Hirsute Sea Bass

The blog is dead. Long live the blog!

2008-07-13T22:02:00.000-07:00

Low class high class

2008-04-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

Brilliant idea hatched at the bar last night: Invite people to a "Wine and Cheese" party, make it sound all swanky, etc., and then when they show up present them with a table full of Kraft Singles and Franzia.

Dear Carmelina's Taqueria,

2007-10-29T17:46:00.001-07:00

You use fake cheese on your nachos!!! Why??????? I fucking hate fake cheese! You use real cheese on your quesadillas and burritos; why can't you use it on your nachos too? I totally did not see this coming.

I mean, if I'm going to be so unhealthy as to eat nachos for dinner, I at least want the pleasure of having gobs of real cheese alongside my black beans, peppers, and chunks of chicken. What I don't want is that space age orange liquid--which doesn't even actually deserve to be called fake cheese, because that suggests it bears some resemblance to and has some of the virtues of the real deal--spoiling my otherwise delicious act of nutritional sin. I mean, your tortilla chips are actually pretty good. Everything else was fine. The fake cheese was not.

Thanks for listening.

Why Wikipedia is great

2007-10-21T20:08:00.001-07:00

I doubt Britannica includes a section titled "Gallery of notable taquerias."

Acts in American lives, according to Google

2007-09-05T21:03:00.000-07:00

Searches done on "X acts in American lives," where X is replaced with the ordinal term (first, second, etc.), quotes are included, and the comma is not. 1 is added to all values to facilitate the logarithmic plotting of searches which returned 0 hits.

It's Reeve, dammit!

2007-04-16T13:47:00.000-07:00

I just read an Annu. Rev. Neurosci. article by an esteemed professor. In the Acknowledgments section of the paper, he and his coauthor thanked the "Christopher Reeves Foundation" [sic] for financial support. Come on, people! If they give you money, you should be able to get their name right! It's R-E-E-V-E. No "S" at the end. Ok?

Boston

2007-01-31T20:51:00.000-08:00

Did Boston overreact here?

Possibly.

Do I nonetheless hope Turner Broadcasting gets in as much trouble as possible?

Yes.

Why?

Because maybe big financial consequences in this case will force any company considering guerrilla, viral, "non-traditional," whatever marketing bullshit to reconsider. Hey marketers: When you deface our cities, try to be oh-so-clever, transparently try to create a curious buzz--it does not make me want to buy your product. It just pisses me off.

See also, Peace, Love, & Linux. How many more servers did that sell, fuckers?

Wow.

2006-12-14T11:39:00.000-08:00

Who knew Michael Crichton was such an ass? I really hope the major media (no, TNR) is not part of the major media) pick this up and he receives a significant public shaming.

See also Crowley's full response at TNR.

Urban myths

2006-12-04T21:42:00.000-08:00

Salon has some guy's ruminations on SF's North Beach up. Passages that resonated:

The dirty secret is that there never was a Golden Age. North Beach has been dining out on its myth forever. We're nostalgic for Jack Kerouac? Well, guess what -- Jack Kerouac was nostalgic for Jack London, and Jack London was envious of Robert Louis Stevenson, and Robert Louis Stevenson thought that Mark Twain got there first and ate all the candy, and Mark Twain -- he just wanted to be back on the Mississippi.

and

But it doesn't matter. There's always next time. And when you finally begin to understand that there ain't going to be no next time, that this is it, that's OK.

It struck me because it reminds me of my own early fantasies about cities, developed around the time I became aware of the Beats, Alternativeness, and the broad theme of the romance of urban grittiness. Like the author of this piece, I remember being driven around Minneapolis by my parents, and later, when I got my license, deliberately taking the long way home through the grittier parts of the city, all while treating steam from grates, old buildings, and everything beat down as an aesthetic experience. Cities were fertile targets this new sort of fantasy in the years before I started spending time in them.

Cities remained these vessels through the move to Chicago, and for some time while I was there. However, I eventually, somehow--I suppose through the gradual accretion of experiences--realized that cities were simply real live places, and that their grittiness, when wandered through enough, felt rather mundane, and that my fantasies were insulting and silly.

Now, in SF, I really don't have urban fantasies any more. I like to think that I've moved closer to that second passage, living life not in pursuit of an authentic experience that never existed (good book on the subject), but as if this is it--this is the real experience I'm supposed to be happening.

So yeah, for multiple reasons, it's important to not spend too much time in fantasy world.

Just realized

2006-11-17T15:19:00.000-08:00

So I just learned that Max Weber is credited with the idea that the state can be defined as an entity that possesses a monopoly on the use of physical force. Check it. Wikipedia says it came from a speech he gave in 1918. Who knew that was such a recent idea? Well, I suppose was probably floating around in the ether earlier, but still, go Weber!

Hell yeah

2006-10-24T12:09:00.000-07:00

NYT: “Especially this time of year, all you hear is people talking about fantasy football leagues,” Ms. Montgomery said. “I couldn’t care less if I tried, either about real football or fantasy football. But hey, I actually pay attention to what goes on in Congress.”

http://www.fantasycongress.org/

I probably miss my old glasses

2006-08-18T10:54:00.000-07:00

What are your favorite plurals? Two of mine:

Attorneys General
Schemata

News of the World

2006-08-16T17:44:00.000-07:00

My new rice cooker kicks ass.

Fuck this bullshit

2006-07-27T17:56:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker has given us another article on Wikipedia and the "controversy" surrounding it. What I object to about the article is contained in this paragraph:

Wales also appointed an arbitration committee to rule on disputes. Before a case reaches the arbitration committee, it often passes through a mediation committee. Essjay is serving a second term as chair of the mediation committee. He is also an admin, a bureaucrat, and a checkuser, which means that he is one of fourteen Wikipedians authorized to trace I.P. addresses in cases of suspected abuse. He often takes his laptop to class, so that he can be available to Wikipedians while giving a quiz, and he keeps an eye on twenty I.R.C. chat channels, where users often trade gossip about abuses they have witnessed.

I.P.? I.R.C.? What the fuck? That's not the way those initialisms are written! It's IP and IRC. Even the most cursory Google would tell you that! Since I can't believe The New Yorker hires anything but the best copy editors, I do not believe for a second that this was an act of ignorance. Inserting those periods was an act of deliberate and premeditated pedantry. Inserting those periods was a way of saying, "we're so smart" and "we do things the right way." The New Yorker doesn't own the proper punctuation of those abbreviations, the internet does.

Stylistic decisions such at these should be about making written communication effective, clear, and efficient. By inserting those periods--and thus deliberately flouting the norms of a community because of a misplaced sense of what is "proper"--they have done the opposite, as it distracted me from the point of the piece.

And don't get me started on that New York Times Magazine article a few months back where they wrote f.M.R.I. instead of fMRI.

Time to go write a letter to the editor. After all, "all that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing."

Hwang still doesn't get it

2006-07-25T11:44:00.000-07:00

From CNN:
"I am also a victim who was deceived. I am the biggest victim," he said.

Yeah, sure, that's it. You're the biggest victim.

Zach Braff is staring at you.

2006-06-29T20:16:00.000-07:00

Stop it! Stop it Zach! Stop your staring! It's rude!

(c.f., trailer. Seems to be more thirtysomething angst. (The preceding comment should not be interpreted as me not liking Garden State))

In other news, it seems that I'll be moving to a new apartment in a few days. Going to Minnesota first though.

Snow, Bolton, Bolten, Snow

2006-05-17T15:50:00.000-07:00

This administration really seems to be economizing on names lately. First we have John Snow, Secretary of the Treasury. Then, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, we got John Bolton, Ambassador to the U.N. Recently, after the departure of Andy Card from Chief of Staff, we got Josh Bolten. And now, one of Bolten personnel changes was to replace White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan with Tony Snow. This is really starting to get confusing, especially when all these guys are referred to by their last names in the news. The next person who joins this administration better have a wholly unused name. If not, he or she should be required to change his or her name as a condition of hiring.

A polemic worth reading (not mine, the linked one)

2006-03-18T22:03:00.000-08:00

What's most striking (and sad) to me is that this rant about conference presentations was written in 1985 and yet it is still highly relevant today (except for the part about good slides costing hundreds of dollars). Will things ever get better?

Now that I think about it, though, maybe things have been getting better. Some people around me, for instance, seem to be very aware of what works and does not work in a presentation and are adjusting theirs accordingly. I've definitely seen some good talks recently, and some of them have even been delivered by young people. I think that those of us starting out have a particularly hard time delivering effective presentations because we have talked to so few people outside of your labs and thus don't realize just how little the average outsider knows about our work. Before we step out of our little research worlds to tell others of their glories, we have to be productive inside them. And sometimes it takes awhile before we have something worth sharing. When we finally emerge from these worlds, we forget that while on our separate planets we have developed our own language--a language that even those just down the hall don't speak. (One of the first things I noticed when I started doing research was how quickly one invents new terminology in conversation with one's collaborators. This is essential, as this abstraction, this encapsulation of complex ideas in small linguistic units, is necessary for efficient communication.)

So when the young researcher first travels back to the home planet after a long journey, to present his or her "findings" at the inevitable "[Demographic] Research Day" symposium at the end of the summer program or rotation, if the student has been successful he or she will have created a whole set of concise tags for the distributed patterns of activity that he or she has been kicking around upstairs throughout the term. If the student is less successful (or if the topic is especially difficult), the terms will still be new to him or her, and thus the young researcher will still be excited enough about them to include their definitions in the presentation. If the student has been even slightly more successful, he or she will have become fluent in the new language, and thus will have a hard time identifying everything the outsider does not know.

I took this writing class in college where they announced on the first day, "You're not writing for yourself. You're writing for an audience, so know your audience." "Know your audience" was the mantra of the class. It's obvious advice that isn't followed often enough. There are two reasons people don't know their audience: First, some people don't know their audience because they think their audience should know them. This is the immature take that the class tried to drill out of us. If one of your target readers makes a good faith effort to understand you, and yet he or she cannot, it's not their fault, it's yours. Taking any other attitude is not an option for virtually everyone who needs to communicate in order to do their job. But the second people don't know their audience is the one that we all struggle with and is the one I have been discussing above: Knowing your audience intimately enough to communicate with them well is really really hard and takes a lot of practice. (One might also add that one needs to know oneself as well as one's audience, so that one can find the set difference of the things one knows and one's audience knows, but I guess that's assumed.) The moral of the story: we should talk to our neighbors early and often.

Maybe there's a backlash by some of the youth of today because we grew up along with PowerPoint and thus bore witness to much of the worst it can do, as there was a time when some of its early adopters thought that its gee-whiz features were actually worth using?

See also: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, the Wired article that came out at the same time, and some advice.

Tous les matins du monde

2006-02-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

Sitting here in the office stressing about quals, it occurs to me that the pen I am using is crappy. It's a cheap ball point rather than one of the rollers that I prefer. So I head down to the hall to the lab tech's desk, where our lab's cache of pens is stored. After locating a satisfactory replacement for my ball point, I stop to reread the humorous items that her office has posted on its door. One item is a page from a "Deep Thoughts" (as in the old SNL bit) page-a-day calendar that reads, "I think a good movie would be about a guy who's a brain scientist, but he gets hit on the head, and it damages the part of the brain that makes you want to study the brain."

This gets me thinking: Isn't about time that we tracked down the part of the brain that makes you want to study the brain? Has someone done an fMRI study that compares the brains of neuroscientists to non-neuroscientists yet?

Christmas comes twice

2006-01-10T21:33:00.000-08:00

Corporate America has blessed us with the launch of not one, but two major new logos in recent months. First, upon the launch of the merger between AT&T and SBC in November, (a.k.a. "The New AT&T") we were awarded with a slightly different blue globe and some lowercase text:

Now, this month Intel has given us some futuristic type, an open ellipse, and a demand that we "leap ahead":

Let's look at what these companies have to say about their new coats-of-arms:

AT&T

"The new globe is three-dimensional, representing the expanding breadth and depth of services that the new AT&T family of companies provides to customers, as well as its global presence."

"Transparency was added to the globe to represent clarity and vision."

"Lowercase type is now used for the "AT&T" characters because it projects a more welcoming and accessible image."

Intel

"The new brand identity involves changes to the widely recognized Intel Inside® logo that was created in 1991, and the original Intel “dropped-e” logo, which was created by Silicon Valley pioneers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore 37 years ago as they were forming their new “integrated electronics” company. Intel’s new logo combines the essence of both of these powerful symbols, building on Intel’s rich heritage, yet also signaling the new direction the company is headed today."

"It also includes a new tagline: “Intel. Leap ahead™.” This tagline is Intel’s unique brand promise and is designed to communicate what drives Intel as a company, and what Intel makes possible."

But I didn't need to tell you this, since I'm sure "transparency = clarity & vision" was the first thing that came to mind when you saw the AT&T logo, and you said "This makes me feel like Intel has a unique brand promise," as soon as you saw the other logo.

I like how the AT&T employees were invited to a "launch party" for the new corporate identity. Looks like it was quite the time. I hope they got to keep the nifty flags.

I've never been a part of a large corporation, so I don't know how it feels. Do people get into the corporate-speak and feel their company loyalty in their bones? Are the words of the PR types rooted in a passionate belief in the company, or is saying them just a job? Do midlevel drones feel like they are a part of the "AT&T family" or do they just clap at logo-launch events out of politeness? To what extent is the corporate language, which so often reads like parody, internalized by the employees? Are they passionate about something larger than their friends at work and what they do--are they passionate about the corporate entity itself?

Or is Office Space more accurate?

It always seems funny to me when stodgy and unromantic organizations talk about spiritual concepts like a "shared vision" and "virtues." It's as if the corporations are religions with their own ten commandments.

Gee, I hope I don't sound like too much of a Naomi Klein wannabe here (full disclosure: I haven't read No Logo).

The sillyness of attempts of PR types to explicate their symbolism in text aside, logos can of course be powerful things and can evoke an unconcious sense of an organization's vibe. My all time favorite logo is the biohazard symbol:

It's such an amazing symbol in that it conveys so well without words that whatever that sign is marking is something really, really bad. I remember being afraid upon seeing the symbol as a kid. I've wondered if this has something to do with the resemblence between the curves along the outside and pincers. I wonder how universal the understanding of this sign as bad is, and how that understanding will vary across time.

Awhile ago there was a write up somewhere of a competition to design a symbol to convey to future generations that the proposed nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain was a place of danger. They wanted something that would last 10,000 years--longer than any of our languages can be guarantee to last. How do you convey without words the idea of danger to the people of the future? It's a hard problem.

target="_blank" is evil

2005-11-22T12:07:00.000-08:00

It is the height of arrogance to force someone's browser to open a new window when they click on one of your links. Who are you to go invade someone's personal computer space like that? By using target="_blank" you are stating that you are certain that the person visiting your page loves it so much that he or she could not possibly want to leave it. And what the hell makes you think that your site is that great? Quite often I just go to a page and click on a link and then I'm done with that page. I have no interest in keeping a copy of the original page open.

This is 2005, people! All of us should be using tabbed browsing, which allows us to decide on our own whether we want to keep the original page open when we click on a new link. And even those who haven't yet embraced tabs yet are likely perfectly capable of right clicking or control clicking and selecting "Open Link in New Window" if they decide they want to keep your page open while they view the link they have clicked on. There's simply no need for target="_blank"!

Awesome

2005-09-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

This guy transcribed two tracks off DJ Shadow's Endtroducing for the high school percussion ensemble he directs. They worked on them for many months and then put on a concert. You can see videos of their practices and the performance here. I would have joined the high school band if we had gotten to do this. Well, maybe.
(via Metafilter)

Roberts Reveals His Favorite Movies

2005-09-14T15:45:00.000-07:00

(via Wonkette)

Sure, why not?

2005-09-14T14:47:00.000-07:00

Now we have LibraryThing, which is "like Flickr for your books".

I'm not sure what the point is yet but that didn't stop me from cataloging the books on my shelf at work anyway. You can see them here.

I will say that the search engine you use to find the books you want to add (it queries Amazon and the Library of Congress) works remarkably well.

And yes, they let you use tags too.

Hopefully, the social music revolution will be a relatively bloodless one

2005-09-12T23:37:00.000-07:00

Via a plugin for your music player, last.fm keeps track of the songs you have been listening to on your computer and uses that information to update a "profile page" that contains a list of the songs you have listened to most recently and many "charts" such as "Weekly Top Artists" and "Top Tracks -- Overall." It uses this information to find "musical neighbours," or people whose listening data are similar to yours, and create a "neighbour radio" station with tracks you haven't been listening to that it thinks you might want to listen to. Presumably the playlist for the neighbour radio is generated from the set difference between your neighbors' tracks and your tracks, probably ranked by an average relative frequency somehow or something.

Anyway, a kind of neat addtion to the "social everything" bandwagon (yes, they have tags too), and what better way to find out what songs you actually like than to keep track of what you listen to most often?

My profile page.

Stupid product alert: Verizon ringback tones

2005-09-12T23:11:00.000-07:00

Verizon now offers what they call "Ringback Tones." This feature allows you to select a custom ring for your contacts to hear back over the line when they call you. For this service, they charge you $0.99 per month and $1.99 per year per ringtone. I know this isn't that expensive, but still, do people really think this is worth any money at all? Will your calling experience really be enhanced by a significant amount if you get to hear 1-4 band-limited two-second clips of the latest pop song before the person you are calling picks up?

We're all mentally ill in our own special way

2005-09-12T20:56:00.000-07:00

According to this, I am both schizoid, which means I "genuinely prefer to be alone," and avoidant, which means I "yearn for social relations." So are two mutally contradictory personality disorders worse than one, or do they just cancel each other out?

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid Personality Disorder:	Low
Schizoid Personality Disorder:	High
Schizotypal Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Antisocial Personality Disorder:	Low
Borderline Personality Disorder:	Low
Histrionic Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Narcissistic Personality Disorder:	Low
Avoidant Personality Disorder:	High
Dependent Personality Disorder:	Low
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder:	Low
-- Take the Personality Disorder Test -- -- Personality Disorder Info --

I say this because, ...

2005-09-12T00:19:00.000-07:00

... inspired by this guy, I've been thinking it might be useful to start a research blog. In getting started in my thesis lab I've found that many of the ideas I want to bounce off my PI really only crystallize fully when I am actually writing an email to him. Just going down the hall and letting ideas come out of my head for the first time via my mouth is often not a good strategy, as upon escaping to the outside world in that sudden manner they often tend to mostly engage in a lot of ineffectual flailing about.

No, for now at least ("for now" because this is probably an issue of practice, and if I keep working at it I might someday be able to work things out in my head just as well as on e-paper), I think it will be productive to write out potentially useful trains of thought fully when working. And since blogging software allows one to easily keep a journal on a computer, a blog seems like an obvious place to put research notes. (A wiki would be another option.) Plus, the exhibitionist thrill of having my thoughts in a format designed to be accessed by others could be an additional incentive to keep up with my writing (ok, so maybe that incentive hasn't done much to help me keep up this blog.)

An issue to consider would be whether I would be violating any "no prior publication" rules of any journals we might want to publish in (if, God willing, my projects are successful) by keeping a work diary online. It's somewhat sad to have to think about this, but the biological sciences really do seem to encourage secrecy before publication. In theory, one's productivity could be increased by making the whole process public, but that's just not the way our field works right now. (Exposing your entire process to the public could of course also increase the productivity of other researchers--and thus the field of the whole--for if everyone had access to everyone's ideas, duds as well as gems, one researcher might find in the idle, never to be published thoughts of another researcher a solution to one of his or her problems.)

Is there a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting neuroscience to be this open? Could we ever convince people to stop hiding things and start turning the web into a vast collective neuroscience thinking machine? Can we restructure the field such that everyone collaborates and shares with everyone every single day? (I mean, when you tour grad schools, everyone talks about their love of collaboration. But if they love collaboration so much why do they limit its scope to a handful of their peers?) Can we agree to start preserving all ideas, good and bad, in case the bad ones turn out to be good ones later?

Sigh. We're a long way away from neuroscience working like this. It seems like CS and physics communities do function more like this, and that's probably because a much larger percentage of the members of those communities are computer geeks who have internalized the various FOSS philosophies.

(This is a thought many people have had, but think of the labor that could be saved, too. As AM brought up yesterday, if you spend a couple months doing experiments to test an idea and they don't pan out, you don't publish it and move on to something else. This leaves the failure of that bad idea as an unpublished secret. Does anyone benefit from having people try the same bad idea over-and-over again?)

So the moral of the story is that if I start a research blog, I'll probably have to restrict the IP space from which it is accessible. That's not because I think I actually have great ideas, or that anyone would read a research blog about my obscure project, but merely because if I have to sign a form prior to publication swearing that I have not published my thoughts elsewhere, and that the internet counts as "elsewhere," I want to be able to sign it.

What is needed:

2005-09-11T22:31:00.000-07:00

An interface between Blogger, Moveable Type, whatever, and LaTeX. It would be nice to be able to throw down equations LaTeX style and have them typeset all pretty and either rendered in images that would be automatically uploaded and <IMG SRC>'d into your post or added as html through a link with latex2html. Then one could rapidly put equations in a blog post and have them look the right way--or close to the right way, if you go the latex2html route.

The Donnie Darko soundtrack is depressing me right now

2005-08-07T19:07:00.000-07:00

Went to Borders at Union Square last night. The first thing I noticed was that The Washingtonienne's book is out. Predictably, the pages that it fell open to when I grabbed it off the shelf included a discussion of anal sex. [Insert obvious Andy Warhol quote and unoriginal reflections on the downfall of our culture here.]

Books bought, and why:

Book: Bowling Alone, by Robert D. Putnam. Why: Because I'm lonely. And because I like pop sociology.
Book: Lynch on Lynch, edited by Chris Rodley. Why: For obvious reasons.

Book finished:

The Future of Ideas, by Lawrence Lessig

A lot of the ideas in this book didn't seem all that new, but that may be a reflection of the pervasive influence of Lessig (and like-minded folk) rather than a sign of banal thinking. Anyone who follows the various tech websites already knows about the never-ending copyright extensions, Napster, Hilary Rosen, the Creative Commons countercounterrevolution, etc. Still, the book usefully collates and gives context to all the Internet happenings of the past few years, and puts into concise words those assumptions that have been behind the online rantings of lesser--or at least more casual--thinkers. For example, the idea that innovation in a network is best facillitated by keeping its intelligence at its outskirts (what Lessig calls "end-to-end") seems like something I already was aware of, but hadn't heard put so well until I read this book. The concept of layers in a network--physical, code, and content--and the possiblity of different levels of control at those different layers was useful. Also, it was interesting to learn what people mean when they discuss the "Tragedy of the Commons," too. In sum, we're very lucky to have someone like Lessig on our side.

Movie watched:

Spellbound, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

I became a bit uncomfortable watching this with the roommate's girlfriend after it became clear that it would be full of chauvinistic comments. She seemed able to take it in its 1945 context, though. Anyway, lovely little film, kept me in suspense, has a nice twist that I didn't see coming, and Ingrid Bergman is still hot.

Aaaaaah!

2005-07-29T22:11:00.000-07:00

I usually like to keep this a family blog, but what the fuck were they thinking?

Tuesday evening

2005-07-19T20:58:00.000-07:00

You know, since it just hasn't been done enough, I'd like to take a moment to give a shout out to the Unix command line utility diff. I mean, the concept is so simple, and yet it's so powerful.

Funny

2005-06-25T20:19:00.000-07:00

This article about Poland's reaction to the recent "Polish Plumber" debacle that surrounded France's rejection of the EU constitution cracked me up. Way to go, Poland! You get the Hirsute Sea Bass Best National Sense of Humor award for, uh, today.

On the other hand...

2005-06-19T23:00:00.000-07:00

There was that part towards the end where they showed him the model of the school they would build ("Derek Zoolander School for Kids Who Don't Read Good" or something), and he exclaims, "But it's way too small!" That part actually is really funny.

A Theory

2005-06-19T22:56:00.000-07:00

There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who think that Zoolander is one of the funniest movies ever made, and those who think it sucks. I am firmly in the latter category.

More on kittens

2005-05-25T00:10:00.000-07:00

Since kittens have been a topic lately, I thought you might be interested in kittenwar. (Link via boingboing.net)

Nerd Interlude: Mac OS X 10.4

2005-05-24T00:17:00.000-07:00

3 notes:

1. Safari 2.0's RSS aggregator actually makes RSS seem kind of useful. (I had never really understood why everyone was so excited about that particular technology until now.) But can I really switch back after being so devoted to Firefox after so long?

2. Dashboard is also more useful than I had thought it would be. The weather widget has allowed me to drop the weather link from my bookmarks toolbar, I now have Wikipedia at my fingertips at all times, and finally, I can now get nextmuni.com arrival times for my N-Judah stop by just typing F12, thanks to this guy and his widget. In fact, while I have been typing this via DashBlog, the arrival time has ticked down to 0 minutes, and just now I hear the rumble of the N.

3. 10.4 breaks the UCSF VPN software. The company is aware of the issue.

Now, the narrative

2005-05-23T22:30:00.000-07:00

A bowl of vegetable beef soup is out of the microwave (Campbell's Chunky--the soup so thick, it eats like a meal), and I am ready to go.

The bike ride went ok, even though I was a little disappointed by the extent of my leg soreness during it. (Yes, rides are a lot easier in Chicago than they are in San Francisco, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who is remotely familiar with the topography of those two cities, but this one was harder than my previous rides in SF.) It was my first ride in awhile, so top shape shouldn't have been expected, but I had assumed that my successes in running would carry over to the world of biking. Nonetheless, it was a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon, even if I had trouble not thinking about work while I was supposed to be out communing with nature. Of course, the US 101 corridor and the crowded bayfront promenade of Sausalito don't really qualify as nature, but they at least head in that direction. At Mill Valley I started heading up Hwy 1 with the brief thought that I could ride all the way to Stinson Beach, but I soon realized I was in no condition to scale that peak and then ride all the way back. So that's one goal for the short term--be more of a badass on the bike and tack on the extra 20 miles and something like a 1,500' climb that that loop would entail.

By "successes in running," I'm referring to the fact that last Sunday I ran in the annual Bay To Breakers race with a reasonable amount of vigor for someone who hasn't been in the best shape lately and because I did not feel like collapsing at the end. So, I'm getting in shape to some degree, and I'm sort of eating better. California will do that to you. (Digression: Even though I've long been a stalwart opponent of Coastal Snobbery, I have to admit that there are number of wonderful things about life out here. I'm still not ready to concede to the east coast snobs, though.)

If you've never run in a race, I recommend it. All that running crap actually starts to get fun and you feel so very healthy at the end. It's like you're body just gets all lean within the course of an hour. Sitting at Ocean Beach at the end and listening to the waves crash was a great way to end it, too. Also, if you ever live near a road race, play some music. It's amazing how much just a few measures of some high-energy electronica can boost one's mood while running. And the other thing that works is shouted cheers. It's really hard to believe that a few trite words of encouragement from a complete stranger (e.g., "You're doin' good! Keep going!") can make a difference, but after a sufficient amount of sweat they actually start to mean something. "Yes, I really am doing well," you start to think to yourself, and your mood swings up at a high velocity.

But I'm convinced that the only way I'll be able to keep running (and thus to stay in shape) is to keep having races looming ahead. So today I went and signed up for the first half of the San Francisco Marathon on July 31st. I found this training schedule at the top of Google's list. It looks like I'm in Week 3 of the program, and thus I should find a 3.5 mile run for tomorrow. So, goal number 2: train for and complete 1/2 marathon.

I meant to write about things other than exercise, but they'll have to wait for a bit as it's getting late and I need to turn over a new leaf with this going to bed thing. I need multiple new leaves for various things, in fact, but that's for another day.

I'm one of those guys who takes pictures and posts them on his blog.

2005-05-23T22:14:00.000-07:00

P1010034
Originally uploaded by epugachev.

So 9 months after moving here, I finally got around to pulling out the camera and taking some pictures. Here's a series taken during a bike trip from my apartment to Mill Valley.

Kittens and Puppies

2005-02-26T22:01:00.000-08:00

Per Dawn's request, I am posting again, and I am posting about puppies and kittens.

But now that I think about it, I really don't have much in depth to say about puppies or kittens. Puppies are small dogs. Kittens are small cats. I have had neither a puppy nor a kitten in my life for any great period of time. I see them now and then, and I pet them, and I make comments about how cute they are. I once dog sat my friend's dog while she was away in Florida. It was fine.

Sorry Dawn, I'm just not sure there's much to be said about puppies and kittens that hasn't already been said ad nauseum. In closing, however, I provide an exemplar of a puppy and a kitten.

A puppy.

A kitten.

Note to self and others

2005-02-13T15:57:00.000-08:00

While reviewing MB's lecture notes before opening up the mailer envelope containing our midterm, I came across one of those classic plots of voice-onset-time (VOT) versus percent of time the sound is perceived as the intended phoneme. In this plot, there is a sharp transition between perception of the sound as "bah" and perception of it as "pah" when the VOT passes a certain threshold. This is an example of categorical perception, or our tendency to break continuously varying quantities into discrete categories. I've recently felt there's something profound about the brain's ability to make the continuous discrete, and that issues in categorical perception are intertwined with a lot of arguments in politics and life. In fact, it seems that a common arguing tactic is to point out that the quantity that separates what two perceptually discrete categories is continuously varying, and thus the boundary between the categories is arbitrary. I don't have in mind the various times I've observed this phonemenon, but I feel like I've seen it a lot. One of my questions is whether this tactic--the invalidation of categories based on the arbitrary nature of the boundary between them--is valid or bogus.

I guess I don't have anything more to say; I just wanted to make a note of these ideas so that I will hopefully remember to read about theories of categorization at some point in the future.

More on quantitative intellectual history

2005-02-07T18:26:00.000-08:00

Everyone really ought to know what an Erdős Number is. You might also check out the Erdős Number Project. The ENP has a page on collaboration research in general. Then yesterday I saw this paper in the pile of unclaimed printouts (you can a lot by seeing what other people printed out but never picked up) and thought it looked interesting. Like many papers I think look interesting, I'll probably never get around to reading it.

Stupid internet tricks

2005-02-06T01:06:00.000-08:00

Following metalife's lead, I did a dumb quiz and I am posting the results on my blog.

You Are 32 Years Old

32

Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe.

13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world.

20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences.

30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more!

40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.

What Age Do You Act?

Idea for a side project which will never get off the ground

2005-02-02T23:10:00.000-08:00

Just as mathematicians have The Mathematics Genealogy Project, neuroscientists should have a Neuroscience Genealogy Project. (For a sample of what the MGP can do, put in the name of one of your college math professors and start clicking the "Advisor" links. He or she is probably not that many generations from someone mentioned in your textbooks, such as Weierstrass, Hilbert, or Dirchelet. Erdos and von Neumann had the same thesis advisor.)

Neuroscience, being much younger than math, should be easier to catalog. As I've become more a part of the field, I've realized that even though SfN annual meeting attendance has grown from 1,396 in 1971 to over 31,000 in 2004, everyone within a subfield still seems to know (or at least know of) everyone else. Famous people of today were often trained by famous people of yesterday, and incest seems to run rampant, with former labmates helping out each other's students. Many subfields in neuroscience are still comprehensible communities.

I'd like to see graphs showing the intellectual fathers and mothers of the field and their descendants, so that we could see whose intellectual traditions had influenced the largest number of today's neuroscientists. Links would be made from PIs to their graduate students, and postdocs, and perhaps to their undergraduates too. From this we could see where an individuals influences came from, and who that individual infleunced. Links could maybe also be added to the graph between individuals who have carried on a significant collaboration.

So how to gather this data? The reason I'm thinking about this is because I think it could be done in a semi-automated fashion. We already have big publication databases like PubMed, ISI, and Google Scholar. I think that one could write a bot that could crawl these databases and use a few simple heuristics to infer the relationships that would make up the edges of a neuroscience genealogy digraph from bibliographic citations.

For each individual on the graph, the things to look at would be: (a) The order of authors on that individual's publications, (b) Frequency of coauthorship with another individual, and (c) where each frequent coauthor falls in the individual's career. For example, one's first papers are often written with one's graduate advisor. One may start out as a middle author on these papers, but a couple papers should be published early on where the student is the first author and the advisor is the last author. So have the bot search PubMed for an individuals first publications, and have it create a vertex for most common last author on the individual's first few first-authored papers, and a "graduate student" edge from the added vertex to this individual's vertex.

After doing this, take the next few first-authored publications and find the most common last author of these. Call this new last author our sample neuroscientist's postdoctoral advisor, and make a new vertex for this advisor and add an edge from it to the initial edge. Finally, when our neuroscientist begins a long string of last-authored publications, have the bot start looking at the first authors of these papers to determine our initial individual's students and postdocs. Do the same thing with in the opposite direction, too: The bot could move further up the tree by inferring our initial neuroscientist's advisor's advisor in the same way that it inferred his or her advisor.

Clearly these heuristics would need work and accounting for edge cases, but I think they would do a not-so-bad job for most stereotypical neuroscience careers. Because there would be multiple "Public JQ"s in PubMed, one could separate the publications of the neuroscientist from the non-neuroscientists with, say, ISI's Journal Citation Reports list of neuroscience journals.

Oh, and the bot could be seeded at the beginning with the lists of faculty that are available on the websites of neuroscience departments.

My question is whether these heuristics would work well enough or if it might not be easier in the long run to spend the time up front creating a hand-labeled training set and then using statistical learning techniques to build a classifier from this training set. Each vector to be classified would represent the relationship between a pair of individuals. The dimensions of this vector would be ones like I cited above (relative locations in lists of authors, location of the period of coauthorship in the timeline of an individual's career) and the output classes would be one of the possible edges, e.g., "Individual A is the graduate advisor of individual B." Now that I think about it, I suppose it would make sense to look at the entire publication record of both individuals when classifying an edge. That is, for Individual A to be the graduate advisor of Individual B, A should be last author and should already have gone through a period of first-authorship, and B should be first author and not have many publications yet.

So clearly these ideas need fleshing out before they are remotely implementable. My feeling is that doing this with statistical learning is probably the better way to go, even though it would probably require one to go through the tedious process of building a fairly large training set up front. The genealogy of neuroscience does seem like the sort of problem a computer could be programmed to solve fairly reliably, though.

Yeah, yeah, I know I never post anymore

2005-01-25T16:49:00.000-08:00

This thought just occurred to me as I returned to the office I am temporarily sharing a desk in:

Do you think that people in 1900 imagined that 100 years in the future it would be possible to unlock a door by smacking your ass against the wall beside it?

The Battle of Algiers

2005-01-10T08:20:00.000-08:00

If anyone is looking for a movie to rent, I highly recommend "The Battle of Algiers." Made in 1965, it's a reconstruction of crucial events in the revolt of the Algerian people against the French colonial administration. This war, which lasted from 1954-1962, eventually led to the French departure from Algeria and the establishment of an independent nation there.

While watching this film, it's impossible not to think of the current situation in Iraq. In fact, the movie was screened at the Pentagon prior to the start of the current conflict there. That's not to say that the French occupation of Algeria and the American occupation of Iraq are the same thing, just that it's hard to watch the movie without thinking of today's situation.

Thoughts inspired by the movie:

If they are merely able to successfully carry out an attack, terrorists have already won at least something. The reason for this is that terrorism is impossible to ignore, as it's human nature to have a reaction when a bus full of babies gets blown up. It's impossible not to moan and wail in the face of ruthless carnage against innocents, and it is irresponsible not to take actions that you think will help prevent future terrorism. But just like mothers telling their sons not to react if the class bully teases them--as the reaction of the bullied itself is the bully's reward--our natural reactions to terrorism are victories for the terrorist. The only way to render an act of terrorism mere ineffective violence would be to not change one's ways at all in response to it, and to do so would be ridiculous. Should we really not reevaluate our national security policy in response to an attack, just to prove a point to the terrorists? Terrorism forces the terrorized to sit up and pay attention to something they would have continued ignoring otherwise, as it would be insane to not do so, and contrary to the rhetoric of the terrorized, who always state "this will get them nowhere," this mere acknowledgement of the existence of the terrorists' cause counts as a victory for them, for in moving from obscurity to infamy, even if they have attracted a new set of outraged, powerful enemies in the process, they at least stand a chance of accomplishing their goals.

For instance, I was thinking about this when Arafat's death led me to contemplate the history and status of the Palestinian situation. Maybe this was a trivial realization on my part, but at the time it scared me to consider how all the high-profile killings of Israelis have been a series of victories for the Palestinians. The killing of innocents has represented the gaining of ground for the Palestinians in the sense that when faced with this violence, the world couldn't help but to ask, "Who are these Palestinians and why are they doing this?" Maybe my sense of history is off here, but isn't it true that the events like Munich 1972 perversely "worked," in the sense that they helped force the world to treat Palestinians as an issue rather than a non-entity? Because of their terrorism, the world started to pay attention to them, and I think it's only honest to call that by itself a victory. In sum, then, it seems to me that for terrorism to work, it merely needs to happen. For those of us who would like to ride buses without dying, this is scary.

My second thought while watching the movie was that even though terrorism works, one can only use it to accomplish so much. Being ignorant of the details of the French-Algerian war, I was getting down midway through the movie because I thought that the terrorism of the FLN (the Algerian nationalist group guiding the rebellion) would alone be enough to drive the French back across the Mediterranean. I thought that the movie would end and my roommate and I would be left with the bleak message that terrorism alone is enough to expel an occupying power, which would mean that we would only see more of our present world situation--that buses would keep blowing up--as more and more angry groups become aware that terrorism really does get you something. The movie (and presumably the history) seemed to contradict this premonition, however, as the terror by itself did not cause the French to give up their colony. Rather, it was the more peaceful revolution of the masses that finally caused the French to leave. The way to really drive out a foreign power is not to just keep planting bombs in cafés, but to get everyone mobilized and out on the streets. If the entire population gets up at once and rebels, that is what actually causes mighty military powers to fall. It is an entire nation, acting at once, that cannot be stopped by an occupying army. And this reminded of another movie about revolt, which showed that this rebellion of the masses need not even be violent to be effective.

So I'm sure all my thoughts here are incredibly sophomoric, and my historical knowledge is lacking, and possibly I even have written things that would be offensive to someone who has suffered as a result of the horrors of recent years, but I figure that Hirsute Sea Bass won't count as a blog until I post at least one sophomoric analysis of terrorism.

Finally, when I heard this quote (or rather, read its English translation off the screen), I had to think, "It's too bad TSA doesn't think about security as rationally as this French security officer":

MATHIEU
Here is some film taken by the police. The cameras were hidden at the Casbah exits. They thought these films might be useful, and in fact they are useful in demonstrating the usefulness of certain methods. Or, at least, their inadequacy.

Hassiba is now seen and the soldiers who are wooing her, while she laughs, jokes, flirts in a provocative manner, and passes the blockade.

MATHIEU
I chose these films because they were shot in the hours preceding some recent terroristic assaults. And so, among all these Arabs, men and women, there are the ones responsible. But which ones are they? How can we recognize them? Controlling documents is ridiculous: one who has everything in order is most likely to be the terrorist.

(Emphasis mine)

That is, we might spend less of our nation's precious resources checking IDs at airports, and spend more of them on security measures that might actually make us safer (I wish I knew what those measures might be).

More on Spain

2005-01-09T23:05:00.000-08:00

Knight Rider = Coche Fantastico

Addendum

2005-01-04T17:34:00.000-08:00

I was delighted to find out last night that the dictionary that the predictive text feature on my cell phone uses contains the word "betwixt."

Clean the woods of the east

2005-01-04T15:34:00.000-08:00

The previews before the movie last night reminded me of an anecdote: In the summer following my junior year of high school, I went to Esparraguera, Spain to live with a family for a month. I returned two years later to spend two more weeks with the same family. One day on that second trip, AJ (my "host brother") and I were walking around the neighborhood visiting his friends. We came upon the house of J, and he came out to engage in some idle chit-chat. At some point, the conversation drifted to Clint Eastwood. J asked me, "Why anyone would name their child "limpiar el bosque del este"? AJ laughed--apparently this was a familiar joke to him. I was confused and struggled for a minute to understand why they were all of a sudden talking about cleaning the woods of the east.

Then it hit me. It was obvious they were turning "Eastwood" into "el bosque del este," but they also apparently had been mispronouncing "Clint" as "kleen" (in Spanish, "i" is pronounced like the "ee" in "green," and since "nt" is not a standard word ending, "nt" would likely be pronounced "n"; thus "Clint" became "kleen"). Thus, I figured, their knowledge of the meaning of the English word "clean" and their pronounciation of it as "kleen" must have led them to think that "Clint" and "clean" were homophones. So they thought "Clint Eastwood" was said the same to them as "Clean Eastwood." Since "clean" is English for "limpiar," it would then be an obvious cross-linguistic play-on-words to refer to the American actor as "limpiar el bosque del este," or "clean the woods of the east."

I wonder if Clint Eastwood knows that a bunch of Spaniards hear his name as an admonition to treat the eastern woodlands in a more environmentally sound manner. Really, "limpiar el bosque del este" sounds like something the leader of a Spanish Boy Scout troop would have on his to-do list.

Welcome back, Kotter

2004-12-29T22:54:00.000-08:00

Books acquired during the Christmas holiday, and the questions that inspired those purchases:

Consilience, by E. O. Wilson

How should we think about relationships between different disciplines? How do we get social scientists to stop feeling threatened by natural scientists and instead see them as working in complementary ways towards the understanding of the same big issues? Can we get researchers in all fields to quit denying the relevance of work outside their discipline to the questions they ask, and to stop the stupid turf wars about who gets to ask what questions? Can we get people to stop seeing outsiders as competitors, so that hopefully they'll quit writing letters to the editor like this?

Reflections on a Ravaged Century , by Robert Conquest.

Why did people kill each other so much over the past 100 years? How can we stop this in the future? Is there any hope of putting a stop to this cycle of death, evil, and destruction. See also "A Problem from Hell," by Samantha Power, for food for thought on the question of why genocide happens repeatedly even when we swear "never again." (I only read part of this latter book because I left it on an airplane.)

Intellectuals, by Paul Johnson.

What should be the role of social and political theorists in setting up our societies? Is it ever possible to see how society should be organized when looking down from the top? (This was in the same section of Borders as the above book. I had no idea if either of these books was any good, and just purchased them because they seemed to be about things I wonder about.)

Biophysics of Computation, by Christof Koch

OK, this one I just wanted because it's supposed to be important.

Earth Abides, by George Stewart

I've lately been fascinated by apocalyptic movies and writings. I see this interest as coming from obvious questions: What would life be like if we had to rebuild society from scratch? Just how volatile is our society? Couldn't it all be gone quite quickly? In this age of Just in Time everything, where many of us (especially us twentysomething bachelor males) keep hardly any food around because we assume grocery stores and restaurants will always be there, how much perturbation can the system take before chaos ensues?

The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil

What is intelligence? Like Searle asked, if a computer passes the Turing Test, is that computer intellgent? If a computer can do everything a human can do, do we say that computer is thinking? Many computers today can do "intelligent" things, and yet no one would call our computers intelligent. I've found that whenever I explain to people outside the field what goes on in AI research (or the small portion of it that I am somewhat familiar with), they invariably respond, "but that's not artificial intelligence. That's just math and statistics!" But I've wondered if the reason that we don't consider the somewhat intelligent things computers can do today (many of which, I am sure, were thought to be impossible mere decades ago) is that we associate intelligence exclusively with the seemingly magical process of thinking that goes on in our heads, and computers do not seem magical because we built them and thus know how they work. For who really understands how one solves a problem, or has insight, or examines data and generalizes and infers? We just become conscious of these thoughts without really knowing how they came about. I think that with today's thinking, if there were a computer that had enough human traits to pass the Turing Test, people would still not call that machine "intelligent" because humans presumably would have built it and thus all the mechanisms of its function would be understood. Because its mechanisms would seem mundane, it would not have that aura of magical brilliance and out-of-nowhere insight that we require before calling something intelligent. But what if we could explain human intelligence in terms of similarly mundane mechanisms? What if we took Amazon.com's book recommendation service, and could show that humans recommend books to their friends based on similar principles, that we humans are essentially just using math and statistics too? (I realize our internal book recommendation service is extermely unlikely to be as simple as Amazon's in it's current incarnation. I'm just searching for a real-world example.) It seems that if we remove the mystery from our own intelligent behaviors and it turns out that the algorithms we use are essentially the same as the algorithms the computer uses, then even with the different implementations (cf. Marr's levels) we would have to call both the human and the computer intelligent. So perhaps we are so uncomfortable with calling current research in AI progress toward intelligent machines merely because we don't understand yet that the same algorithms are used for human intelligence. Or perhaps things work differently in the case of human intelligence and the field of AI is truly not progressing towards intelligence but instead keeps building things that seem more and more intelligent but are never actually more and more intelligent. Or maybe nothing I've said here makes any sense. I'm not in the mood to advocate a position here, for I don't have strong arguments to back one up and I've already been typing for too long.

Now, if only I could get myself to actually read the books I buy/am given.

Nothing deep, just an update

2004-12-20T19:11:00.000-08:00

I am here. Today I skied here with my dad and sister. My mother, being one with the "screwy hobby" of genealogy, spent her day here instead. As may not be well known among this readership, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints considers the researching of one's dead relatives to be an important activity for religious reasons, and probably because of this eternal motivation its members have become world-renowned record-keepers and family history researchers, among both Mormon and non-Mormon genealogists. In fact, the center here in Salt Lake City is said to be the "world's largest family history library," and as such this town is a bit of a mecca for those who like to find out who their ancestors were. Yes, it's a bit of an odd vacation--as oddity and family certainly go together, as they should--but it seems to work, as my dad, my sister, and I get to take in some phenomenal skiing. Plus, this hotel now has free WiFi, and really, what more does one need?

For those who don't get the "screwy hobby" reference above, here is the quote in question, from a beautiful movie:

ED (V.O.)
I found myself more and more going over to the Abundas's. It was a routine we fell into, most every evening. I even went when Walter was away on his research trips. He was a genealogist, had traced back his side of the family seven generations, his late wife's, eight. It seemed like a screwy hobby. But then maybe all hobbies are. Maybe Walter found something there, in the old county courthouses, hospital file rooms, city archives, property rolls, registries, something maybe like what I found listening to Birdy play. Some kind of escape. Some kind of peace...

Esotetric pet peeve

2004-12-09T17:54:00.000-08:00

Why does Elsevier insist on naming all the pdfs you download from sciencedirect.com "science.pdf"? Why not just write a simple naming algorithm that sucks the author names in and integrates creates a filename with them and the journal title, so that I don't have a hundred files with the same name floating around my computer?

Post-mortem

2004-12-09T14:08:00.000-08:00

So the exam is over. And it was sort of a doozy. Way too long. The format was pretty accurately described here. I'm definitely not in the mood to design any more experiments to characterize unknown ligands from the Amazon rainforest anytime soon.

Now I'm chilling a bit at home before heading off to lab. I feel I've earned the right to not think or act for awhile. So I'm watching MSNBC, which I consider to be an utterly superfluous network. And they're talking about the Scott Peterson sentencing. And I ask, who the fuck wants to hear another thing about that trial? Where did the media get the idea that we want to hear so much about that case? Do people actually want to hear about it? I feel bad for the people involved, and what happened was certainly a tragedy, but that doesn't mean I need to be informed every time the judge goes to the bathroom. Am I the only one who has heard enough?

So now I've got to take care of all the things I've been putting off during the academic mayhem of recent days.

Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis

2004-11-26T22:45:00.000-08:00

The more I move and travel around, the more American cities seem to blur together. Because current ideas about urbanity are so widely propagated, everything being built in cities today looks pretty much the same. The same patterns are everywhere, I've found myself thinking as I've driven around Minneapolis these past few days. For example, developers everywhere seem to be anticipating an explosion of empty-nesters looking to downsize--without forfeiting luxury--and move back to the city, and thus the same condos are going up everywhere. Chicago has a ridiculous number. High rises were going up everywhere in River North, the Gold Coast, and the South Loop while I was there. When I was in San Diego recently, it appeared that the same thing had happened there. And now in Minneapolis I'm driving by construction sites covered up with the same fancy signs bearing images of the fancy building to be built, the same script typeface, and the same instructions to go across the street to the sales center to see models of penthouses starting at $1 million. Naturally, they don't want to wait until it's finished before they start selling units. I imagine the financing factors in a certain number of "presales," in fact. And the condo towers all look the same, too. I suppose you can't really expect much variation in design from residential high rise to residential high rise when you're trying to build so many so fast.

Another constant of core city revitalization is the built-all-at-once entertainment district. Baltimore rebuilt its Inner Harbor, Chicago has its Navy Pier, and now Minneapolis has its Block E. Block E is a large block near the edge of downtown that sat empty for a really long amount of time while the City Council argued what to do with it. I remember going to my first "shows" at First Avenue in junior high and staring at the posters on the abandoned Shubert Theater (which was across the street) afterward and thinking I was all urban and hip--while I waited for my mom to pick me up. But the council eventually found someone to build an "entertainment and dining experience" that was plopped down in one piece maybe two years ago. These districts, or "experiences," all have the same features. Hotels, restaurants, video arcades, movie theaters, and bars and clubs for later on. The same tenants show up in these developments from city to city. They're where you go to find your Cheesecake Factory, your Hard Rock Cafe, your AMC megaplexes, and your Borders Books & Music. Sometimes someone's vision of the entertainment complex of the future is included, and the city ends up with a temple to media such as San Francisco's Metreon, wherein sensations (tastes! lights! colors! sounds!) rather than solid goods are emphasized. This latter complex is not a mall but an "entertainment destination" and "the place to try all things bright, shiny, and irresistibly new." If I knew anything about Marshall McLuhan's work I might quote him here.

I'm guessing that the original model for all this was the redevelopment of New York City's Times Square. And that's part of what I think is interesting about these districts. While New York may have the biggest such development, and the city undoubtedly retains its edge in many other ways, so much of what it offers in its most famous entertainment district has been cloned throughout the country. Is it really worth it to go all the way to Times Square just because its Olive Garden is bigger? Or they have a Virgin Megastore rather than just a Tower Records or a Sam Goody? Or its megaplex has 5 more screens? It seems to me that what people use for "a big night out" can be found just about anywhere these days with these mini Times Squares popping up throughout the country. The same experience can be had everywhere due to the spread of the chains. And if you're running a business, of course you would want to expand beyond just one market. I guess there's still only one TRL taping a day to scream outside of, though, and Times Square will always have that. Just don't try to get tickets if you're older than 24.

I'm too tired now to celebrate or bemoan the phenomena I've been talking about, so I'll say this is just a record of my musings this Thanksgiving rather than an attempt to argue some grand point.

Finally, a cause we can unite behind

2004-11-23T17:31:00.000-08:00

I think it's time to start a campaign to convince the database and web programmers of the world that sometimes people have names that are structured in ways other than the most common method of a capitalized first letter followed by a series of lower-case letters. Sometimes people have two word first names, sometimes people have hyphens in their last names, and sometimes people even capitalize the first two letters of their last name and separate them with an apostrophe. Crazy, I know. All I'm saying is that it doesn't take that long to add these few exceptions to your input-checking code and throw in an escape character (which is 99% of the time just a backslash) before the apostrophes so that they won't be interpreted as extra single quotes and thus as syntax errors.

Either the coders of the world will have to start doing this or I will have to drop the apostrophe from my last name. I'm sick of having my records not stored in your databases even though I get a confirmation page and I'm sick of having to give multiple spellings everytime I need to be looked up somewhere. Be sensitive to my proud Irish heritage already.

A realistic portrayal of the American south

2004-11-22T23:41:00.000-08:00

AMC is showing the Smokey and the Bandit II right now. When did this film become an American movie classic?

Coda

2004-11-19T01:36:00.000-08:00

I ran across this article while looking up the definition of "reductionism" while writing the NSF essays. Is "Systems Thinking" anything new or just new jargon for stuff we already know? It references some books about management, so I'm suspicious of the latter. Perhaps it's the title of a new seminar that will be taught at businesses around the country for exorbitant fees. Maybe it's an accurate description of concepts that I agree with but that are too high-level and generic to be directly useful. Nonetheless, I liked the Weltanschauung sketched in this paragraph:

"Systems Thinking is a worldview based on the perspective of the systems sciences, which seeks to understand interconnectedness, complexity and wholeness of components of systems in specific relationship to each other. Systems thinking is not only constructivist, rather systems thinking embraces the values of reductionist science by understanding the parts, and the constructivist perspectives which seek to understand wholes, and more so, the understanding of the complex relationships that enable 'parts' to become 'wholes' as noted in the example below."

We can't just be reductionists. We've got to think about the whole too. We've got to do it all. All at the same time. We've should think about everything up and down the scales in everything we do if we want to do things right. Interactions between components of the system. Functions of the individual components. But paradoxically, if we try to do it all, we'll get nothing done.

So how do we translate this desire to do "systems sciences" into actual systems science? What are some good examples of this type of science in practice? Or are these concepts so general that they are meaningless?

I know, I know, the easy answer is that we can't do it all, and that's why science keeps going forever. But because it's reasonable to expect to make at least some progress, how do we then start moving in the direction of systems science?

The Essay Assay

2004-11-16T01:03:00.000-08:00

Time for an update. Here's the score:

"Why do you want to be a scientist?"
This one is going ok. I really wrote the whole thing tonight based on stuff from my Statements of Purpose for grad school admissions. This of course took way too long, just like everything does, but I think the end product has been adequate. Unfortunately, from looking at SH's score sheets from last year, it's not even clear where this essay is rated. Maybe it's "holistic" deal where this essay acts as a frontispiece [Is that a proper use of that word? Ed.] for your other essays. So the key with this essay is probably to put your reviewers in a good mood and make them think you're a worthwhile human being. I feel like what I have written tonight may be able to do this, but then again maybe not. As DR said last night, it's all a crap shoot anyway. Also, this one still has two lines on the second page. Should be cuttable.

"What research have you done before?"
This one is written but needs cleanup. Again, it's all just cut-and-pasted out of my grad admissions SoPs, so most of it has already been vetted by multiple people. I of course had to change the present tenses to past for the stuff I did in NH's lab, and I had to add in the new stuff I've been doing in LT's lab. LB looked at it last night but I haven't looked at her comments yet. I think the main task for this one will be to cut a bit and put some sort of frame around it, some sort of intro-ish and conclusion-ish words so that the reader isn't jumping right in at the start and jumping right out at the end. Then again, maybe the jaded reviewer would rather I just listed a bunch of bullet points.

"So what's are your big research plans, you smarty-pants graduate student?"
This needs an introductory sentence so the fall into the essay isn't as steep and the intro needs general flow-improvement. I think most of the body is ok. Needs a concluding sentence or two. Overall, could use some cutting. But I'm afraid if I cut too much more I'll sound vague to the point of seeming like I don't know what I'm talking about.

"While you're at it, show us you have a social conscience, too."
Haven't written a single substantive thing for this one yet. That means ~1000 words to go for a one-page essay under my spacing, margin, and font size scheme. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuckity fuckity fuckity fuck fuck fuck. Don't know what to write for this one. Clock is ticking. Must get to work.

In other news, I actually kind of miss the 24-hour A-level reading room at U of C. There was something The library here at Parnassus closes at midnight on weeknights, and my smarty-pants grad student status doesn't seem to confer upon me any after-hours privileges. I guess there's just no demand for it. If you're a med student, you should be in bed at that hour so you can get up the next morning at a normal hour like a doctor would. If you're a grad student, you should only be working this late if you are in lab. And since all the journal articles are online, it just doesn't make sense to have a 24-hour bricks-and-mortar library at an all-biomedical-sciences campus like this one.

Still, I could use a place to type after hours on nights like tonight (hopefully there won't be too many more), and the nice thing about the A-level was that there were always other freaks there at every ungodly hour, and even though they were strangers you somehow felt less lonely being near them because you knew that you weren't the only person still awake and working. And there was a bit of schadenfreude when you left and saw that they were still there while you were about to go to bed because your stupid complexity theory problem set or your stupid western civ paper was finally done. Actually, I don't know if I ever felt that way upon leaving the A-level. I'm just making this shit up. Well, some of it.

There aren't any late-night coffeehouses that I know of in this neighborhood either. I guess there weren't any near U of C either. I guess the attitude of local proprietors is that the only thing you should be buying at this hour is liquor. But there is that donut shop at 9th and Judah. Donut World, I believe it's called. That's open nonstop. I could use a chocolate old fashioned or two. That's where I'll go on my way home.

Focus

2004-11-13T16:06:00.000-08:00

I need to focus. It's 4:06 p.m. already and I haven't done a damn thing.

Things I have done today:

Woken up.
Walked to living room to grab laptop.
Brought laptop to bed so I could check in on the state of the world while still under the covers.
Fallen asleep.
Woken up.
Checked the news again.
Showered, brushed teeth, ate apple.
Canvas cafe for a latte and bowl of soup. (This cost me $8. What the fuck?)
Wrote a few lines of my "Broader Impacts" NSF essay.
Headed to Milberry Union for iced tea and an energy bar. Looked up an article I want to reference in the above-mentioned essay while eating said items.
Headed to the library and grabbed a chair with a panoramic view of the ocean, the Golden Gate, and the Transamerica Pyramid.

This has to stop. I should be getting so much done. There's so much to do and most of it is actually quite worth doing. One might say that by working late I ought to be able to get just as much done as a normal person, but it usually doesn't work that way. Saturday night rolls along and the whole ambience makes it seem like work is not an option. It gets dark out and you feel like you should be at home. You start to think you can allow yourself just a little bit of relaxation when really you shouldn't stop working. I need to start working during the daylight and sleeping during the darkness.

So it's time to get going. Time to start thinking about just one thing at a time, and thinking about that thing for a long amount of time. I'll turn AirPort off so I can't check the web or look at my email. Find some peaceful music and be frenetic.

Metametapost

2004-11-10T16:38:00.000-08:00

Per metalife's suggestion, I am reposting his post with my own links:

"i started off grounded. i sought self-awareness. i saw myself seeking and the whole process looked sad and futile. i tried to become grounded in some beautiful state of perpetual seeking and not finding. but there was no end to the recursive analysis and i am now left floating, alone, a metalife."

Neuropsychopharmacology

2004-11-09T19:35:00.000-08:00

I know HIPAA places all kinds of restrictions on what doctors can say about their experiences with their patients. I think patients can still say whatever they want about their experiences with their doctors, though. It's interesting that health care is such a private matter (I'm not saying it shouldn't be, I just think it's interesting that it is). Whenever we admit that we went to or are going to see a doctor it's always in hushed, vague tones, as if we are embarrassed about even having to set foot in the door of one, no matter how minor the issue. Is this because it's just not something others care about or are we afraid of admitting we have weaknesses, that we need help? Certainly as a twentysomething there's a tendency to feel pretty immortal at times.

Anyway, being new in this town and one to put these things off I hadn't yet located a medical provider when my paroxetine (Paxil generic) ran out on Saturday. As this drug is supposed to have some pretty nasty withdrawal symptoms, I was concerned about letting it lapse for too long and got the first available appointment from Student Health. (Coincidentally, the only available time was during discussion section, so in going to this appointment I was leaving a discussion about membrane transporters to go shut down one of my own membrane transporters.) The NP I saw was nice and obliging, and gave me a fresh prescription with a minimum of rehashing of my troubles. She asked routine questions about how I was adjusting to life here, and I tried to convey the truth, which is that I've been more satisfied with the way things have been going since I've been in SF than I have been in a long time. She described the talk therapy programs here at UCSF, and when I did that thing I do where I stumble and stutter rather than simply saying "I'm not interested," she ended my hemming and hawing by saying "You just want your Paxil."

This was the truth, but hearing it put this way was a little funny. It really is something that I want rather than something I need, as I could certainly live without it and have lived without it. It's just something I'm afraid to go off of at this point because I know how bad it can get. Rather than being a necessity, for some of us SSRIs end up a lifestyle choice. Some think there's a certain moral high ground in not taking them, as one should be able to deal with one's own problems without the aid of exogenous psychoactive chemicals. You could probably argue that there's a practical high ground to this as well, as learning to deal with one class of difficulties may enhance your ability to deal with other problems. I used to feel this way but at this point I just don't care about any high ground I may be losing by continuing to block SERT. Choice A is a wider range of moods and the risk of being incapacitated by a significant depressive episode. Choice B is emotional equanimity and dependence on a drug. It seems so much safer to stay on the drug.

After all, would I be where I am today without my meds? Would I have been confident enough to pursue the opportunities I am today glad that I pursued? Would I have cared enough and been able to concentrate enough to keep getting things done? Would I have managed to be unanxious enough to not come off as completely socially inept? Would I have avoided having a breakdown that might have driven me to fail or give up? I'm inclined to stay on the meds just because they might be what's keeping me sane enough to at least get some work done. They certainly aren't bringing me joy or bliss--and I wonder if they're preventing me from highs as well as lows--but I'm pretty sure they are play a role in making sure I stay functional. I'm thinking in functionality I've got a pretty good thing going, and I therefore should count my blessings and feel lucky to have found in these meds something that seems to guarantee that I'll live a life where I feel at least O.K. and probably do some worthwhile things, even if I never feel great.

Is anyone ever this ambivalent about, say, taking their blood pressure medication?

Nurseteria

2004-11-09T13:51:00.000-08:00

Those chocolate chip cookies that are half dipped in chocolate that they sell at the Nurseteria for $1.75? Really, really, good.

List Time II

2004-06-02T17:41:00.000-07:00

Movies where attractive women are supposed to look ugly at the beginning (with varying degrees of success) and pretty in the end:
1. She's All That
2. America's Sweerhearts
3. A Walk to Remember

List Time I

2004-06-01T14:55:00.000-07:00

(The below should be considered works in progress. That is, I hate more words than two and there are definitely more monkey movies than I have listed.)

Words I hate:
1. preggers (as in, "Guess who's preggers!")
2. blog

So bad they're good diaster movies:
1. The Day After Tomorrow
2. The Core

Monkey (or more accurately, non-human primate) movies:
1. Monkey Trouble
2. Dunston Checks In
3. Monkey Shines
4. MVP: Most Valuable Primate
5. MVP 2: Most Vertical Primate
6. Project X (1987)
7. Gorillas in the Mist
8. Planet of the Apes
9. Every Which Way But Loose

Highbrow Magazine Website Reviews I

2004-05-19T19:44:00.000-07:00

The Atlantic: A top-of-the-line highbrow magazine website, this one scores highly in the Freeloader, Archive, and Completeness categories. The Atlantic has been publishing online since September 1995 (only 4 years after Tim-Berners Lee unveiled the World Wide Web to the public) and most articles from each issue since then are still available today at no charge. In fact, for the most part one only has to pay for content that was published before the dawn of online issues (i.e., before September 1995): Older articles are only available from The Archive for a fee. (I say "for the most part" because certain articles in issues from January 2004 to the present have also been pay-only.) While the existence of a pay archive certainly requires a deduction from the Freeloader category, the size of this archive offsets this deduction with an increase in the Archive category, for The Atlantic's archive contains articles dating from 1857 to the present. To be fair, the magazine could also lose points in Completeness because not every article from every issue is online. However, I don't dock them for this because the articles that are not available online are apparently only missing because of copyright restrictions and the preferences of certain authors.

One caveat, however: The Atlantic may be heading further south on the Freeloader scale, as an atypically large number of articles in the current issue (June 2004) are unavailable online, and the Table of Contents page for this issue contains the following note: "Only selected articles from the current issue of the magazine are available free on the Web. Most articles with headlines in gray will soon be available for online purchase in our premium archive." Only time will tell whether this marks a new trend in how much of its content The Atlantic will be giving away in the future.

Introduction

2004-05-16T09:42:00.000-07:00

I guess an opening statement is in order.

Welcome to my blog. I hope it doesn't suck too bad. Even though I may sometimes write things that make it seem like I think I have really deep thoughts and profound insights into the way the world works, I really don't think that about myself. I know that some of the stuff I will write will probably come across as pretentious crap, so I won't be offended if you feel that way. Really I'm just starting this because I think writing is a healthy activity and useful for getting ones thoughts in order, but I've never been able to stick with a traditional journal. Maybe, I figured, if I try out this public journal format I might write more. So the purpose of this blog is to drive me to write on a regular basis, no matter how bad the writing is.

Oh, and the name, "Hirsute Sea Bass," is meaningless. I chose if by flipping to random pages in the dictionary (American Heritage 3rd College Edition) and pointing my finger at a random locations on each page. I did this until inspiration struck and I decided what this blog should be called.

5 o'clock on a Sunday

2004-05-16T03:12:00.000-07:00

It's 5 a.m. on Sunday morning, and for some reason I'm awake. I woke up about half an hour ago after having restless dreams for who-knows-how-long. I know what class of dreams they were, even though I can't remember what they were about. They're dreams that leave some emotional residue behind, as the feeling brought on by the dreams remains well after I awoke.

It occurs to me that I haven't seen this hour of the week in a long time. I haven't had a reason to be awake at 5 a.m. on a Sunday in a long time, so if I were awake it would have been due to accidents like this morning's dreams. It's like there's a whole world that I miss because I work on another clock. A tow truck is at the Amoco across the street, filling up. I guess 5 a.m. is when he (or she) starts his (or her) day. It's also striking that the change from night to morning happens fairly quickly: at about 4:45, when I woke up, I unequivocally thought it was the middle of the night, but just 30 minutes later it's pretty obviously morning. The light ramps up fairly quickly. And probably the first Metra of the day just went by on the South Shore tracks. Traffic on 51st and Lake Park now sounds regular, like daytime traffic, instead of intermittent, like nighttime traffic. There's a bit of a rumble in the background, presumably from Lake Shore Drive. A rumble even though it's a Sunday. And now, at 5:30, I hear the first birds making noise. 45 minutes or so since it started, morning has officially arrived.

And now I've got whatever it was out of my system (i.e., the dream-residue) and I am getting very, very sleepy once again.

First Post

2004-04-24T22:02:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to resist the temptation to just say something dumb and post it to make sure everything works.