Movie Studio Malpractice!

I am upset to learn that the new Harry Potter movie got bumped from a Christmas to a July release because Dark Knight did such awesome business last July, so therefore all big movies should now be shown in July? I don't really get it, and I am outraged. The Harry Potter movies have always been Christmas movies, even as they've gotten darker and darker. The new one will seem silly in July. Dark Knight worked in July because it's a hot, dark movie. This then led to my new theory of cinema, which is that all movies can be placed on three orthogonal axes: light-dark, hot-cold, and wet-dry. I wanted to make a 3D scatterplot to illustrate this theory, but Excel doesn't let you do that. Instead, here is a scatterplot of movies with Wet and Dry collapsed - you will have to squint your eyes and pretend you can see that dimension. Click on the pic for legible titles.

Before you die, you see...

...a couple of things! Here are some things that are like The Ring, in that my life has been ruined by them and now I must show them to you. First up, the Gray Lady's long-running, soul-sucking series, Modern Love. This one is about how a lady doesn't like to have sex with her husband. I have no problem with people whose sex drive is low. I've had to watch videos in therapy class about how to help people whose sex lives are on the fritz (answer: have your man grow an awesome mustache, stop having penetrative intercourse be the focus of your sex life, engage in "sensate focus"). What I object to is this attitude that not wanting to have sex when you're married to someone is actually, you know, really freeing and awesome and everyone should try it. Not wanting to have sex ever, for the rest of your life, is like not having a left arm. It's not the end of the world, but don't try to convince me that it's really actually pretty awesome, that instead of thinking about sex I should really try scouring flea markets for pieces of glass that I can use in my new hobby, making stained glass windows, which is actually way better than sex. Seriously, that's the argument. Ugh, where do they find these people?

Here is a second thing that has ruined my life: Vector TD. It only ruins your life for a few days before it gets so ridiculously hard that it's not addictive any more (wtf, no fucking left turn? So hard!!!!!). Also I'm way more prone to video game addiction than most people, so this may not have any influence on you at all. Why am I so video game addiction prone, it is the lamest of all addictions. I think it's from my mom, who is not allowed to do jigsaw puzzles because when we were kids she would get so engrossed that she would forget to make dinner. We would always start the puzzle and then get frustrated and we'd be like "Mom, come help!" and then she would take over and not stop for hours and we'd wake up the next morning and she'd be in her bathrobe doing the puzzle again.

In any event, I like Vector TD because although it seems like it is about lasers and missiles and whatnot, it is actually about what a fucking force of nature compound interest is. The trick is to abstain from buying fancy weapons and amass a small kitty of loot towards the start of the game and then when you win a bonus, never pick increased fire power or weapon range, instead always increase the interest rate that you earn on your money. Every round of the game is like a financial quarter where interest earned is compounded back to the principal. If you play your cards right, you will be so fucking rich towards the end of the game that you can basically put missiles onto lasers inside of bombs. If you fritter away your principal at the start of the game on shiny new weapons, then you will end up destitute and the aliens will destroy you. This is a valuable lesson for kids to learn, I feel. Seriously, if you could go into debt and they had like little alien payday lenders who would engage in predatory lending and then repossess the weapons you already had, this would be some good edutainment.

Do public school kids spend a lot of time learning about compound interest? Man, they hammered that shit home in private school. They were like, don't tell anyone, but this is how rich people stay so fucking rich. The word problems were all about Granville Estinghouse IV being unable to pay off his gambling debts because his grandfather had set up a spendthrift trust which restrained the alienation of the interest, and then he's approached by Moshe Ratfinkelstein and offered a loan at usurious rates and what should he do, etc. Haha, kidding! We did learn about the perils of dipping into principal, though. Take home message: if you have any spare cash at all and you are young and you haven't started an IRA, seriously, start an IRA.

Jesus is the reason for the season

Adrian: I think I found you a Christmas present, but I'm worried it's not appropriate.
Me: Not appropriate? What is it, porn?
Adrian: No! Yes.
Me: But I love porn.
Adrian: It's dog porn.
Me: Like dogs and humans?
Adrian: No, dogs and dogs.
Me: Dogs humping dogs isn't porn, it's America's Funniest Home Videos.
Adrian: It's dogs humping dogs, but set to techno.
Me: (silence, mind appropriately blown).

I still don't know what Adrian meant by "not appropriate". It seems I won't find out 'til Christmas day. However, I did discover that there does in fact exist video of dogs humping away to pounding techno beats, as one would suspect, the internets being what they are. Note that it's NOT dogs humping dogs as the good Lord intended, and therefore is TRFW, too risque for work.

Things that I made that I like.

Our title is after Mindy Kaling's awesome blog, things i bought that i love. For Thanksgiving we went over to Tammy and David's and had a wonderful time. Adrian made a delicious yam casserole with a toasted marshmallow glaze, an Old School dish she entitled Sweet Potato Casserole, Because I Don't Care What's in It. I made Guinness gingerbread cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. Since David is now mad at me about recipes all the time, here is the cake recipe I worked off of (n.b.that I skipped the candied pistachios because ew, and instead substituted diced candied ginger on a subset of cupcakes). Here is a picture of said cupcakes, of which I am unreasonably proud:

More hobo tips

While we're on the topic of having a good time while dirt poor, may I make some drink recommendations? Our picture is of Old Crow bourbon, which is a great bourbon if you really don't have a pot to piss in. A regular 750 ml bottle should run you around 6 or 7 bucks, and you'll have to trust me on this, it's actually not bad. That should be Old Crow's motto - "Bourbon drinkers agree: Old Crow is honestly not bad!". It used to be quite an illustrious brand before prohibition, but eventually hit upon hard times in the sixties. Now it's a bottom shelf whiskey for the Fortune Brands company. But in terms of taste, it's basically just Jim Beam without any advertising budget, and possibly with a little less quality control. What are you, some kind of Little Lord Fauntleroy, with your quality control? Sack up.

If you should manage to mooch a few nickles to rub together, then you might want to consider another relative bargain: Wild Turkey Rye. At 17 bucks per bottle, it should be reserved for special hobo occasions, like a near-miss mauling from a junkyard dog. Rye whiskey is generally a bit more of an acquired taste than bourbon, but this shit is just delicious. Also, rye whiskey was America's most beloved form of whiskey prior to prohibition, so it's what the founding fathers intended you to drink. You wouldn't want to piss George Washington off, would you? Also, Wild Turkey is keeping it real by keeping their proof up over 100, as opposed to the more trendy 80. Yet more reason why this is a good buy for people looking for a convivial time on the cheap! That shit is hot as all get out, though, so I would recommend a generous splash of water or plenty of ice, unless you are a bruiser in which case you can drink it neat. Excellent pairings include soup made from an old boot, and a meaty bone that you fought with a dog for.

Things to do in L.A. during the Second Depression.

One thing that I'm always planning for in the back of my head is how I will survive when I am sent to prison for a crime I did not commit. I am not totally clear on what crime I could plausibly be framed for - embezzlement of research funds, maybe? I do have a habit of keyword-baiting the Echelon system in e-mails and postcards ("How are you? I am fine! I have been funneling monies to the Black Hand! Much love!") that is probably going to get me extraordinary-renditioned at some point. Another possibility is that I will observe someone pulling the old "I'm driving in the parking lane as if I'm going to make a right at this intersection but at the last minute I'm going to try to merge left, thereby cutting to the head of this line of cars who are all waiting patiently to get through this godawful intersection" one too many times and I will lose my shit and actually kill a dude. In any event, one thing that I've made pretty good progress on is having interests and activities that translate well to an incarcerated setting: lifting weights, running, meditating, and reading books. A corollary benefit that I did not realize until recently is that I was also cultivating a set of interests that are well-suited to the current economic situation: i.e. hours of entertainment with minimal investment required up front. In the interests of pulling our country up by its collective bootstraps, I would like to share some of my experiences!

Unfortunately, most of these prison-ready interests are boring to read about. Actually, wait, one exception: weight lifting. I am not going to talk at length about weight lifting, lest I become that guy. But I would like to throw something out there. Ladies, when you are working out, it can sometimes be beneficial to consider the amount of time that you are expending on an exercise relative to the possible benefits that might accrue. I assume that the reason I see the ladies going nuts on the hip adduction and hip abduction machines is because it will make their legs sexy. I can see doing one or two sets on the hip adductor machine (assuming you do high weight and low reps), your adductor group could conceivably flesh out a bit and make your thighs curvier. I do not understand doing 5 sets of 20 reps on the hip abduction machine, unless you do some awesome sport that requires an extraordinary level of endurance in these muscles (professional jumping jacks?). It will not make your legs more sexy. Having massive hip abductors is probably not even possible because those muscles are very flat and relatively tiny, but if it were possible, it would just make you look weird and bulgy. So get off those machines and let people whose physical therapists told them to use them have a shot. Also, ladies, if you are lifting weights and looking around the room and talking with your friends and laughing and smiling while you are lifting, then you are not lifting hard enough to produce any noticeable changes in your muscle physiology and so you are wasting your time and my space. Christ, I've become that guy. I'm sorry. Moving on.

One thing that I've become very enthusiastic about since our economy collapsed is rice and bean burritos. If you buy your rice and beans dry, you can get the fixins for 10-12 burritos with an outlay of less than 20 bucks. I recommend: Mission tortillas, Uncle Ben's brown rice (racist?), Goya frijoles negros (racist?), Tillamook cheddar, and Cholula hot sauce. Salt and pepper to taste. So delicious, and so economical! For bonus points, cook everything on a hot-plate - you can heat the tortilla using the old bent-coat hanger maneuver. Then you can bathe in a wash-basin using only a sponge, you creepy fuck. Who owns a hot plate?

The second enthusiasm of mine that has come to seem prescient in recent months is actually a hand-me-down from my bizarre, WASPy family: walks! My family loves walks, we walk everywhere. We go on vacation to places and we walk around and that's our vacation. I'd rebelled against it for a few years, but now I've fallen back into the fold. I've been going on one-person walks around the Greater Los Angeles area, as well as dragging others along with me. For my group walks I try to keep it to less than 5 miles, but I've been trying to push myself on the solo walks a bit. My last walk was up in oil-company land in the mountains north of the 126; the place was a dead ringer for the opening scenes of There Will Be Blood, except I didn't break my legs and have to crawl back to civilization. It was creepy to be in a place that was totally and utterly empty (it was Sunday, so maybe all the oil workers were home?) save for the creaks and groans of the pumpjacks. It got very, very lonely around mile 7, so I headed back towards civilization before I was tempted to adopt any orphans and raise them as my boy.

For my most recent walk, I decided to go in the opposite direction: humanity overload! I decided to go for a beachfront hike on Saturday, starting in Marina del Rey, going through Venice and Santa Monica, and making it as far up to Malibu as possible without having to hike in the sand, which is miserable. I've always been fascinated by the denizens of Venice and environs - there's a whole underground economy of dudes who don't seem to have a real job but do seem to have a place to sleep and change their clothes and they mostly just hang out and drink beer and get tans and socialize endlessly. I think this probably involves the selling of puka necklaces and weed? Or possibly receiving residual checks for their work with some seminal funk band of the seventies? In any event, I am a little jealous of these dudes because being a grad student is like the opposite of their job. I saw all the things that are always at Venice: tiny tennis, gold dude, streetballers, electric guitar on skates dude, busty ladies of a certain age going all out with the decolletage, personal space-invading dudes who recorded a hip-hop CD that they will sell to you for only $20 and here you can listen on these headphones, etc.

I brought Adrian's camera so as to document this hike, but unfortunately most of the interesting things that I saw were not things but people, and because I am shy I am not able to take pictures of people. So you will have to trust me that this is a fun and economical way to spend your afternoon. But it was! I filled up my Nalgene bottle with ice and lemonade for $1.50 at a Subway, and I got a hot-dog from a vendor for $2, and I was entertained for more than four hours! I did take this picture on the Venice Fishing Pier. I like to think that these two have formed an unlikely friendship!

Who's afraid of light and sound?

To get back to our titular topic (haha, titular) for a moment: migraines are definitely a thing that is weird. Although I am technically a migraineur, I hesitate to identify myself as such because of the relative benignity of my condition: I typically suffer from migraine scotoma (blind spot) followed by aura (broad arcs shimmering with a pattern of variegated ziggurats cycling through the color palette, or rather (since I can almost see through them to the world beyond) brightly hued shadings of my visual scene, so that a crescent of my visual field appears to be shimmering like a piece of quartz held up to the sunlight). These vaguely hallucinatory experiences are followed by photophobia, hyperacusis, and a headache roughly equivalent to awakening on a Sunday morning after having the night before consumed three drinks instead of my more wonted two. That is: no big whoop. Please note that if my writing seems a bit odd at the moment, I'm writing while migraining, which is leading to a few word-finding difficulties - for instance, is there a more felicitous phrase for my meaning than "no big whoop"? If there is, my neural networks are experiencing a temporary slowdown in services at several key nodes, leading to a commensurate degradation of the quality of information culled from my synaptic fields - a bit like when that YouTube video of Christopher Hitchens won't load, and each refresh of the page leads only to additional input from the YouTube commenters - but inside my brain.

A brief aside: a pet peeve of mine about journalistic portrayals of cognitive neuroscience (all cognitive neuroscientists have a lot of pet peeves about journalistic portrayals of their field, it's part of the job description) is when journalists express amazement at a scientists contention that this cutting edge new treatment or that traumatic experience or whatever can "literally re-wire the brain". First of all, probably as a journalist you should learn the difference between things that are literally true and metaphorically true, but that's not crucial here. More importantly, for those who didn't take psychology or neuroscience in college, here is how the brain works: you have cells in your brain called neurons. A big part of the job description of neurons is to communicate with other neurons. Neurons communicate at spaces called synapses. These synapses change in various complicated ways so that neurons communicate more or less with certain other neurons. This changing of synaptic strength is almost certainly a major component to the formation of memories. If you want to use the metaphor of "rewiring your brain" to describe changes in synaptic strengths, then every time you park your car in a new location and manage to remember approximately where it was, you have successfully rewired your brain. Congratulations. It's not that big a deal.

In any event, I hesitate to identify myself as a migraineur because of the tepidity of my headache - true migraine sufferers tend to guard their membership ranks somewhat jealously. Those at the innermost circle of this cabal require that their surroundings be dimly lit at all times, and boast of losing entire weeks to a particularly vicious cluster of attacks. These folks are understandably perturbed when the hoi polloi use the word migraine to describe a bad headache that they had one time. In short: if you've never spent all day puking and hiding in bed, you probably shouldn't front. Although, to be honest, this one I'm having at the moment is shaping up to be worse than usual: I'm definitely feeling nauseous right now, which is not typical for me.

But speaking of neural short circuits, when thinking of the migraine cabal I cannot help but be reminded of a brief enthusiasm that swept my high school (remember: all boys, predominantly white, blazers and ties and Anglophilia) at some point in the mid-nineties for throwing the frat sign of the Omega Psi Phis, a historically black fraternity - arms up in a U shape, wrists bent to form the seriphs of the Ω. There were so many brief fads that swept through my school that left me utterly perplexed, but looking back on this one, I have to wonder: what the fuck? That was so inexplicable. The general interaction went something like this: one (white) kid would throw the sign, and another (white) kid would guffaw appreciatively but then caution that you'd better not let any Omegas see you do that. I mean, what? Were there were black college students hiding in odd corners around our school, waiting for the opportunity to give some white ninth graders a beat down so as to avoid any dilution of their frat's brand? So confusing. But I digress.

So there are a number of things about migraines that are weird. Hallucinating is weird. Suddenly realizing that large objects are disappearing into your blind spot is weird. Having a phenominological representation of the way in which your visual conscious experience is draped across the calcarine fissure is a bit unnerving. The crescent that I experienced had the tip of one horn pointed directly into the very center of my visual field, and it swept upwards and to the left, which would mean that the corical spreading depression of my migraine was in the right hemishpere of my brain, constrained to that portion of striate cortex below the calcarine fissure? I think? In any event, it makes you feel physical and not metaphysical, to have your conscious experience be so messy and neurological. For those following along at home, try taking your finger and poking your left eye (through your eyelid!) at the left-most portion of your eye. Do you see a little black dot appear at the right hand side of your visual field? Try poking a little further up and down, and see how the dot goes in the opposite direction. This is happening because your eye actually represents the visual scene upside down and backwards, because the lens of your eye flips the picture before it hits your retina. I don't know why, but even though I've known this on an intellectual level for many years, it still freaks me out a little when I demonstrate it to myself with this trick. Migraines are the same, but worse. They make me feel like my entire existence is very physical and very delicate and very temporary.

In college I used to joke that if you had a mad-scientist type device which, if it were broken, would lead to the end of the entire universe, you would take very good care of that device. You would not toss it about or leave it sitting on the edges of tables or credenzas, for fear that the cosmos would be snuffed out by your carelessness. Most likely you would create an enormous fortified bunker far beneath the earth's surface to protect your device. If, like me, you believe that your own personal universe will end when your brain ceases to function, then why not take similar care with your own delicate neural device? At the very least, I argued, we should all be wearing helmets at all times. This seems like a fairly air-tight argument to me, but my friends would inevitably talk me out of wearing a helmet for the rest of my life, on the grounds that social convention was more important than my desire to protect my own personal universe from destruction. Now I'm thinking that, Barack Obama-like, I must be the change I wish to see in this world. I'm the one that I've been waiting for. If I can convince everyone else to start wearing helmets, then there will be no social convention to hold me back. This blog post is my first attempt to build a critical mass. Next up: perhaps a Facebook group?

On leadership: professorial, failed, and otherwise.

For hippy McGovernites who live in CA, today was a little bittersweet. I'm really, really happy about Obama. I'm happy that I can share this good feeling with such a broad array of people all over the world, including a woman at a Magic Johnson Starbucks who was interviewed on the radio this morning and saw his victory as a blow against atheism. Henhhh? Like maybe Obama will be a tireless crusader against atheists such as myself? I hope not? Maybe he will be such an eloquent spokesman for belief that I will have to re-examine my thoughts on the matter? If he wants to try, I won't begrudge him that. Or maybe the fact that a black man won the presidency of the US of A is evidence that there is a Prime Mover? Okay, sure! I've heard worse teleological arguments.

So that part was all warm fuzzy feelings. Unfortunately we also apparently lost Prop 8. This brings up feelings that are neither warm nor fuzzy. Some are blaming the Mormons who funded the proposition, some are blaming the Black community for voting in favor of it 70-30 (as compared with near 50-50 for whites and Latinos). I say, this kind of inter-minority gang warfare is not change we can believe in. Although it would make a good plot for a more updated version of The Warriors (what weapon would the Mormon Gang bring to the fight? Razor edged clip-boards? Their defense would obviously be Magic Underwear). Or, possibly, a Choir-off: Gay Men's Choir vs. Mormon Tabernacle Choir vs. Harlem Gospel Choir. In any event, I reject all of these forms of blame-throwing, because that's not racial transcendence!

Also, because I blame someone else: the leadership on No on Prop 8. If the last 2 presidential elections have taught us anything, it's that when your political opponents attack you with bullshit, it will work and people will believe literally anything that gets said, unless you demonstrate some fucking leadership and savvy. John Kerry, God love him, full-on choked when confronted with absolute bullshit. Barack Obama, when confronted with bullshit, he went to work. He attacked it, using methods that he learned from his pre-political jobs: professor and community organizer (btw, I'd like to give a shout out to Rudy Giuliani, who famously chortled and asked "Community organizing? What is that?" - Hey Rudy, do you know what community organizing is now, bitch?). He got people going door to door, confronting ignorance and stupidity and racism. He got union members to call each other up and talk to each other and not stop talking just because the guy on the other end of the line used the n word. One thing that I genuinely admire about Obama is that he was apparently a great professor. It is not always easy to do. You are tempted to focus on the smart students and ignore the ones whose abstract reasoning abilities are more mediocre. But I'm always struck by how far even the worst students can come in clarifying their thinking about complex issues, as long as you are able to ask them the right questions and help them to evaluate the evidence that is in front of them. I think Barack Obama has shown some of this professorial flair in his candidacy, but then I have a soft spot for pointy-headed professor types. So, did we see any of this in the No on Prop 8 campaign? I'll let a portion of today's LA times article on the prop do the talking:

"Mom, guess what I learned in school today?" a little girl said in one spot. "I learned how a prince married a prince."

As the girl's mother made a horrified face, a voice-over said: "Think it can't happen? It's already happened. ... Teaching about gay marriage will happen unless we pass Proposition 8."

Many voters said they had been swayed by that message.

Amy Mora, a 26-year-old teacher, came with her mother to a polling place in Lynwood on Tuesday morning. She said she believes gay people have the right to marry one another. But she said she voted in favor of Proposition 8 because she does not believe students should be taught that same-sex marriage is acceptable.

So, I'm a little worried about what this Amy Mora teaches. But mostly I'm upset that someone who believes in gay marriage voted for Prop 8 because she actually thought that it somehow involved teaching children about buttsecks. Even if Amy Mora worked as a traveling carnie, I'd say that her thought process here is pretty damning evidence of a failure of rhetoric on our part.

People, all people, have the capacity to think clearly about very cognitively complex issues, if you help them to do so. This is not just my teaching experience talking here but my experience doing neuropsychological testing with people who have pretty serious brain disorders: with a few hints and a little luck, even people with mild dementia can figure out some startlingly complex stuff. So, if we can't make a rational, comprehensible case for why no children have been harmed in the making of these gay marriages, that's not the fault of the folks who voted yes on prop 8. It's our fault, and it's the fault of the people who were in charge of spending all those tens of millions of dollars that they collected from Hollywood Royalty.

So, now that we've inserted language into California's constitution that lets the gays know where they stand, where do we go from here? The legal challenges look pretty hopeless. Our only shot is to wait a few years for any effects of cognitive dissonance to diminish, and try to get that clause taken out of the constitution. In the meantime, let's all study Barack Obama. Look at his powers of persuasion, both cognitive and emotional. Emulate him on a small scale. Look at Gavin "whether you like or not" Newsom. Seek to avoid emulating him. Wait for the decrepit end of our population's age distribution, that doddering bracket who both vote and fear gays in overwhelming numbers, to do what they do best: die of old age. Implacable demographic forces are on our side. We shall prevail.

Chewing gum magnates: they're just like us!

My blog posts are getting too long. Even I realize it. Who has the time, these days? In the interests of appealing to the youth market, I will attempt to make my blog more like US Weekly - lots of photographs and brief anecdotes. Here I present photos of me that are of general interest because I was in places that I recommend that others go to: Catalina and Long Beach. Both were fun!

The off-season is starting soon in Catalina and you can stay in places with beautiful views, as well as showers that have seen better days and whose unfortunate design may momentarily flummox you, for like $60 dollars a night. We recommend the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel, once the getaway home of Mr. Zane Grey, noted Western author and apparently the scourge of Catalina Island, or at least the scourge of the Wrigleys (of the gum and the field) who basically owned Catalina back in the day.

This is a picture of the monument to Mr. Wrigley built by his wife... apparently he was supposed to be buried here but things didn't work out? Regardless, it was fun to hike up to, and there was a nice garden with endemic plants below it. I always get endemics and pandemics confused: pandemics are bad, endemics are good. I took some pictures of endemic cacti, but they are much more boring in picture form than they were in real life. In real life unusual cacti are very interesting, but on the internets pictures of unusual cacti rank right up there with pictures of other people taking pictures. I just did a flickr search for boring to see if there was some more boring type of picture than that, and I realized two things: those flickr pictures aren't boring at all, and I'm really bad at taking pictures. Here is one that Adrian took:


That is me in Long Beach carefully petting a zebra shark using only two fingers, which I don't totally understand the naming of because it looks a lot more like a leopard to me. Long Beach is also fun! Especially around the aquarium. It is also where you catch the boat to Catalina, so you can make a half-day of it. We can also recommend the Root Beer Float Icees sold outside the aquarium.

Vive la Résistance!

I'm trying desperately to have faith in Nate Silver when he says that the odds of an Obama victory are good, even accounting for the inevitable last-minute tightening (which sounds like what happens to your scrotum right before you punch a bigger dude in the face). I'm trying to resist this cringing mindset, this shtetl mentality that tells me that we can never really win, that some rough beast of a last-minute reversal is now slouching towards Bethlehem, PA. It's hard to feel any genuine confidence, though. I think one of the more interesting personality differences between liberals and conservatives is how we assimilate information that seems to bode ill for our respective causes: liberals, as you know, immediately panic and gnash their teeth and bewail their impotence in this cruel, cold world - I'm reminded of the Huffington Post article in the midst of the Palin bump that read something like "We're gonna frickin' lose this thing".

Conservatives, in contrast, seem to act like a John Wayne-type accused by his wife of being lost - you just clench your jaw and tighten your eyes and drive faster in the direction you're already headed. As some of you know, I've become addicted to reading the comments on the conservative blogs. Whenever the blog editors post some piece of bad news like "McCain down 12" all the commenters talk about how polls are totally biased and how they've been voting for years and no pollster has ever called them, so... you know. (I'd love to ask these commenters more about their thought process here - because honestly, no, I have no idea what you think that means. Are they implying that pollsters just yoink the newspaper's money and make up some numbers and call it a day? That would be a hilarious approach!).

So I say all this as a preamble to my basic reservation about writing any more about this election, which is that I suspect that whatever I have to say today will be rendered utterly moot by the hard left turn that the race will take tomorrow or the next day. This has been the craziest election of all time, so I don't think I'm being excessively cautious here. Nevertheless! I will forge ahead, conscious of my own impending mootness. I've just been struck by the most recent turn of the campaign. I'm talking here about the mutterings that reached their apex in the recent comments of Representative Bachmann (who, despite everything, I still believe to be our nation's hottest representative): her stated wish for a penetrating expose, one which would "take a great look at the people in Congress" and ask, are they now or have they ever been anti-American? That soft thump you heard at the end of the YouTube clip was the sound of my jaw dropping. Could it be? At this late hour of the campaign? Red baiting? What genius!

But, as Hegel pointed out, sometimes we are too quick to credit men and women of genius with what are, at least in part, the fruits of the labour of the world consciousness. What Hegel said of Julius Caesar applies equally well to the good Representative: "It was not merely [her] private gain but an unconscious impulse that occasioned the accomplishment of that for which the time was ripe". That is, it was not merely chance that Newton and Leibniz discovered the Calculus at the same time, but rather some combination of individual genius and a state of generalized cognitive readiness among the general population of thinking fellers (Hegel may actually be implying the existence of a for-reals collective unconscious here, but if so I'm politely ignoring that bit of idiocy on his part). I know I'm not the only one to notice the almost catalytic rate at which new memes seem to now be spreading through the blogs, the columnists, the rallies, the campaigns themselves, everywhere all at once. One day nobody has ever heard of Acorn, the next day people are showing up at rallies with hastily-printed bumper stickers about "Don't blame me, Acorn stole my vote". It's like that chemistry experiment you did in high school where you supersaturated the solution and then dropped one seed crystal in and suddenly the whole jar was crystalized.

I am very excited by the prospect that Red-baiting will continue to play a role in this campaign, or at least in the Resistance movement that will have to be set up should Obama win. It's important to distinguish here between genuine frisson-inducing Red-baiting, and boring old Social Democrat-baiting, which is not exciting at all. Social-Democrat baiting is what McCain and Joe the Plumber are doing these days: implying that Obama wants to turn our beloved nation into France or Canada, with job-killing high taxes and soul-crushing universal health-care. Yawnsville. This line of attack is so boring because it is essentially fairly accurate, and we all know it. I'm sure Obama could talk at length about the drawbacks of single-payer plans and why there shouldn't be a National Health Service, but we all know that deep down he just thinks it's too difficult to accomplish politically, and he thinks there are perfectly reasonable alternative models for achieving universal health care. So the attack ad goes like this: "Barack Obama can present a coherent argument against Canadian and French health care plans, but when he does, there's no note of abject fear in his voice; he isn't truly terrified of spending his sunset years telling his children about what America was like when we were still free. Barack Obama: can American trust a leader who isn't scared of Canada?" Ugh, right? This is such a boring line of attack that I can feel all the strength draining from my body as I write about it.

In fairness, though, Social-Democrat baiting probably set the groundwork for what was to come. And there has been a pretty good narrative building for a while here: Obama's foolish "spread the wealth around" reply to Joe the plumber, Joe straight up calling Obama a socialist (and a great tap-dancer!), and so forth. Even Sarah Palin's quote about the "pro-America areas of this great nation" skirted the line of being an awesome return to blacklisting, but it crucially didn't quite get there. If you're feeling contentious, the obvious contrapositive to her statement is that there exist areas of our country which are anti-American. But we all know that's not really what she meant. What she actually meant is almost certainly true: some areas of the country are really into being patriotic, and some areas of the country are total slackers about it. And those slackers are ruining it for everyone. You can argue with that if you want to, but it's true.

I'm reminded of a kid at my high school who was having trouble drumming up attendance for a pep rally where an oversized teddy bear (standing in for the mascot of our rival boy's school) was to be beaten and burned in effigy. "The problem with this school," he said, "is that people have no school spirit. That's why we always lose." More than our lack of bench depth, more than the weakness of our passing game, it was our insufficiently fervid school spirit that truly held us back on the football field. This boy's sense of being hamstrung by the tepidness of his peers, is, writ large, a major complaint of the Fox News wing of the conservative movement (come to think of it, the kid eventually became president of the school's Young Republican club): the problem with this country is our shocking lack of nationalism. We would totally be able to kick ass in Iraq, if only people took it as seriously as they did WWII! I can think of several wry responses to this plaint, but that doesn't change the fact that it's undeniably true. If we had 11 million people fighting in Iraq, I think we'd be all set. We could assign practically every Iraqi male of trouble-making age his very own full-time guard. If we were more patriotic, then thousands of us would take to the streets whenever Hugo Chavez criticized our president and we'd burn the Venezuelan flag for the BBC news cameras which, tell the truth now, would be pretty fun. And also there would be no laws against fireworks so 4th of July celebrations would be way more exciting, and kids who lost their hands while holding onto these fireworks would be treated as American heroes and people would clap for them when they got off airplanes. In short, Sarah's absolutely right: if America isn't living up to it's potential, don't be blaming our small towns, cause they're ready when you are.

So Sarah didn't really cross into awesome territory with that quote. I do, however, think she has the potential to be the Newton to Bachmann's Leibniz. In her first critique of the Ayers connection, the "palling around with terrorists" phrase got all the play, but I liked the fuller quote: "Someone who sees America as imperfect enough to etc.". It's worth focusing in on the message here: Hey friend, Barack Obama thinks America is imperfect. Now I know that sounds reasonable, maybe America is a little imperfect, but he sees it as so imperfect. Just how imperfect, you might ask? I'm glad you did. Imperfect enough that you need to bomb it a little to make it better!

This, my friends, is what separates glorious Red-baiting from snoozefest Social-Democrat-Baiting. You're actually full-on implying that the candidate is attempting to destroy America from within. This candidate does not believe that change is possible within the system as it exists, and so he will try to bring our nation to its knees through cunning and subterfuge. Anything he says cannot be trusted, because he's simply trying to assuage your fears, that he might rise as high in the ranks as possible, thereby to maximize the effects of the damage that he will eventually wreak. He is aided in this quest by a number of others who have similarly infiltrated the highest levels of government, where they wait for a pre-determined signal to strike. How many of these sleeper cells are there, you might wonder? This was my main complaint with Chris Matthew's cross-examination of Rep. Bachmann - he could have gone in for a number! If someone says that some members of Congress might be anti-American, you ask them to estimate how many. When they say it's impossible to estimate, you throw the number 57 out there! At least run it up the flagpole and see if they salute.

In any event, I really really hope that things continue down this path. In my opinion, the saddest moment in the history of the conservative movement was when William F. Buckley denounced the John Birch Society and Revilo P. Oliver and that whole crew and then never let them write for the National Review again. Those guys were so much more entertaining! And their threshold for diagnosing someone as a crypto-fellow-traveler was so low as to bring to mind a hilarious party game - "No, you're a communist!". Sure, Revilo hated the Jews a little, but his name was a palindrome, so that counts for something in the grand scheme of things. And to be fair, he also hated Christians - he called Christianity a "spiritual syphilis" which was creating lacunae in our brains and slowly dementing the human race. Which, speaking of, brings us to an entirely separate philologist who also hated Christianity (and maybe possibly the Jews a little?), Nietszche! Brief aside: I can only name three people with training in philology: Oliver, Nietzsche, and Ezra Pound. Coincidence, or is there some obscure, cursed Sanskrit text that if you offend the ancient Gods by attempting to translate it, you become sick to your empty core with Jew-hatred?

In any event: Nietzsche. I haven't read him since college, but one of the ideas that keeps popping into my head is the concept of the master and slave morality. This sounds like a Depeche Mode song, but in fact is a very interesting series of wild-ass speculations about how panty-waisted Judeo-Christian morality arose against the backdrop of strong-like-bull Greco-Roman morality. It gets a little complicated and there's a bit of Jew-baiting that goes on, but one of the interesting empirical questions that arises for me is this: is it possible for certain systems of thought, or systems of morality, to offer more to those who are on the outside looking in? Living in a backwater under a repressive government, or being a citizen of a small country whose fortunes are dictated by a distant but powerful empire, how do you understand your world and cope with the emotions that are engendered by your situation? Again, it's an empirical question, but I wonder if Christianity doesn't offer a more effective "tool kit" of coping skills for the permanently disempowered and disenfranchised than say, Islam. Not that Islam is in any way bad or anything! Islam is great! Big ups to all my readers in Saudi Arabia who find my blog when searching for Aikido moves! I guess what I'm saying is that I wonder if people who are Christian may experience a less distressing level of cognitive dissonance when they find themselves at the bottom end of a power structure, whether it's a geopolitical one or an interpersonal one. They think, hey, it's okay that I'm powerless, that doesn't make me a bad person, in fact it makes me a good person, because here I have this religion that tells me that being powerless is actually the key to being loved by God. Good luck getting into heaven, powerful people!

Which, to bring it back to William F. Buckley and the National Review wing of the conservative movement, is what I predict will happen if Obama wins the presidency. Those intellectual conservatives may be gritting their teeth at the moment, but I predict that in a few months they're going to be having a grand old time (the type of conservative who gets involved in burning Dixie Chicks CD's and whose main political belief is that you shouldn't criticize the president is a whole different story). I could be wrong about this (and again, it's an entirely empirical question), but I suspect that the ideology of conservatism is most ideally suited, on a purely emotional level, to being outside the corridors of government looking in. This is not to say that conservatism is a slave morality, just that some of the same principles may hold. Being given the reins to the very thing (government) that you profess to despise is no fun! Better to let the liberals try their hand and offer your refreshingly fair-minded advice. And criticism. And guffawing. And eye-rolling. Conservatives love knowing better than whoever is in charge, they love predicting that grand schemes will result in abject failure. They love it when, Cassandra-like, they are utterly ignored by the unwashed masses and then they are proven right and can smugly refrain from saying I told you so (I believe Cassandra was not allowed to say that either). Think of what a fun place to work the National Review must have been during the Clinton years! And, if the themes being sketched in this electoral race are the tropes that the resistance movement will hammer away at during an Obama presidency, there's some serious frisson-induction in store for the next four years. I just hope that the level of sheer pizazz doesn't diminish too much from these heady days. In short, free Michelle Bachmann!

A helpful, if tiny, guide to CA propositions.

So I have a hard time deciding on California propositions. If I were making a state, I'd leave the whole direct democracy thing out of it. Too much work for everyone involved! Nevertheless, if you are a conscientious voter and want to see a variety of opinions on each issue before you decide, here is a table that I make every year. I didn't have the energy to learn about making tables in html, so you're stuck with tiny little images. They might get a little better if you click on them? In any event, the LA times editorial board is more conservative than you'd think, the SD Union-Tribune are actually conservative, the Republican party is the Republican party, and everyone else is a godless liberal.

Great art with douchebags

So we went to two Arclight screenings of the new restoration of The Godfather a few weeks ago - part one on Saturday, part two on Sunday. Part one went by without remark, except that I had forgotten how awesome Moe Green is ("Sonofabitch! Do you know who I am? I'm Moe Greene! I made my bones when you were going out with cheerleaders!").

Part two was a bit more unfortunate - we were seated a few rows in front of a sizable group of aging guidos who seemed to feel that the Godfather was a bit like Scarface, but longer and slower in parts. For those of you who haven't seen part two recently, it comes in at 3 hours and 45 minutes, including a 10 minute intermission, and there aren't really a huge number of "quotable" quotes aside from the obvious "I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart." But these guys were clearly relating to the movie on an entirely different level than we were.

Now, full disclosure, I've never actually seen Scarface, I've only seen the amazing Jersey boys from True Life: I Have a (Jersey Shore) Summer Share watching it as a sort of pre-game ritual to get amped up prior to going clubbing (these guys really do need to their sympathetic nervous system humming prior to a night of clubbing, because they routinely fuck and fight whilst in and around clubs). My understanding of how it works is this: most guidos have seen Scarface many, many times. When they decide to watch it one more time, they aren't exactly doing close readings of the film, sussing out how audience expectations of what it means to "see" or "observe" are undermined by the antihegemonic framing of the shots blah blah blah. Rather, they're doing what I did when I watched Goonies over and over again as a little kid: they're reveling in certain scenes, certain lines, certain ideas that just strike them as amazingly cool. In the case of Goonies, at the age of 8 or 9, I particularly loved the idea of the start of a hidden tunnel being tucked below the ash grill of a fireplace; much to my parent's chagrin I actually took a hammer and chisel to the tiles of our home fireplace, just in case there was a similar situation going on there (turned out not). I watched that Betamax tape over and over until the picture started getting fuzzy.

So, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to people who watch movies over and over again, but the fact of the matter is that my tolerance for repetition has progressively diminished as I've gotten older, and it's hard not to feel that there is something a bit childish about wanting to see the same stimulus on an endless loop. Of course, I can watch movies that are all great one-liners (Big Lebowski, Kicking & Screaming) multiple times, but I max out at about once every couple of years. Not that this repetition intolerance is necessarily a good thing: I feel like the rate at which I habituate to new works of art has gotten so rapid that it's hard to keep CD's in my car that I still retain any visceral pleasure from listening to - sometimes I get so desperate that I'm stuck listening to Big Boy in the morning on my way to work (Luther Lufeye's got your phone taps on the tens!).

So, if the only sin of these guidos had been that they had seen the Godfather many times before, it probably wouldn't have bothered me. The problem was that they kept reacting to the movie in ways that were clearly an extension of previous viewings in various living rooms with various inside jokes being made. They kept laughing in parts that didn't make any sense - there's a shot of a little red car that Michael bought for his son Anthony (except that he didn't buy it, Tom Hagen bought it because Michael was too busy being Machiavellian) sitting in the snow, and they all started laughing at this shot. Now, if they had started talking or texting or something, we could have gotten them in trouble with the Arclight ushers, those purple-shirted martinets who take the enforcement of movie theater etiquette very seriously indeed. But how can you complain about people laughing at a toy car? What are you, going to force them not to do it again? They also loved Frank Pentangeli (the guy who testifies against the Corleones in front of the subcommittee) for some reason - they couldn't stop laughing at his every line. It was mystifying and really, really distracting.

By far the worst part, however, was the scene in which Kay reveals that her miscarriage was, in fact, an abortion ("It was an abortion! An abortion, Michael! Just like our marriage!"), and then Michael leaps forward and slaps the shit out of her. The guidos laughed like it was the funniest physical comedy bit they had seen since the season finale of Carlos Mencia. Which, when you think about it, is pretty fucked up. I guess their thought process was that it's awesome when people hit other people out of the blue, and it's doubly awesome when people hit people they're not supposed to hit, and since men aren't supposed to hit women this was just a big pile of awesome. At the time I found their reaction distasteful but chalked it up to these dudes being serious losers who don't spend a lot of time with women, but Adrian and Amy were both so upset that they had a hard time paying attention to the rest of the movie.

And here's the thing: I could see myself laughing at something similar in another movie. Like, say our antihero (I'm imagining it's Billy Bob Thorton) is being bothered by a fat kid with cake all over his face and instead of giving the kid a zippy one liner to shut him up he just punches the kid in the face. I might laugh at that, even though in real life I'm firmly against punching kids in the face. But that would be a different situation, because that would be a fucking comedy. The authorial intent would be for this to be a thing that is funny precisely because it's not supposed to happen in real life. I'm pretty sure that Coppola did not intend for the abortion scene to be funny in any way. But I don't typically get this worked up about violations of authorial intention, so I don't think that's the whole story.

I think a more fundamental element of this situation is that I don't like sharing my aesthetic experience with people whose taste is fundamentally different than my own. I have no problem with the fact that there are people who enjoy films like Epic Movie (okay, I'm a little worried that it debuted at number one at the box office), but I don't want to have to be around those people when I'm trying to enjoy a good movie. If I go see Live Free or Die Hard (which, speaking of, featured a Bruce-Willis-beating-of-a-lady that I didn't particularly object to) I have the expectation that I'm not entirely on home turf, so I try to play by their rules - a little yelling at the screen is okay in certain scenes (but hey, asshole who was checking text messages when Bruce Willis was crashing his fucking car into a fucking helicopter: what the fuck are you looking for in a movie?). But when I'm there to watch a movie that is one of the greatest movies ever made, art-house rules are on. No talking to the screen, no laughing unless it's a joke or it's making you so uncomfortable that you have to laugh, and just, I don't know, try to appreciate it on a deeper level, you dipshit.

But that's the thing that was so frustrating and weird about the situation: I was there to watch the art-house movie that I loved, they were there to watch the hilarious action-comedy that they also truly loved, and it was the same goddamn movie. How do you resolve this situation? Who's movie was it? De gustibus non etc. It reminds me of the early years of the Simpsons, when literally every mook in the country thought that Bart was the funniest character ever with his shorts-related catchphrases, but at the same time there was this absolute genius happening in the background and it seemed like only you and your friends were noticing this. My dad, whose taste in television runs towards broad English comedies, always hated the Simpsons with a passion because he never got past that initial impression that it was somehow of a piece with it's lead in - Married: With Children. He thought they were both just shows about stupid people doing stupid things, and he never bothered to see if there was anything else going on. He was also hilariously bothered by the fact that the Simpsons were colored yellow. I had no response to this criticism.

So, while I may have advanced past the toddler developmental stage where watching the same movie over and over again seems delightful, I've somehow managed to get stuck in an adolescent stage where my identity is still defined in large part by the books that I read, the movies I watch, and the music I listen to. And when I feel people that I judge to be fundamentally different and inferior encroaching upon my territory, my first inclination is to freak out and label them poseurs and dilettantes. Which is to say, I appreciate the Muppets on a much deeper level than you do. At this juncture it is worth noting that Adrian truly does appreciate the Muppets on a much deeper level than any of us do, and has been doing so for some time, so step off if you were considering fronting (watching that video I'm left wondering if maybe all along Adrian only likes me because, like Beaker, I am a red-headed accident-prone scientist who tends to communicate monosyllabically?). In any event, I can recognize that this feeling of being threatened by assholes liking the same stuff that I like is a bit immature, but I simply can't shake it. Especially not if they're sitting behind me in a movie theater (why are they always sitting behind me?). I do appreciate the Godfather on a much deeper level than they do! I notice every time there's an orange! I stop breathing when there's a doorframe between Michael and Kay! I could probably remember a good five minute spiel from my time at Oberlin on the relationship between the Godfather, classical mythology, and Lacanian psychoanalysis!

So, here is why those guys were douchebags: men hitting women isn't funny, it's terrible. In certain contexts maybe it can be less terrible, but this movie isn't one of those contexts. I know this because Francis Ford Coppola is standing in line behind us and he'd like to tell you that this movie is deadly fucking serious and not funny, and frankly you're an asshole. Also, Marty Scorcese is here and he doesn't want to talk to you about a time share because he thinks you hate women. So suck it.

Obama is a finely-woven cotton fabric.

Sorry for blog silence, I was in the midwest for my BFF's wedding. Central Wisconsin: knows how to party. I have longer blogs that are backing up in my headspace, waiting to be written, but in the meantime, did you know that 10% of Democrats believe Obama is a Muslim? It's true! But! Help is on the way. Check out this Florida Democrat who is trying to set the record straight - Obama is in fact a closely woven cloth. N.B. - just watch the video for maximum hilarity.

I mean c'mon.

I don't think I know any undecided voters, but if you do you should forward this picture to them. I imagine that this kid was thinking "I was getting worried about the direction our country was headed in for a while there, but now Barack is hugging me! Everything is going to be A-OK!"

Interlude

Before I get to part two of falsification and why my dissertation depresses me, let's have a brief intermission. While we're on the topic of the UFC, there was a news story a few weeks ago about a UFC fighter named Evan Tanner who died in the desert out in Brawley, CA, where he was camping by himself. He had run out of gas for his dirtbike and was about to run out of water, so he attempted to hike to a nearby spring, however when he reached the spring he found it dry; he died of heat exhaustion soon thereafter. The temperatures were near 118, too much even for someone in as good shape as he was. He apparently had a problem with alcoholism that had interfered with his career in the UFC, but was generally regarded as an incredibly nice guy who happened to beat people up for a living.

His death struck a chord with me partly because he was a fellow reddish-haired hipster woodsman type. However, it's mostly an issue of how he died: accidentally dying of exposure in the desert is an idea that tends to ricochet about in my mind for some reason. When Joan Didion wrote about the former Episcopal Bishop of California, James Pike, the only details of his life that stuck with me were the circumstances of his death. He and his new wife drove into the desert a few months after their marriage to see what the wilderness would have been like for Jesus. Their only supplies were two bottles of Coke. Their rental car broke down miles from civilization and they split up to find help - she made it, he died in a canyon. These details stuck with me long after I forgot about the other crazy aspects of his life - his rejection of the Trinity, his expulsion from the Episcopal church for heresy (I grew up listening to liberal Episcopal priests yammer on every schoolday, with their hippy McGovernite ways; you have really want it to be accused of heresy by Episcopalians), his experience of poltergeist phenomena at the hands of his drug addict son who committed suicide, there was all kinds of crazy shit that I forgot all about because it didn't play into my deepest fears.

I've been having recurring dreams about packing up my backpack for an expedition. I don't know what this signifies, as I'm sure as shit not about to go into the desert in my waking life. I dreamt that there was a medication that would protect me from the sun and I was trying to scam some before I headed out to parts unknown. I think there is, on the horizon, an actual medication that would help with this a bit - Melanotan II is in Phase II clinical trials at the moment. It's a peptide that stimulates the production of melatonin in the skin. It turned a dog with white skin into a dog with black skin. I would love, love to have that pill. Desert peoples such as my girlfriend don't understand what it's like to be in the sun for 15 minutes and realize that you need to beat a hasty retreat or face certain bodily injury. The sun! That motherfucker is relentless. He does not care for northern Europeans. My people spent generations learning to adapt to his absence, learning to create vitamin D when it was cold and misty and drizzling, and then like a dumbass I move to Los Angeles, where my kind is not wanted.

Anyways, if there was a pill that could make me swarthy with limited side effects, I would gobble that shit like it was Oxycontin and I was a family member of someone on the Republican ticket. It sounds like Melanotan II has some interesting side effects - the stage I trials showed that men who took it got tan, sleepy, yawny, and prone to unexplained but long-lasting erections. This drug sounds like it is racist against Matthew McConaughey. Also the drug companies are excited about it because it engendered concupiscence when administered to lady mice, and the drug companies are desparate for lady Viagra.

But I digress. One interesting thing about having a blog is that you learn about the themes that dominate your mental life. Mine are apparently disaster preparedness, being a fish out of water in L.A., Episcopal boys schools, and the UFC. Who knew?

Wittgenstein's poker vs. Popper's roundhouse kick

So, a while ago I mentioned that I would write about why I'm so discouraged about neuroimaging approaches to understanding neurocognitive deficits in psychopathology. It's a fancy way of describing the use of techniques that pick up on brain activity (like electroencephalography or functional magnetic resonance imaging) to understand why people with certain psychological disorders (like schizophrenia) have problems with basic cognitive abilities like attention and memory. This is what my dissertation is on, so it's a bit unfortunate that I'm so discouraged about it. It's a complicated enough subject that I think it's going to take two posts to do it justice: part one, on falsification and why I feel it is so important, and part two, on how I feel we've moved away from falsification in my field.

To start out, it would help to back up a bit, to my senior year of high school. I went to an all-boys school that required us to take about 2 hours of sports every day. That's a crazy amount of athletics for most people, and although initially I tried to tough it out and take "hard" sports like wrestling and track, by senior year I was just sick of it. My friend Pat and I discovered that our sister school had bullshit "non-team" sports that through some oversight we were actually allowed to take. One of these "sports" was Aikido. It was me, Pat, one other guy, and 3 girls. We were taught by a lady who, in retrospect, looked a lot like Aileen Wuornos, but did not hate dudes with a murderous passion. She was, however, very enthusiastic about Aikido, and told us all sorts of stories about the charming older Japanese gentleman who had founded Aikido, whom she called Osensei. She told stories of his demonstrations of how to handle being attacked from multiple angles, which involved him throwing brawny young men about every which way all at once. She mentioned that there were whispered stories of him having such fast reactions that he was able to dodge bullets in the war.

This last struck me as bullshit, but I was intriqued by the basic moral of these stories: if you spent years and years learning Aikido, eventually you would totally be able to kick anyone's ass. It seemed a little implausible, given that Aikido training mostly consisted of having people come at you very slowly with their arm out as if they were going to chop you in the forehead. Given that all-boys schools are a fair approximation of Lord of the Flies, I had seen my fair share of fights, and I'd never seen anybody chop anybody else in the forehead. Mostly dudes punched or tackled each other (my preferred move was the headlock, left over from my wrestling days), and with a rapidity that would seem to render ineffective most of the rather complicated maneuvers that we were learning. Still, I was an adolescent, and I was so open to new ideas that I was still reading Ayn Rand, so I wasn't about to call bullshit on this nice lady. But, as soon as the season ended, so did my interest in Aikido.

Flash forward to several years later when I read an article about this new-fangled thing called the Ultimate Fighting Championship; I believe the article was in Spin (ha! the nineties!). As I recall, the article was mostly about the dominance of the Gracie family in those early years, but it mentioned that the first few years of UFC had been more of a "death-match" atmosphere, where all different styles of martial arts went head to head against each other, with the winner advancing to the next round. You had Sumo wrestlers squaring off against boxers, kung-fu masters against tae-kwon-doe champions, even a few masters of the dark arts of nin-jitsu showed up (sans throwing stars). There was even, if memory serves, a hulking young man who was a black belt in Aikido. If you don't follow the UFC, the story ends badly for most of these styles of fighting. People with backgrounds in wrestling, kick-boxing, and most importantly Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu basically embarrassed all the black belts in the other domains. The poor Aikido guy got his ass handed to him. Turns out that slow-motion forehead chops did not figure heavily in the match, much to his chagrin.

So here's my thesis: pre-UFC, martial arts were akin to religion: each sect was able to claim whatever powers it wished, to assert its superiority over all other sects, to assuage the doubts of initiates by assuring them that many more years of study would answer all their questions, to schism endlessly over matters that might seem trivial to outsiders. Eighty-year-old dudes who weighed 120 pounds were allowed to claim that they could defeat virtually anyone in hand-to-hand combat. Why? Because nobody ever called bullshit. Nobody ever said: if what you are claiming is true, then it follows that you should be able to get in the ring with that enormous 22-year-old guy over there who is not one of your students, and you should be able to beat the shit out of him. No one ever attempted to falsify these claims that were made. Post-UFC, there was suddenly a very visible way to test any claim someone wanted to make about their particular brand of martial art. If Crane-style Kung Fu is so great, then go kick that guy's ass. Suddenly everyone was trying to falsify each other's claims.

Falsification. Looking not for confirmatory evidence, but for disconfirmatory evidence. As I mentioned previously, Karl Popper famously described falsification as the cornerstone of scientific progress. If you are interested in finding out the truth about something, it's what you have to do. You can see the dangers of what happens when you look only for confirmatory evidence in pseudo-sciences like phrenology - well-intentioned scholars who swore up and down that personality characteristics like conscientiousness were actually detectable in bumps on the skull. How did they come to believe something so crazy? Well, probably they started out by feeling the skull of some really conscientious fellow, found a bumpy part, and then looked for that part to be bumpy in any new person they met who was conscientious. If someone was missing that bump, probably they weren't all that conscientious, even if they said that they were. Nobody was ever a jerk to the phrenologists, nobody ever said "If what you're claiming is true, you should be able to take 100 men, 50 of whom are generally agreed to be conscientious and 50 of whom are total slackers, and you should be able to sort them correctly into two groups by feeling their heads. If you can't do that, then you're probably full of shit."

You can also see the perils of looking only for confirmatory evidence in the history of psychology. Irving Bieber is one figure that leaps immediately to my mind: he was a psychiatrist who wrote a very influential early study of homosexuality and its origins. He performed psychoanalysis with hundreds of gay men in the 40's and 50's, seeking to piece together the common thread that could lead a man to become "a person whose heterosexual function is crippled, like the legs of a polio victim." He found that homosexual men were created when their fathers were excessively cold or distant and did not protect them from the subtle seductive or "close-binding" attempts of their mother. Now, many people reading this in 2008 will immediately be able to spot the flaws in this chain of reasoning - first of all, of course gay men in the 40's and 50's had weird relationships with their dads. That proves fuck-all. Second of all, you're only looking at gay men who are in traditional 3x/week psychoanalysis, so that's not exactly a representative sample. Those guys probably had even weirder relationships with their dads than most gay men of the era. Finally, when he happened upon gay men who claimed to have good relationships with their dads, he would question them and undermine them and work on their "defenses" until he was satisfied that in fact the relationship had been terrible all along. It never occurred to Dr. Bieber, but he would never see anything except for confirmatory evidence of his theories, because that's all he ever looked for. Even in the 70's when people started calling bullshit, he stuck to his guns and never changed his mind.

Popper famously criticized Freudian psychoanalysis because so many of Freud's claims were inherently unfalsifiable - e.g. the claim that the human sexual system is structured around a scaffolding of an inherent desire to have sex with your parents (ick, right?). If you've ever had thoughts or dreams about having sex with your parents, that's just proof of what Freud was saying. If you have never had such thoughts or dreams, that's also proof of what Freud was saying, because you suppresssed your desires because they were so powerful and dangerous. Thus, both the presence and the absence of some phenomenon are taken as proof of the theorem, and as such it cannot be falsified. Now, I know that many of my peeps who are into psychodynamic therapy will have problems with this characterization, and I admit there is room for argument. I think that some (not all) psychoanalytic ideas are entirely falsifiable (I also would be willing to bet that a even a cursory effort at experimentation would, in fact, falsify them; but that's another story).

One point that is undeniable is that the history of psychoanalysis has been riddled with all the features that we discussed earlier: endless claims of amazing powers and superiority over other strains of therapy, terrible schisms among sects over seemingly trivial issues, assurances that even basic proficiency in psychoanalysis could come only after many years of dedicated study, etc. In contrast, academic psychology has never had a permanent schism. It has had fads, it has had crazy ideas that held sway for too long, but eventually everyone gets welcomed back into the fold or else they die of old age. People seldom get too big for their britches for long before some young whippersnapper brings them down a peg or two.

So how does academic psychology do it? Do we just have really great personalities and thinking skills? Absolutely not. We do it the same way that all sciences manage it: we have an agreed-upon method of settling arguments. When people disagree, we perform experiments. If you think someone else is full of shit, you design an experiment to prove it. If somebody thinks that something is true, they design an experiment in such a way that they are essentially trying to prove themselves wrong. That way, when that one jerk stands up in the back during your presentation and tells you that you're full of shit because you didn't consider such and such hypothesis, you can say "Actually, we did consider that, and we tested it, and even so we didn't manage to prove our hypothesis wrong". All experiments are supposed to be designed to satisfy that jerk who thinks that you're actually just full of shit. When two scientists disagree on whether a theory is true, they should be able to come up with an experiment that they can both agree beforehand is a good way of settling their disagreement. Just as two martial artists can agree that getting into a cage and trying to kill each other is probably a good way of figuring out whose method is better for trying to kill people.

For instance, if I was talking to Dr. Bieber back in the day, I'd present my concerns with the evidence that he had gathered for his theory. Then I'd say, well, if having a weird relationship with your dad makes you gay, then maybe we can find a group of people who are more likely to have weird relationships with their dads for unrelated reasons and see if more of them are gay. Like, we could look up men who were raised by their stepdads and not their real dads. And we could limit our sample to men whose stepdads were convicted of violent offenses prior to their birth, just to get a nastier group of stepdads. And we'll compare them to men who grew up with their real dads, dads who haven't ever been convicted of a crime. We'll double check to make sure our two groups actually differ in terms of how weird their relationship with their dad is, and then if you're right, there should be a few more gay dudes in the stepdad group. If there's no difference between the two groups, then you have to agree to stop with this stupid theory.

Does it actually work? Not always, some guys are just stubborn as hell, but eventually those guys die of old age and everyone else can see you did everything you could to take their criticism seriously. The ideas that stand up despite all your best efforts to falsify them are the ones that get transmitted to the next generation of scientists.

Quick political note

Okay, so I can define several different versions of the Bush doctrine, versions that would satisfy the entire political spectrum; fellows from the American Enterprise Foundation as well as the Center for American Progress would harrumph in agreement. Can I be vice president now? People who read the paper on a regular basis are asking themselves this question across America today. But I'm not going to get mad about the fact that I have at least 30 or 40 people who are more qualified to be vice president than Sarah Palin in my cell phone. Or the fact that I have at least 2 women who are way more qualified to be vice president than Sarah Palin in my immediate family. My mother graduated from Radcliffe, was second in her class at Columbia Law when there were like 3 women in the entire class, argued in front of the Supreme Court for the Solicitor General's office (once while pregnant with me!), fought crime and corruption for the Antitrust division of the Justice Department for 30 years, and she reads the fucking paper and knows what the Bush Doctrine is. But I'm not mad about that today. Because deep down, I'm just mad that Sarah Palin is winning. No, today I'm actually, seriously mad about the man behind the curtain.

Because if Sarah Palin is the A-Rod of this campaign (hated by those who hate her stupid fucking team because she is so good and she's going to make that stupid fucking team win another fucking time which is so fucking unfair), then Steve Schmidt is the Bill Belichick: hated because he is such an evil human being with a heart that is a small lump of rusty iron and with a brain that is a seething, wriggling mass of trickery and deception.

Just watch this ad, especially around 0:18, and tell me that they're not subtly accusing Barack Obama of whistling at a white woman.

Epistemology & Eschatology

So, Large Hadron Collider, right? I've been worrying a little bit about this thing for like a year now; Adrian procrastinated until the last minute and did all her worrying about it last night in one big dose. Little did we realize that apparently we have to wait until "late fall" for the first meaningful collisions to happen, which means a few months of endlessly pressing refresh on hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com. I'm not entirely clear on this, but it kind of sounds like the collisions that scientists say are definitely not going to create any black holes or strangelets, these totally-safe collisions might happen at any point during that "late fall, early-winterish" period. That's the type of scientific precision usually reserved for telling your advisor when that dissertation is going to get written. I have some more problems with the vagueness of the timing on this apocalypse, but I'll get to those later. Just in general, having scientists promise you that they thought really hard about it and they decided that their new Definitely-Not-A-Doomsday-Machine will absolutely, positively not destroy all human life is a bit like having your kid's school bus driver assure you that he's spent a lot of time thinking about it and he's definitely 100% positive that he's not going to rape your kids.

So like I said I've been worrying about this for a while now. I've come to some sort of peace with it, but my route to equanimity was a bit roundabout and I suspect that walking you through it will make you more nervous than you already are, if you're prone to that sort of thing. So you might want to skip this post.

So when I first knew that there were any "end of existence" concerns associated with the LHC, I read that a variety of theorists with very different perspectives and opinions had all looked at the issue and concluded that there was no reason to be concerned. But hold on, I said, think about the number of great scientific experiments, particularly in physics, where the results weren't in any way consistent with any prevalent theories of the way the world worked. Like not even that the results ran counter to existing theories, like the results were so far out there and unexpected that existing theories were left holding their dicks and scratching their heads. A paradigm shift, you might say, if you were a Kuhnian (which I'm definitely not, and even Kuhn himself may not have been). Leaving aside debates about how science progresses: just in general, how can we accurately measure the probability of unforeseen consequences? As Don Rumsfeld said, there are known unknowns, and then there are unknown unknowns. So this line of thinking got me a little worried.

So let's posit for a moment that the end of the world might be nigh. When Adrian got all worked up last night, I tried to calm her down by explaining my method for calming myself down when I'm on airplanes that are going through turbulence. I've found that reminding myself that turbulence almost never leads to planes having critical failures doesn't do much to relax me (again, your kid's bus driver "almost never" rapes children). Instead, I pretend that I am going to die, and I try to review my life so far to see if I'm okay with this fact. Did I accomplish as much as I could given my lack of intestinal fortitude? Did I treat people reasonably well given my general lack of moral fiber? The conclusions I draw are rarely very comforting in the existential sense, but for some reason I get very calm about the turbulence. So how did this self-soothing method go over with Adrian? Let's just say she found it wanting.

Why did she find this method so inadequate to the task at hand? It's worth considering the ideas of another Jewish apocalypticist in answering this. I'm talking, of course, about my main man: Jesus H. Christ. Credit for highlighting the fact that Jesus was neither a free-love hippy nor a free-market capitalist but instead a wild-eyed predictor of imminent doom goes to another all-around good guy, Albert Schweitzer (speaking of good guy, isn't there a line from some movie where the heroine is a little drunk and she's saying that all men are putzes, except maybe that Dr. Schweitzer, he seems nice? What movie was that?).

The idea here is that so much of what Jesus preached to his followers could actually be demonstrated to pretty wildly violate the categorical imperative. That is, if everyone started doing what Jesus told his followers to do - abandon their wives and kids, stop working, renounce all property, and travel the land spreading the gospel to others, etc., the world would pretty quickly fall apart and everyone would be utterly miserable. The deep dark secret of Christianity is that from a societal perspective, Jesus' actual commands are not exactly models of sustainability, and they sure as shit are not conducive to civic stability or "family values". Along with a lot of textual evidence that I'm not qualified to discuss, basically Schweitzer (and more recently Bart Ehrman) make a pretty convincing case that Jesus was actually, literally predicting that the world would end in his lifetime. Turns out he was wrong, but it was a ballsy call to make.

But given that his premise turned out to be wildly off-base, how did this crazy Jew's conclusions catch on like such wildfire? To bring it back to grad school, he (perhaps unwittingly) did a little trick that any advisor knows can work miracles in clarifying the minds of his students: he gave them a fake deadline. When someone tells you that your dissertation has to be done in 3 months, suddenly the scales fall from your eyes. You see what is truly important, and what is mere distraction. Suddenly your complacency over the years seems like a terrible mistake that you do not even have time to mourn, because right now you need to bust ass to make it right, before it's too late. Of course, your advisor can only make this trick work if he actually gives you a very specific date and time as your deadline, not if he's like "Oh, try to get it done at some point during the fall, or early winter. Late winter at the latest". THAT IS NOT HELPFUL AT ALL, LHC PEOPLE (and also my advisor).

In any event, the power of this kind of last-minute mental clarity can be seen in other phenomena such as the memento mori, or the Buddhist meditation on loathsomeness (speaking of which, when I read contemplations like the following: "but again, O priests, a priest, if perchance he sees in a cemetery a decaying body being eaten by crows, or being eaten by eagles, or being eaten by vultures, or being eaten by dogs, or being eaten by jackals, or being eaten by various kinds of insects, he compares his own body, saying, "Verily, my body also has this nature, this destiny, and is not exempt," am I alone in thinking of Kenny? Perhaps South Park has depths we're not aware of). These are obviously exercises aimed at provoking a more individualistic self-appraisal and sense of detachment from material things. To me, one of the interesting things about contemplating the apocalypse is that you're forced to consider not just the nubbles on your own soul but rather how we've all been doing (of course, if you're an atheist, a materialist, and a solipsist, then there's no functional difference between your own death and the end of all existence - I'm only 2 out those 3, though).

Of course, figuring out how we've all been doing, there's the rub: for Adrian, for Jesus, for everyone. Of course, the obvious answer is that we're doing terribly, and we've been doing terribly for a long time. I've always thought that if you wanted to start your own cult, or political movement, or whatever, all you have to do is approach people indiscriminately and, whatever argument you put to them, start out with the premise that something is terribly wrong with the world. People's bullshit detectors seem to malfunction as soon as you start with this premise. It also seems to help if you tell them that they're special for having noticed. "I know you've felt it, you've sensed it since you were young, although it wasn't always easy to put into words. This isn't the way things are supposed to be. Something's gone terribly wrong. You tried to ignore it, but it was always there, in the back of your mind. I'm sure you've noticed that there is something different about you, something that forced you to keep looking, even when it made things difficult for you. The others didn't always understand what you were looking for, did they? Well, I understand. I can help you find those answers. I'll just need 20% of your pre-tax income. And also sex."

Is it really true, though? Have things really gone so terribly with the world that it would be a tragedy if it ended now? Or have we actually had a pretty good run, like Seinfeld? Would any further millennia just end up being kind of a let-down? I'd certainly say that humans have had our moments. Of course, we've been pretty awful to each other a lot of the time, but, you know, we gave it a go. We had some laughs. I guess the flaw in the Seinfeld argument is that it presupposes an audience, which, if the world suddenly slips out of existence, there won't be one of. I think that's the saddest part for me, is that there will be no future observers to look at what we all did with a little objectivity and appreciate it or condemn it. When Jesus was predicting the end, he of course had in mind the ultimate audience: him and his Dad, judging your ass. When a secular humanist considers something terrible like a nuclear holocaust, at least you can take comfort that there will be some cockroaches afterward to think to themselves how delicious Twinkies are. And of couse, if I died from turbulence, there would presumably be a funeral at which I would expect people to gloss over my lack of moral fiber. But if our planet twinkles out of the space-time continuum, no dice.

So it turns out that thinking about the end-times and considering our collective moral failings, while good for the soul, is not so great for the anxiety level. Why am I so calm about this whole thing, then? Faith. Not in Jesus, but in scientific consensus. So much of what I do as a researcher depends upon information provided to me by researchers and theorists in other fields whose work I am not qualified to judge. Every time I run a filter on my data, I have faith that all the electrical engineers who have spent their lives studying the properties of filters haven't made some critical error that has somehow gone overlooked for decades. I need to have faith in them because I don't have the time or the mental capacity to check their work. I have faith that, contra Kuhn, there is scientific consensus which occasionally gets completely overturned, and then there is no joke we're positive about this it's really fine consensus. If you asked a schizophrenia researcher if there was some consensus on certain theories within the field, he might be able to offer you a few ideas that are very widely accepted. If you told him that the continued existence of the planet depended on these ideas being correct, he'd be like "NOOOO!!!!!". We (schizophrenia researchers) have consensus on a few points, but we're not really sure about anything. That's Kuhnian "overturned at any minute" consensus. In contrast, I have some sense of what "seriously, we're definitely sure about this" consensus looks like, and the people talking about the LHC seem to have it. So I'm not too worried.

Still, call your mother.