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.
So, the first girl I ever kissed, Cara Spallone called me a few days ago to tell me she's engaged. This is pretty cool, and seemed worth noting, here. Congratulations, Cara & Paul!
. . .
If you google her name, the fifth hit is an excerpt from a letter I once wrote her, that I have on my website: Nagasaki. Despite her science-minded beginnings (we actually met at a science fair) I guess she never developed a web-presence like some of my other old friends. :-) But really, who needs this web-thing?
It's almost as bad as Cable TV, I think. Mostly just a waste of time. We broke down and got cable last week, because of an addiction to watching the NBA playoffs, just in time to see both of our teams go down in defeat. Anyway, the web is maybe worse, right, because you have to be at home to watch cable, whereas you can waste your whole day on the web while at work.
Sometimes, however, this INTERNET thing comes in downright handy. Like when you need to know where Bruce Chen is from, when you've forgotten (Panama!), or when you need to answer the question, what's the difference between the standard deviation and the standard error of the mean? (the standard deviation is a characteristic of a real-world distribution; the standard error is an indicator of how confident you are in your estimate of the mean of a real-world distribution, based on your sampling - this is a big difference.) These are real-world examples of the INTERNET being useful!
If you really want the INTERNET to be useful, though, you have to become a hax0r, like that Trinity chick, who looks like my girlfriend. posted by Miles 5:56 PM
My old friends from tech are awesome: check out The Pop Vs. Soda Page, by my man Alan McConchie. It's a linguistic survey (with N=120,000) on the geographic distribution of word usage for "generic soft drink". (That is, some wierd folks out there say "pop" or "coke" when they should be saying "soda". Lots of them, actually.)
Also see the abandoned but still famous Bazooka Joe page (this went up in 1995, back in the dark ages) by my main man Jimmy K, who also remarkably seems to have a DeKalb, Minnesota rock band named after him (who knew?!)
I made some modifications to my "toddler large number" experiment (3-5 year olds look at pairs of dot arrays, and tell me which one has more dots) today, tossing a few of the easier ratios, and using a (drumroll . . .) sticker book, giving a new sticker every three trials . . . and it went great - the kid made it through the whole study, and seemed attentive and engaged the whole time. This is a great improvement, because in earlier attempts with this experiment, kids had gotten pretty bored by about 1/3 of the way in, and none had actually been interested in completing everything I'd hoped for them to complete. Since we try to be nice to our subjects, that had meant I was sorely lacking for data. No more. Whooooo!
In another installment of "Miles echos a plastic quicklink" we have a brief speech by Kurt Vonnegut.
And we have a Jimmy Cliff song:
I can't seem to find my way over
Wandering I am lost
As I travel along
The white cliffs of Dover
Many rivers to cross
And it's only my will
That keeps me alive
I've been licked, washed up for years
And I've merely survived
Because of my pride
I've been under so much stress lately that my neck almost literally just froze up on me, yesterday, from tension. Turning my head more than about 20 degrees still, today, is making me wince in pain. Argghh.
So Jess tells me last night she just "brought in" a new job opening - a big one, where the salary would be in six figures. So this morning I say "good luck executive hunting today". She's like "I don't need an executive, I need a toxicologist."
"Toxicologists make that much?" I ask.
She replies, "I get to spend today finding someone who's spent at least the last four years sticking their arm up horses' butts."
On Sunday Jess and I rode almost all the way out the Minuteman bike path, starting from her place in Cambridge. We'd gone a little ways out, just as far as the beginning of the real trail, in Arlington, a few weeks ago; this time we kept going right on out to maybe a mile or two short of the end. That trail is a great resource - a great thing to have nearby. It is so relaxing just cruising along out there, surrounded by the spring.
I've got drafts (rough ones, but drafts) of the introduction, methods, and results sections of my fMRI paper. Leaving just the discussion, plus the abstract. Progress.
There's a book by Philip K. Dick (one of my favorite authors) in which one of the characters is a little girl who's twin brother was born inside of her, and lives there as a parasite, communicating with her telepathically.
Bizarre, right?
Cut to reality:
"Doctors at Chimkent Children's Hospital in Kazakhstan originally believed Mourat Zhanaidarov was suffering from a cyst.
But during surgery, they discovered he was in fact carrying the dead foetus of his twin brother.
"Stun" has to be the most overused word in the sports lexicon. I bring up CNN this morning, and a headline is "Lakers pull one back against stunned Spurs". Excuse me? The Lakers have won three straight championships. The Lakers were at home. The Lakers are the Lakers, for chrissake. The Spurs were in no way stunned.
In more hyperbole, the sportswriter compared Devean George's comeback from an ankle sprain four days ago to start the game to Willis Reed's storied gimp game in the finals 33 years ago. Were only Bill Bradley (in lieu of Lloyd Bentsen) here to say "Devean, I served with Willis Reed. I knew Willis Reed. Willis Reed was a friend of mine. Devean, you're no Willis Reed."
And while I'm on basketball, I have to mention how totally and utterly depressing it was watching Allen Iverson miss those two free throws to ice it with 12 seconds left the other night, and then to see the Sixers get dominated by . . . Tayshaun Prince. Jesus H.
I'm finished with day one of my CBB final exam; like the midterm, it's two 12 hour days. I'm exhausted. My roommate is sick, and I have a tickle in my throat; I'm knocking on wood that I won't come down with anything overnight.
It was pointed out to me today that this might be the last exam I ever take.
Yesterday I drove up to New Hampshire with Patrick, Kirsten, & Jessica for a full day of hiking. It was gorgeous. Spring hasn't really arrived yet, up there - tree and flower wise - but it was deliciously warm and clear. We went to the Pemigewasset Wilderness Area, a few miles East of Lincoln, N.H.
. . . . .
Today, Patrick & I figured out the sharing feature of iTunes 4. Voila - access (for me) to about 26 GB of new mp3s, over the network. Legally. Simply - his library and playlists just show up in my player, and I can play them like I would anything stored locally on my machine. We were both pretty geeked-out over this.
Arrest This Man, He Talks In Maths 
Friday, May 30, 2003
