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. :-)
Arrest This Man, He Talks In Maths 
Thursday, October 30, 2003