I came down with a cold on Tuesday, and (as usual) went down for the count. I've always subscribed to the theory that it's best to just shut down and let my body devote all its energy to the immune system. I suppose this is a good idea, but I don't seem to get well more quickly than others; in fact I think I generally stay sick for longer. I've begun to think maybe I should just drug myself up on contac & nyquil and try to stay functional.
Anyway. Enough bitchin'.
I had a wonderful evening out with Jess last night to celebrate the one year anniversary of the day we first met. Last year on December 18th we had lunch at Algiers, in Harvard Sq., after getting briefly acquainted on-line; this year we had dinner at The Blue Room, after a year of getting more intimately acquainted. It was a good year. :-)
On Saturday, in the blizzard, I took my cross-country skis out and went all the way to Arlington via the bike path. It was a lot of fun; wicked cold, and painfully so when the wind was in my face, but it was beautiful to be out in, and I felt all "hardcore" for doing it, and going so far.
That was all well and good, but unfortunately by the time I got back, I had developed a nasty blister on the back of one foot. Six days later, it's infected, and nasty, and too painful to the touch for me to wear shoes & walk . . . so I'm going around in Boston winter with one boot & one flip-flop.
I guess there's some lesson there about trying to be hardcore, but only infrequently. Argh. posted by Miles 2:22 PM
So I was thinking about how I wish my iPod had a simple radio tuner in it. Right? I mean, how simple and obvious is that? I don't know, maybe it would give "the wrong image", or maybe there would be some interference or power issue . . . but I don't think so.
Anyway, aside from this, it occured to me that it seems like overkill for all the different cellular networks to have their own servers, and use phone bandwidth, to deliver the same simple data set to everyone with the limited "web" service that's just scores, weather, news headlines, and that kind of thing. It seems to me that a broadcast radio service could deliver the same information more cost-effectively; I mean, it does, in the form of news radio stations, but there's no reason that information can't be transmitted in a form such that it can be displayed as text on cell phone, PDA, or iPod screens.
Ah, I have so many million dollar ideas, and so little interest in putting any effort into them.
Another (maybe $100,000) idea is bluetooth-enabled vent-covers. Dumb idea, right? Well, my room never gets warm enough if the living room vent is open, because the thermostat's in the living room, and gets the best flow. Now, it's hard to rework the whole heating system in a building to ensure even flow to every vent, and totally impractical & inefficient to have independent heaters for each room. But it's now (relatively) cheap to put little chips in things, and temperature sensors are cheap, and motors strong enough to (essentially) turn some flaps are cheap, it seems like making a smart network to manage your heating system should be pretty doable.
Meanwhile, I have a second-year project proposal (that will make me $0, and hopefully ensure an additional three years of grad school & poverty wages) to write. Back to work! posted by Miles 10:08 AM
Or, maybe google does not work the way I think it does, and this has been effectively engineered by 'outsiders'. As in, there's a 'web project' to write HTML tags with the label "miserable failure" that list to the official presidential biography, and that's what's making the google search work the way it does. This sort of does (and sort of doesn't) fit with my conception of how 'reference ranking' based search engines like google work.
Jim, do you know enough about how google works to clarify this? Anyone else?
I've had a bit of email back 'n forth with Pauly, Jess' friend working on the Edwards campaign.
This is somewhat over-the-top, but . . . you know, whatever, it's the political arena we're talking about here.
Pauly,
Yes, lots of nitty gritty, and that's fine . . . I've read through what presented in the education of the edwards2004 website, as well. I just don't think the details are especially important, because I don't think the big picture is substantively different from the standard democratic party line, which I think I can state in six words:
More Teachers
Smaller Classrooms
Greater Equality
There is, aside from this, the issue of "standards" . . . which I think is essentially an unimportant distraction, though it's tied in with the Republican Party Line, which I'll get to in a sec.
I'll grant that Edwards departs from this in what I would call small ways: linking colleges with underperforming high-schools, for instance (a nice idea), & promoting more after-school programs (great, but not directly relevant to education, really). But I'm unimpressed.
Democratic & Republican big-picture stances on education policy are boringly reflective of general ideology; Democrats appeal to voters' faith that big-hearted teachers & parents, given just a little more money, can work together to make a better world; Republicans appeal to voters' faith in markets' ability to promote innovation. Dems think equality in funding is a Big Deal, Republicans think freedom is (see vouchers.) The standards issue (to come back to it) I see simply as a way for Republicans to put some steam into the free market engine.
I think this is a clear case where everyone sees a problem, but no one has any good or innovative ideas on how to fix it, so they dig into the ideology box and put something together.
It is as if ignorance were a disease, like cancer, but instead of putting any money into researching treatments, the democrats were saying "let's put more money into hospice care for the dying, and make sure even poor people have access to clean beds & pain killers", while the republicans were saying "let's leave this to the markets; people who provide lousy hospice care will go out of business, and the people who care the most will prosper, bringing better hospice care and more comfortable final days to everyone."
Now, this seems ridiculous on the surface of things, because we all know there are things you can do to treat & cure diseases LIKE cancer, so even if we don't know how to cure a given kind of cancer, we believe it to be possible, and we believe the way to go about doing it is to invest in research into different therapies; education, on the other hand, is a simple thing (they're just kids! it's stuff we all know, that they're being taught!), we know how it's done, we're just not doing it right, for some reason - probably due to lack of money.
I don't believe the second half of that paragraph. I think it's dead wrong. Education is not a simple thing, and even small, wealthy, private schools do a fundamentally lousy job with it.
Now, I could launch into the details of what I believe are structural and methodological changes that might have a real effect on "educational productivity", but I think that would be beside the point. In a big picture political sense, what's important is innovation; Democrats have let Republicans grab this as an issue and attach it to vouchers, but the two are not necessarily related. If I'm anywhere in the political spectrum on education, I'm crossed over to the Republican side, because at least with a free-market ideology, vouchers, & charter schools, there's the random chance someone will actually come up with something innovative in the right direction, that works - even if by and large the push is towards "better hospice care". In general, though, investment in technology & innovation isn't a Democratic issue or a Republican issue, and it doesn't have to be in this domain. I'm NOT talking about investing in putting computers in classrooms (possibly not a bad idea, but tangential.) I'm not talking about improving federal support for teacher education (though this is a step in the right direction.) I'm talking about support for both basic & applied research, in cognitive development and on the effectiveness of different educational approaches, both methodological and structural.
I'm serious! :-)
I've never heard a politician say anything like this, though, and I don't suppose I have any great expectation that I'll hear it soon. But is it a fundamentally untenable platform, politically? I don't think so, but politics isn't my field.
Thanks for your attentive ear; sorry if I'm not giving you useable feedback on policy specifics. But if your man wants something truly fresh and original, a distinctive platform that will signal "leader!", then hook 'im up with my plan. :-p
- Miles
On Wednesday, November 19, 2003, at 02:12 PM, Pauly Rodney wrote:
Miles, FYI here are the broad stroke outlines for the education policy. Lot of nitty gritty of course, but let me know what you think makes sense and doesn't. Part of the question and answer process is refining our goals, refining our statements, and (we hope this never happens), admitting that something may need to be approached in a different way.
-Pauly
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Van Ess
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 12:55 PM
To: Jeremy Van Ess
Subject: Edwards Brings High School Renewal Plan to Detroit
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
CONTACT:
Jennifer Palmieri
(919) 788-7477
EDWARDS BRINGS HIGH SCHOOL RENEWAL PLAN TO DETROIT
DETROIT, MI: John Edwards Wednesday met with students and teachers at Western International High School in Detroit.
Edwards outlined his agenda to renew America's high schools, including steps to provide an excellent teacher for every child, break up large schools, ensure that every student begins high school with a challenging curriculum, and partner colleges with struggling high schools.
"This is American Education Week, a time to remember all the hard work our country's
educators do and a time to remember how much work we still have left to do so that all children can make the most of their God-given talents," Edwards said.
Edwards said that President Bush's implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind law has done very little to improve education for the 1.7 million children in Michigan's public schools. Last year over a third of Michigan's schools were considered failing under the Act , the most schools of any state in the nation.
"President Bush talks about leaving no child left behind, but his education policies have left millions of children behind," Edwards said. And no state has been hit harder by his failure to live up to his promises than Michigan."
Edwards Wednesday focused on high schools because, compared to students in other nations, American students often excel when they are in lower grades and then fall behind in high school.
" We need to makes sure all American teenagers go to high schools where the adults know their names, where expectations are high and classes are challenging, and where teachers have the resources and support they need to succeed," he said.
Edwards Wednesday outlined a series of measures to improve Michigan's high schools:
· Excellent Teachers for Every Child. Edwards will double funding for teacher development and create college scholarships to attract teachers into the weakest schools.
· Smaller High Schools. Research shows that small schools can help raise achievement and graduation rates and, in fact, most successful high-poverty schools have fewer than 600 students. Along lines recently proposed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Edwards will support smaller schools by supporting new efforts to build new schools, break up existing schools, and reopen old ones.
· Challenging Academics. For high school graduates who go on to college, the rigor of their high school coursework is the number-one factor in determining whether they succeed. Edwards will ask states participating in his College for Everyone program (which will pay tuition for students willing to work part-time) to instill in every child the expectation that they will master the core subjects of the college preparatory curriculum.
· Expand College Outreach and Ask Every University to Adopt a School. Edwards believes that every college and university should adopt at least one high-poverty school and help it improve. He will expand funding for college outreach programs that offer extra tutoring, guidance, and scholarships to low-income students. These policies will give more than a million students in high-poverty schools a real shot at a brighter future.
"Where I come from, education has meant everything," said Edwards. "This plan will make sure our students get the quality education they deserve."
A product of public schools and the first in his family to go to college, Edwards has laid out the most comprehensive plan to improve education in the country.
Last month, the South Carolina Education Association recommended Edwards for president. "Public education clearly has a friend in Sen. John Edwards," SCEA President Jan McCarthy said at the time. "Our members saw his passion and commitment to education."
Wednesday's trip was Edwards' sixth to Michigan this year.
###
Paid for by Edwards for President, Inc. Contributions to Edwards for President are not tax-deductible for federal income tax purposes.
Jess & I went to Manchester, N.H. last night to attend a John Edwards "house party". One of Jess' close friends from Princeton is working on the Edwards campaign, and invited us up.
It was neat; he seems like a charismatic guy with Clinton-like political intelligence and empathy, and pretty reasonable positions. Or so I thought. Jess disagreed somewhat virulently with some of his positions & with his background; he's for universal healthcare, which she thinks will kill physicians and the quality of care, and before he was a Senator he was an ambulance-chasing lawyer (essentially), and Jess thinks the biggest thing medicine needs is tort reform. She also thought he was disingenuous and factually wrong when he indicted drug companies for spending too much on advertising, while claiming they need to keep pricing power in order to maintain R&D and develop new drugs.
Here's what my friend Google told me this morning:
On Merck's financial sheets there's a "Selling, General, and Administrative" line that's $6.2 Billion, annually, which compares to an R&D budget of about $2.5 Billion, annually, averaged across the last three years.
In 2000, according to an NIH study, $15.7 Billion was spent, industry wide, on 'advertising', with 16% of that, or $2.5 Billion, spent on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising. (Fully 50% was 'spent' on donating free samples to physicians - read: 'taken as an expense for tax purposes', as manufacturing costs are pretty tiny compared to the retail price that's tallied; this is however neither here nor there.)
Merck's revenues for 2002 were about $52 Billion, or about 1/6 of _worldwide_ drug sales ($300 Billion) , so if they advertise proportionally, their annual advertising budget should be something like $2.6-5.2 Billion, with $0.4-0.8 Billion of that spent on DTC (the range is because the advertising figures are for the U.S. only, while the 1/6 is based on worldwide pharma revenue). Even the low end of that range ($2.6 Billion) is equal to their annual R&D budget. Then again, the DTC number only amounts to 1-2% of annual revenues.
Jess' biggest issue with universal healthcare is that she thinks government price controls and mandates (combined with malpractice insurance costs, which are already huge) would make it impossible for physicians to stay afloat financially, and over time this would dissuade the most qualified potential doctors from entering the field. A big part of the equation is the up-front cost of medical school, and the crippling debt physicians carry as a result. My suggestion was that while we were socializing medical care, we could socialize medical education at the same time, for an incidental amount of money.
Something like 9,000 people matriculate in U.S. medical schools every year; the full cost for 4 years of school averages something like $200,000, including living expenses. Fully subsidizing this would thus cost about $2 Billion annually.
This is a lot of money, and then it's not so much money.
The annual NIH budget is about $26 Billion (as an aside, this is twice what it was in 1998, but Bush wants to limit annual increases to 2% annually for the next five years.)
Kuchinch, the "extreme leftist" in the democratic primary race, has a 'plan' for a single-payer healthcare system, and it looks like he's proposing annual spending of approximately $2 Trillion ($2,000 Billion).
So you could make medical school free, with stipend support, and only increase this budget by 0.1%.
This would mean more qualified people applying to med school (since it would be free) and it would mean doctors would come out free of debt, good for several reasons.
For an additional 0.1% you could double the number of physicians in training, and (for instance) let interns work 55 hours a week instead of 110. Heck, for another $80 Billion over 10 years (another 0.4%) you could pay back all the practicing physicians who have gone to medical school in the last 40 years for their costs of education (or, taking into account the fact that costs used to be lower, you could probably pay back every physician still practicing.) Both of these are somewhat loony proposals, but I include them just for the sake of illustration: lots of potential ways to improve the system are really pretty tractable, when you're talking about throwing around 2 Trillion dollars. posted by Miles 8:39 AM
Jess & I went up to Vermont for the weekend, joining my Dad & Ruth, my uncle Bill & aunt Donna, and my grandmother Joan. We went horseback riding on Saturday, in brisk fall air, through woods & fields colored by the season. It was the first time I'd been on a horse since I was about seven years old. I was scared at first . . . them's some big animals . . . but I was given a very well-behaved, responsive horse, and I had a great time. I even reigned him in a few times, just so I could trot him back ahead. I really wanted to kick my heels and urge him to just take off over a field; I felt no fear at all, and just the thought was exhilarating.
We went out for dinner Saturday night, and I had roasted pheasant. It was excellent, but unfortunately, it had its revenge on me by coming out the same way it went in, several hours later. I had to order the game dish. I love going to Vermont & seeing my dad, but it seems like somehow something weird and bad happens every time I go.
Anyway. I've got three more days to complete my NSF Graduate Research Fellowship application. Which means I've got three days left in which to try, in essence, to make myself $81,000. There will thus not be another entry in this blog until I'm done. :-)
People everywhere are saying this, but I've gotta' say it anyway: I saw LeBron James play his first NBA game last night, and I'm telling you right now, he's going to be absurd. That's my word to describe him. 25 points, 9 assists, 4 steals, 2 turnovers . . . and he's 18 years old. The Cavs almost beat the Kings in Sacramento, too, which is crazy. If he's the next anybody he's the next Magic Johnson, but really, the man is just going to be himself, and that's going to be plenty.
Watch sportscenter . . . or don't, it doesn't matter, you'll be able to see the same amazing stuff on sportscenter for the next, you know, 15 years or so.
Cool fact I noticed about the Cavs . . . aside from "King James" the Cavs best players are Miles & Davis (Darius & Ricky).
It's an overcast, dark, damp, cold autumn-heading-quickly-towards-winter day, here in Boston. The kind of day that makes me not want to get out from under the covers, in the morning, and leaves me standing under the hot running water in the shower for at least a half an hour. The kind of day that dampens even the euphoric, careening melodies of "Carboot Soul". The kind of day that says "you'd better suck it up and get used to me." posted by Miles 11:44 AM
I guess that’s me
A ball of pop culture
With some arms and feet
As discrete
as I’ve tried to keep the drama
and cancer
it’s no secret that I hunger
for someone to feed the answers
[...]
Let no tears fall
From none of y’all
Just remember it all
The beauty as well
As the flaws
“L-O-V-E
L-I-F-E
Here lies Sean
Finally free”
And as I look across the sea
I smile at the sun
While it feeds the weeds
The nutrition they need
The people still breathe
The city still bleeds
I’m a love it to death
And keep planting my seeds
I’m a love it to death
And keep an eye on the seeds
- Atmosphere, "Lovelife" from the album "God Loves Ugly"
Patrick and I walked across Boston, on Saturday. It was excellent! This was a follow-up for me to my walk across Philadelphia last winter. Boston's a smaller city; I'd estimate our total distance covered was about 14 miles, whereas Philadelphia was about 20. We started in the SW corner of incorporated Boston, in Hyde Park, and worked our way up through Mattapan, Dorchester, South Boston, downtown, then across the Zakim into Charlestown and finally out of the city, back into Cambridge. Strangely enough, there's no way of walking to East Boston (incorporated as part of the city of Boston) without leaving the city; there are only tunnels & ferries.
Walking through Mattapan and Dorchester was the kind of eye-opening, "I didn't even know this part of Boston existed" kind of experience I was aiming for. These two neighborhoods probably account for 40% of incorporated city area, and yet seem like they might as well not exist to the white / business / academic Boston. South Boston, on the other hand - supposed to be a really rough part of town - seemed pretty gentrified and unremarkable, to me.
This blog got a hit from the DOJ this morning. Wonder what they were interested in.
The Red Sox loss last night was devestating. I didn't feel as bad when the 76ers were eliminated by the Lakers in the finals (Knew it was coming, and they were down 3-1); I didn't feel as bad when the Phillies lost in the World Series on Joe Carter's home run (again, they were down 3-2; if they'd won it wouldn't have meant clinching). Red Sox fans will tell you about the heartache; about how much it hurts to come so close only to fail. Before yesterday, I don't think I really understood that. It hurts more to lose a close one than it does to lose in a blowout. It hurts more to lose to a comeback than to come up short in a comeback. And it hurts real bad when you've tasted victory (the ALDS against Oakland), and come so close (5 outs away and a 3 run lead), only to have it slip away. In the 7th, we were all anticipation, we were just waiting to explode. The feeling pervading that crowd, and all of Boston, had the Red Sox held on, would have been incredible; the town would have been glowing for days, and had they won the World Series people wouldn't have stopped smiling for weeks if not months, and they wouldn't have stopped talking for years. I could taste all of that. Then Jeter, Williams, Matsui, & Posada hit Boston like so many lead slugs, and I could feel every impact. All that could have been, lost, gone. Fuck.
Have there ever been more depressed people in Boston & Chicago? posted by Miles 6:14 PM
If there is one organizing principle to my philosophy of life / human psychology, it is this: you do what you want to do, in every situation in which you have any control over your actions.
If you think this is trivial, it's probably because you think this just comes down to the definition of "want"; I didn't say this principle explained anything, I just said it organizes things. If you think it's wrong, it's probably because you think a sense of responsibility, or morality, often guides you to act against your desires. If you grant free will, however, you act "morally" because you want to; it's not externally imposed, you choose it. Trivialization? See the beginning of the paragraph. I think of this principle as a restatement / generalization of a principle of "rational self-interest" that allows for second (and higher) order causes for action (like love, moral codes, etc.)*
I'm thinking about settling on a second principle, not unrelated. I don't have as succinct a way of phrasing it, but I think it may be just as solid and important. If you have no "wants" at all, you will try to find or create them; human psychology abhores a vacuum in the space of desire: this is at the root of "meaning".
You don't worry much about meaning when you're starving, or calling a girl to ask for a date, or rushing to meet a deadline. You worry about it when you're idle, when you don't care about your work; in general, when you're satiated. I think this is more than a coincidence, more than a deep concern surfacing only when not obscured by the immediate. I think in a very general way we have a "meta-desire" to desire, and it is only the absence of immediate desire that leads us to seek external motivations for desire, which we identify as "meaning". I guess I'm not totally sure, though, so I welcome debate.
* and leaves out any moral "assignment" like that of Ayn Rand style "objectivists"; there's no "should" in an organizing principle; it's just stated for the sake of understanding. posted by Miles 2:11 PM
First: Jess got her MCAT scores back, and they're awesome! Woooo! Let me tell you, high MCAT scores are sexy. Jess, my dad says to remind you that if you get into every single school you applied to, you owe him a dollar. :-P
Second: I was at Fenway last night for the Sox win over the Yankees. Really, it was a remarkably calm crowd, considering all the craziness on Saturday, but it was still a blast. The Sox are now 3-0 with me in attendance during the playoffs. :-) And may I just say one more time: Fenway is an incredible place to take in a ballgame.
Third: I might have set my all time personal high in Digger. A monstrous 38,000. Oh, yeah.
Fourth: I went down to N.Y. for the weekend, with Jess, Jimmy K, and Patrick, for a party of Jordan's in Manhattan. Jim Buckwalter surprised Jordan by coming all the way from California, and it was really great to see him. God, I love spending time with those guys; we're such total goofballs when we're around each other. The party location was really amazing, too; on the roof of 41 River Terrace, in Battery City, about 45 stories high, and right on the Hudson. We arrived in time for sunset, and we could see the entire city bathed in beautiful light. In one view, we could see the Statue of Liberty, the Financial District (including the construction at ground zero), the length of the Hudson, and Hoboken across the River. Just . . . totally amazing.
Fifth: I have a big talk to give tomorrow. It ain't close to done. Yeah.
An angel comes down to earth, and visits a philosopher. The angel says to the philosopher, "God will answer one question for you - it can be anything at all. What would you like to ask him?" The philosopher thinks, and thinks, and can't decide, so he asks the angel to give him some more time. The angel comes back a few weeks later and the philosopher says "Okay, I've thought it through, and I've got it. I would like to know the pair consisting of the best question I could possibly ask, and its answer." So, the angel goes back up to heaven, and tells God the question, and God thinks it through, calculates, very quickly (he's God), and gives the angel the answer. The angel goes back to earth, and finds the philosopher. "Do you have it?!?" the philosopher asks, with great anticipation. "Yes," says the angel, "the best possible question is the one that you asked, and the answer is the one I've just given you."
There are a number of articles I've read in the last few days on Red Sox fans, and the crazy experience the playoffs are here in New England. Bill Simmons, ESPN's "The Sports Guy" is almost always good, and his take on this is no exception.
God damn it. I wrote a long post, and Safari "unexpectedly quit". Totally random, I'm sure.
I went to the departmental colloquium yesterday, despite having no idea what it was going to be about. I couldn't decipher the title: "Precognitive Habituation: Replicable Evicence for a Process of Anomalous Cognition". (Huh?)
Maybe you're smarter than me. Forget the context, and just think about the first word in the title. Precognitive. Okay, shorten it to "Precog". Yep, you got it. The talk was about "precognition", which is to say, seeing the future.
The speaker was Daryl Bem, apparently a well respected social psychologist and tenured professor at Cornell. There's a well established psychological phenomenon called the "mere exposure effect", observable in all kinds of domains, where just being exposed to something once will make you like it more when you encounter it again. So, for instance, if you show a subject 15 pictures, randomly selected from a group of 30, and then show her all 30 a day or a week later, she'll say she likes the 15 she saw before better, on average, than the 15 she didn't see. There's another phenomenon, which goes the other way, called habituation - this is actually the basis for most infant studies in our lab. If you show a subject the same thing over and over again, they'll get bored with it; babies will look longer at a new, novel object or event than they will at an old, frequently seen event, and we use this as a dependent measure in tests to see what kinds of things babies can "tell apart". It works with adults, too, and does nifty things like make very appealing things less appealing (think porn) and make very unpleasant things less unpleasant (if you see gunshot wounds every day, they become less shocking and disturbing).
Anyway, what Bem did was just flip pretty well established psychological experimental methods around, temporally. Ran 'em backwards. That is, showed subjects pairs of images, asked them which they liked better, and then - randomly - flashed one of the images multiple times, for subliminal durations. Then he analyzed the data to see whether there was a tendency for you to pick the one you're about to be exposed to.
Oh, my god. That was the scariest thing I've ever seen. I was shaking, I was sick to my stomach, and I was intermittantly screaming my head off. The Red Sox took a 4-3 lead into the bottom of the ninth, but the closer, Williamson, walked the first two batters he faced. HE WALKED THE FIRST TWO BATTERS IN THE BOTTOM OF THE NINTH IN GAME FIVE WITH A ONE RUN LEAD. 5 million New Englanders were feeling dread and fear and nausea come over them. You just can't do that kind of shit and win.
Lowe came in, two days after starting game 3. Sacrifice bunt, perfectly executed, putting runners on second and third with one out. Time to intentionally walk someone to load the bases and set up the force at home and a possible double play. LOWE DIDN'T WALK HIM. He pitched to him. My stomach was doing flips. He struck him out, looking, and the crowd at Good Times ROARED. Screamed. Lost control. There was one out left to get. He didn't get it; worked the count full, and then walked Singleton. Bases Loaded. Two Outs. Bottom of the Ninth. Game Five.
I have no memory of what happened next. It's wiped clean; I don't know what the sequence of pitches was, what the count was. I just remember strike three dropping into the strikezone, the umpire pumping his fist forward emphatically to indicate the K, and the the crowd going into hysterics, throwing chairs, overturning tables, people giving high-fives and howling at the ceiling.
I went to the Red Sox playoff game at Fenway last night, and it was mind blowing. It was the weirdest game I've ever seen - 6 errors, 2 key interference calls, a runner missing home - and one of the best, with Trot Nixon hitting a pinch-hit homerun in the 11th to dead center, for a walk-off win that sent the sellout crowd into a euphoric hysteria that wouldn't stop - no one left that building for a half-an-hour.
Amazingly enough, I get to go back for more today.
Wow, wow, wow.
Liesje, I wish you coulda' been there with us for that one. :-)
There is freedom within, there is freedom without
Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup
There's a battle ahead, many battles are lost
But you'll never see the end of the road
While you're traveling with me
Oh, this is so amazing! It's the best thing ever! Someone has remastered my absolute favorite game from my childhood, Digger. That link is to a java version that I've been playing for the last hour; there are also DOS and windows playable versions (no OS X release, for now.) posted by Miles 6:43 PM
"That mortality is unbearable or makes human existence intrinsically pointless is a culture-specific speculation and by no means provides universal motivation."
- Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought posted by Miles 12:21 PM
I scored Red Sox playoff tickets! No ways, dude! Unbelievable. Four of us manned all the PC's on the 15th floor at the 6:00 pm starting line, and with about an hour of effort managed to get through - a couple times. Now the Sox just need to not blow their 2.5 game lead in the Wildcard. :-) posted by Miles 7:04 PM
My computer's back! With a brand new motherboard inside, apparently. It died nine days ago, now; started doing screen fireworks, crashing, and then simply not coming up at all. I thought, at first, that I might lose a month and a half's work; all the data, analysis, and code for my latest experiment. I was about ready to shoot myself for not having backed it up more recently; in the end, though, I managed to get it to come on and stay up long enough to get my data off. Even then, though, and even with a pretty similar lab-laptop to use as a backup, it was a tough week not having my machine. It's got a pretty integral role in my life. :-)
School's starting up, and I'm taking a class I'm decently psyched about. It's about computational theories of conceptual development: bayesian models for learning, that kind of thing. Heavy on Philosophy, heavy on AI, which is to say heavy on lots of stuff that I don't have much of a clue about. Good.
My AR study is wrapping up, or should be soon; I'm not sure exactly where to move next, but I've got a ton of possibilities, and a newly hired R.A. coming to work for me (& just me!). I was at Harvard for about 17 hours on Tuesday, and worked maybe 11 yesterday. I feel pressured, like there's tons to do, but I'm not feeling weighed down by it, for once, just pushed forward.
The Eagles are absolutely terrible. That's depressing.
But I'm not letting them weigh me down, either; after all, the Phillies are in a penant race, the Red Sox are winning one, and my fantasy baseball team is kickin' butt in the playoffs.
I need a nap.
And I need to examine two analyses, analyze three subjects, write code for four new experiments, write two essays, one grant and one paper, and . . . eat.
I dig it: a streaming audio hijacking program for macs. Next we need a hardware-software combo that converts a line-in signal to, say, firewire, & turns the datastream into mp3 audio (maybe even intelligently splitting tracks). Then the RIAA is even more completely toast. :-) posted by Miles 11:41 AM
I solved the last riddle! It was actually last thursday, I went at it for about two hours on the giant whiteboard in my lab's kitchen area. I'm tempted to post the solution . . . but that wouldn't be any good; if it were here, you'd be tempted to just click through and look at it, when what you really want to do is solve it for yourself. :-) Just email me if you really do want to see my solution.
I went out to Walden Pond with Jess, Jim, Patrick & Kirsten last Thursday; Friday night was an end-of-summer Carey Lab party; Saturday night was our last Adams Terrace party. We went with a timecube theme, which I thought was awesome, but appeared to just confuse most people. Ah, well. The reminder email went like this:
4+ ?4 Adams Terrace.
Tonight. Party!
Hey stupid - are you too dumb to know there are 4 different simultaneous 24 hour days within a single rotation of Earth? Greenwich 1 day is a lie. 4 quadrants = 4 corners, and 4 PARTIES, in the same location: ADAMS TERRACE!
Humans are 1-corner beings (1-corner face 4-corner head) who rotate 4-corner lifetimes: baby, child, parent, g-parent. Time Cube debunks god lies.
Evil people deny Time Cube and don't come to party. Educators are flat-out liars. Evil media hides Time Cube and suppresses knowledge of party.
Today is the 4*4 = 16th day of the 4+4=8th month of the f(4)=26th year since Elvis Presley transcended the man-god word world! Party!
I had . . . this is both amusing and distressing . . . been so stressed out about Jess taking the MCATs on Saturday that I'd barely slept the night before . . . I woke up at 4:00 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep, while she peacefully snoozed all night. This left us both exhausted by the time the party started, but she still made it 'til 1:00, and I made it all the way through to 3:00 am, when the party was finally dispersing. It was a good time.
To come: an essay on the sociological and psychological origins of pride, its applicability at different levels, and a look at the balance between heirarchy, egalitarianism, isolation & internationalism in politics and in religion. Hit me if I don't write it.
Today is math riddle day. Here are three tough ones, maybe in order of increasing difficulty:
(edited to correct two errors in the statement of the problems, 8/13/03 11:00 pm)
(1) Say M is thinking of a number between 0 and 15; what's the smallest number of yes-no questions you'll have to ask M in order to know the number, if M is allowed to lie once?
(2) If you have 5 points on the surface of a sphere, prove that no matter where they are on the sphere, it will be possible to cut the sphere in half and have at least 4 on one half.
(3)
(i) P is told the product of two numbers A and B
(ii) S is told the sum of these two numbers A and B
(iii) A and B are numbers between 2 and 99
P says "I don't know what the two numbers are"
S says "I knew you didn't know them!"
P says "Oh, well, I know them now."
S says "Ah, well in that case, I know them too."
What are the two numbers?
this should be solvable without using a brute force approach
Riddles courtesy of Tania Lombrozo & Nelson Lai. I think I've solved the first one; not so much the last two.
It's really striking, walking by the Stata Center and Tech Square at night, the buildings glowing in the darkness, how different the MIT end of Cambridge is from the Harvard end. So beautifully, optimistically modern. posted by Miles 2:33 PM
Ken Shan, 2003-08-06 13:53:37-0400:
|| There's also Enemyster and Fiendster.
I'm amused. :-)
Of course, I have a dirty mind, too, so it immediately came to mind that there should be a "sexster", which would consist of links between people you've slept with. This way you could figure out how many degrees-of-copulation separate you and . . . some number of other people. Okay, yes, it obviously wouldn't work at all, for privacy reasons. But you can imagine it, because it does actually exist, even if you can't see it. For instance, I've transitively (two steps!) had sex with Alastair, who I played golf with last weekend.
(This has been mocked (up) at std-ster . . . thanks to Kaihsu & (transitively!) Ken for the link)
The (slightly) more innocent original version of this was the hand-made charts of who had kissed/messed-around-with who, that used to get passed around at youth-group conventions I went to when I was a teen. Back then, I didn't make it onto the charts. :-) posted by Miles 3:39 PM
So this weekend, about three different people asked me somewhat out-of-the-blue, "Are you on friendster?" I had no idea what this friendster thing was.
It's strangely compelling. Kind of.
My boy Jordan is the most gregarious, well-connected person I've ever met. We played golf together this weekend, down in CT, and he was raving about how it's the greatest networking tool ever. So, I've got to respect that.
On the other hand, Jess thinks it's totally lame, and only of use to the desperate / in-need-of-affirmation. :-) I can see that perspective, too.
I guess, basically, I just think they've got a trillion-dollar concept on their hands, and they've only built a million-dollar website on that intellectual property. So far; I'm willing to cut them some slack, they've only been at it for a month, or something, and they're still in beta.
My ideas for expansion:
(1) hook up with ebay, or one of the used-car sites, or any p2p web-commerce site that would benefit from increased trust and accountability between parties. wow, this is just begging to be done.
(2) allow searches by N-degrees. this is SO important. right now you can see your friends, and you can search within a four-degrees-of-separation (4-DOS) set; it's GOT to be easy to make this flexible, so that you can search only within 2 or 3 degrees.
(3) have an "abilities", "talents", or "business" field, rather than just "interests" . . . so that, for instance, if I want to friendster a D.J. for my upcoming party I can search for someone capable; testimonials could be domain-specific.
(4) hook up with blogspot &/or geocities, to create instant access to more detailed info; this should be made visible in a DOS dependent way.
(5) write a mapping function, so you can see the geographic distribution of your connections, with different colored "pins" for each degree of separation.
(5a) create a parallel "travel" service, allowing people to designate themselves as "hosts" for folks in need of a place to stay (potentially with a small attached fee) . . . or just in search of someone to go out for drinks with, in a new town.
Anyway, check it out, if only just to get the idea. And just look me up by name & add me as a friend, if you dig it. posted by Miles 11:06 AM
Jess and I were talking about the development of moral and social reasoning this morning, over coffee & pastries at Carberry's. She asked when kids learn to cooperate to succeed at a task; I didn't know, but I thought it was a great, very relevant question.
So, this is from an email I just sent my advisor: (read the first link - none of what I say may make any sense, without it, and it's interesting stuff)
We seem to focus on Theory of Mind as the root of social cognitive development; this makes lots of sense, to me, as you're pretty limited in your ability to reason about social situations if you lack understanding of the internal beliefs, desires, etc of agents around you.
We had a conference on Moral Development, and this made a little less sense to me; there was discussion of the development of empathy, and some Theory of Mind, and some nativist proposals concerning innate moral rules. This was all interesting, but I've always had trouble looking at the world through a moral lens; morals aren't very real, to me: they don't map onto the physical world, and they don't seem to offer very deep explanations of human action.*
Basically, I see the world this way: moral rules are a shortcut to socially functional behavior. The "Golden Rule", or the "ethic of reciprocity", for instance, is simply stated, simply understood, and pretty effective (if followed) for a culture; however, from a social psychology (or game theoretical) perspective I think you would say there's a _reason_ this is a "good" ethic: if you consistently follow this rule, you will generally not piss people off, and if others notice this, your reputation (honor) will improve and other individuals will trust you. All of this will result in: (A) a maximization of cooperative opportunities with greater rewards than are obtainable alone, and (B) a minimization of retributive actions against you. There are always other good (but high risk) strategies like "leverage your power and exploit everybody else because they can't do anything about it", but this only really works for a few individuals; most would get hurt by retribution.
In any case, if you want to follow this effective "ethic of reciprocity" you can either (1) learn the rule, or (2) understand all the social psychology.
It seems marginally obvious that (1) is easier.
But. It doesn't generalize that well; while the ethic of reciprocity is a really good one, there are lots of other moral/ethical rules to learn, and they pretty much all conflict, from time to time, with immediate interests or desires that you have. When faced with such a conflict, you have a decision to make: you have to consider your desire D, your moral code M, and (if you want to think a little harder) the social consequences \ of your possible actions \.
Adults consider social consequences all the time, regardless of whether ethics are involved. My position (not supported by any data, that I know of) is that 95% of the time when there is a conflict between D & M (such that ethics might be involved) the choice of action based on consideration of social consequences will match the choice of action based on your moral code, as, at least in the long term, violations of cultural-norm morals lead to deep, negative social consequences.
This means that if you're willing to invest in a careful consideration of social consequences, you don't need moral or ethical codes.
The point of all of this is really simple:
I suspect kids are limited in their understanding of social dynamics, as compared to adults. (duh)
I suspect there's a gradual transition from rule-based strategies to consideration of social consequences . . . late in development (adulthood?) for most people; possibly never, for some.
And finally . . .
I think there's an important difference between a basic-level belief/desire theory of mind (what I've seen in the literature), and a "dynamic" theory of mind that integrates the affects of our actions on the internal states of others. This latter dynamic ToM seems like the real core system of adult social cognition. I suspect this system begins to develop fairly early on; once you have a full "static" ToM and any kind of general learning mechanism, you've got all the tools you need to build it.
I'm trying to think of an empirical way to get at this; it seems like there should be something simple from game theory - some variation on the prisoner's dilemma adaptable to a toddler game/task - that would let me test whether kids understand the affect of their actions towards a co-participant, in an initial stage, on their success / reward in a second stage that has a large "cooperative" payout. However, I realize that attempting to simulate real, rich social interactions and social learning in a brief "game" or "task" might be a poor approach. Might there be a way to do this with "verbal reasoning" style questions concerning fictional social interactions detailed in (very) short stories?
Body parts are nice,
I can close my eyes,
and think about your lips;
They quiver to the tips
of the fingers on my hand
I'm a man
with some secret plans
I need to carry out.
You are my mission......impossible, at first
We're like cold fission...I feel an energy flow...
Flow..
Let it all go,
Close your eyes
Body parts are nice.
What makes you warm?
The sun on your skin, a summer storm
Rain,
Rain, on your face,
Rain that you can taste
slowly,
As it drips
down your lips
like a kiss
from the one you love.
- "Bodyparts", from the album Magazine, by Jump, Little Children
Ay, my head is ringing from listening to it over & over at high volumes. It's the best White Stripes song the White Stripes never wrote, man. No offense to either side.
So I was in lab working 'til about midnight, last night, and then I started playing Starcraft with Justin Halberda. He had on some tunes that I really liked, so I asked him who the band was. "Them", he said. I was like, "Them? (hmm, I've never heard of that band)". Justin clarified: "Them - the guys we're playing starcraft with. The band's called Jump, Little Children.
Holy shit! My old company just got bought by pharmaceutical giant Roche; it was a complicated deal, but basically Roche paid 1.4 Billion, sending Igen shares up about 60%. Wowza. posted by Miles 4:59 PM
So, I'll admit to being a little scared by the RIAA's shotgun lawsuit approach against filesharers. I don't appear to be on the shitlist - though it's increasing every day - and it appears they're exclusively targetting KaZaA users, meaning macintosh users (who can't use the PC-only KaZaA) get another free pass (like we do with most viruses).
But. What am I supposed to do when I want a song like Aretha Franklin's "One Step Ahead", the song sampled in Mos Def's awesome "Ms. Fat Booty"? I've wanted this song for a long time. I remembered I wanted it, today, and went to the iTunes music store, to legally purchase it. No dice. It wasn't there. They have a good selection, but they don't have full catalogs for most "older" artists - just recent "best-of" collections or re-releases, in most cases.
Now, I actually was never able to find this song using LimeWire, either. The network simply doesn't have the selection KaZaA does. And I'll grant that this is a somewhat niche-market kind of desire. But while most of the controversy rages over new music CD sales, it seems like there's a real market opportunity in back-catalogs and out-of-print albums. "One Step Ahead" may never have even been released on CD; it was a 1965 single, but I haven't been able to find it on any compilation.
Another market opportunity waiting to be exploited: adult baseball leagues. Both in D.C. and in Boston, I sent out multiple inquiries every spring, and never heard back. There are leagues, but they're established and exclusive, holding try-outs to fill a few open positions every year, but turning away many interested players. The Boston Men's Baseball League turned away about 120 hopefuls this year, and it's not the only league around. The rest of us are relegated to softball. Why? Softball is some fun, but it's not baseball. Adults play basketball. Adults play soccer. Adults are fully capable of playing baseball. Instead, we play a second-class game. It's bogus. posted by Miles 11:35 AM
That Red Sox comeback against the Yankees last night was awesome! Dave Barner and I were driving back from our Harvard-Yale psychology department softball grudge match, and the game kept us company for the 2+ hour drive. We were going through a toll booth on 90 when Varitek hit his homer, so I dosed the booth attendant with some very loud hooting and hollering. She just smiled.
Dave and I had noticed the other day that the Yankees looked to have an incredibly easy schedule down the strech in September - Detroit, Tampa Bay, Chicago. So we had agreed that the Red Sox probably needed to catch the Yankees quick, and pull ahead, if they were to have any shot at winning the East.
I decided to put this hypothesis to an analytical test.
The Sox have a brutal 14 straight games against Seattle & Oakland in the middle of August, a home-and-home set of 7 with the Yankees, and assorted garbage: 14 against Baltimore, 7 vs Tampa Bay, 5 vs the Chi Sox, 3 each against Texas, Anaheim & Cleveland, 2 vs the BJs, and 1 make-up against the Phillies.
Meanwhile the Yankees have a matching 14 against Baltimore and 7 vs. Tampa Bay, 6 each vs K.C. & the Chi Sox, 3 each vs. Oakland, Seattle, Anaheim, Texas, Toronto & Detroit, and the games with the Red Sox.
6 K.C. (57-46)
3 Detroit (28-75)
1 Chi Sox (54-51)
1 Blue Jays (54-51)
total (weighted) opposition W-L percentage: .470
However, as this is only over 11-12 games, it shouldn't amount to much; the Yankees can expect to win 5.83 and lose 5.17, the Sox can expect to win 5.46 and lose 6.54. The difference in these is 0.37 W, 1.37 L; add these up and divide by two and you get a 0.87 game difference in the standings as the, eh, "variance attributable to strength-of-remaining-schedule effects". Which is substantially less that the effect of any single game between the Sox and the Yankees.
So if the Red Sox don't catch the Yankees, no blaming it on scheduling. :-)
I keep getting this conflict between feeling discouraged by my ignorance, and excited about making progress and finding shit out. posted by Miles 8:32 PM
Hey, if my blog looks whack, formatting wise, please tell me. I only see it from my mac, really, and lately it's coming out strange . . . stubbornly running off the right side of the screen regardless of what I do in the template settings. I checked, and it's not doing this in IE on a windows box . . . but the font is unreadably tiny. So anyway . . . like I said, give me a shout if it's hard to read. posted by Miles 6:54 PM
Wow, I have a full weekend ahead of me. Free clubbin' at La Boom tonight, courtesy of some softball buds; softball practice, then either The Hip Hop Peace & Unity Fest or the all-boston team poetry slam, or both, tomorrow afternoon & evening; then 2 softball games Sunday morning & a (second!) free Blue Man Group show (their regular theater show, rather than the rock concert - again courtesy of Jess' friend Martin!) on Sunday afternoon. All this after a lazy morning 'lab pool party' out in Andover at Andy Barron's phat family-pad, today. It's a good life, you know?
I gotta really solve this number-pair/ratio/proper-scale-distribution set thing, though, and soon. I have now put way, way too much time into solving what should, goddamnit, be a simple enough problem.
Given a sequence of N bits, what metric would give you something akin to "how unlikely it is that the sequence resulted from random (p=.5) generation"?
I know there are measures of the 'complexity' of sequences (Kolmogorov complexity, for one). I don't really know how they work, but I know they exist. But they don't really seem like they answer the specific question.
My curiosity was piqued by this sequence: (The history of the MLB All-Star game)
I saw the most fucking amazing show last night - The Blue Man Group's The Complex Tour. Massive thanks to Jess' friend Martin, who gave us a pair of (free!) tickets he obtained through his theater production connections! You should absolutely check 'em out if they're coming to a venue near you. posted by Miles 12:01 PM
function [inside_stats, bas] = sm_ratio_finder(target_ratios,set_sizes,slop)
%SM_RATIO_FINDER
%
%usage: [inside_stats, bas] = sm_ratio_finder(target_ratios,set_sizes,slop)
%
%creates all possible pairings for an input set of integers (set_sizes), picks those
%matching (within the range 'slop') an input set of ratios (target_ratios), and then
%looks for the '2-from-each-ratio' combination of pairings that includes the most
%'within threshold range' pairs.
%
%'slop' may be a vector (with the same length as target_ratios) or it may be a scalar.
%
if num_slop == 1
slop = slop*ones(1,num_target_ratios);
else
if num_target_ratios ~= num_target_ratios
error('slop and target_ratios dimensions do not match');
end
end
num_ratios = zeros(num_set_sizes,num_set_sizes);
% compute ratios for all pairings:
for i=1:num_set_sizes
for j=1:num_set_sizes
num_ratios(i,j) = set_sizes(i)/set_sizes(j);
end
end
% find matches to target ratio set:
for i=1:num_target_ratios
[a b] = find(num_ratios>(target_ratios(i)-slop(i)));
[c d] = find(num_ratios<(target_ratios(i)+slop(i)));
matches{i} = intersect([a b],[c d],'rows');
[num_matches,junk] = size(matches{i});
if (num_matches < 2)
fprintf('%s %2.2f \n','failure to find two pairs within range for ratio: ',target_ratios(i));
error('exiting - no successful pairing');
end
end
% reformat, to create a cell array of one number pair / exact ratio matrix per target ratio
for i=1:num_target_ratios
[num_matches junk] = size(matches{i});
matches_w_ratios{i} = zeros(num_matches,3);
% matches_w_ratios{i}(:,1:2) = matches{i};
for j=1:num_matches
matches_w_ratios{i}(j,1) = set_sizes(matches{i}(j,1));
matches_w_ratios{i}(j,2) = set_sizes(matches{i}(j,2));
matches_w_ratios{i}(j,3) = num_ratios(matches{i}(j,1),matches{i}(j,2));
end
end
% prepare to calculate "big and small" matrix, calculate thresholds, & count "inside" pairings:
big_and_small = zeros(num_set_sizes,2);
% for each target ratio, create list of all different "2 pair" sets
for i=1:num_target_ratios
[num_matches, junk] = size(matches_w_ratios{i});
index_vector = [1:num_matches];
nck_matrix{i} = nchoosek(index_vector,2);
end
% calculate total number of "N*2 pair" full experimental sets
tot_num_bas = 1;
for i=1:num_target_ratios
[num_combos(i) junk] = size(nck_matrix{i});
tot_num_bas = tot_num_bas*num_combos(i);
end
num_combos
bas = zeros(num_set_sizes,2,tot_num_bas);
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% This is just a progress bar:
% Third, count "overlap" and "inside" pairs
% (pairs with one or two members, respectively, inside threshold limits)
overlap_pairs(i) = sum(sum(cur_bas(high_threshold(i):low_threshold(i),:)));
for j=1:(2*num_target_ratios)
if and((these_real_pairs(j,2)>=high_threshold(i)),(these_real_pairs(j,1)<=low_threshold(i)))
inside_pairs(i) = inside_pairs(i)+1;
end
end
% go back and find the actual numbers & ratios for chosen optimal set
for i=1:num_dims
set_pair = nck_matrix{num_dims-i+1}(max_cart_coords(i),:);
for j=1:2
real_goddamn_pairs((i-1)*2+j,:) = matches_w_ratios{num_dims-i+1}(set_pair(j),:);
end
end
real_goddamn_pairs
etime(clock,start_time)
(took me freakin' long enough) posted by Miles 6:59 PM
Cambridge is covered by a dense mist. It's beautiful from up here on the 11th floor.
and in the backseat of your car
you showed me every single star
and how the zenith and the sounds
change in every single town
well, it's over and i can't go there anymore
I saw this band, along with "The New Pornographers" last night at the Middle East. It had been a long, long time since I'd been to a show. It was good - I'd never heard of The Organ, but I loved 'em - the singer reminds me of Patti Smith, voice & lyrics wise, with a sexy/androgynous lesbian-meloncholy-punk attitude. Indie rock rules. They're playing in N.Y. at the Bowery tonight & tomorrow, and in D.C. at the Black Cat on the 13th.
Several of us here are working on the vague outlines of an experiment that would require simulating virtual sound-emitting objects. The idea would be to have a surround-sound-like system (or surround-sound headphones) in a dark room (no visual stimuli) and create the illusion of objects whizzing around in 3D.
I feel like there must be some software, somewhere, written to do exactly this - for special effects, or whatever. I have no idea where to look, however, or even what to look for. Any ideas, anyone? email me.
Another question is how hard it would be to write such a thing from scratch - the "sound" equivalent of a ray-tracer that would compute the sound that would be "recorded" at each of N points, from the sounds emitted from M moving, humming objects. It seems to me like it would be very easy to do a bad approximation (hey, 1/r^2 amplitude!), moderately difficult to do taking a little more physics into account (doppler shifts, reflection off walls . . . other stuff?) and maybe extremely hard to do perfectly (accounting for speaker directionality? reflections off the observer? appropriate interference? tons of other factors that i'm naive to?)
Jess & I biked the Minuteman last night, after Anh, JimmyK, Jenny & I signed the lease on our new place. We made it all the way to the official "end" in Bedford! Didn't make it back home until after 10:00, so the way back was pretty dark. :-)
Nice, an awesome song just came on my iPod. "Summer of Love" from the "Rain" Soundtrack. I love this thing.
Alright, I've got an 11:00 kid to run! Gotta' go set-up. Watch for some preliminary data & analysis here soon - I'm approaching 20 subjects on this version of TLN. (!!!) posted by Miles 10:31 AM
I always say I like to live my life as an open book. This, in one way, is as open book as you can get: I figured out I can export my to-do lists from omni outliner to html, so here they are - my (work) life, raw and uncut:
A lot of the specifics won't make any sense to most of you, but I feel like you can probably get a kind of a gestalt something from it, anyway. posted by Miles 8:38 PM
A strikeout on the apartment; multiple realtors were showing it, it was a long weekend, there was a middleman between our guy and the owner . . . same kind of mess that sunk us on the place we loved and put a deposit down on two years ago, only to lose. I hate this process.
Fortunately, we saw another place that we like, today - hopefully we'll actually get this one. It's not as close, for me; it's right near the start of the bike path in Somerville, North of Porter. Nice, big place, with off-street parking, front & rear decks, brand-new looking kitchen, two common rooms, two bathrooms. Nice. Just not quite as nice for me, because of the location. But still cheap. $100 per person less than we're paying now, for a substantially nicer place.
Don't hate the player, man, hate the game.
Speaking of which, I used to be in the "Why does MTV play all these stupid shows instead of music videos?" camp. I don't even watch TV, but I have no idea how I could not watch Snoop Dogg's "Doggy Fizzle Televizzle". I was a little addicted to Punk'd for a while, too. I mean, this is good sh*t, dude. posted by Miles 12:58 PM
We put a deposit down on a new place! It's on Beacon Street, right near the Star Market. It's $500/mo cheaper than our current place, and just as nice. Also, it's still a pretty short walk to lab, for me. posted by Miles 11:14 PM
"Good love never dies
It only hurts when we burn our eyes
From staring too long at the sun
You gotta throw your hands up
And let the night come
Take your chances
And let the night come"
So, I haven't been posting because I've felt like there's so much to write that I don't know where to start; that's no good, so I'll break the trend with a trivial post.
I love the new Liz Phair album. It took me a few listens to fully warm up to it, but I've arrived. Yes, it's more of a pop sound, and yes, the lyrics have a different tone . . . it's interesting, if whitechocolatespaceegg was Liz showing her maturity, the theme of this album might be said to be post-mature. Liz hashing out (apparently) the breakdown of the marriage she was glowing about in whitechocolatespaceegg, the ever dynamic nature of attraction, love, and friendship, and - in my favorite song of the album - how it all seems and feels to her now six year old son.
Dig little digger, don't be shy
You saw your mother with another guy
You think you'll tell her that she's one of a kind, you say
My Mother is mine
You put your trucks up on the bed next to him
So he can get a better look at them, you say
This ones my favorite one, this one you can't have
I got it from my Dad, you say
I got it from my Dad
Now you're thinking little thoughts about it
Taking every inch of him in
What does it mean when something changes how its always been
And in your head you keep repeating the line
My Mother is mine
I've done the damage, the damage is done
I pray to God that I'm the damaged one
In all these grown-up complications that you don't understand
I hope you can, someday
I hope you can
There's something intensely sad, even in all the energy of the album - a sorrowful acknowledgement and recognition of the simple reality that nothing is - that nothing related to love can be - as simple as we think it should be when we are children.
They don't seem to have solved the problem that replacing the O2 sensor was supposed to be for - an erratic idle and occasional stalling out when in neutral - but I'm happy just to have my car out of there. Going straight to the top works sometimes, I guess - I got the general manager of the dealership on the phone yesterday, and he straightened things out.
I spent an hour making phone calls this morning, and got almost exclusively answering machines; I scheduled one kid to come in for my study. Ah, well. Back to it.
About a month ago, they look at my car and tell me I need to replace an 02 sensor; the initial estimate they give me is $700. This is way, way too much. When I check prices, and call them back, the guy says "oh, gosh, I don't know what happened, I must have hit a key twice . . ." and lowers the estimate to about $400. I still don't bite, and a couple days later I find out the sensor had been replaced by another dealer last November (before I owned the car) and is still under warranty. So I make an appointment to bring my car back in, since I can get it done for free.
Great. I take it in, and I get a call later that day, saying "we don't have that part in stock; we'ver ordered it but it will take a few days. Okay, that's a drag, they're idiots for not having ordered it, since they knew what needed to be done, but not a huge deal. Three or four days pass, and I get another call . . . saying "The parts have come in, please call us back to make an appointment to bring your car back in." They still have my car. I call back and leave a message telling them this. No reply. I call back a couple days later, get no pick-up from service, and leave another message. No reply. I call back today, finally get through to the guy in service . . . and he says "well, who's going to pay the bill for the week's storage?" WHAT?!? He says when they realized they didn't have the part, they left a message telling me to pick up my car. I say "I have the message, that's not what it said." "Are you calling me a liar?!?" he demands. "That's not what the message said, no one told me to pick up my car." "Your car will get done, we'll call you when it's ready." Abrupt. Rude. I check my voicemail when I get off the phone. All the message asked was that I return the call.
Now I'm left paranoid about them having my car, and potentially having a grudge. The last time I argued with a mechanic (who'd tried to gouge me) my car developed serious (and its last) problems about a week later, unrelated to the repair it was in for.
Jess noticed my old company making biotech news yesterday. Seeing that made me go check to see what they've been up to lately. It looks like the product I worked on my whole year there is finally on the market! In fact, maybe I just missed it for a while because they've kept the "joint venture" LLC that it is being produced "by" carefully separated from IGEN itself. It's a joint venture between (cough, impropriety, cough) IGEN's director and majority shareholder and his son & wife, called "Meso Scale Diagnostics"; IGEN pours money & employee time in, the accessory Wohlstaders provide the "key patents" & reap at least half of any money the LLC ever makes.
Anyway, that's not the point. Point is, the product I worked on is actually out! This is cool because nothing else I've ever worked on, scientifically, has actually come to fruition (with one exception); my high-school spinal neuropathology work never got published, the sky survey and the CMB polarimetry project I did my thesis on at Caltech both, I'm pretty sure, got "scooped" by other research teams, and - until now - it looked like the year's work I put in in Gaithersburg three years ago had disappeared into a black hole, too. But no!
Look at the "Sector HTS", under "products"; that's the device I was primarily involved in the engineering of, though I worked some on the lil' one (the "PR") too.
(Portions of this post shamelessly cut'n'pasted from an email I wrote earlier to Jess.)
It was pointed out to me once that the Rockies, playing in Coors Field with its famously thin atmosphere (the ball carries really well when hit) have a built-in home field disadvantage, since their pitchers will, over the course of a season, have to throw a lot more pitches (in all those 9-7 Coors Field games) and will wear down. It occurs to me today that they should really be able to take advantage of their field - in terms of pitching - by dealing for sinkerball and split-finger fastball pitchers. These guys specialize in groundball outs - and grounders do pretty much the same thing in a thin atmosphere that they do in a soupy one. So I look to see who the leading groundball pitchers in the majors are (look at the G/F ratio) and . . . the Rockies have none of them. Or, no starters anyway; their closer does come in 24th. I wonder if this has never occured to them, or whether it just wouldn't be as big an advantage as I think it would be.
I went to the Red Sox game at Fenway, last night, with a couple of friends from the department. It was maybe the most ridiculous, action packed game I've ever seen . . . starting in the 9th inning. The Sox had nothing happening for the first 8, and were down 3-0. Then in the bottom of the 9th they rallied: Varitek hit a 2-run HR, Walker got a hit, and Nomar nailed a game-tying triple to dead center. Awesome; they left the bases loaded, but hey, we were headed for extra innings.
Then the Cardinals scored 2 in the 10th. Doh! All that comeback for nothing.
But.
With 2 outs, Johnny Damon barely beat out a drag bunt, David Ortiz blasted a double high off the Green Monster, and Nomar got another game-tying hit. The Sox then loaded the bases again, but couldn't bring home the game-winner. The 11th and 12th passed without any scoring, and little drama. Then in the 13th the Cardinals got a runner to 3rd with two outs, and for some reason the Sox decided to intentionally walk Pujols. Up steps Jim Edmonds, and the next pitch lands on Landsdowne St, way, way outta' the park. Cardinals up three, both those comebacks all for nothing.
But.
Bottom of the 13th, the Sox started out with a walk and two singles, scoring one and putting runners at 1st and 3rd. Mueller grounded into a double play, but got the Sox within one run again. Giambi walked; the Varitek was intentionally walked. Then Johnny Damon lofted one down the very short right field line; it was caught a few feet from the wall. Game over.
Ooof.
That was NUTS, though. I decided an analysis was necessary. Based on two days of action, I obtained the following histogram of runs-per-inning:
The simplest analysis is this: given the Cardinals scored what they did, how improbable is it that the Red Sox came back to tie, to extend the game to 13 innings? Teams score 3 runs in 2.3% of all half-innings; teams score 2 runs in 6.6% of all half innings; teams score 0 runs in 76.3% of all half innings. So, the chances of the Sox exactly matching the Cardinals' scoring of with {3,2,0,0} in the 9th through 12th were (p3*p2*p0*p0) = (.023*.066*.763*.763) = .00088, or a little under 1 in a thousand. Nutty.
I'm headed up to Vermont to spend my 25th birthday with my dad. Vacation! Alright! So, possibly no blogging for the next few days.
I got "The Great Gatsby" from audible.com to listen to on my iPod during the bus ride up, tonight (as my Scirocco is coughing and choking and shouldn't go out without the treatment it's scheduled for next week) so I can be entertained without getting motion-sick. Alright, technology overcomes, again.
You feeling alright?
I'm not feeling too good myself
You're feeling alright . . .
I woke up this morning just feeling out of place.
Alright.
Time to go get packed. Time away can only do me good.
I feel like an old man, today. My body aches. Spent the best part of the weekend helping Jess move into her new place, which was a lot of fun, but also a lot of backbreakin' work, since her new place is a fourth floor walk-up. It all got done, though, and despite my initial feeling of claustrophobia when I saw the place empty (it's a studio - big, but still a studio) I think it looks great, set-up. Check her blog soon for pictures. Wonderful light, especially in the morning - the sun just comes streaming in, and there's a view of the Boston skyline.
I had a 3+ hour practice with my new softball team, the "Gorilla Fingers", Saturday. We were then supposed to play a doubleheader to kick the season off, on Sunday, but the all-day downpour put that on hold. I'm looking forward to it, though; the team Dave and Neal and I were assigned to is mostly BU law-school students, and it's a very laid-back "dude!" kind of group. I think we will lose a lot of games (this is a relatively competitive league), and have a lot of cook-outs on Sunday afternoons. And, uh, apparently the team name is from a cigar frequently used for rolling blunts. So. Anyway, should be a lot of fun. Also, Boston is such a small world kind of town - by total coincidence Dave and I already knew one of the guys on the team we were assigned to; Josh, who's the husband of Anna Shusterman, a third year grad student in Spelke lab. Cool guy. Wacky.
Jess and I saw Finding Nemo on Friday night. Go see it; it's absolutely amazing.
So, Apple "updated" iTunes to version 4.0.1; I went ahead and took the update, and only afterwards realized that the primary "improvement" was that they had crippled the sharing functionality. I thought this was pretty underhanded and rude; my friend Patrick and I had been using the feature to listen to each others' collections (it allowed you to listen to, but not download, songs from someone else's library, with a password) and I thought that was very cool.
So I've now spent several hours (yeah, way too much time) trying to get back to where I was before. Googling and Slashdotting, perusing the Apple discussion boards, trying to figure out how to obtain an installation package for iTunes 4.0 (check!) and how to actually get it to work (eh-eh. so far.) That's how bad it is: they push the update on me, and then the software is built not to allow you to go back once you've taken an update. Fuck.
This is mildly ridiculous. I have 30 GB of music I haven't listened to since getting my laptop last October (fact thanks to iTunes excellent "playcount" feature), and ve haf odder metodes of obtaining more. I just (a) really dug being able to check out what my friends are listening to, and be exposed to new stuff that way, and (b) really hate feeling swindled or fooled in any situation, and I feel that way about this - with a company I normally have a lot of affection for (and heck, hold a "1/4 of my net worth" financial interest in.)
For anyone who doesn't know, I went on a trip around the world way back when I was 16; I kept a diary, and took a lot of photos (sorry, the biggest collection was on a server at school where my account got wiped out . . . have the files somewhere, but I don't know where.)
So, the bit about standard deviation and standard error, yesterday. It made me feel like I should live up to my blog's name.
I think my confusion on such a simple question (aside from being embarrasing) is possibly indicative of something deeper. I had an argument with Jess a while back about whether psychology experiments were "real" science; whether they're as "real" as experiments in (her old field) molecular biology are, say. She said she doesn't really believe in the results of studies on a population with so much uncontrolled variability and such a great level of complexity. This is a reasonable point; I think I might have said something very similar a few years ago in explaining why I thought psychology in general was total bunk.
Here's my hypothesis as to the deeper issue:
Some scientists are accustomed to thinking of variables they're interested in as having one, exact real world value, which their observations only approximate because of measurement errors of various kinds. The freezing point of water "is" 32 degrees F, or 0 degrees C, right? If you add X ml of A to 1 liter of B, you get your reaction; if you really always had exactly 1 liter of B, the required X will always be exactly the same, right? In this frame of mind, there's not a whole lot of reason to conceptually differentiate the concepts of standard deviation and standard error, even if you learn the formulae and realize they're different. This was my default setting back when I was a physicist.
Cognitive psychologists don't, and can't think this way. We have to accept that we're working with populations - distributions - that have inherent variability; this variability isn't the result of unavoidable small fuck-ups by the experimenter, it's just there. But this is okay! This is why we have statistics! We can deal with this variability, and still do real science!
Of course, back in reality reality, there's very little that's near as exact as even scientists like to think of it as. What do you get once you dig deep enough into rigourous theoretical quantum mechanics that you can begin to set up the equations governing simple little atoms like hydrogen? You hit a wall, and have to revert to approximation methods as soon as you try to describe a helium atom. You don't have to know much at all about quantum to know that no "elementary particles" are close to exact in character, due to the uncertainty principle; an electron in an atom isn't in any one place, you have to describe its location in terms of - yeah, a distribution, with an inherent "spread" or variance just like a human population. Everything in theory that is elegant and exact yields itself up to variability and the necessity of approximation, when you get close enough to it in the real world. This isn't artifact. It's the way things really are.
Arrest This Man, He Talks In Maths 
Friday, December 19, 2003
