Arrest This Man, He Talks In Maths

2008-03-17T15:36:00.003-04:00

This is the view from our apartment-to-be, in Ocean Beach, San Diego. Wowza!

2008-02-08T13:23:00.000-05:00

Wow, it's been awhile, huh? The last time I posted was a solid five months ago. Yikes.

The big news: We're moving to San Diego!

Jess will start her neurosurgery residency there, at UCSD, in late June.

More big news, in case you missed it: We, um, got married. In October. Which, given how rapidly our lives have been moving, seems like about 10 years ago. In a good way. :-)

Anyway, that's the massively incomplete life update.

Now, on to some insightful (if I do say so myself) political analysis:

If a bevy of states hadn't decided, at a late date, to move their primaries up to February 5th, the race would arguably be all but over, now, with Clinton the presumptive nominee. Why? Because Obama ended up winning a large majority of the delegates in these states, and beat Clinton in the popular vote in all but two of them.

All of these states were originally scheduled to hold primaries well after February 5th; the delegate differential is shown beside each:

AK: Obama + 5
CO: Obama + 10
CT: Obama + 4
GA: Obama +31
IL: Obama + 47
KA: Obama + 14
MA: Clinton (-21)
MN: Obama +24
ND: Obama + 3
TN: Clinton (-11)

As it happened, Obama won 12 states to Clinton's 9 (with MO a tie), but if these states hadn't voted, it would have been Clinton 7, Obama 4. Furthermore, Obama netted +106 delegates in these states. Now, at the moment news agencies are reporting that Clinton leads in delegates (including superdelegates) by 72 (1077-1005); this would have been 178. That alone might not appear to be an insurmountable lead, but the ratio of delegates would have seemed much more definitive. These late states contributed 592 of the 2082 delegates currently tallied for the two candidates combined. Obama won 349 - 243. So if these states hadn't voted, the delegate count would be 834 - 656. Psychologically, this would have clearly cast Clinton as the front-runner. And since voters are kind of sheep-like, as a rule, this would have made it much harder for Obama to win later states. In fact, polls before February 5th would have showed Hilary with a definitive lead, which might have turned it into essentially a landslide.

Now, I've decided I'm rooting for Obama, so I'm happy things came out the way they did. I just think it's weird and interesting the way the schedule influences things so much.

2007-08-28T14:18:00.000-04:00

Play the "Next Seven Years of Your Life" lottery!

View Larger Map

This is a map showing all the places we might be moving to, next year. J gets to submit a rank list, and she's tha' BOMB . . . but in the end, it will be the "match" algorithm that determines where we live for the next seven years. It's basically absolute; either we go where the algorithm sends us, or J can't become a neurosurgeon.

As my friend Darren once said . . . "You must really like this girl, huh?"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Since it's been a long while since I last posted, I'll give you a (very) brief summary: I finished my dissertation, graduated, traveled around mexico, moved to upstate NY, started AI postdoc, and got chickens.

Word.

----------------
Now playing: Mos Def - Champion Requiem
via FoxyTunes

2007-04-27T09:46:00.000-04:00

I decided to do a little ego-pumping this morning to get me going. So I went and looked up my Neuron paper in the ISI citation index, and then looked up the impact factors of all the journals my paper has been cited in. It's been cited 28 times:

Impact	Journal (times cited)
20.95	Nature Reviews Neuroscience (3)
14.67	PLOS Biology
14.30	Neuron (4)
10.23	PNAS
9.78	Annual Review of Psychology
9.16	Trends in Cognitive Sciences
8.57	Current Opinion in Neurobiology
7.56	Journal of Neuroscience
5.29	Neuroimage (6)
5.00	Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
4.53	Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
4.50	Psychological Science
4.12	Neuropsychologia
3.58	Cortex
2.30	Brain Research
2.00	Neuroreport (2)

Of course, most of these citations are people saying I'm wrong. :-)

That's okay. I know the truth. :-p

2007-04-26T08:29:00.000-04:00

Okay, after I just posted, when I clicked "view blog", talksinmaths came up, but so did an obnoxious, big pop-up ad. I think my brother had mentioned something about this before. If you see this as well, can you leave me a comment below? Even better, if you can look at the source code, or otherwise figure out how I can make it stop, that would be much appreciated!

2007-04-26T08:07:00.000-04:00

You know you've been spending a little too much time in front of your computer when you notice your mouse-clicking finger is fatigued . . . after a night's sleep, when you first sit down in your office in the morning to start working.

But: I will get this thesis done, damnit!

I got a nice jolt of positive feedback this morning from my advisor, after she read my second paper (of the three constituting the thesis):

This is a gorgeous paper -- my favorite as well.

I've made some suggested changes, mostly with the view that it's better to let other people tell us how elegant this is, etc. But not much. It's just so so so pretty already.

bravo!

:-)

Definitely helped me feel like I really am going to make it . . .

2007-04-20T11:23:00.000-04:00

A compendium of minor league baseball stats - mostly for my own use, but maybe it will be of use to someone else, too.

Minor League Statistical Leaders

Pitching Leaders:

Batting Leaders:

Also, if anyone out there knows how to automate grabbing this kind of data, pipe up; I'd love to combine all the data and see the leaders amongst all minor leaguers, regardless of level.

2007-04-06T11:50:00.000-04:00

My brother came up with a list of "middle names" for all of the presidential candidates, that's pretty entertaining. Highlights include:

Rudy "Dear Evangelicals, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, You Don't See The Drag Video Online, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, Nor The Bit About Living With A Couple Gay Guys, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, Also I'm Not Corrupt, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11" Giuliani.

Tom "I Hate Mexicans" Tancredo.

Duncan "I Hate Mexicans More Than Tancredo" Hunter.

<digression>

I've gotta go search youtube for "Giuliani in drag" . . . hold on.

Whoa:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IrE6FMpai8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sCKPC8bTsA&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb2y1IM17sM&NR=1

I did not know that about Mr. Giuliani. Pretty cool. You know, George Bush is loosening up a lot in his second term . . . I wonder if someone could talk him into dressing up as a woman at some point.

</digression>

Anyway, the "middle name" that popped to mind for me was:

Mitt "Sweet Jesus, Mormons know how to raise money" Romney

Like, aren't you the slight bit curious what percentage of his money has come from Mormon folks, even if unsolicited? Is this bigoted of me to even suggest?

Googling it, the NY Times beat me to it by two days:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/us/politics/03money.html?_r=1&ref=politics

And then there's this article apparently from the Boston Globe, though I found it on what seems to be a mormon-friendly, Salt Lake City newspaper's site; it goes into Romney's strategy & planning concerning fundraising amongst & through Mormons:

http://webserver.desnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,650200100,00.html

It's technically illegal for a church itself to "advocate on behalf" of a specific candidate, so they kind of tip-toe around it . . . I wonder if this will become the subject of smear attacks (re: "illegal" fundraising tactics) at some later point in the campaign.

Actually, even if he doesn't win the nomination, he might be a lock as the vice-presidential candidate, because Mormons would still contribute in droves. What the heck would happen if there were a Giuliani-Romney ticket? Could the Republicans win Massachusetts and New York? Could they lose the South to the Democrats over Giuliani being a transvestite and Romney being a Mormon (which seems to be least palatable to evangelicals)?

Politics can definitely make for good entertainment, at times. Maybe Harrison Ford will run.

2007-04-04T10:24:00.000-04:00

After watching the NCAA Championship game with Francis, the other night, I read Bill Simmons' take on the game, and felt compelled to respond. He actually answers a lot of reader queries in mailbag columns, so maybe I'll even get a response. :-p

Here's what I wrote him:

Bill, in your April 3 column you noted that Florida had 5 players projected as top-10 (Noah, Brewer, Horford) or second-round (Green, Richard) picks. I know he's one dimensional, but Lee Humphrey absolutely shoots the lights out and clearly already has NBA 3-range, so why isn't he considered potential NBA material, as a Steve Kerr type specialist? While watching that game didn't you find yourself thinking, every time Humphrey drilled a 3, "Oh, man, that was a dagger!" In the first half, Ohio St. went on a 7-1 run to close within 2 with about 5 minutes left in the first half, and then Humphrey hit a stopper three; Ohio St. never closed the lead to less than 5 the rest of the game. With 9 minutes left in the game, Ohio St. went on a 5-0 run to bring a 14-point deficit back under double-digits; bang, Humphrey stops the momentum with a dagger 3. Anyway, maybe it's reading too much from a few clutch performances (6-12, 4-8, 4-8 and 4-7 on threes in the '06 & '07 final four games), but . . . damn, the kid is just Money. If I were an NBA coach I'd sure want him on my bench, ready to come into the game when my team's down by 3 with 4 ticks on the clock, and in that role he'd be a heck of a lot more useful than most of the DNP regulars cluttering NBA rosters.

Also, on a far more important note, the funding finally came through to make my postdoc at RPI official. Woo-hoo!

Switching back to a far less important note, allow me to introduce the 2007 model of the Ragin' Rhinos: (my keeper-league fantasy baseball squad)

Active:

C: Chris Ianetta (COL)
1B: Albert Pujols (STL)
2B: Chase Utley (PHI)
SS: Miguel Tejada (BAL)
3B: Miguel Cabrera (FLA)
OF: Jason Bay (PIT)
OF: Chris Young (ARI)
OF: Scott Podsednik (CHW)
DH: Jim Thome (CHW)
SP: Johan Santana (MIN)
SP: Ben Sheets (MIL)
SP: Greg Maddux (SD)
SP: Doug Davis (ARI)
SP: Adam Eaton (PHI)
SP: Edgar Gonzalez (ARI)
RP: Jorge Julio (FLA)

Bench:

OF: Matt Kemp (LAD)
OF: Josh Hamilton (CIN)
RP: Jonathan Sanchez (SF)
RP: Octavio Dotel (KC)
SP: Roger Clemens (Unsigned)

On the Disabled List:

OF: Carlos Quentin (ARI)
SP: Freddy Garcia (PHI)
SP: Bartolo Colon (CLE)
SP: Pedro Martinez (NYM)
SP: Francisco Liriano (MIN)

In the Minors:

OF: Adam Lind (TOR)
SP: Mike Pelfrey (NYM)
SP: Tim Lincecum (SF)
SP: Micah Owings (ARI)
SP: Scott Elbert (LAD)

Huh . . . only in writing this down did I realize how tilted my team is towards the NL: 22 of 30 players. Anyways, that's the team. With Clemens, Colon, & Martinez stashed away until later, and loads of young new talent with high upside (Ianetta, Young, Quentin, Hamilton, Kemp, Pelfrey, Lincecum) it's a team that I clearly built with the playoffs in mind. I don't expect my team to lead the ZHL (Zen Holist League . . . okay, keep it clean, kids) in regular season total points, as it has the last three years, but I think I should be really strong come September. If everyone's back in action, I'll be able to run out a pitching rotation of Santana, Sheets, Clemens, Martinez, Garcia, Colon, & Maddux, to go with my all-world Pujols-Utley-Tejada-Cabrera infield. Not bad.

Oh, and my crop of rookie "flyers" includes four (Hamilton (2 votes), Lincecum (1), C. Young (5), & Pelfrey(2)) who were picked by 10 different members of ESPN's panel of 17 experts to win the NL rookie-of-the-year.

2007-03-29T19:33:00.000-04:00

Inspired in part by reading the Dalai Lama's book "The Universe in a Single Atom", I've recently taken up daily meditation - a simple form, for now, just trying to attend to my breathing, and let thoughts go when they come, with my eyes open but sort of allowed to defocus. This is per the instruction of a fellow at a local Tibetan Meditation Center, and I've really been enjoying it (by which I don't mean "blissing out" or anything, just appreciating the peace, the focus, and the "presentness".)

Anyway, today I meditated for about 15 minutes, and when I got up my vision was blurry! I could only see clearly at very short distances. It's been over an hour, now, and although my distance vision is improved, I'd say it's still not entirely back to normal. Anyone out there ever heard of this kind of thing before? Any guesses as to how or why it would have happened - in terms of anything from biophysical mechanism to chi?

I've never needed corrective lenses of any kind, and normally I have essentially perfect vision - I actually just had it checked a few weeks ago. What my experience today reminded me of was when the ophthalmologist gave me eye-drops to dilate my pupils (or something); the same sort of thing happened then, with my vision going all blurry for a long period of time, and then slowly coming back, near vision returning sooner than far. Jess said then that what the eye-drops do is just paralyze a muscle (or nerve?) that controls . . . I forget, either dilation & contraction of the pupils, or the shape of the eyeball / lens, or something. Anatomy is not a strength of mine.

Comment away!

* * * *

p.s. - I couldn't post this the first time around, because Google's automated checker algorithm decided talksinmaths was a likely "spam blog", and made me jump through hoops to prove that I'm human, just to get them to have an actual human check on it. Weird.

p.p.s. - Jess says her best guess is actually that my visual cortex started adapting; I fed it defocused input for long enough that it "decided" that must be normal & tried to adjust, somehow.

2007-03-07T11:12:00.000-05:00

"I tend to err on the side of objectivity, even when not warranted."

- Me (in conversation)

2007-02-22T09:39:00.000-05:00

You know the old cliche phrase "think outside the box"? Sometimes I feel like I have a hard time thinking inside the box. I've cultivated abstraction, objectivity and introspection for so long that even when I'm just trying to reason coherently within a conventional framework, my mind insists on digressions into epistemological questions about the validity of the framework, or metacognitive observations of what it's doing and why, or metametacognitive consideration of these metacognitive observations. It's not just distractibility; it's too systematic and consistent. If you want to characterize it as pathological, it's closer to obsessive compulsive: it's hard for me to just be in the world, in the moment, perceiving, problem solving, and acting, because my mind pulls me away, down into itself or off into the abstract, conceptual world, depending on how you want to look at it.

Like now: I'm trying to work on a paper, develop an analysis, and instead I feel compelled to think out loud, here, about things like my obsession with metametacognition.

2007-02-14T15:13:00.000-05:00

Albany, NY - Valentine's Day

It is a genuine blizzard outside:

2007-02-10T10:50:00.000-05:00

Infinity is, in a way, a simple concept. It's a magnitude; a scalar. It's just the biggest one there is. Or maybe more accurately, it's where you never get to even if you just keep going and going (to the right, in the Cartesian plane.)

I've been thinking, lately, in terms of a different kind of infinity: epistemological infinity.* This term has obvious ambiguity, but it's the best I've come up with. To really get across what I mean, I think I'll have to take the long way around. There is a well known proverb that says "The more you learn, the more you realize how much you don't know." There are two interpretations of this: the one I think is more common parses "how much you don't know" as "how much you have left to learn [and could learn, given sufficient/infinite time]"; the second is a more epistemologically nihilistic version that parses "how much you don't know" as "how little you truly can know". This second interpretation is a decent starting point for understanding what I mean by epistemological infinity. From my phrasing, it seems like it has more to do with the infinitesimal than the infinite - and I think this is how people usually think about it. However, you can flip it around to become "how much there may be that is beyond your capacity to know or understand." In a way, this is still a simple concept; I can't know the position and momentum of every fundamental particle in the universe, because that much information won't fit in my brain. This doesn't seem very deep or meaningful.

Where I think things get more interesting is if you think about unknowability in computational terms. I'm not talking about the issue of Turing computability.** Suppose you write a program, and set it running on your computer - and for now lets assume for simplicity that your computer is not connected to a network. If the program is sufficiently complex, it might have the capacity to access anything in the computer's memory, and in that sense everything in that memory is "knowable" to the program. The program cannot, however, no matter how diligently it searches, or how hard it thinks, learn something outside of its scope: how many coins are in your spare change jar, or the name of your neighbor's cat. If you give it sensors, you can expand its scope: with an aimable camera and some exceptional AI, it might be able to estimate the number of coins in the jar. An internet connection is just a special case of such a sensor. It is more to the point, however, to note that you can also restrict its scope in a fundamental way. If you create a "virtual machine" - a software instantiation, or "simulation" of a computer, that runs on your ("real") computer, and you run a program on that virtual machine, it can't get out: its scope is limited to the virtual machine. In practice, this can be very useful for some things, since it can prevent a potentially "dangerous" program from crashing your ("real") machine by, say, overwriting some bits the OS needs to function properly. In theory, you can create any number of layers of virtualization: no program running on the Nth-layer virtual machine will have access to any information on any layer M < N.

Now, if you're in the know, you're probably aware of the concept of the universe as a computation; google yielded a nice little essay on the topic on a blog with an exceptionally clever name: Gnostical Turpitude. As the blogger says, the idea is not especially new, and he dismisses it as facile and trivial (a la The Matrix: "Dude, what if we’re all living in, like, a computer?"). I think it's much more interesting than this.

Before going further, though, there's one thing I have to clear up. We generally think about computations teleologically: in terms of the purpose they serve. This makes sense, because this is how we use computers: to accomplish things***. But computation can be thought of nonteleologically, as well, and for present purposes (sorry) teleological reasoning just muddies things up. A computer, in the abstract, is simply a state machine; a program is a set of rules that govern transitions between states, and a computation is simply the sequence of states produced by that program, given some initial state. When stated (again, sorry) this abstractly, it's pretty clear that the physical universe, as we understand it, fits the definition pretty well. No purpose required.

Okay, so:

(1) The universe may accurately be described as a computation
(2) Any number of layers of virtualization are possible, and no program running on the Nth-layer virtual machine will have access to any information on any layer M < N.

Now we're getting to my concept of epistemological infinity: everything outside of the "scope" of the physical universe we have the capacity to perceive.

I'm greedy. It's not enough to think about the trillions upon trillions of teeming quarks that make up my body and everything around me, that I'll never see. I could study quantum electrodynamics and visit an accelerator, see evidence of quarks, and suppose myself to understand something about them. But beyond all of this - not at smaller or larger scales in any conventional sense, but simply outside, outside of that outside, and so on - there could be infinitely more to the world. Is there? It should be obvious that the answer is simply that we can't know. We can't even guess, since probability doesn't seem like it applies.

*Bizarre footnote: I googled the term"Epistemological Infinity" to see if it's been used before, and what came up? Gay hardcore and prescription drugs. Huh?

**If after reading this, you would argue that I haven't really gone beyond the issue of Turing computability, please leave a comment, and explain why!

***The time we waste reading news and farting around on the web notwithstanding.

2007-02-10T10:44:00.000-05:00

Two short, elegant books recently leapfrogged all the others into the "finished" stack:

The Alchemist ranks as one of my favorite books in years.

2007-02-08T09:49:00.000-05:00

I liked the world better when cool was real to me;
When I saw characters, rather than charicatures.

If I could put you in a frame
I'd draw you smiling
With a cigarette in your mouth
And your hands reaching out for something [...]
And if I had your speaking voice I'd never whisper
I'd talk and talk and talk

It's not a matter of being jaded
If anything maybe I see more depth in people
I see human universals

There is beauty in the soft greys of twilight
But it is not the same
As the vibrancy of bright color on a sunny summer day

Don't put me in a frame upon the mantel
For memories turn dusty, old and grey
Don't leave me alone in the twilight
Twilight is the loneliest time of day

Restricting yourself to reality
Is limiting;
There is a richer life to be lived
Dancing amidst the clouds
With eyes open to metaphor, myth, spirit, art, beauty, and cool
Or floating with eyes closed
Letting all that is not real but can still be felt
Flow through your unreal soul

2007-01-30T21:00:00.000-05:00

Here's what I'm currently reading:

Yes, I'm legitimately in the middle of all of these books. It's not actually as bad as I thought it would be.

Here's what I've recently finished:

2007-01-25T07:09:00.000-05:00

Randy Newman, on the State of the Union:

A president once said,
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”
Now it seems like we’re supposed to be afraid
It’s patriotic in fact and color coded
And what are we supposed to be afraid of?
Why, of being afraid
That’s what terror means, doesn’t it?
That’s what it used to mean

2007-01-18T13:50:00.000-05:00

My link of the day: Leibniz's Monodology. A wikipedia summary is also worth a read, for perspective.

2007-01-18T12:14:00.000-05:00

I went to my high-school class' 10th reunion back in November - and actually had a great time (who knew?). Anyway, a friend of mine mentioned that he'd heard that one of our classmates, Tyree Simmons, had gone on to become a big name in hip-hop . . . so we were all wondering whether he would show. He didn't, unfortunately, and I hadn't thought anything of it since. But then today an email came in to the class mailing list that was set up for announcements related to the reunion, with a link to a story in today's NY Times:

With Arrest of DJ Drama, the Law Takes Aim at Mixtapes

Turns out, my classmate Tyree Simmons is DJ Drama, a big name in the production of hip-hop mixtapes, as well as the DJ for "King of the South" rapper T.I., who's 2006 album King was reportedly the top-selling hip-hop/rap album of 2006, with over 500,000 copies sold in the first week of its release alone.

Tyree was arrested yesterday by law enforcement working in collaboration with the RIAA, because they regard his mixtapes as no different from bootleg / counterfeit CDs . . . this despite the fact that (according to the NY Times) he has been a major factor in launching many rappers careers, and artists line-up to get their tracks included on his mixtapes for the promotional benefits. Kinda bizarre.

2007-01-15T14:03:00.000-05:00

What is the power in stories? I know of no other way to phrase the question. If I frame my life within a story, I can feel, and act, and be; if I try to abstract myself out - if I do no more than try to see the world simply for what it is - I am an empty shell by comparison.

2007-01-04T11:15:00.000-05:00

Hypothesis: Consciousness is not an emergent property of sufficiently complex neural (or more generally, computational) circuitry.

Many scientists have made remarks to the effect that the most remarkable thing about the universe is that it is understandable; that it is subject to scientific examination and so perfectly describable by mathematics. It seems to me that there's a kind of epistemologically anthropic principle worth noting, with regard to this kind of statement: Some aspects of the universe happen to be understandable (by us; through a scientific approach), and it is precisely these aspects which constitute the whole of a scientist's perception of the universe. Whatever is not understandable is either simply unseen, or dismissed as not measurable, and thus not an appropriate thing for a scientist to ask questions about. Indeed, the universe might be packed infinitely densely with activity of an infinite variety of different kinds, and so long as none of them are measureable and understandable, we will be utterly blind to them so long as they do not disrupt what regular (measureable & understandable) activity we do see. From this view, the understandability of "the universe" is not a surprise at all; it is in fact inevitable as long as some subset of the universe - even if it is a relatively infinitesimal subset - is understandable.

A pragmatic scientist is perfectly correct to ignore the rest, and focus only on what is measurable; on scientifically testable hypotheses. It's the right way to get things done. However, there is no justification for taking the position that it is the only valid way to look at the world, or understand it. Consider this hypothesis: some real truths are directly knowable, without proof, evidence, or instruction. This doesn't seem so outlandish to most people; for the 90+% of the population with religious convictions it's unquestioned, and it even features prominently in the constitution: "We hold these truths to be self-evident:" Yet it is anathema to the cognitive scientist's view of the world: knowledge, from a materialist, computational perspective, consists of a cognitive state brought into a correct correspondence with the world. On the assumption that the world is fundamentally mechanistic, this kind of correct correspondence can only be reached via processes like deduction, induction, dictation, or (if you're permissive of some degree of nativism) evolution. So who's right? Well, there's no way to tell. It depends on the validity of the scientist's assumption of a mechanistic universe, which is untestable: no finite body of data on mechanistic, rule-abiding behavior actually constitutes evidence against the existence of unobservable behavior of other kinds, as discussed above.

So: Consciousness.

The conscious experience of something like the color yellow is not "the same" as even a theoretically plausible complete description of the neural process of perception, from the retina on as far as a signal could be traced. There is a certain relationship, to be sure: if I had an appropriate instrument, I have no doubt I could measure a characteristic response somewhere in my CNS that would correlate strongly with my perception of yellow. However, I also have no doubt that, with an appropriate instrument, I could measure some characteristic of a rock that would correlate strongly with yellow light being shone on it. So a certain stimulus (yellow light) seems to produce both a characteristic CNS response and a characteristic quale, in me; it also seems to produce a characteristic response in a rock. I have access to my own qualia, but not to those that the rock might hypothetically possess. If it is sensible to ascribe a causal role to my characteristic CNS response in the "generation" of my quale, what does that say about the rock's hypothetical quale? It doesn't say anything definitive, to be sure, because as mentioned, I have no way of obtaining any data about any conscious experience the rock might be having. But this lack of data also means there's no justification for arguing that the difference between the (arguably complex) response produced in me and the (arguably simple) response produced in the rock corresponds to any difference in conscious experience. The data simply aren't there, and can't be obtained.

So what is a rock aware of?

It is possible, of course, to collect data on what types of signals - and what types of responses - correlate with our own consciously experienced qualia, or those communicated by others. But I would argue that what we've found even here doesn't suggest a requisite level of complexity. Brevity of a stimulus, or the presence of distractors, can prevent conscious experience; more dramatically, so can (e.g.) cutting the spinal cord. But very simple stimuli & responses - like pain signals, or white light - can induce conscious experience.

2006-12-18T12:33:00.000-05:00

I posted a while back about the divide between Shia and Sunni, and how many US policymakers have little understanding of the role sectarianism plays in regional politics. I'd never gotten a complete grasp on the geographical distribution of the two sects, myself . . . but here it is: A map of the geographical distribution of Islamic sects

2006-12-08T10:17:00.000-05:00

I just sold all my stocks, and put my life savings in 6-month T-Bills instead.

For the first time since I bought my first stock (in the now-defunct CDNow) I'm out.

Why?

(A) Executives sold 63 times as many shares of their own companies than they bought, last month, the highest ratio since 1987, and we all know what happened then.

(B) Sony has just been excessively lame, lately.

(C) I can't tell you specifics, but I've heard some speculative doomsaying from some people who might have reason to know.

So, we'll see. Maybe I'll miss out on big bucks as the economic expansion continues without flaw. I hope so, really.

2006-11-16T10:36:00.000-05:00

Essay question: (answer in 500 words or less, by "comment" or email)

Without defering to God, give a justification for caring about the fate of the world at a point in the future sufficiently distant (say, 500 years from now) that there is no chance you or anyone you know will be effected. No fair being simplistically humanist and just assigning "value" to human life.

(Yeah, I'm serious! Go ahead, give it a try.)

2006-11-16T09:48:00.000-05:00

Maybe the real administration plan, all along, has been to precipitate a broad, regional sectarian war in the Middle East. "If we just nudge this domino," they might have thought, "the Islamic world will implode in Sunni-Shiite civil war, turning the violence inward."

No, I don't really believe that was the plan. But it might be what happens, anyway.

I haven't found a betting site that lists odds for such a conflagration, but tradesports.com has odds on:

(1) U.S. military action against North Korea (Current market: 15-20% chance this will happen by December '07)

and

(2) U.S. or Israeli overt airstrike against Iran (Current market: 20-25% chance this will happen by December '07)

One more thing:

I wonder whether the U.S. has a long-term strategy regarding nuclear proliferation, where I'm talking on the order of 50-200 years. The bomb has only been around for 60 years - that's an eye-blink in historical terms. Given that information "wants to be free" and simply tends to leak and spread over time, and given the course of development around the world, there is little reason to believe there will be many nations incapable of developing nuclear arms in 2100. To date, many have declined to develop them; maybe this will continue, maybe it won't. I have trouble getting my head around the "cognitive processes" of states, given that they really exist only in the minds of individuals. In any case, it seems to me that achieving stability in the long-term is a very different challenge from, say, avoiding nuclear holocaust during the cold war. Then, there was essentially one "enemy" command structure, with one authority to negotiate with, and they were known quantities. In a future where 200 different states have neutron-bomb caliber WMDs, the dynamic is completely different. I don't think MAD works, and I don't think comprehensive monitoring works.

So I don't know . . . functional missile defense plus a nation-blanketing network of nanobots with geiger-counters to prevent attacks via smuggled bombs?

Unrelated link of the day (PDF): A computational model of the cerebral cortex - Thomas Dean, of Brown University.

p.s. - The cast I've been wearing on my wrist for the last month is getting really ripe. I'm so glad it's coming off tomorrow.

2006-11-06T20:29:00.000-05:00

The 12th richest man in america has left his personal website un-updated since about 1998.

"Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I'm no exception. Recently I have been working on the Google search engine with Larry Page."

No kidding.

2006-10-31T14:40:00.000-05:00

Arrest This Man, He Talks In Maths is now available as an RSS feed.

2006-10-31T07:23:00.000-05:00

(Yes)

2006-10-25T09:04:00.000-04:00

An illuminating article from Fortune magazine:

Revolt of the fairly rich: Today's lower upper class is seething about the ultrawealthy.

Not long ago an investment banker worth millions told me that he wasn't in his line of work for the money. "If I was doing this for the money," he said, with no trace of irony, "I'd be at a hedge fund." What to say? Only on a small plot of real estate in lower Manhattan at the dawn of the 21st century could such a statement be remotely fathomable. That it is suggests how debauched our ruling class has become.

[...]

2006-10-19T08:49:00.000-04:00

Why is cool cool? Why is it hip to be jaded? Why are the hippies made fun of? Why is goodness considered passe? Why is it taboo amongst the cool to wear all of your heart on your sleeve?

Maybe it's all perspective; we all see the world through lenses that change in color as we age. If I listen with a jaded ear, I hear the cold twang of a music exec's market research, and miss the artist's original emotion. If I watch with a jaded eye, I see drama written to capture attention and breed compulsion, and miss the underlying, mediating emotional content.

One function that art can serve is to make the private public; to bridge the gap between our lives on the inside, and our constrained, socially purposeful behavior on the outside.

My link of the day: 300 love letters sent to strangers

2006-10-18T01:17:00.000-04:00

I think what we're to take from this NY Times article is that we'd all be better off if congress & the FBI joined us 20-somethings in getting all of our news from The Daily Show.

"Can you tell a Sunni from a Shiite?"

This reporter has made a habit of asking this simple question at the end of each interview he does with anyone in Washington, D.C. He tells them he's not asking for intricate details, just who's who and what they want now, basically. He describes how many in congress & the intelligence community are entirely unable to answer the question.

Can you? How about Iran: Sunni or Shiite? How about Al Qaida? Saddam Hussein? Hezbollah? Do you know the fundamentals of what they disagree on?

Here are some answers for ya' (and for you, Mr. Congressman):

Wikipedia:
Divisions of Islam
History of Shi'a-Sunni relations

2006-10-02T12:57:00.000-04:00

About a month ago (according to stickers on the engine) my 1987 Volkswagen Scirocco turned 20. I was very proud. Then, a week later, she died. I heard some nasty rattles from under the hood, took it into the shop, and they told me to be safe on the road I needed to replace the front tie rods and ball joints on both sides, all of the brakes (entirely, not just pads), the A/C compressor clutch, the head gasket, and a couple of other things. The bill would have been around $2000. Fortunately, I found a great home for the car, selling it for $400 to a young mechanic & Volkswagen enthusiast in who had drooled over the car every time I'd brought it in for an oil change. He was very, very excited about the car, and is planning to fully restore it & probably make it a show car. Pretty cool.

Losing the Scirocco also made me accelerate my search for a new car. I'd already settled on the exact model & color, but I thought I'd have to order one and wait a few months. Instead, a dealer managed to find one - in Long Island, NY - secure it for me, and get it driven up here to MA. I took delivery this weekend. I love this car.

It's an Aurora Blue 2007 Mazda 3, completely loaded. It's fun to drive, with a 2.3 liter, 4 cylinder, 151 Horsepower engine, a very smooth manual transmission, and a sweet sport-tuned suspension. It's safe, with ABS, EBD, Traction Control, Dynamic Stability Control, front, side, & curtain airbags, and HID headlights. And it's luxurious, with a leather interior, heated seats, an 8-speaker Bose stereo system, a moonroof, and automatic climate control. All of this for a total price of under $22,000. I couldn't ask for anything more.

Oh, and I have a very cool, very nerdy customization coming soon. I'll post pics when it's done. :-)

2006-09-20T12:26:00.000-04:00

Oh, and since I became a "Lost" addict last year, I thought I'd link to this:

ABC is offering last season's finale as a free download through iTunes.

You should check it out. It's the only show on TV that I watch.

(Not counting The Daily Show . . . which is in it's own league.)

2006-09-20T12:24:00.000-04:00

Another instance of me bugging Apple to add some feature. (no pun intended. see below.)

With the availability of video, it would be AWESOME if iTunes added an "advertisements" section where for free (for the consumer) you could download ads seen on TV. Like, I saw a Cingular ad yesterday with an awesome song in the background, that I'd love to buy. If that ad were available on iTunes, (1) I'd go watch it, and (2) I'd buy the song, and maybe an album, through iTunes. For Apple, this could be a cheap & easy revenue stream: Advertisers would pay for bandwidth, and toss a few cents Apple's way for every viewing or download, and Apple could get additional revenue from follow-up music purchases. If there were a list of "top 10 ads", I would even go and browse them on a regular basis, because I'd know they'd be fun to watch and have good music.

It's a new era. Think Different!

2006-09-12T11:44:00.000-04:00

For the last few years, I've played in the Boston Men's Baseball League, for a team called the Mariners. This is a hardball league, mind you, not softball. I love it; I love the game, and just taking the field in a baseball uniform is one of the best feelings in the world. I only made it to about half the games, this year, mostly because I was traveling too much, but also in some part because my thesis & job apps have been staring me in the face. Anyway, the team actually got decent this year, and finished better than .500, good enough for a wildcard playoff berth. Because I missed so many games, I didn't end up being playoff eligible . . . which was a bummer, but in truth I would have missed the playoff games anyway, being away in NY & NJ visiting family.

So here's the good part: the team won their wildcard matchup, to advance to the next round. Unfortunately, they were matched up with the best team in the league, the Cutters, who finished 18-5 and have been at or near the top of the league for years. I figured, truthfully, that my guys were toast. They managed to split the first two games, though, over the weekend, and make it to a deciding third game.

Game three was last night. It went rough early on; the Mariners went down 3-0, picked up one, then gave up another three. The game went to the 7th (last) inning with the M's down 6-1. Then the unthinkable happened: with TWO OUTS in the last inning, the M's strung together SEVEN consecutive hits, the last one driving home the tying and go-ahead runs, and then held off the Cutters in the bottom of the inning to lock down the win. Here's the game summary on the league site.

Before I go on, I just want to say: HOLY SHIT!

Okay, now, in honor of this blog's name: the odds against a team with a .250 team average getting 7 straight hits at a particular moment (like with 2 outs in the last inning) are 4^7 to 1; that works out to 16384 to 1 against.

So here's a question: has there EVER been a more unlikely, more amazing comeback in a similar backs-against-the-wall situation, in the deciding game of a pro-sports playoff series? I can't think of one. In baseball, there are seven playoff series every year (since the advent of the wildcard, anyway), and it's safe to say that fewer than half of them go to a deciding final game. Before 1969 there was only ONE series per year. So over the 103 years since the first world series, you would get fewer than 160 deciding final games. So the odds are at least 100:1 against such a comeback ever having happened in the history of major league baseball.

So I say again: HOLY SHIT!

2006-09-02T23:15:00.000-04:00

I know something you don't know!

2006-08-15T09:09:00.000-04:00

Here's my question of the day - what does this Kanye West lyric mean:

"Mayonnaise colored Benz, I push Miracle Whips"

(The first half is transparent, but what does "whips" mean in this context, or is the meaning in the phrase "miracle whips"?)

[Hmm . . . this offers some possibilities: "Urban Dictionary" open dictionary definition for "whip"]

Droppin' knowledge on the daily . . .

2006-08-10T00:25:00.000-04:00

I'm going to pack my lunch in the morning
And go to work each day
And when the evening rolls around
I'll go on home and lay my body down
And when the morning light comes streaming in
I'll get up and do it again

I've been aware of the time going by
They say in the end its the wink of an eye

So I'm going to find myself a girl
And learn what laughter means
And we'll fill in the missing colors
In each others paint-by-number dreams
And when the morning light comes streaming in
We'll get up and do it all again

- Jackson Browne, "The Pretender" (~)

2006-08-06T00:18:00.000-04:00

Jess & I are on a little road-trip vacation, 'clock-wise' around Lake Ontario. We started out West from Albany, went swimming in the lake, toured the summer-home mansion of the founder of Citibank, visited the site where Joseph Smith claimed to have unearthed the Book of Mormon, took an awesome Jet Boat tour on the Niagara River, went to Niagara Falls (Wow!), scooted up to Toronto for a visit with Dave & Julie (great city! great folks!), and just today drove all the way up to Montreal.

So:

Wow, is it weird to just be driving along, and then all of a sudden have everything not be in English! We're actually much closer to home (geographically) here than we were in Toronto, but it feels like we're on a different continent. While it may be true that Quebecois has a unique and different culture, above and beyond the language, you don't get any meaningful sense of it, crossing the border from Ontario; nonetheless, language is enough - when you don't speak the language, everything instantly becomes strange and mysterious and different. It's one thing when you expect it; when you book a flight, and fly to some far-away country. It's another when you stay in the same country, and you're only a 5-hour drive away from home. Honestly, it's kind of a world-shaking revelation, to realize that this essentially fully Francophone 'country' is about as close to Boston as Philadelphia is.

And . . . I feel like some kind of subversive, carrying around the copy of Infinite Jest that I'm reading.

2006-06-14T14:11:00.000-04:00

I bought a nice guitar as a birthday present to myself, and I've been having a great time beginning to learn to play. I can just about play the four power-chord intro to the White Stripes "Fell In Love With A Girl", now. :-p On the whole, my chord repertoire now includes A, Am, B, C, D, Dm, E, Em, and G . . . and in my next on-line lesson I'm going to learn the blues scale, which I'm psyched about.

Anyways, Jess being a pretty expert musician (she's played piano, french horn, cello, bass, and she sings) I asked her what the deal was, exactly, with chords; what makes some consonant and some dissonant, physically. She told me not to worry about it, and that it would just get in the way - that I should just focus on learning to play. This illustrates a deep difference between us that we have trouble with, sometimes: I value understanding itself, regardless of whether it's practical or useful; she doesn't, really. Or maybe, to be fair, she just values and prioritizes productivity and efficacy more than the merely theoretical or abstract.

In any case, unsatisfied, I went out on my own into the wilds of the www to try to find how how physical wave "harmonics" relate to musical scales, chords, etc.

Here's a good beginning: Deriving The Musical Scale

In short:

If the (physical) frequency of a note is x (like, 440 Hz is an "A"), doubling the frequency (say, by vibrating a string exactly half as long) produces the same (letter) note, an octave higher.

If "x" is the frequency of a "C", then:

2x = "C"
4x = "C"
8x = "C"

etc.

The chromatic scale used in most modern western music is "twelve-tone equal temperament", meaning that an octave is divided into a series of 12 equal "steps" - which is to say, equal frequency ratios.

So regardless of what octave you're in, or what notes you're playing, x * y^12 = 2x, where y is the frequency ratio that defines the steps (if you go up 12 steps, you're up an octave, meaning the frequency has doubled.) We can actually solve for y in this equation, and it comes out to about 1.059, though that's not really too important.

What's cool, though, is that chords "sound nice" because they minimize dissonance.

The ratio of a "major third" is y^4 (~5/4), and that of a "minor third" y^3 (~6:5) . So a "major" chord has fundamental frequencies approximately equal to:

x, 5/4x, (6/5)(5/4)x

or more simply:

x, 5/4 x, 3/2 x

Each of these notes has overtones, since when you pluck a string with length L, the fundamental frequency is f = 1/L, but you also create waves of lengths L/2, L/3, L/4, L/5, etc: these have frequencies 2f, 3f, 4f, 5f, etc.

The more the overtones of a set of notes tend to match, the more "harmonic" (and the less "dissonant") the set sounds. For the major chord, we get:

x | 5/4x | 3/2x
2x | 5/2x | 3x
3x | 15/4x | 9/2x
4x | 5x | 6x
5x | 25/4x | 15/2x
6x | 15/2x | 9x
7x | 35/4x | 21/2x
8x | 10x | 12x
9x | 45/4x | 27/2x
10x | 25/2x | 15x

But keep in mind that any pair of frequencies {f,2f} are heard as the "same" note - so, e.g., 15/4 x is the same note as 15/2 x, just an octave lower. With that in mind, you can see that only the 6th overtones of the fundamentals (7x, 35/4x, 21/2x) and the 8th overtones of the second and third notes lack harmony with the other notes in the chord, within the first nine overtones; all the other overtones comprise only 6 notes, in a range of different octaves. The 11x row admittedly gets a little messy, but the 12x row is again perfectly harmonious.

The overtone structure of a minor chord (a minor third first, and a major third second) is left as an exercise for the reader. :-)

One other interesting note: the "perfect fifth" interval corresponds to a ratio of 3:2, which is the smallest integer ratio next to the 2:1 octave ratio. What does playing a just a note and its perfect fifth give you? A "power chord":

x | 3/2x
2x | 3x
3x | 9/2x
4x | 6x
5x | 15/2x
6x | 9x
7x | 21/2x
8x | 12x
9x | 27/2x
10x | 15x

This is dominated by just two notes: the fundamentals and their octaves comprise 5/6 of the first three overtones, and aside from the 6th and 8th (again), there are only 4 notes represented in all the overtones through 10x. This is why power chords sound so "pure" and, well, powerful.

Which in part, to bring us full circle, explains why the White Stripes rock.

2006-06-14T14:03:00.000-04:00

(This post written but unposted on Sunday, May 28th)

Jess is in Boston now, studying for The Boards, and I've been enjoying playing a supporting role - grocery shopping, cooking dinners, that kind of thing. It's great, actually. Yesterday I convinced Jess to take a study break and go see a movie, so we went and saw Over the Hedge. Hilarious movie, I highly recommend it. But I digress. On the way home, we passed this fish market in a portuguese neighborhood, and a light went on in my head - so after dropping Jess at home (to study more - she was getting antsy) I circled back and visited the market. Here's dinner:

That's a whole Tilapia, marinated in rosemary-basil olive oil, stuffed with lemon, fresh herbs, scallions and sun-dried tomatos, wrapped in bacon, and then roasted. It was pretty damn good.

Thursday night I made Tangine Chicken (the Joy of Cooking recipe), which was even tastier than the fish (though not as pretty) . . . and made a salad with the first produce from my garden! Fresh spinach, straight out of the ground, is amazing.

2006-05-21T11:08:00.000-04:00

As scientists, we're taught to think in dichotomies; the scientific method requires testable hypotheses, and hypotheses are testable in that they're 'supported' or 'unsupported' by data - we use these terms to be prudent and cautious, since no dataset is complete, but the underlying conceptual framework is that hypotheses are true or false. So: We think about the world in terms of (binary) truth values of poseable hypotheses.

Is this the way the world actually is? Or maybe, less dichotomously: how well does this let us describe the world in its infinite complexity?

Dumb example: There are some flowers in a vase on my desk, that I got for Jess. It's obvious enough, to a casual observer, that the flowers are purple. And a bit yellow - okay, so already a bit of complexity. Ah, and green, too: don't forget the stems. As a scientist, though, I can't just make these wild claims (about the color of the flowers) - instead, I need to come up with some testable hypotheses, and empirically test them. Hypothesis 1 might be: one component of the flowers absorbs EM radiation in the frequency ranges {X} and reflects EM radiation in the frequency ranges {Y} (where X & Y would have actual values if I had a textbook in front of me; I'm lazy). I could then obtain a spectrometer of some kind, isolate a flower in an appropriately controlled environment, and measure the frequencies absorbed & emitted, to test hypothesis 1. Simple enough, right? Okay, but what if I find that according to my spec data, the picture is a little more complicated; absorption and reflection aren't 100% within the ranges X & Y that I specified; they're actually some (relatively) smooth and complicated function - according to my data, at least. Knowing that my data is a little noisy, however, I know I can't make any strong claims about the precise absorption function of the flower, how much it would vary from flower to flower, etc. And even if I could, such a description of the absorption function wouldn't be easily translatable into a linguistic description like "the flowers are purple, yellow, and green."

So where would I have gotten?

2006-05-02T08:14:00.000-04:00

Heh-heh. Some of these are pretty funny:

New PC / Mac Ads

My favorite is "Viruses"

And for more comedy, check out Steven Colbert, endorsing George Bush (in person, to his face) as only he can, as a guest speaker at the Whitehouse Correspondents' Dinner:

Colbert Roasts Bush

2006-04-26T15:34:00.000-04:00

For all the Bill James, Billy Beane, Moneyball talk about optimally predictive baseball statistics, I've still never heard of this conceptually simple, but computationally intensive statistic:

First, consider all the at-bats in all the major league games ever played: at the time of a given at-bat, there's a game condition, which can be neatly summarized by 3 simple measures: Current difference in score, current inning & number of outs, and current positioning of runners on base (e.g. leading by 2, 4th inning with 1 out, a runner on second.) You can add more variables if you want (also increasing degrees-of-freedom) but I think this is a good minimal set of measures. Okay, now let's call these measures D (difference), O (outs), and R (runners). For each triple {D,O,R}, there's an associated probability that the team will win the game, in the end; we'll call this p(W|{D,O,R}). To create a 'look-up table' for this stat, we need to crunch through every at-bat in MLB history (or the last 50 years, or whatever) and calculate the probabilities.

Okay, so: When the batter comes up to the plate, the team's chance of winning is p(W|{D,O,R}i), with 'i' denoting the fact that this is the 'initial' state. We can look the value up in our table. The result of the player's at-bat is p(W|{D,O,R}f); the team's chance of winning has changed, and taken on some new value. The player's contribution to the team, therefore, has been p(W|{D,O,R}f)-p(W|{D,O,R}i). Simple!

The two best things about this stat are:

(1) It measures 'clutch peformance' in a really meaningful, and nicely continuous way. If A-Rod hits lots of HRs, but really does actually tend to hit them in the late innings of blowouts, he will get a lower 'score' than you'd expect from the stats we usually look at; if a guy is an awesome situational hitter, drawing walks when he should (to best help the team), getting down the sacrifice bunt, etc, he'll get a higher score.

(2) It's directly interpretable in terms of a player's expected impact on his team, in terms of wins & losses. Really, what more could you want from a stat?

The way I described it is really a slight over-simplification. Players should get 'points' for anything attributable to them as an 'action'; if a guy steals a base, he's changed the {D,O,R} state, and should get credit for it. Like, Dave Roberts would have gotten a massive p(W|DOR) jolt for stealing that base off of Rivera & Posada in game 4 a few years ago, even though he didn't even have an AB in the game. Better yet, you can apply the stat equally well to pitchers: each batter a guy faces results in a change in p(W|DOR). Using this stat, in fact, might be a cool way to resolve the debate about how important closers are relative to starters, and who the best closers are; it would be ideal, since it provides such a direct measure of 'clutch' performance, and closer is the position where that matters most consistently.

One cool potential addition: add measures for 'games left in the season' and 'number of games in or out of the playoffs', to get a handle on clutch performance on a longer timescale. You wouldn't build these factors into the main look-up table; instead you'd just use them to weight the player's d(p(W|DOR)): if you hit a game-winning HR for a team 25 games out, in August, that's less meaningful than bunting a guy over to third for the first out in the 9th when you're down by one, for a team just a half game up in the wildcard race, in mid-september.

The only disadvantage of this stat, that I see, is the fact that it gives so much weight to clutch performance. If you think psychology has no impact on the game at all, and situational hitting ability is homogeneous across the leage, then you'd take an A-Rod HR late in a blow-out as just as predictive of his chances of helping the team in a close game, regardless of the situation. Turned around, you don't want to make the Type 1 error of thinking apparently 'clutch' contributions are more predictive than they actually are. However, players have so many ABs in a season, and in a career, than with a continuous stat like this, I don't think 'spurious' clutch performances will affect things too much: there's not enough noise.

I'd love to actually compute this stat. I wonder who has the necessary database, coded the right way. I figure it's got to exist.

2006-04-26T15:24:00.000-04:00

Why, you ask, should you be concerned with the question 'who would ask the question "how many words, at minimum, are required to ask 'what is the maximum number of sequential question marks you can grammatically place at the end of a hierarchically structured query like this?'?"?'?

(To my knowledge no one has previously pondered this. If you'd like to try setting a new world record (5 ?s, at the time of posting) just click that "comments" link below.)

2006-04-19T14:56:00.000-04:00

A cool little discovery courtesy my subconscious, always-tune-humming mind:

Listen to The Pretenders' "Middle of the Road".

Now listen to The White Stripes' "Fell in Love with a Girl".

Check that out. Who knew?

2006-04-11T11:21:00.000-04:00

I've walked the same route to work at least 500 times. Somehow, it wasn't until this morning that I realized: if I walk on the right side of street on my way in, in the morning, I can be in the sun the whole way. I'm walking basically due South, so when the sun is rising, in the East, the houses on the left side of the street cast a shadow over the sidewalk on that side, but the right side of the street is in direct sunlight.

An amazingly simple fact, but one that had never entered my mind; I just always optimize my path to be the absolute shortest distance.

I only thought of it today, I think, because yesterday afternooon I was thinking about how to optimize the placement of my garden to maximize sunlight.

An unexpected side-benefit of gardening . . .

And speaking of which, can I just say how amazing it is to get out of bed, in the early morning of a beautiful spring day, and go out to work in my garden? It's a great way to start a day.

2006-04-10T20:50:00.000-04:00

It came to me, a couple of weeks ago, that I really wanted a garden. I haven't gardened since I can't remember when; maybe when I was 9 or 10 years old. The idea just came out of nowhere, but once the seed was planted, so to speak, I couldn't get it out of my mind. I spend most of my time in front of a computer; it gets old. There's something about getting your hands dirty, doing something physical. Then too, there's something about fresh vegetables, right off the vine or out of the ground.

So this weekend Jess helped me get everything I needed, at Home Depot, and today I "built" my garden:

Here's the plot, before I started:

. . . and after I tilled it:

I wanted a raised garden, so I built this enclosure out of pressure-treated 12x2's, 4 feet to a side:

Then I dug a shallow trench around the perimeter of the plot, set the 'box' in place, and added 8 cubic feet of Miracle Grow Garden Soil. Voila! A garden!

I've left the fun of planting for another day. :-) More updates later . . .

2006-04-04T01:20:00.000-04:00

There's a pretty cool article on an experimental surgical treatment for severe, medication-resistant depression in this week's New York Times Magazine:

A Depression Switch?

An excerpt:

Now Lozano threaded a guide tube — "It's a straight shot," he said later, "really quite easy" — down between crevices and seams to one side of Area 25, which is in two small lobes at the midline of the brain. He slid the first electrode and its lead down the tube, then repeated this for the other side. All this took nearly two hours. After he double-checked his locations, he wired the leads to a pacemaker and gave Mayberg a nod. They could turn it on anytime now.

Mayberg had squeezed into a spot at Deanna's side some time before. She had told Deanna that if anything felt different, she should say so. Mayberg wasn't going to tell her when the device was activated. "Don't try to decide what's important," Mayberg told her. "If your nose itches, I want to know." Now and then the two would chat. But so far Deanna hadn't said much.

So we turn it on," Mayberg told me later, "and all of a sudden she says to me, 'It's very strange,' she says, 'I know you've been with me in the operating room this whole time. I know you care about me. But it's not that. I don't know what you just did. But I'm looking at you, and it's like I just feel suddenly more connected to you.' "

Mayberg, stunned, signaled with her hand to the others, out of Deanna's view, to turn the stimulator off.

"And they turn it off," Mayberg said, "and she goes: 'God, it's just so odd. You just went away again. I guess it wasn't really anything.'

"It was subtle like a brick," Mayberg told me. "There's no reason for her to say that. Zero. And all through those tapes I have of her, every time she's in the clinic beforehand, she always talks about this disconnect, this closeness and sense of affiliation she misses, that was so agonizingly painful for her to lose. And there it was. It was back in an instant."

Deanna later described it in similar terms. "It was literally like a switch being turned on that had been held down for years," she said. "All of a sudden they hit the spot, and I feel so calm and so peaceful. It was overwhelming to be able to process emotion on somebody's face. I'd been numb to that for so long."

2006-04-03T11:05:00.000-04:00

I want a new car.

This one: http://toyota.jp/bb/

There's just one problem; it's not sold in the US. Yet. But Daaaammn.

You should explore the site linked above, even though it's heavily flash & beaming to you direct from Japan, meaning it's pretty slow to load. Go into the site, and try the "Experience" link. :-)

2006-02-16T10:30:00.000-05:00

One thing I've never understood is why Apple doesn't offer a subscription service as an option in iTunes. It could just be a DRM issue, where the changes to the protected AAC format, and potentially the iPod software, would be too much of a hassle. I doubt it, though - I think Apple has the technological savvy to get it done if they want to.

I wish they would. I'd love, for instance, to pay $15 a month and be able to listen to anything in the iTunes music store . . . as long as I'd be able to download & keep a song for every dollar spent, if I wanted to cancel the subscription. As I see it, everybody wins - Apple gets the steady revenue stream of knowing I'll "buy" at least $15 of music a month, and I get to explore the entire catalog, and more easily find new music.

2006-02-15T13:44:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I could swear there's a pattern in my data. Not in any one experiment, but across all of them. You know how, in an ideal world, every experiment is done double-blind to guard against experimenter bias creeping into the data? Well, it's like that, except the exact opposite: it feels like every experiment I run produces the result I least expected. That's not the reality, of course; if I step back and examine this one series of studies that's confounding me at the moment, I'm about 3 for 6. In part, it's just that the unexpected results hit me harder. Still, 3 for 6 feels kind of lousy. Fundamentally, (theoretically?) all data is good data, and when the data tells you to modify your theory, you modify your theory, and get closer to the truth. But if you go 3 for 6, that means you've modified your theory 3 times, and you start questioning whether you're making progress, or just stupidly meandering around in theoretical circles.

Much of the time, I love science.

Today, science has stamped "return to sender" on my metaphorical valentine.

Argh.

2006-01-30T10:49:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine went to Mexico for a few weeks over winter break. "What good are third-hand photos?" you ask. "Why should I care?" Because of the COLOR that screams out of these images, and the life. These are not the pale reflections of concepts or ideas; not the images of life buried in industry or efficiency. These are faith, and flavor, and memory, and action, and being.

Zinchenko - Mexico

2006-01-29T19:05:00.000-05:00

"We are a retard. Or two."

2006-01-19T10:35:00.000-05:00

I wanted to see Rize when it hit the theaters, but it didn't happen. I watched it last night, and . . . damn. If you have a chance to rent it, do. There's not that much that can be said about it; you've just got to see it.

Here's the trailer, to give you a taste, though a small screen and compressed, choppy video can't do justice to the dancing.

2006-01-18T09:34:00.000-05:00

My friend Patrick sent me a link to this essay by Tom Wolfe:

Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died

Wolfe writes (from a somewhat quaint, 1996 perspective) about the nativist revolution in science, and how neuroimaging will inevitably lead to the "death of the soul" - a poetic expression (referencing Nietzsche's "God is dead") referring to the annihilation of our belief in the concepts of free-will and the autonomous self. I call his perspective quaint not because I think he's wrong, but because it seems so passe, and obvious. To me. Because I think I came to the same conclusion in around 1991, when I was 13 years old, and not on the basis of any proof from neuroimaging, but simply inferential reasoning from a materialist, determinist starting point. That sounds kind of like bragging, and ok, yeah, it is to some extent a point of pride. The larger point is simply that I probably have an atypical perspective; probably a reasonable approximation to 100% of people on earth believe that they "have free will" in a fundamental sense, or would if they stopped to think about it for a minute.

I think there's still obviously some confusion surrounding this issue, even at the highest levels of academe. For instance, I think nativism is almost entirely beside the point, when it comes to the question of psychological determinism; from an external perspective, "whether" your life is determined by your genes or your social interactions (the quotes meant to express my disdain for this obviously idiotic dichotomy) isn't much relevant to the question of whether it's determined. And yet, though lip service is paid universally to the falsity of this dichotomy, the debate rages on. (Some) scientists frame their results in essentially nativist terms, and portray themselves as leading a righteous army in search of truth against the enemies of political correctness and behaviorism. Others still take the other side, and persist in portraying the nativists as a band of destructive, corruptive -ists. It's all bunk.

Look, I'll break it down for you:

No, you don't fundamentally have any such thing as free will. The universe is deterministic, and materialistic, and your life is both entirely pre-determined and insignificant. But it won't do you much good to sit and dwell on it. More importantly, these truths only really hold - are only really relevant - from an external perspective. From your perspective - as you perceive the world - yes, you do have free will. Why? Because of the definition of YOU. YOU are this collection of atoms, molecules, and (at the most relevant level of analysis) neurons, and more importantly their connections & patterns of activity. So, from an external perspective, when you do something it's "because" of a certain pattern of activity in these neurons. But that pattern of activity IS YOU, so from your perspective, it's entirely reasonable to take the perspective that YOU have made a decision / executed some motor function / whatever. So if we go with this definition of "decision", yes, if YOU DECIDE to drink a bottle of robitussin and sit on the floor all day, you'll do just that (and probably feel lousy about yourself later on) and conversely if YOU DECIDE to read a book, have sex, start a business, etc, you'll do that (and feel pretty good about it, at one point or another. So, as Obi Wan Kenobi said in "Trainspotting", Choose Life.

That's what's important.

But what resonated most with me, in Wolfe's essay, was the final section, on how the skepticism that is the foundation of science may soon begin to destroy it; that science may eat itself. "When I first went into geology, we all thought that in science you create a solid layer of findings, through experiment and careful investigation, and then you add a second layer, like a second layer of bricks, all very carefully, and so on. Occasionally some adventurous scientist stacks the bricks up in towers, and these towers turn out to be insubstantial and they get torn down, and you proceed again with the careful layers. But we now realize that the very first layers aren't even resting on solid ground. They are balanced on bubbles, on concepts that are full of air, and those bubbles are being burst today, one after the other."

Now, in psychology we prefer to simply keep laying bricks on the ground, anywhere we spot a patch of bare earth, because (stretching the metaphor like laffy taffy) our bricks tend to be narrow and pointy and nearly impossible to balance anything on. So the process is simplified; we rarely even pretend to make progress. But still, the point holds, and it's something I've been reflecting upon a lot, lately. It's like I said a few entries ago, in reference to Huxley: "Truth lies in reality itself; words, measurements, statistics, publications do not add to the amount of truth in the universe; the universe just IS, and all the truth that there is, is." Science produces sparse data, and attempts to distill that down to an even sparser description of phenomona, in the form of concepts. What hope do we have, in the long run, of building a solid edifice of understanding, let alone truth, with such sparse representational building material?

Then again, what other cosmically insignificant persuit would I rather be engaged in? Right. Off to finish up an analysis and engage in some extremely unappealing (but probably necessary) academic diplomacy / politics. Or, rather, grab a coke & do nothing very productive for the next 20 minutes or so until my experimental subject arrives, since, you know, what the hell can you get done in 20 minutes? Maybe some crunches & push-ups. Because exercise feels good, god damn it.

2006-01-16T14:58:00.000-05:00

Maneuvering your car out of a slick, ice-covered driveway can be really tricky.

Especially with the parking brake on.

2006-01-15T11:48:00.000-05:00

My "read of the day" is slashdot's original discussion of the iPod, the day it was first introduced. The one-line summary in the header? "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." Absolutely hilarious. I mean, I respect slashdot a lot; you see a lot of really sharp analysis, there. But people were just absolutely clueless about the impact the iPod would have. A few choice comments:

"I have to agree this is a let-down. For all the secrecy and even Steve Jobs promise of something "revolutionary", as an Apple fanatic I am unimpressed. I was expecting something quite a bit cooler then an MP3 player."

"Replace the 5 gig drive with a 20 gig drive, change Firewire to USB, keep the ability to use it as an external hard disk, drop the presumed heavy integration with iTunes, knock the battery life down to 8 hours from 10, knock $50 off the price, and you've got this [thinkgeek.com] [thinkgeek.com]. iPod is a good product, but nothing to get excited over. I'll stay with my RioVolt [thinkgeek.com] [thinkgeek.com]. Instead of a hard disk, it uses CD-R or CD-RW, and can play regular audio CDs."

"iPod is Apple testing the waters. There's more to come."

2006-01-11T08:55:00.000-05:00

In "The Doors of Perception" Aldous Huxley mentions how Thomas Aquinas, after a lifetime of scholarly work, had a "mystical" experience, which Huxley characterizes as one of simply unfiltered perception of reality, and stopped writing, never returning to scholarly work in the remaining two years of his life. Explaining why, he famously said: "I cannot go on...All that I have written seems to me like so much straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me."

As I walked in to work this brisk, overcast morning, I tried to leave all thought behind, and just see the world around me. It is a very different way to pass the time, and very nice. Being a novice, however, and an addict of the intellect, I couldn't help slipping back into the contemplative mode, and here's what I thought:

As I scientist, I'm devoted to the pursuit of discovering and revealing truth. At least, that's how I concieve of it. But as Huxley points out, the tool of our intellect is language, and language is capable only of crude, vague, awkward description. Scientists attempt to outrun the limitations of language by quantifying the world with numbers and statistics and equations, but these too allow only a reduction of reality to a representational shadow of itself.

What good is it, then, to "discover" truth? It's out there already, doing just fine on its own. Truth lies in reality itself; words, measurements, statistics, publications do not add to the amount of truth in the universe; the universe just IS, and all the truth that there is, is. All a scientist can do, then, is attempt to facilitate the revelation of truth to other people . . . and even then, the truths science is capable of revealing are generally (as Huxley also points out) merely the verbal, conceptual, abstract shadows of truth.

So what am I going to do today? Run 4 participants in my behavioral study, and scan another person's brain for my fMRI study. No use letting the futility of life get in the way of living it.

2005-11-09T08:31:00.000-05:00

This made me really happy:

Evolution Slate Outpolls Rivals

(Unrelated to my last post. Really)

2005-11-08T23:42:00.000-05:00

Colbert just suggested that God has an infinite ass.

It's a philosophically interesting proposal.

2005-10-24T11:05:00.000-04:00

Being a Mac user makes me feel powerless, sometimes.

Like, I talked to my mom today; her Dell PC has started acting up when connected to the internet, and she's worried she may have a spyware problem. She looks to me for technical help, and I'm clueless. "Sorry, mom," I say, "I don't use Windows anymore, and there basically isn't any spyware or other malware written for Macs, so I never have to deal with it, so no - I don't have any idea how effective those clean-up programs are, or which ones are best, or even how to diagnose whether you really have a problem."

It's tough. I feel bad. But I guess I'll have to live with it.

2005-10-23T23:48:00.000-04:00

I woke up this morning to a landscape covered in snow. Jess & I went up to Vermont for the weekend, to hang out with my dad & Ruth at the house in Danby . . . and though I knew it was going to be chilly, I didn't expect snow. It's only October 23rd. But snow we got; summer's definitively gone, and fall is on its last legs, here in New England.

2005-10-19T17:36:00.000-04:00

2005-10-12T15:49:00.000-04:00

The frustrating thing about to-do lists is when they just keep getting longer as you work on a project, rather than shorter.

In other news, there's a new Liz Phair album out. iTunes tells me I listened to her last album about 37 times. So, excuse me while I go download it . . .

2005-10-05T09:35:00.000-04:00

I don't remember how it came up, but last night I was reminded of this program I heard of when I was an undergrad, that calculates pi by computing its own area. My memory was hazy, but I managed to navigoogle my way to a wikipedia page on it:

#define _ -F<00||--F-OO--;
int F=00,OO=00;main(){F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);}F_OO()
{
_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_
}
(Okay, I can't get the spacing to come out right at all; properly formatted, it actually does look like a circle. Look at the wikipedia page.)

My new roommates (both programmers) were agog, and we spent some time trying to decipher it, last night. It's pretty neat; this program won an award for "Best Abuse of the Preprocessor", and deservedly so. Here's what we could make of it: The #define line at the top defines the "_" symbol to mean the statement/fragment "-F<00||--F-OO--;" . . . so on compilation, that statement is substituted in everywhere the "_" symbol occurs in the main program (or, actually, in the F_OO() function.) Because of the "--F" and "OO--" clauses, every time this fragment executes, it changes the values of the (globally defined) variables "F" and "OO". Somehow, it does so very cleverly, such that F comes out to the area, and OO comes out to 1/2 the radius. I think. Actually, in no way do I actually see how it does that. But apparently it does.

Pretty cool.

2005-09-29T14:29:00.000-04:00

2005-09-26T20:44:00.000-04:00

For the second year in a row, my Ragin' Rhinos are the Zen Holist League Champions!

Boo-yah! Who's your daddy, Dave?!? :-)

How did I assemble such an awe-inspiring fantasy baseball squad, you ask? Pujols, Tejada, Bay, Cabrera, Ramirez, Lidge & Wagner on the same team? Absurd!

Long, hard work, my friend, and serious devotion. My payoff? Nothing but bragging rights. So . . . I figured I'd better brag a little.

2005-09-06T23:05:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning, for a while, to install a nice X11 window manager on my iBook. A part of what makes OS X so cool is that it's based on UNIX, so it's nice & easy to run unix software (in my case, analyzing fMRI data) on a server, and have the interface appear nicely on your Mac. OS X comes with a basic unix window-manager built-in, that shows unix stuff right alongside all the regular mac stuff (like Office, Safari, etc.); sometimes, though, if you're doing intensive unix-based work, it's nice to have a full-on UNIX desktop.

I thought this would be pretty straightforward: install Fink, and then use that to install Gnome, and voila.

Not so, really.

It turns out there's a pretty decent lag in development, such that there aren't yet binaries ("executables; what you usually think of in terms of software that you install) for Gnome, for OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Actually, there are, but only for some components (packages) of Gnome, and when I did what I thought was a basic install, nothing actually worked. I wasn't able to find any documentation to tell me what all I need, and there aren't binaries for the "bundle-gnome" package that's supposed to give you everything you need, nicely wrapped-up. And the source code is listed as "unstable".

Okay, no problem, I'll install from source & compile it myself, instability be damned.

Oops, that means I have to go install the XCode Development Tools.

Alright, all set. Go!

That was about 6 hours ago. It's still humming away, working on compiling things. The extra-fantastic thing is that there's nothing like an overall progress-bar to tell you how far along in the process you are. Who knows how long this will take? And who knows if it will actually work, in the end, since it's "unstable" source?

Open source is . . . great.

* * * *

Addendum, the following morning:

It didn't work. It finished compiling, but crashes without really getting anywhere if I try to run it, and leaves behind an unruly mess of processes.

So, I thought maybe I'd try to figure out how to just install the "enlightenment" window manager, without gnome. I looked on the Apple support page, to see if anyone had posted to a discussion board about doing this.

The result was . . . apropos:

2005-07-05T05:58:00.000-04:00

Jess & I went to see War of the Worlds last night. There's one brief scene, only an image that flashes before your eyes, that is on my mind this morning: as refugees pour out of scorched cities and towns, we see two people pushing a cartful of books. This imagery has been used many times, but its power is undiminished. I grew up on this stuff, and with perspective I see this: science fiction is responsible for my deepest, most universal love of humanity, our achievements, and our understanding of the world. Some part of that has survived all my efforts at labored objectivity and rationality, and my psychology-inspired, sometimes depressive realism about human nature. I'm glad.

And I'm humbly grateful, on this 5th of July, that I get to walk in to my office and work, in the smallest of small ways, on adding to that understanding of the world.

2005-06-28T12:42:00.000-04:00

This (this) is a meta-blog.

I've been "bad" about blogging, lately, but it's actually a conscious thing. When I began blogging, I didn't give much thought to maintaining anonymity; I've long tried to live my life as an open book, and blogging seemed like a good way to capture that spirit. Why try to be anonymous? I've never been too worried about stalkers, and really, who would care, if they didn't know I was me?

I started worrying, a little, about my lack of anonymity, when I published a paper, and around the same time realized I'll be looking for a job in a couple years. There is a reason people project different images professionally & among friends; neither image is a false representation, each is just incomplete, and each serves a different purpose. It makes me happy to revel in immaturity, sometimes; I talk to the dog in baby-talk, I get drunk & dance while standing on the couch, I rev my engine & accelerate to 60 in second gear (caveat: never while drunk!), I goof around and talk like I'm Ice Cube, amongst friends. Am I ashamed of any of this? No. Hell no. But I wouldn't do any of it while on a job interview, either, and that's the thing . . . without anonymity, this blog can be printed out and distributed, stapled to my vita, if whoever is considering hiring me is sufficiently inquisitive.

I think that if I could balance things out, so that the blog gave a full reflection of both my professional & personal life, that would be a little more okay, and I might say "fuck it, let them judge me as a whole." However, there impediments to that in some (perhaps unfortunate) realities of how science works. If I have a study I'm preparing to publish, I can't blog about it in any substantial way, without jeopardizing its publication; you can't have published work anywhere else, first, if you want a decent journal to publish it. If I have an experiment I'm beginning work on, I can't blog about it without risking someone scooping me; the reality is that there's "intellectual property" in science. In an ideal world, science is an ego-less search for truth, and there is a free & flowing exchange of information, and I honestly try to promote that as much as possible, offering my thoughts freely, trying to build collaborative, cooperative relationships . . . but the truth is that I will fail as a research academic if I don't carve out an intellectual space to call my own.

So, those are my thoughts for today. I can't say what I'll do going forward . . . I'll have to give it more thought. Maybe there's a balance that can be reached. If you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear 'em. Yes, they may include "You're lame! Stop taking yourself so seriously and just write!". :-)

2005-05-24T01:23:00.000-04:00

1, 2, 3, see what I see?

1:23. A.M. Wilco. W. VV. VW. Rev the engine on yellow, jam it into first on red; green. Second, third. 1, 2, 3, 60, in a burst of adrenaline.

4:56, waking from a dream, bolt upright, escaping an ampitheatre of screaming Nazis.

7-8-9 up to bat, in the 7th, down 3-1. I'm "9". 1-2 count. ball. foul. foul. ball. ball. on base, game extended. OBP? .555

3 o'clock, 45 degrees and raining; it's 5/23, we're almost to June, and it's 45 and raining. 45? I could use a .45 . . .

6/78. 26 years ago, almost 27 now. 13 more days, and it's time to turn one more page.

9:10. A.M. Tomorrow. Deadline . . .

2005-05-05T01:44:00.000-04:00

There's no feeling in the world quite like hitting a fastball right on the nose, feeling that perfect, solid jolt of contact, hearing the crack of the bat, and watching the ball rocket into the night sky.

I tripled, tonight, to dead center, in my only at bat of our season opener.

All is right in the world. :-)

2005-03-16T21:27:00.000-05:00

There once was a time when I did not define the quality of my day by my productivity.

An old friend made me step back, today. We ran into eachother at the gym, and after friendly hello's she just asked: "So, how is your life? Do you have peace and clarity?"

Such directness is admirable.

I stumbled around a bit with an answer. It was an enlightening stumbling, though. No, I don't have peace and clarity; I don't prioritize them, I prioritize energy, and focus, and productivity. Because of the mania I see in people around me who I admire. Because it's what expected of a graduate student. Because, as they say, you can rest (in peace) when you're dead. Because I want to be accepted? No, I said, because I want to prove to myself that I can be that kind of person. Bullshit? Who knows.

But the truth is, I do feel like I'm swimming against a current.

And maybe . . . maybe I should just be who I am. Who I was. Because I think people liked and respected the me that valued peace and clarity. I did. I still do.

Listening: K's Choice, "If You're Not Scared"

2005-03-09T20:03:00.000-05:00

And now: Programming Under the Influence.

I just had a delicious dinner of Tapas with several other graduate students and one of the top researchers in the world, in my field. Luckily enough, I had a few glasses of their very tasty sangria along with dinner. Luckily enough, I also set up a meeting with The Man for tomorrow, to discuss a new experiment we're collaborating on, and to show him the stimuli I've come up with.

Or, will come up with. Tonight. If the sangria is unable to stop me.

Woo-hoo!

(ah, well, maybe they'll just be funkier arrays of circles & squares than they otherwise would be.)

2005-03-02T22:57:00.001-05:00

Life rolls along. Not without its bumps, potholes, and patches of ice (literally & figuratively). But it continues rolling.

I go to [the office]
stay out til 4
it's hard to leave
when you can't find the door

I'm getting away, though, this weekend: heading out to Arizona for a weekend hiking in the Sonoran Desert at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

What's up?

2005-01-21T13:28:00.000-05:00

Today, I'm into metal.

Not like AC/DC, Godsmack, or Megadeath. No, I'm talking about something way crazier.

I bought stock in these companies:

POSCO (NYSE: PKX), a Korean steel maker, and Liquidmetal Technologies (OTC:LQMT), a company (co-founded by a Caltech prof) that produces a new class of amorphous alloys that are stronger than titanium.

Check out the company websites. I must be totally nutto. :-)

2005-01-20T11:08:00.000-05:00

You know what's hot? When girls wear sport-jackets. Like, men's sport-jackets.

Yes, I suppose this is all part of my lesbian-chic attraction, and a peculiarity.

I'm just saying.

Here's what I'm working on, today. Anyone who can decipher what the code does & is for wins a special prize. :-p

best_orth = 0;

for j=1:1000
test_nums = [19 18 17 16 21 22 24 25];

%% scoring:
%%
%% 1 = "more"
%% -1 = "less"
%% 0 = no prediction

num_trials = 16;

stim_order = ceil(8*rand(num_trials,1));

R = zeros(4,num_trials);

running_total = zeros(num_trials,1);
moving_mean = zeros(num_trials,1);

running_total(1) = test_nums(stim_order(1));

for i=2:num_trials
running_total(i) = running_total(i-1)+test_nums(stim_order(i));
end

moving_mean = (running_total+60)./[4:num_trials+3]';

for i=1:num_trials

% scoring for "correct task performance" hypothesis
% sensible for color; no change required
if stim_order(i) <= 4
R(1,i) = -1;
else
R(1,i) = 1;
end

% scoring for "modulating standard" hypothesis, window = 1
% sensible for color; some change required

if i==1
R(2,i) = R(1,i);
else
if test_nums(stim_order(i)) > test_nums(stim_order(i-1))
R(2,i) = 1;
elseif test_nums(stim_order(i)) < test_nums(stim_order(i-1))
R(2,i) = -1;
else
R(2,i) = 0;
end
end

% scoring for "modulating standard" hypothesis, window = 3
% not sensible for color

if i==1
R(3,i) = R(1,i);
else
if i < 4
current_std = (running_total(i-1)+(4-i)*20)/3;
else
current_std = (test_nums(stim_order(i-1))+test_nums(stim_order(i-2))+test_nums(stim_order(i-3)))/3;
end

if test_nums(stim_order(i)) > current_std
R(3,i) = 1;
elseif test_nums(stim_order(i)) < current_std
R(3,i) = -1;
else
R(3,i) = 0;
end
end

% scoring for "compensating for previous responses" hypothesis
% sensible for color; no change required

if i==1
R(4,i) = R(1,i);
else
if sum(R(4,1:i)) < 0
R(4,i) = 1;
elseif sum(R(4,1:i)) > 0
R(4,i) = -1;
else
if stim_order(i) <= 4
R(4,i) = -1;
else
R(4,i) = 1;
end
end
end

end
orthogonality = sum(sum(sqrt(1-corrcoef(R'))));
if orthogonality > best_orth
best_orth = orthogonality;
best_sequence = stim_order;
best_R = R';
end
end

best_R
best_sequence
best_orth
corrcoef(best_R)

2005-01-19T16:47:00.000-05:00

Wow! This is so cool!

Boston--January 19, 2005--Harvard Medical School researchers have applied a new microscopy technique in a living animal brain that for the first time reveals highly sophisticated time-lapse images of many neurons coordinating to produce complex patterns of activity. The approach will open up new avenues for analyzing neurodegenerative diseases and other aspects of the brain.

The full article is in the online version of Nature, this week, if you happen to have access.

So cool!!!

2005-01-08T15:15:00.000-05:00

This morning I had what I think may be a really important theoretical revelation about my work - about different types of representation that may have importantly different roles in number cognition, and perhaps importantly different neural instantiations. I was pretty excited when it came together, as I was lying in bed, barely awake; I jumped out of bed, telling Jess "I've got a theoretical revelation, I've got to get up!"

It's a feeling to live for.

Like Busta' Rhymes said: "Woo-hah! Woo-hah! I got you all in check . . . "

2005-01-07T11:56:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while, I feel the need to kick Steve Jobs' ass, and I send a comment into Apple's user feedback system. Who knows if they ever get read. Here's what I wrote today:

I'm both a shareholder & a user, and from both perspectives it's maddening that Apple has created this wonderful resource, in AppleScript, and then completely failed to make its benefits accessible to most users. The collection of "Apple approved" scripts available through http://www.apple.com/applescript/ is minimal, and no links to external sites are included.

What I want is search capability across all mailboxes (a la gmail.) A simple google search indicates that exactly such a script is included as an example in the AppleScript Studio documentation but not even script - clearly judged suitable by Apple - is linked to from the Mail AppleScript page, and indeed I've been unable to find a version I can download, ANYWHERE, after an hour of searching.

I understand the value in keeping the core applications simple, for ease of use. But there's also a lot of untapped value in the fact that applescript makes these applications customizable, and CAN make them much more powerful.

The Mac OS X Software link in the main OS X "Apple" menu is wonderful, and takes you directly to a list of 3rd-party applications. This taps the energy of the development community in a wonderful way. What I'm suggesting is a similar link within each core application's "Scripts" menu that will take you to an Apple-managed collection of 3rd-party scripts. This would be SO POWERFUL. Please, please, please! :-)

Thank you for your consideration.

2005-01-06T13:07:00.000-05:00

While I'm here in Albany, I'm sort of taking a "vacation" from work, to study neuroanatomy. Jess' classmates continue to express amazement that I'd voluntarily attend their classes, but it's fun: it's something I've meant to do, and wanted to do, for a long time. Interestingly, though, one of the sources that I'm finding most useful (not to mention addictive) is a free website at the University of Washington, the Digital Anatomist Interactive Brain Atlas. Now, while I do recommend checking it out, because it's just incredibly neat (I especially recommend the 3-D objects section) I realize that just seeing all the names, without knowing or learning about the function in a comprehensive way, might be a little dull. But as a companion to the neuro texts that Jess has, the site is just a fantastic, ideal way to really dig into the anatomy and learn how everything relates in 3-D, something that's really difficult with the complex, messy anatomy of the brain. Especially the quizzes. Damn they're addictive. (Yes, I know I'm a total freak. Thank you.)

2005-01-02T21:11:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year! It's 2005. Wacky.

In the past few days, I've gone on a bit of a shopping binge. Let's see if there's a theme:

(1) A winter coat ($40 at Burlington Coat Factory)
(2) Hiking boots (-$5, thanks to EMS's wonderful "100% satisfaction guarantee" & my falling-apart old boots)
(3) Yaktrax ($20)
(4) A DVD player ($27)
(5) A hairdryer ($10)
(6) A vibrating timer ($20)
(7) A 500 ml water bottle ($6)
(8) Polypro long underwear ($32)
(9) A neoprene facemask ($13)
(10) A sleeping bag ($85)

Disregarding #4-#6, there are two themes that stand out: (A) I don't like being cold, and (B) I miss backpacking. In actuality, #5 fits theme A, too, because it was used to put up window-insulating plastic sheeting around my apartment. In any case, it's true: I don't like being cold, and I miss backpacking.

I'm in Albany with Jess for a few weeks, now, so the concern about the cold is at least on the rational side of obsessive. The backpacking bit I may not be able to do anything about anytime real soon . . . because of the cold. But I don't know. I'm an "I don't give a f@%*" kind of guy when it comes to hiking & camping, I'll have a warm bag & a good coat, and hell - at least there are no mosquitos, in winter. Maybe I'll do a little exploring of Massachusetts State Forests when the weather's not too god-awful.

In any case, I'm in Albany, and I think my time here is going to be a blast. Jess took me to the histo lab today & I got to play with a real human brain (or two) and skull. That's so cool! She's received permission for me to attend classes with her for the next two weeks, including the skull & brain dissection anatomy labs. While I've done a lot of "virtually" playing with brains in my fMRI work, that was all just picture-takin'. This is something else entirely, and I'm really psyched about it.

Speaking of picture takin', Jess got herself a new digital camera recently (so cool). So, apropos of nothing:

Also apropos of nothing, Jess opened her online store selling hand-sewn greyhound collars this week (yay!) and I volunteered to help with marketing by setting up a google "adwords" account. So cool! I've been longing for something to attempt to advertise on the web for years, but I'm . . . well, far too lazy to actually create a product and launch a business. So this was a golden opportunity! Thus far the google campaign has cost $5 in start-up fees + $1.88 for a grand total of 11 click-throughs (out of ~180 appearances of the ad) and zero purchases. But hey. It has only just begun. And my frequent checks of the hit count over the last two days have been well worth the $6.88 just in entertainment value.

So yeah, happy new year!

2004-12-16T08:55:00.000-05:00

"So... in an HTML analogy, your code now has a "style sheet" instead of you typing in the modifiers for every individual tag you use, every time you use it? (You load the main program once, then switch the parameters without re-performing the vast majority of the task?)"

I don't really know CSS (:-p) so I'm not sure how apt the analogy is, but my guess is this is pretty different. The optimizations don't make my code "cleaner" in an aesthetic sense, and they don't reduce my effort in writing the code - the purpose is just to make the code run faster, i.e. reduce the computer's effort in executing the code.

The best metaphor I can think of for the memory allocation situation is this: let's say you're a professor, and before every lecture, you need a lot of material put up on a board, which you'll lecture from. Fortunately, you have a TA to help you with this task (the subfunction you call, metaphorically speaking.) Now, you would probably think the easiest thing to do would just be to give your TA the relevant info that needs to go up on the board each time. So you do that, and classes go fine, but at the end of the semester you notice you've gone way overbudget due to "TA expenses". It turns out the TA has been going out and BUYING A WHOLE NEW FREAKING BLACKBOARD for every lecture. Now, that's obviously not very efficient. But you don't think it would be very efficient to lug the blackboard over to the TA before each lecture, either. Fortunately, there's a simple solution: just tell the TA where the blackboard is, and ask them to just go write on it. In a language like "C", this is simple to do, with something called a "pointer" - you pass a pointer to a big chunk of memory into a function instead of sending the whole thing, and everything's groovy. Matlab, trying to be simpler and easier to use, doesn't want to confuse you with pointers, so you can't do this. What I did was figure out a trick to let me (effectively) pass a pointer . . . and thus, metaphorically, cut out the cost of the TA buying a new blackboard (allocating memory) for every lecture.

2004-12-15T01:29:00.000-05:00

Booyaka.

This morning, I had no code for my next planned experiment.

Tonight, I not only have working "demo" code, I've also cleaned up and massively optimized a lot of the underlying code. The optimization work was especially satisfying. Matlab is fruity enough that you kind of have to trick it into being efficient, and while the documentation is great for quickly learning how to make something that will work, it doesn't give you a lot of info on how to make things go fast. So I'm left to explore by trial & error.

Case in point:

I have a function (called repeatedly within a loop) which produces a dot-array image matrix from a set of {x,y} coordinates. Simple. But it was taking TONS of time. Making it a 'uint8' instead of a 'double' matrix helped, but it was still painfully slow. Solution? Instead of (implicitly) declaring the variable for the matrix inside the function (which requires memory allocation), I passed a 'template' matrix - declared once, on the "outside" - into the function. I wouldn't have guessed that this would work, actually, because my initial thinking was that it was costly to pass big variables in and out of functions. Not so; apparently, by using the same name for the argument TO and the output FROM a function, you can sort of create a "tunnel" in and out of the function, allowing it to avoid creating (and allocating memory for) a new variable. Neat, but not intuitive, at least to me. I wonder whether I'm thinking about that the right way, conceptually. I'm not totally sure.

In another function, which creates the coordinate sets, I figured out a way to eliminate two levels of nesting (which Matlab tends to stumble over), and turn an O(N^2) process into an O(N) process. The latter improvement was possible merely because my original algorithm was blindingly idiotic, but fixing it was still really satisfying. This is code that I've been using to create experimental stimuli for about the last 4 years, now. It worked, but it was always annoyingly slow. Now it blazes.

It serves to remind me how silly it is to be obsessed with hardware & CPU clockspeed, when comparing across platforms. If the software you're using is well-designed and optimized, it will run fast. If it's poorly-designed, it will drag.

As an aside, it's pretty sad that Pedro's not gonna' be pitching for the Sox next year. Yeah, he seemed to be getting old and tailing off a little, but he was a heck of a fun character.

2004-12-09T17:28:00.000-05:00

Oh, man, this is hard.

I decided this morning (in the shower) that I spend way too much time reading news on the web, and I should quit. I don't really get that much out of it, you know, it's more of a compulsion, and overall I'd be happier if I spent the time (a) working, or (b) actually relaxing and enjoying myself - taking walks along the river, going to museums, watching movies, bowling, getting drunk, that kind of thing.

So I decided to go cold turkey. For 10 days. I'm gonna' ask Jess to go through my web-browser's "history" files over the weekend to check on me, and make sure I haven't slipped.

Oh, man, this is hard.

No cnn.com. No msnbc.com. No nytimes.com, or news.google.com, or finance.yahoo.com. And I had to type all those URLs in by hand, because I couldn't go to the sites and copy & paste, like I usually would.

But like Obi Wan Kenobi said, in Trainspotting (eh-heh) . . . with God's help I will conquer this terrible affliction.

(News: It's the new heroin. Any day now the War on Terror will be passe, and the administration will declare a new "war" to free us from the terrible scourge of news addiction.)

p.s. - Yes, I'm allowed to blog, and yes, it is just about exactly like methadone for me.

2004-12-06T22:59:00.000-05:00

Today, thanks to an applescript I found, I was able to do a calculation I've wanted to do for a long time. Here, in order, are the artists or bands I've listened to the most over the last ~2 years (total playcount > 200):

Liz Phair, Guster, Jump Little Children, The Beatles, Deb Talan, Mos Def, Aimee Mann, Coldplay, Radiohead, The Shins, Ben Folds, The Pixies, R.E.M., The Roots, Joni Mitchell, Evanescence, Elliott Smith, The Foo Fighters

There it is, in the cold light of day. :-)

Liz Phair? 743 listens, total, to the 72 songs in my library. Deb Talan has the highest "density", with 384 listens spread over just 13 songs, for an average of almost 30 plays per song. And yes, you've probably never heard of her. She plays acoustic guitar and sings . . . and writes some really addictive tunes.

Overall, my total iTunes playcount stands at about 24,500. That actually goes back to Nov. 17, 2002, a little more than 2 years ago, or just about 750 days ago . . . which means on average, I've listened to about 32 songs a day, on iTunes & my iPod, combined. Fascinating.

Anyway. Time to walk home through the snow . . .

2004-12-02T10:54:00.000-05:00

I saw the Pixies last night, with Francis & Jordan. Today I can't speak and I'm half-deaf. God, that was good. They closed with "Gigantic", and as I stood, soaked in sweat, eyes closed and a hand in the air, I was hit by a constant rolling wave of endorphins. Listen to the resonance in their guitars in the minute-long closing instrumental to that song. I love the Pixies. And I love endorphins. I haven't moshed like that in years. Gah.

You know, there's something to be said for working hard. There's something to be said for relaxing. There's something to be said for the feeling of being respected. For gettin' paid. For feeling secure.

But fuck all, man, none compare to feeling ALIVE.

I think the Pixies are an acquired taste. To the untrained ear, they can sound too raw, maybe too punk, too angry, too fucked. And since they're frequently credited as the band whose innovations inspired grunge, you might think they're about darkness and pain and depression. But really . . . that's not what the screeching vocals or wailing, driving instrumentals are about. At all. The Pixies are great because they rock, and they rock you. They make your head implode. They make it feel fucking great to be young, and strong, and alive. Their music just embodies everything that Rock is about. In amazing, innovative, pounding, driving, emotive ways.

I don't know - I'm full of shit, I know. I give up. Let's just leave it that the Pixies are awesome.

2004-11-12T13:33:00.000-05:00

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

The domain name "aluminumhat.com" appears to be available.

Who thinks I should register it and make it into a site/blog dedicated to information (& fact checking) related to the "crazy" hypothesis that the Republicans stole the election via massive fraud?

2004-11-11T13:54:00.000-05:00

This morning I had my mind on my money, and my money on my mind (like my man Snoop). I was thinking "How can I make the best of a bad situation . . . how can I profit from Bush's re-election?"

My first thought was "Perhaps Bush's re-election will lead to the overall collapse of the U.S. economy under our crushing debt load." So I started looking at companies in Europe, India, Japan, etc.

Unfortunately, even in this modern age, you can't trade on foreign markets via the internet, and ADRs are only fluid for the largest conglomerates, so I gave up.

So then I thought "Okay, Bush perhaps more than anything means more $$$ in the hands of the few. How can I profit from that?" My answer?

High-end McMansions:

My girlfriend says it was a morally repugnant investment.

Ah, well. What can you do?

2004-11-05T01:44:00.000-05:00

I've been giving a lot of thought to the election, in the last few days. I guess we all have. For the most part, I have simply felt at a loss - unable to comprehend how or why we lost.

Jess pointed me towards this editorial in the NY Times, today, and it resonated with one of the dominant issues on my mind - the division in this country over religion, and how that impacted the election. In my less-magnanimous moods, I equate religiosity with ignorance, and I'm simply disgusted and angry about being a member of an intelligent/secular minority doomed by democracy to lose. A lot of people feel the same way, and the sentiment is expressed in this "new map of the Americas" that has been making its way across the internet in the last two days:

When I first saw it, I thought "yeah, how sad - how frustrating". A minute later I was thinking "wow - what a good idea." I was surprised to find, this evening, that conservatives think it's a good idea, too. This stimulated a productive train of thought: (1) They want it. (2) We want it. (3) It's not plausible. (4) Is there some other way to go about achieving the same ends? I posted the following message on this blog:

I'm an athiest, I'm working on a PhD at Harvard, and I'm fairly generally liberal (unsurprisingly, I suppose). It seems like both liberals & conservatives actually like this idea of splitting the nation in two and being rid of eachother. A lot. (See the freerepublic discussions) Is it plausible? No, probably not. I don't believe any of us actually want civil war, but it would be almost inevitable given the resources that would have to be divided up, and the interweaved populations in many regions of the country. I'm surprised, though, that even the suggestion of liberal secession hasn't elicited expressions of outrage from conservatives about it being traitorous and unamerican. Would it be regarded that way, or would the response truly be "good riddance"?

I find myself wondering what the country would look like if Bush were successful in pushing through (what I regard as) a traditional conservative agenda, shrinking the federal government to almost nothing except national defense, and giving back a great deal of power to the states. Given the vast differences in cultural mores between the Blue & Red states (or between the U.S. of Canada and Jesusland, if you prefer) maybe it really wouldn't be so bad to have dramatically different laws on abortion, marriage, stem-cell research, school prayer, drug legalization, etc. We (liberals) dislike your (conservative) religious values intruding into our lives; you dislike our secular values intruding into yours. Perhaps secession isn't necessary to make us both happy, and the triumph of states-rights conservatism would be enough.

One other aside: why are you folks in the sea of red so concerned about the war on terror? Al-Qaida isn't going to bomb your farmland in West Texas. If they strike again, what would you estimate the chance is they strike a blue (metropolitan) area? I have to guess 90%. Any thoughts?

I really feel like thinking this through has given me a new perspective. My feelings yesterday were of frustration at being ruled over by "one of them" and being subject to the imposition of "their" values. But that's probably akin to what conservatives felt throughout the course of the liberalization of the entire latter half of the twentieth century. Common ground! Empathy! These are important things.

Why do we, as liberals safely tucked away in Blue states, care so much about "imposing" gay rights, school prayer bans, and access to abortion upon those in the vast swath of red states? It is, perhaps, because of a sense of universality in morality - liberals think we should fight for everyone's rights, not just our own. But I don't feel tied to that, being the philosophical amoralist that I am, and with my newfound perspective on the religious right, this leftist attitude seems essentially hippocritical.

So my proposal is this: in response to losing this election, Democrats don't need to give ground and move to the right on "faith and values", as some have suggested. Instead, Democrats need to turn the tables on the Republicans with some political judo, championing a reduction in federal power and the re-expansion of states rights. It's true, this is a fundamentally conservative position. But given the divisions that apparently exist - primarily over cultural/moral issues - perhaps it is the most sensible, most constructive position, even for a liberal.

For an interesting alternative set of views, I suggest the frequently excellent Altercation

2004-11-01T20:40:00.000-05:00

A couple days ago 4 minutes of videotape of Osama Bin Laden were released. Everyone stood up and took notice. But no-one was really surprised by what he had to say.

Time will only tell if others agree with me, but I feel like the real bombshell only came today, with the release of the complete transcript of the full 14 minute video. Bin Laden is a smart fucker. In the extended transcript, he states that the central aim of Al-Qaida is to bankrupt America:

"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations [. . .] the darkness of the black gold blurred [Bush's] vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America. So the war [in Iraq] went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future.

He is, essentially, taunting Bush for falling into his trap by going into Iraq. Until now, this was mere left-wing speculation, the idea that Bin Laden wanted Bush to pursue this kind of aggressive, costly foreign policy. Now it's fact, straight from Bin Laden's mouth.

There are many - including both presidential candidates - who proclaim stridently that we cannot allow the terrorists to dictate our policy, that we cannot show weakness. This is a reasonable argument. But what are these people to think when they see Bin Laden say, straight out, "bring it on - you're stupid, and you have been doing exactly what we want you to"?

I don't even know what to think. I just know this is newsworthy. I hope people stand up and take note.

2004-10-12T01:56:00.000-04:00

I can feel it, coming in the air tonight . . .

2004-10-11T11:28:00.000-04:00

This movie has "Oscar" written all the 'F' over it:

http://www.teamamericamovie.com/

Okay, I haven't seen it yet so I can't say for sure that it will have an Oscar-quality plot, or that it will change the world with its subtle but powerful political statement. But I'm fairly confident that it will be, as Jim would say, the Citizen Kane of sardonic, apropos marionette action movies.

And that's enough to have me very excited.

The site is all in Flash, so I can't provide direct links, but I recommend the "clips" section . . . the commentary by Matt & Trey and the "Behind The Scenes" bits are pretty cool.

2004-10-08T23:39:00.000-04:00

I'm telling ya', you've got to read Jessi Klein:

Flammable pandas

Posted: 10:08 p.m. ET

This is beautiful. Bush just said that the administration before him endangered the environment by not making sure the forests were properly "harvested" in order to protect them from wildfires.

That's just beautiful. I have to say that's very comforting -- I've always considered the wetlands to be a real fire hazard. You know what else is very flammable? Panda bears. They're bone dry. We got at least two or three of those suckers at our national zoos. It's sad, but we should probably kill them for the sake of the greater good.

2004-10-06T21:15:00.000-04:00

Jessi Klein's comedic debate blogs on cnn are a high-point of the whole election season, for me.

2004-10-06T10:54:00.000-04:00

On a slighly more sober note . . .

If I were a small business owner, I think it stands to reason that I would create jobs (hire new employees) if and only if I believed that by doing so, and expanding my business, I could make more money in the long term. I wouldn't create new jobs out of the goodness of my heart, just because I had extra cash lying around. And if I didn't have extra cash lying around, but saw an opportunity to expand and wanted to hire more employees, I would take out a loan, or take on a partner; I would find a way to raise the necessary capital. I might be able to take advantage of a slightly more marginal opportunity if I had capital on hand instead of needing to take out a loan, since I wouldn't have to pay interest in the former case . . . but I think even this is wiped out if you consider opportunity costs: as long as I can make about as much in interest, dividends, or appreciation on my extra capital as I'd have to pay in interest on a loan, it's a total wash.

Doesn't this completely kick the stool out from under the conservative, supply-side argument that tax cuts for wealthy people / business owners are the best tool for spurring job creation and economic growth?

I think that really this requires a somewhat more nuanced analysis, taking into account the affects of incorporation, corporate tax rates, and the capital gains rate, since the immediate economic impact of improved small-business profits for the owner of an incorporated business isn't reflected in his income, but in the value of his assets (I think). I certainly don't have the expertise to analyze the situation at this level, but I'd be interested to read about it.

2004-10-06T01:44:00.000-04:00

M: "Oh no. It is Fuck!"
F: "It is Fuck?"
M: "It is Fuck!"
F: "Ah, you are right. It is Fuck."

...

A: "You guys aren't watching this, right?"
F: "Only halfway sort-of. You can switch it."
M: "Yah. It is Fuck."
F: "It is Fuck!"
M: "It is Fuck!"

2004-10-05T23:54:00.000-04:00

This is an awesome, funny, wholesome piece of Minnesotan sports-writing: Espn Page 2, "Truth, Justice, and the Twins".

Really, read it even if you're not a baseball type.

Meanwhile . . . this Johan Santana fellow is really something, eh?

Neuron let us know today that our paper is all set, and they're targeting October 28th for the publication date. Awesome! That was fast. They've also invited us to submit a candidate cover image - how cool! So now I get to put on my graphic designer hat & try to cook something up.

Also, I led my first class "section" tonight. I was a little nervous at the start, and there are some ways I can improve, but overall I think it went pretty well. Francis reminded me tonight of his suggestion that I eschew staid instruction and just go with an approach of overwhelming my students with my enthusiasm for the subject matter. It's a good plan. Maybe I'll try it on Thursday.