robopocalypse is soon to be upon us, and well, they may actually be right. dr. ishiguro of osaka university, for one, has already created fairly lifelike androids/gemenoids that can controlled from anywhere in the world, so that he can use them to give a talk in poland while sipping sake in the comfort of his own home. these things are apparently so good that they no longer freak people out because of falling within the uncanny valley. in fact, they arouse extremely empathy in people, so much so that there have been plays written in japan with gemenoid roles. also, launching next year, a (rather scary) phone with a humanoid shape that wriggles and talks and will probably soon kill us all much like the baby aliens in alien

there was, of course, the usual-hand-wringing about are we playing god, and what about asimov's laws, and what about robots that create copies of themselves and go all cylon on our asses. my sense is that, much like with climate change, the dialogue on this topic is already starting way too late, that this technology is going to be upon us with a velocity unimaginable, and that (for the general public anyway), surrogates is going to be the nearest thing anyone's going to have to thinking through the ethical implications of creating autonomous systems. quite frankly, even playing with the very basic brain-computer interface devices in our lab, one gets the feeling that this shit is remarkable. i think i'm a little scared of what it's going to look like in a couple of decades.

misshapen but tasty beef empanadas

(Click to enlarge)

LAT 17/10

the applet i use doesn't let me have circles, so you may want to download the .puz or .pdf versions to get the full experiences. not too much else to say about this one, except that it was murder to fill cleanly because of the theme density. also, if you know me you'll realize immediately that 83-across was, of course, the raison d'etre of the puzzle :)

CHE 01/10

i have the chronicle of higher education puzzle today. for reasons that are somewhat hard to explain, i can't get put this puzzle on the java applet, so please head along here to grab it in across lite or pdf format. also, if you don't do crosswords regularly, you may find this one a bit of a struggle. fair warning.

puzzle notes, stop reading if you don't want to be spoiled:

*

*

*

*

*

this one went through 3 different incarnations before finally being accepted at the CHE. my original idea was to insert SIN, COS and TAN into phrases to produce wackiness: my theme set was

AC(COS)T THE GOAT
(TAN)GO FOR THE GOLD
DUTCH COU(SIN) RAGE

which every editor i sent it to uninamously agreed was just way too far to go. patrick suggested this version of the theme, and this is how it turned out. i'm not entirely sure i'm that happy with the final result; i will say though that clue-wise, the final product makes me look like i'm very erudite, which is always a good thing, and 20-Across is something i've always wanted to see in a grid.

an observation

this country needs more dive bars.