A Thing That is Weird

Belief maps: part one.

2009-03-15T21:54:00.000-07:00

I am still upset about the recent violence visited upon a faculty member in my department by animal liberationists. I am friends with members of his lab, I have taken a course with him (as well as with another psychology professor who made headlines several years ago after he publicly stated that he was discontinuing animal research because the lives of his young children had been threatened), he is part of my community. To see his property firebombed, his life threatened, to hear him called a "piece of human shit", because of his use of animals in research is horrifying (btw, if terrorists blow up your car, will insurance pay for that? I'm kind of thinking it probably doesn't. Seems trivial, but much would that suck to just lose your car? Second btw: what is going on with indymedia? They just post terrorist press-releases as news? Fucking hippies).

I have a long history of utter contempt for animal-rights activists who focus on animal testing in scientific research - there was a cadre of hippy dimwits at my small liberal arts college who periodically engaged in "actions" to shut down animal testing in the neuroscience department - think spraypainting messages on sidewalks late at night, rappelling from the roof of the library with banners and then just hanging out there for a few days, just a lot of really useful and productive shit. Left unaddressed in their endless letters to the editor of our college review was why they were so focused saving the lives of a litter of a few dozen rats (our neuroscience department was tiny) who died in order to contribute to the sum of human knowledge about the inner workings of the brain, instead of on all the thousands of fucking cows and pigs that we students were eating every day because we thought that meat was delicious and we liked delicious things.

I mean, obviously as a vegetarian I think there's a good argument to be made that the utter scrumptiousness of meat is, on balance, outweighed by the cruelty of the treatment that animals receive in factory farms (just slightly, though - god, meat is so fucking tasty). The strength of the argument against animal testing pales in comparison with the argument against eating meat, and the comparative numbers of animals involved are just ridiculous. So why was some scruffy asshole hanging outside of my library carrel with a banner when I was studying? I have to believe that there were some Daddy issues involved. Standing outside of the dining hall trying to get your peers to stop eating meat sounds like kind of a drag, but sticking it to The Man with an action? That sounds awesome! "All these know-it-all professors with their rules and their grades and their biomedical research, they're just like my dad! Fuck you, dad!"

So the terrorists are upsetting, but, I hate to say, almost expected. Just as I kind of expect there to be a couple of anti-abortion activists just this side of a murderous rampage somewhere in Colorado Springs, I expect there to be a few dangerously self-righteous animal rights nutballs somewhere in SoCal. What's actually been slightly terrifying is confronting the range of ignorance in the aftermath of the attack - the comments posted to news articles, etc. have been really terrifying. Some of them are just frothing at the mouth from vegan idiots - DID YOU KNOW YOUR GLASSOF MILK CONTAIN PUS ITS TRUE LOOK IT UP ON INTERNET, but some of it seems to be words put together by people who know how to read and write but not how to think or make decisions, e.g.

"I couldn't care less for the safety or welfare of anyone who inflicts harm on animals in the course of their work. Do your medical testing with computer models, on willing humans or not at all."

Really, you couldn't care less for their safety? What about the safety of people who kill animals and rip the flesh from their bones and then eat that flesh? Not worth anything to you either? So maybe we should firebomb little kids who like hot dogs? Also, this whole "computer modeling" thing is so transparently ridiculous. Computer models play a role in understanding how complex systems work, but how the fuck do you think you program a computer model? How do you think you set the parameters of the model and double check to make sure that your current model has some sort of biological validity? And even if your model is amazing and incredibly accurate and the best anyone has ever seen, the best you could hope for is to maybe model how one layer of cells in one small area of cortex handles one specific type of information under ideal conditions and never mind that it leaves out basically all of reality like genes and metabolic activity and all that stuff for the moment because no one in the scientific community would ever expect your computer model to replace reality; only a complete fuckwit would think that you could stop looking at reality entirely and now only do research on a computer model of reality and computer models will be science from now on and GAAAAH WHERE DID YOU LEARN TO USE YOUR BRAIN YOU DIDN'T LEARN RIGHT.

Okay, deep breath. The other inaccuracy that's been bugging me is this word vivisection. I'm not even sure what these people mean when they say vivisection - to me it means the thing that 19th century physicians and scientists did where they would basically dissect an animal while it was still alive, which is fucked up but then have you seen the 19th century? Nobody does that now. There are plenty of scientists who anesthetize their animals and then perform surgeries on them and then administer pain medications once the animal wakes up again, just like we do with people, but that is hardly comparable. And, as far as I know, the professor who got firebombed doesn't even perform surgeries on his monkeys! He euthanizes them once the experiment is over so that he can examine their brains. If you find that horrifying and morally unjustifiable, then all I can ask is that you again look around you. You are surrounded by people who euthanize animals every day so they can eat them in sandwiches, which does nothing to help us understand or treat terrible disorders like drug addiction. Are you firebombing your friends and neighbors? Maybe you should start, see how far it gets you.

Okay, so it's taking me a while to get around to my point, so let's call this part one. Part two to follow.

Mt. Lowe Railway Trail

2009-03-09T00:45:00.000-07:00

Sorry to have been absent from my blog for so long. Turns out dissertations are actually kind of hard to do, not to mention time consuming. Regardless, mine seems like it might actually happen this year, and I am also set up with a job in LA for next year, so I am breathing a little easier this week. In celebration of having a weekend that I didn't have to work through, I decided to go for a hike today. I picked the Mt. Lowe Railway Trail pretty much at random from my book of local hikes, and I thought it was pretty awesome. Basically, there was once a funicular that went up this mountain to a grand hotel that was the place to rest and recuperate in the late 1890's for a few years before it was destroyed in various fires and storms. They had bowling alleys and billiard rooms and all kinds of diversions for the rich and famous of Los Angeles and Pasadena to amuse themselves. Once you were at the top, there was also once a trolley line that went around the edges of the mountains purely for sightseeing purposes, and it went over all kinds of crazy bridges and horseshoes to make it up the necessary elevations. Apparently it was an engineering marvel of the time. Now the hotel is in ruins and the rail embankments have been converted to a lovely hiking path that anyone can enjoy, even impoverished saps such as myself. You park at the edge of Altadena on surface streets, and then walk up one hell of a hill to get the hotel. This stretch is like a non-stop party on Sunday mornings, because there's just so many people. Little 4 year olds running around and trying to dig up erosion-control equipment, delightful older couples taking their morning consitutional, just everybody was out. Once you get to the hotel, then you take the old train embankment around in a big loop that goes on for most of the day. This stretch was almost entirely empty except for a few pairs of mountain bikers speeding down the hill (one pair with a hilarious dog wearing a backpack running madly after them with its tongue hanging out the side of its mouth). Here are pictures of the things that I saw!

This is a picture of hotel ruins, possibly a dance floor? Possibly with a bartender informing you that you have always been the caretaker?

Here are funicular ruins, which sounds like an Enya song:

Here is the rail embankment as it goes through the "granite gates", which apparently took eight months to cut. People were way more patient back then.

Here is a burned out stump of a tree that is filled with rocks. I assume this happened when there was a crazy rockslide and all these rocks bounced into the tree and got stuck there. Nature crazy!

Here is inspiration point, which has little fake telescopes pointing to all the things you can see from there when it's not too cloudy or foggy. It was beautiful and sunny when I was there but unfortunately the lowlands were socked in with fog, so I couldn't see shit.

Here is the scope aimed at Silverlake. You can just make out some fucking hipsters.

Going on hikes for me is like a neverending conversation between Little Toph and Big Toph. Big Toph is all, "In any venture, it is paramount to consider not only the probability of misadventure, but the consequences thereof in the current setting - we may be certain that we will not fall, but if we should fall, will it lead to a bruised ego, a twisted knee, or certain death?" Little Toph is like, "Holy crap, there's a cave in that rock wall. There's probably treasure in there. We should try to scramble up that patch of scree and check it out."

Strong recommend for this hike! Although it's 12 miles and took me about 6 hours with lunch and snack breaks, and now my knees feel like I'm 90, so I'd pre-dose with Tylenol if you are old and feeble like me.

Meteoric

2009-02-02T18:54:00.000-08:00

So I was listening to the oldies station this weekend, and a couple of things that are weird occurred to me: first, that the Grammys have always sucked. When I was a youngster and cringing at the thought of Celine Dion's Falling Into You being the best album released in 1997, I sort of assumed that the contest was decided by a bunch of fat old men with visible chest hair and gold chains who maybe had been kind of cool at one time but now were not cool any more. From what the Oldies DJ was saying, this is apparently not true - the Grammys have actually been steadily getting cooler as time goes on, and have just now reached a point of moderate suckiness from the depths of awfulness where they once resided. Interesting aside: what was the best album of 1997, or rather 1996, since that's when all the nominees were released apparently? From my itunes I'd pick Squarepusher's Feed Me Weird Things, but I think The Score from the Fugees is the most awesomely 1996ish of the albums released that year. Obviously certain people are going to choose Pinkterton, and I have no problem with that. I do have a problem with anyone who picks DJ Shadow's Endtroducing. If you haven't admitted to yourself that that shit was vastly overrated by now, I have no use for you. It's been 13 years. It's time to admit it and move on.

Anyways, back to the Grammys always having sucked. Now, maybe I should be rejoicing because apparently the Grammys also share my distaste for the Beatles, but they take it a little too far. I'm not bringing Abbey Road to a desert island with me, but I sure as hell wouldn't shaft it to give a Grammy to Blood, Sweat and Tears by Blood, Sweat and Tears. Which same also beat out At San Quentin, which just makes you angry. I mean, c'mon. The best album of the year 1970 was a jazz fusion record? Do you hate posterity or something?

The one that really got my goat was 1981, though. Christopher Cross by Christopher Cross? Beats Pink Floyd's the motherfucking Wall? The movie version of The Wall had a very strong role to play in my adolescence, so perhaps I'm a bit biased (note for those who knew me in college - remember the eyebrow thing? That was because of the Wall). But this seems insane. I have never even heard of this pasty motherfucker, but apparently this album was noted for being one of the most influential soft-rock albums of the early eighties. Christ.

In any event, the fact that Outkast could win or Radiohead could get routinely nominated is like a miracle when you think about how lame the Grammys used to be. So Kanye should stop complaining.

Here's the second thing that is weird that occurred to me because of the oldies station: the DJ was describing someone's rise to fame as being meteoric, and I was like, that sounds very familiar but it can't possibly be the right expression. But then I looked and it is the right expression. This expression makes no sense, this meteoric rise. Meteors do not rise, they fall. They are one of the few objects in the world that are defined by their falling. If you were trying to create an expression that served as an intensifier for rising, it would seem that you could not pick any worse word or phrase than meteoric, save maybe dead monkey. Also, why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway? Airplane food, it's the worst! And those peanuts they give you!

In fact, if you bother to look at the definition of meteoric (which I just did), you realize that the aspect of meteors that is meant to be analagous to persons in the midst of a rise to fame is not the vector of their trajectory, but rather its swiftness and sudden but temporary brilliance, which makes it really quite a lovely turn of phrase when you think about it. Now I feel stupid.

I'm in danger of starting a migraine blog.

2009-01-20T16:17:00.000-08:00

Mostly because when a migraine hits I'm stuck at school (can't drive home until my left visual field returns), too spacey to do work, and too attention deficient to read, so all I can do is blog. This one will be brief. I'd just like to point out something that I'd never noticed until my cortex started shutting down: how incredibly, mind-fuckingly red fruit punch Gatorade is. I bought a bottle to wash down some travel-sized Excedrin, and it's just sitting on my desk now, blowing me away with its Platonic ideal of redness. It's like a giant ruby that Sinbad the Sailor stole from a Roc and then mistakenly put on sale at the student store for a buck fifty. And also you can drink it and replenish your electrolytes, which you can't do with most giant rubies, only this motherfucker right here.

Things that I am crazy for not liking

2009-01-11T22:19:00.001-08:00

Here is a brief list of things that it blows peoples minds when I say I don't like them. Dismiss me if you want, but what if I'm sane, and the rest of the world is insane?

1) The Beatles. Not in the sense of my choice in Beatles vs. Stones is Stones, although it is. If a Beatles song comes on the radio, I will change the channel. How can this be? How can I be such a hateful person? I will say that I used to like the Beatles, a lot, when I was 5. From the ages of 5-10 I liked the Beatles a huge amount. Now listening to them is like listening to running water. It is like watching the Goonies for the 78th time, but now as an adult. There's no way I'm going to get any enjoyment at all from any Beatles song. I'm sorry. (interesting note: I also loved Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass to an alarming degree when I was a wee tyke. I have no explanation for this. Also, just to add insult to injury, I still like Herb Alpert and the TJB).

2) Water. I love juice, I love soda, I love milk, I don't like water. I especially don't like water if I'm eating food. If I'm eating a delicious tuna melt made with rye bread and sharp cheddar and no goddamn celery (more on that later), and I drink a glass of water, that water tastes like a glass of water that someone very quickly dipped a tuna melt into. Tuna melt flavored water. It is gross, and I don't have to like it. I don't know how the rest of you haven't noticed this.

3) Bob Dylan. I'm willing to submit that I might eventually get into Bob Dylan when I am really old. Like when I'm 50, maybe. I enjoyed his book! So that should count for something. This one isn't really fair, I can't really honestly say that I actively dislike Bob Dylan's music, although I'm not really into it. What really, really bores me to tears is people writing about Bob Dylan. Oh my god, so boring. It makes me want to pluck out my eyes.

4) Tuna with celery. So gross! I have a childhood loathing for foods that mix textures too dramatically that I have mostly gotten over. I can now eat chili despite the fact that the texture of beans and the texture of hamburger have absolutely nothing in common with each other and have been unhappily married in this dish for centuries now. I have not gotten over tuna with celery. If you're eating fish, or any meat really, you don't want anything to crunch. Crunching means you got a gill, or a fin tumour, or something. Not delicious.

5) Tomatoes. I love cooked tomatoes, I love tomato sauce, I love ketchup (catsup?), but I hate fresh tomatoes. Haters are always like, "Oh, you just haven't ever tried a really good, fresh vine ripened tomato, where you can sink your teeth into it and it spews into your mouth all its gooey seeds and mush" and I'm like okay hater, I'm not friends with you any more. What are some other things that you enjoy eating? Babies brains that you suck through their soft spots? Because fresh tomatoes taste like little Vomit Exploderz. Seriously, the flavor of fresh tomato is strongly reminiscent of throw up. Don't get me started on Fried Green Tomatoes (the food - loved the movie).

6) Citizen Kane. Not that great. Certainly not the greatest movie ever. I don't care how revolutionary the shots were, Birth of a Nation had a lot of innovative technical achievements too, that doesn't make it the greatest ever. Did anybody really care what Rosebud was? I didn't. This movie was a snoozefest.

7) Awards shows. Timely, right? I hate awards shows. Emmys, Grammys, Golden Globes, Oscars, you name it, I hate it. I hate scripted banter that isn't funny and just makes you feel bad for famous people for being so lame. I hate acceptance speeches. You can basically just do one of four things: weepy, nervous, jokey, or straight ahead. None of these is entertaining, ever. I hate hosting. I hate song numbers, I hate dance numbers, and I hate hate song and dance numbers.

8) Garrison Keillor. AAAAAAAGH, I HATE THIS MOTHERFUCKER SO FUCKING MUCH. I HATE HIS STUPID MIDDLEBROW HUMOR I HATE HIS LAME FUCKING OLD-TIMEYNESS I HATE HOW HE BLOGS ABOUT HIS SEX LIFE WITH HIS GROSS OLD BODY I JUST WANT HIM TO FUCKING DIE.

9) J.D. Salinger. It would require a whole separate blog post to really explain why I hate this bitch so much. Let's just say that I wasn't surprised when I learned he force fed his family frozen peas, because reading Catcher in the Rye was pretty much an equivalent experience.

Movie Studio Malpractice!

2008-12-05T19:49:00.001-08:00

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...

2008-12-04T23:01:00.000-08:00

...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

2008-12-01T16:12:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-11-28T22:56:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-25T20:40:00.001-08:00

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.

2008-11-24T16:34:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-11-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-11-05T14:50:00.001-08:00

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!

2008-10-28T23:06:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-10-21T14:23:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-10-12T14:13:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-08T23:16:00.001-07:00

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.

2008-10-01T18:19:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-09-20T13:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-17T23:32:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-14T18:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-10T13:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Briefly

2008-09-08T13:10:00.000-07:00

A thing that is weird: the depth of people's desire to have someone take a picture of them and post it on the internets. I guess I'd sort of confronted this fact several years ago when I became old-person-aware of cobrasnake and misshapes (old-person-awareness is when you are old like me and you become vaguely aware that the kids are doing some new thing, but you do not fully grasp why they would do this thing, and you feel a sinking in the pit of your stomach that this is the future because it seems pretty fucking lame, but then maybe you're no longer able to accurately diagnose lameness because you are so old), but I confronted it up close and personal this weekend. We went to an event at LACMA called LA Flash, which was basically a cool exhibit of photography of street styles in 1973, but they were comparing it to street style today as well, so they were taking photos of the guest's street style. Here's the thing: you had to wait in line to have your photo taken, and people were all waiting in this crazy long line so that someone would take a picture of them and put it on the internet. Is it really that hard to get your picture on the internet? Have you run into so many roadblocks in this quest that you're forced to pay $10 admission and stand in an endless line? Apparently the answer is an enthusiastic yes (n.b. that we did not pay admission because I lied to a dude and said that we were looking for someone that we had lost, which I feel bad about but we got there super late and I did pay $8 for a Heineken). Adrian also blogged about this, so if you're into Rashomon-style dueling blogs, here you go. Adrian would probably also like me to mention that the most likely source of my bad attitude is that my street style is wack, whilst hers is fresh.

An ersatz Disneyland

2008-09-05T15:07:00.000-07:00

So I was reading this very real news article from the Sioux-City Journal that has drawn attention for the unintentional Onionesqueness of its prose. For those of you too lazy to click through, it's a slightly breathless article about how the citizens of Sioux City, Iowa, are very excited that they finally (finally!) have an Olive Garden opening up in their fair city. First question: how the hell did it take this long for the Olive Garden to get around to opening a branch in Sioux City? Second question: how dare the commentariat make fun of the residents of Sioux City for being excited about an Olive Garden? Now, admittedly, the Olive Garden is a shitty restaurant with bland-ass food and commercials that make it seem as if non-self-hating-Italian-Americans would actually eat at an Olive Garden. But as someone who loves the equally ersatz but much more delicious Macaroni Grill, I say we have to take a stand. People who are all like "Oooh, I'm all fancy and I demand authenticity from my restaurants and I get all uncomfortable in places that share an enormous parking lot with the Ruby Tuesday and the Outback Steakhouse" are... well, actually, they're my parents, and they're very nice people in a lot of ways. They prefer that their food not be developed by the good folks at the Institute of Food Technologists, which is fine, if a bit quaint.

But, the problem is, if you live in Los Angeles and you're really going to insist on authenticity in all things, you're going to miss out on a lot of awesome stuff. You could still eat at burrito trucks, I guess, and you could drink at Del's (but not on fucking karaoke night! Related post for later: why I hate karaoke so much). But then someone is eventually going to be like "Hey, I need to go buy some mass-market casual clothing that projects a comfortable familiarity with clam bakes, G&T's, and playing with golden retrievers whilst ensconsed in weathered dinghys" and you're like, "That's fine, but for myself I need to ride a make-believe choo-choo train for approximately 50 feet!" and then you both look at each other, smile, and say "Of course, The Grove!". This happens to me and my girlfriend all the time. Actually, mostly it happens to my girlfriend, and then I am a person who hates fun, so I'm all "I haaaaaate The Grove, please don't maaaake me".

For non-Angelenos, The Grove is a "retail and entertainment complex", sort of like a cross between an upscale outdoor mall and a movie set, with false-fronts to each store that collectively are meant to suggest... I don't know, actually. I want to say Venetian villas, but that doesn't seem accurate? Regardless, it's a big fake"experience" that must have suggested "class, but at a discount!" to some focus group; it comes complete with cobble-stone streets and footbridges and fountains and piped-in Sinatra. Also it has a choo-choo train for reasons that escape me. It is the sort of thing that Jean Baudrillard would have had a lot to say about if he hadn't apparently died of typhoid several years ago (btw, typhoid? wtf? That's some Anne of Green Gables shit right there). In short, deep down I am my parent's son, and The Grove is not my favorite place.

But! On a recent excursion to The Grove with couple friends Tammy and David, we ate at a magical place called Morel's French Steakhouse and Bistro. We actually ate on the first floor, which I guess is the bistro part. Imagine, if you will, that the producers of Saved By The Bell decided to make a special "study abroad" episode in gay Paris, and at the very last minute they informed the set designer that they needed an "authentic Parisian bistro" for an important scene where Kelly Kapowski is seduced by a Frenchman in a beret, and the set-designer (I imagine her as a chain-smoking, mid-fifties, bleach-blond, overtanned badass) managed to knock one out at the last possible minute using only materials that she had on hand. You can almost hear her in the background quietly mumbling "shit ass motherfucker suck dick assholes" etc.

So the decor, not so much. Neither the wait-staff, who are authentically Parisian in that they are not terribly motivated to be good at their job (also they have white smocks on!). So what did I like so much? Well, their croque monsieur was fucking delicious, if not very authentic. It used chicken instead of ham, but apparently croque monsieur is like a classic cocktail: variations on a theme are expected and welcomed. All I know is, things with melted emmental and baked-on Bechamel sauce are fucking delicious.

And if you're still Quixotically looking for authenticity in this place, I can also recommend their selection of fine liqueurs. They have them all! Galliano, Benedictine, Tuaca, Chartreuse, just a whole bunch of liqueurs. If I remember correctly, I thought about getting a glass of Chartreuse but decided against for some reason. For those who've never had it, Chartreuse is delicious and about as authentic as something can get without being like a granite boulder or something. The color is named after it, that's how OG Chartreuse is. The Carthusian monks who make it in have been around for like 900 years. If you saw Into Great Silence, apparently those are the same dudes (I haven't seen it yet, that shit's been number two on my Netflix for like a year because the next disc of the Wire keeps getting bumped up).

My point, then, if I actually have one, is that even in the most false and derivative place in Los Angeles (The Grove beats out Universal CityWalk for this title by a slim margin - Universal CityWalk is the ersatz Disneyland of my title, a place my parents would just refuse to set foot in. My mother would describe it as too loud, both visually and auditorially. They have giant flaming guitars, shitty live bands, and a giant neon-rimmed King-Kong dressed up according to the season - currently I believe he's wearing board shorts and sunglasses. I imagine the message is "Hey, this gorilla likes to have a good time, and so do we! And we're betting you do too! We're not all snooty like that other retail-and-entertainment complex across town!" Actually, in between the cracks that place is pretty fucking real, we saw some straight-up hookers plying their trade by the Hard Rock Cafe last weekend (we were there for the IMAX - see what I mean about the awesomeness you'd miss out on if you insisted on authenticity?) Also the restaurants at CityWalk are pretty downscale - think Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, which, speaking of simulations, is a fucking restaurant named after two characters in a movie from the nineties - am I blowing your mind yet? How about this, then: the only time I have ever been on a real movie set (i.e. a true falsehood), it was a wrap party that they held on the fake New York street on the ABC lot. It was kind of a weird experience, having a block party on a fake block. You're all chilling, having a beer, standing in the middle of the street, thinking "Hey, it's kind of weird how I'm here in the middle of the street and I'm not worried about getting hit by a car!" like you usually do at a block party, but then you're like "Oh, wait a minute. Fake block." - so I was there courtesy of my roommate Amy for a wrap party of her show, but, get ready to have your mind blown, guess what band was playing that wrap party? The Lieutenant Dan Band, a band fronted by Gary Sinise and inexplicably named after the movie character that he played in that self-same 90's movie).

To start again: even in the most false and derivative place it is possible to find things which are not simulations of some other thing, which were not created so as to suggest some aspirational lifestyle to a focus group, but rather exist because some monk hundreds of years ago tried a strange liqueur recipe that had been given to him and found that the unusual mixture of herbs produced something quite wonderful. Sometimes I worry that eventually all of experience will become a simulation of some other, more distant experience, which will in turn eventually be lost. Chartreuse helps to remind me that there are limits.

Don't you fucking look at her!

2008-09-03T21:07:00.000-07:00

There was a study a while ago that found that true "swing voters" or "independent independents" are the least likely to have even the most basic knowledge of politics - like they're seriously unclear on whether Al Gore or George Bush is the one who likes the environment. It's a bit weird for those of us who decided a long time ago to watch these conventions and try to put ourselves in the mindset of that smidgen of the electorate who really haven't nailed it down to a particular candidate yet. I believe the author of the study I'm thinking of (I can't seem to find it right now) mentioned that one plausible reason why extreme partisans such as myself tend to have a bit more political knowledge is that we are akin to the sports fanatic who knows the teams in his league inside and out - if you are rooting hard enough for one candidate, suddenly ag policy seems kind of interesting and worth reading about.

I think that this idea makes sense, this idea of the political junkie as a fanboy (or girl) for whom it is not enough that we should win, we must be entertained by that win. We don't want our team to run up the score against some bullshit expansion team, we want to beat the Yankees. I hope this idea makes sense, because it's the only explanation as to why I'm so happy about Sarah Palin. Of course, I will be deeply terrified if she becomes vice president, and I really hope that doesn't happen. But this bitch is pure gold. She fucking hates polar bears, and also science. Her husband is a goddamn Eskimo (not an Inuit, apparently). Her first major address on the national stage, and she just stepped up and bitch slapped Barack Obama like her babies weren't out there makin' babies. She fucking supports aerial wolf hunting! Anyone who read Julie of the Wolves as a kid knows that you have to be straight up evil to support aerial wolf hunting. She was surrounded by a crowd of Republicans yelling "Drill, baby, drill!!" like they were bad guys from Captain Planet. She is so much more badass than Mittens Romney will ever be. He was just a slimey dude with no principles who thought everyone would be cool with it if he changed his opinion on abortion suddenly in his fifties. Palin is like the bad guy from Blue Velvet. Frank Booth was scary as hell not because he was willing to cut people's ears off, but because he hated Heinekin and he loved PBR and he wanted you to call him Daddy and not fucking look at him. Sarah Palin feels the exact same way, except about library books.

Also see: Sarah Palin videos, I recommend number 1 and number 4.

Base rates

2008-09-02T20:41:00.001-07:00

It occurs to me that my explanation of base rates may not have made a huge amount of sense to non-psychology people, and I'm not sure that wikipedia's explanation is that much better. The idea of Bayesian inference is that before you consider the probability of something given some evidence, you need to take into account what the probability would be if you had no evidence at all (i.e. the base rate). If you fail to do this, your intuition of probabilities will be way, way off. Especially when the base rate is very low.
So, as an example, say you are looking for something in the trunk of your boyfriend's car. You find a duffel bag in there that contains plastic sheeting, black kevlar gloves, a face mask, duct tape, rope, a knife and a crowbar. If you're anything like my lovely girlfriend, you will immediately conclude that your boyfriend is a serial killer (my girlfriend is also very alert to developing terrorist threats at IMAX screenings of The Dark Knight). But, before you leap to that conclusion, it's useful to consider what the good Rev. Bayes would say. First, what is the probability that a serial killer would have creepy tools in his trunk? Hard to say, but in the interests of being generous to the serial killer hypothesis let's say that 1/3 of all serial killers have creepy tools in the trunk of their car. This is called the conditional probability. Next we have to consider the probability of non-serial killers having these things in the trunk of their car. It would seem like this probability is pretty low, however all of these items were taken from a list of earthquake preparedness items that I was looking at earlier (I keep meaning to make an earthquake preparedness kit, but I probably won't get around to it until after the big one hits). So, let's say that 1% of Californians have an earthquake kit, and 10% of those Californians unwittingly create a creepy-seeming kit, so that's 1/1000 odds. Pretty low! But then, and this is key to Bayesian inference, we have to consider: what are the odds of any given person being a serial killer in the absence of any evidence? That is, what is the base rate of serial killers in the general population? I don't know if there's a good answer to this, but on Wikipedia it looked like there were about 100 known American serial killers (including terrifying ones like Zodiac whose acts are known but are not themselves identified; for completists this list also includes old-timey serial killers like the Bloody Benders). Again, for the sake of being generous to the serial killer hypothesis, let's say that for every one serial killer who is known to the world there are 9 that go undetected, so there's maybe like 1000 serial killers in the US. If there are 300 million Americans, then the base rate is 1/300000. If we plug these three numberrs into the formula from Bayes' theorem, we find that the chance your boyfriend is a serial killer is 0.00111, or a little more than a tenth of a percent. So pretty damn low.
We can use a totally different example, but with similar numbers, to illustrate what happens when you alter the base rate. Let's say you find a CD copy of "Now That's What I Call Deep House! Volume 10!" in the trunk of your boyfriend's car. What's the probability that your boyfriend is secretly gay? We'll keep the conditional probability (odds that a Gay American would have crappy house music in the trunk of his car) at 1/3 (an insult to the musical taste of the gays, I know, I'm sorry, but it's in service of explaining a complicated point. Also, I think it's fair to say that about 1/3 of the gays have SOME kind of terrible taste in music). We'll also keep the chances of a straight guy having this CD at 1/1000. But now, insteade of a base rate of 1/30000, we'll have a base rate of whatever percentage of American guys are gay - we'll pick 4% for the sake of argument. Now, all of a sudden, the odds that your boyfriend is gay is about 93%. Remember, the only thing that changed in this example was the base rate. Also the Deep House. Base rates are incredibly important, and nobody who is thinking "intuitively" is taking them into account, at all. So we end up with ladies who are terrified of their boyfriends for no reason and ladies who are not aware that their boyfriends are secretly gay. All because of ignorance of statistics!

My girlfriend's slow descent into 9/11 Truthiness

2008-09-01T21:24:00.000-07:00

A thing that is both weird and a little upsetting: for a few days there, I thought my girlfriend was going to become a 9/11 Truther, but for Sarah Palin. When the interblogs started buzzing with rumors that Sarah Palin had never been pregnant and actually little Trig was actually daughter Bristol's baby etc., etc., my girlfriend was right there with them for like half a day. Fortunately for our relationship, she abandoned this line of thinking fairly quickly, and now of course we know that in fact Bristol was pregnant with her own damn baby, thank you very much, and also (and here I'm imagining Bristol's response to the interwebs), frankly, fuck you very much for saying she looked pregnant 8 months ago when she wasn't, that's kind of a fucked up thing to say about a 16 year old girl who just happens to be a little chunky around the midsection. But whatever.

If we could I'd like to take us back to those heady days of earlier this weekend when speculation about the maternity of little Trig was running rampant. My girlfriend was citing all sorts of facts that she learned from Tumblr that JUST DIDN'T ADD UP. Such as: the fact that Sarah didn't look like the Demi Moore Vanity Fair cover when she was 6 months pregnant, or that Bristol was taken out of school with "mono" at some time point that was deemed suspicious, or that baby Trig was not listed in the web-based birth announcements of the hospital where he was ostensibly (OSTENSIBLY!!!) born, or how weird it was for a woman to give a speech after her water broke and then fly for 9 hours to get back to Alaska and not tell the flight crew that she was in labor, etc. All of these unusual facts, or "problems" with the official account of Trig's birth, were cited as leading inexorably to one conclusion: Sarah Palin couldn't deal with the shame of her underage daughter making a baby, but also couldn't deal with the sin of anyone having any abortions, so she faked a pregnancy and then pretended Trig was her son instead of her grandson.

What I noticed when my girlfriend was on board with all of this theorizing was a series of classical cognitive mistakes happening in real-time. The first, and most relevant to actual 9/11 truthiness, was the failure to create a positive account. That is, at some point you have to stop pointing out things in the official account that you find hard to believe, and instead you have to put forward your own account of what happened. Matt Taibbi, in The Great Derangement, has rather brilliantly elaborated on how completely idiotic the 9/11 Truth movement is revealed to be if you simply create a positive account for them based on the ideas that they cling to. Similarly, with BristolGate, we can do something similar:

Bristol Palin: Hey mom, sorry to be calling right before your big speech in Texas, but my water just broke.
Sarah Palin: That's okay honey, in keeping with our vast conspiracy that we have going here, I'll tell everyone that my water broke, but then I'll insist on giving this speech anyways, and then I'll insist on flying 9 hours to get back to where you are.
Bristol Palin: Um, mom, wouldn't it make more sense for you not to tell anyone your water broke until you get back to Alaska? That way, nobody will freak out and it won't look as suspicious later on.
Sarah Palin: No, no, I think it's best that I pretend that my water broke at the exact same time as your water actually broke, just so everything lines up. I don't really know what that accomplishes, but there's a nice symmetry to it.

And so on. The second classic cognitive mistake that I see in BabyMamaGate is a failure to take base rates into account. See Bayesian Inference if you don't know what I'm talkin' bout. Yes, all of these "interesting facts" you are listing would be consistent with someone who is pretending that her grandson is her son. Just as a child in an emergency room who had taken aspirin and was vomiting, lethargic, and mentally confused, would be consistent with Reyes Syndrome. That doesn't change the fact that while all these interesting facts are anomalies, they are nowhere near as rare as the condition your are diagnosing based on them. That is, the base rate of mothers pretending their grandchildren are their children is incredibly low in the US. There is no doubt in my mind that the bloggers who are examining the evidence are failing to take that base rate into account, since doctors, scientists, and economists all have been found to fail to take them fully into account when making decisions (and I don't know if this research has been done, but I'd be willing to bet that psychologists who study base-rate errors also fail to fully take them into account when dealing with real-world problems).

The third major cognitive mistake that I see people making in this situation relates to Karl Popper and the falsification model of science. This blog post ended up way longer than I intended, so I'm going to leave this issue for another day, but suffice it to say that the batshit insane bloggers who were propogating these scurrilous rumors spent a lot of time looking for confirmatory evidence and very little time looking for disconfirmatory evidence. As do we all. Of course, that's the opposite of what you want to do if you're interested in finding out the truth about something. A related post for later: how I got to be so fucking discouraged about neuroimaging approaches to neurocognition in psychiatric disorders.

From clinical work to research.

2008-08-31T12:09:00.000-07:00

Here is a thing that is not that weird in general, but is proving to be a weird experience for me. So two weeks ago I finished my year-long clinical internship at the VA and went back to UCLA to finish my dissertation. This has been quite a transition, going from full-time, 40 hours a week of doing therapy and assessment to fucking around with Matlab all day. People in the know have been asking me how it's going so far in that sympathetic but slightly amused tone of voice one reserves for gently inquiring after someone's hemorrhoidal issues.
I came into UCLA for the first time in mid-August and I just sat there and tried to figure out what to do. My first thought was that, just one week prior, my day would consist of going in and doing 1 or 2 sessions of group therapy, seeing an individual or two for therapy, writing up some notes, writing an assessment report, and then I would be totally and completely done with all work that I could possible do that day. Not only that, but people would notice that I had done this work and they would appreciate what I had done and I would be considered competent at my job. Now I come in, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. There is no one here who can tell me what I’m supposed to be doing. If I should, against all odds, happen upon something to do, there is not really any one who can judge if I am doing it well or doing it poorly (unless I meet with them for an hour and explain the thinking behind what I have done and what series of problems and stupid Matlab issues led me to this point, and even then it would take great strength of will on their part to give enough of a shit to even offer a vague opinion that what I have done makes sense and is fine. And believe me, nobody wants to have that meeting). But here is the kicker: irrespective of the competence with which I execute whatever thing I should happen to do on any given day, no one will really care if I did it or failed to do it. I will spend the next year of my life working on something that will have no positive or negative impact on anyone, whatsoever. It will be regarded as, at best, an inconvenience by everyone who comes in contact with it. As soon as it is done it will be forgotten about, forever. If you took the average societal impact of performance art pieces carried out by undergraduates in fulfillment of the requirements of their minor in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at third-tier liberal arts colleges, that average societal impact would vastly overshadow whatever impact my dissertation will have on the world.

On the plus side, I can no longer be sued for malpractice if I show up for work drunk.

Here is a thing that is weird.

2008-08-30T23:34:00.001-07:00

I can't say that things that are weird are going to be a major component of this blog, but here's one to start us off.

So imagine that you had a really bad case of sinus congestion. You have sinus pressure going on, sinus headaches, etc. You're really miserable. Your friend tells you about this nasal spray that works really well for her. You try it out, and it's like heaven, it feels so good. It totally relieves all the symptoms you are having. But then, you read the warning packet insert, and in the small print it says that using this particular nasal spray may cause a small creature to lodge inside your sinuses. This small creature may actually lodge itself into the mucous membrane lining your sinus and begin to suck nutrients out of your flesh. It will grow larger and stronger with these nutrients, and will eventually grow so large that your face will start to become swollen and disfigured. This creature will continue to grow and suck nutrients and disfigure you for several months before it dislodges itself from your sinuses and attempts to exit your face via one of your nostrils. This will be incredibly painful and will require you to go to the hospital, and most likely your nostril will never be the same.

Okay, now ask yourself: would you EVER use that nasal spray, ever again? No, right? That's the most terrifying nasal spray ever. And yet (and I'm assuming you've figured out this is a metaphor for pregnancy) and yet, chicks are like, "Hey, getting pregnant is not the most terrifying thing I've ever considered. It seems totally normal! Hey, that boy is really cute, I'm not at all petrified of the possible side effects of having sex with him!"

That is a thing that is weird.