trying not to think about christmas

as day 7 of struggling through my profile writing assignment comes to a conclusion, it occurs to me that there's a reason most journalists don't write about math. Mountains of Pi being the obvious exception, there's just no easy way to make it accessible, let alone understandable, without cute-ifying it.

it's interesting to me that mathematics has become such a rarefied field, and that applied mathematicians are viewed as the bastard stepchildren of the true theorist types. before he got his act together, gauss spent his days trying to measure the curvature of the earth by surveying as much as he could. some other guy - i'm blanking here - who came up with something electrical that was both useful and elegant was originally totally absorbed by the twitching of frog legs. and it took until the last twenty years or so for mathematical biology in its modern sense to gain true cultural traction.

maybe that's not so interesting. i wish we had a xmas tree this year, that would have been nice.

listened to some messiaen today. the concentration camp cd - not sold yet. now moving on to the birdsong-inspired trilogy... so far not hearing so much the sparrows and the robins as a sequence of single, mildly dissonant chords.

uhaul life

i love how this blog randomly decides the time stamp of my posts. ah, so that's what i was doing at 3:72 a.m.! i'd forgotten.

so, i moved today. i woke up miserably hungover to my phone ringing. it was will calling to figure out if he should come over. clock said 9:30. brain said: ____. clock said 9:31. brain said: OH HELL! HANDBASKETS! HOCKEY STICKS! i was supposed to be up at 6. my uhaul reservation was for 9. i hadn't packed a darn thing, and all i wanted was to obliviate in the fetal position in the bathtub.

so i throw my stuff in boxes and myself on the subway, and i retrieve the van. new york driving: lanes and traffic lights are mere suggestions to be considered and then, perhaps, dismissed. of course three cars fit side by side in a lane. run a red light, sure, why not! honk if you feel an itch. honk if you see a cute dog. and park wherever - you won't find a spot and they'll ticket you no matter what. mine was for $115.

so we move boxes and furniture parts and it all goes relatively smoothly. until will takes off and i drive the van back down to chelsea. halfway there it occurs to me: oh, i don't have my wallet. oh, i don't have my credit cards. or my drivers license. or my jacket. in fact, with $1 in my pocket and dressed in a shirt and jeans, i have no way to get back uptown. and it's winter. so, one very cold sojourn at the uhaul office later, i get ahold of andrew who takes a cab from work, picks me up, gives me money and sends me off to 96th. thank god for friends. really. and the uhaul people were great - much love. i on the other hand was a disaster.

and this was the shortened version of the saga! omitted dramatic elements: the threat of the transit strike. the happy traffic cops. the happy traffic cop who came up and tapped on my window as i sat at the red light and pondered my licenseless driving. and as i rolled down the window, i wondered in the pit of my stomach what on earth i could have done wrong while idling at a red light. but all he wanted to say was, "why don't you smile? things can't be that bad!" weird. how did he know. do people normally strike up conversations with mopey girls driving uhauls?


oh oh oh! fun short movie idea. guy gets kicked out of his apt and moves into an elevator. has a lamp, a nice little chair and desk, some bookshelves. even leaves room for one person to ride up and down. somehow sleeps on a plank that's leaned diagonally across, kind of like sleeping on an airplane. he snipes at people who come home late and drunk. he leads a generally good and cozy life. um, i guess some dramatic arc is lacking, but this was what occurred to me as i and my things filled an elevator and all of a sudden the idea of paying no rent and having all that upward mobility was quite appealing.

the old guard

westbrook pegler should not be forgotten. while his Scopes coverage was uninspiring, he's penned some killer phrases. Memorable Peglerisms: the first is from his days as a sports writer, when he wrote of the fur-clad Yale fans who "rose as one raccoon"; the second is his characterization of the the '20s as "The Era of Wonderful Nonsense".

oh man - "the Booboisie" - Mencken's word for the ignorant middle class. I wonder if i'm boobois.

ethnography for dummies

yet another day of being-in-jschool-is-so-humiliating -- sat and stared at an ATM in Lerner for two hours. aahhh!!! courtesy of prof. sudhir "blind date" venkatesh, also known as prof. sudhir "how does it feel to be black and poor" venkatesh. results: a lot of North Face is being worn around the ATMs at Columbia. conclusion: those who wear North Face are more likely to withdraw money from ATMs, or those who withdraw are more likely to buy North Face than those who don't. AHA! Also, none of the bathrooms have soap.

main info gleaned from today: species-area curve controversy. Developed by amateur ecologist who just happened to be reading over some data in a book one day. But he seemed pretty interesting because he didn't go to grad school or anything but just read a lot and then submitted a collection of publications in lieu of a dissertation.

oh, and lisa fauci's leech animations are pretty crazy.

good good link - i'm sure this will come in useful: http://www.realclimate.org

stimuli

one evening of champagne and scones later, the following observations have been made:

1. a kentucky derby field trip is to be scheduled for may.

2. new research project, Brandon's idea: find a way to model how long it takes for X quantity of liquid to generate bathroom-seeking urges. This could then allow people who have difficulties waking to alarms to time their liquid consumption, or invest in IVs, so they wake up out of the need to pee. (wouldn't this potentially lead to a whole lot of bed-wetting?)

3. funny story on ipods and WaPo lameness:
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/media/2005/media1202.html

excellent words -- bathetic ( = maudlin, another good one). and vulcanologist, it's so star trek.

also, to note: Austrian fMRI study linked caffeine consumption to increased activity in short-term memory sections of the brain - frontal lobe (working memory) and anterior cingulum (attention).

find that NYT article from around Thanksgiving on college kids trading prescription stimulants to improve work performance. nothing new there, but maybe some inspiration.

yesterday's NYT story on the northern atlantic oscillation slowing/cooling via climate change (is it the same as the conveyor belt shutdown fear?) and making europe colder as a result.

scopey thoughts

"As a case it is not as much a legal landmark as much as a social landmark. It was a clash between traditionalism and its values and modernism and its values," said Douglas Linder of the University of Missouri-Kansas City law school, who teaches a seminar on famous trials. "It remains an issue. Darwinism and evolution challenge the notion that we are special as a species."
(source:CNN)

it is TIME for a movement in support of underused punctuation. i'm goddamn mad at the dominance of ... over the {s, >s and \s of language.

maybe this wasn't such a lame idea

for the story idea archives -- the antibiotic-resistant strains of tuberculosis. some guy named goldfarb who's working on it in russian prisons. guy at uwashington profiled on the berkeley evolution museum site. tomasz.

of monkeys and zebrafish

the V&R theory proposes that population-level brain lateralization asymmetries arose because the asymmetry conferred an evolutionary advantage on the group. that is, it paid to have everybody exhibit the same brain biases. the main evidence was in the shoaling of fish, which had a better chance of escaping prey when they all swam together and had the instinctual response of turning the same direction. this is counterbalanced by the prey then figuring out that they should attack on the other side, which conferred some advantage to the outliers in the group, those who swam left when everyone else swam right. then there was evidence that the fish could change the direction of their lateralization, and that some species cycle from left-brain to right-brain and back in their flight response bias.

so what does this tell us about humans/primates/any other animal? that lateralization may have occurred back when we were all fish, or earlier? but then what about the switching? why right in the first place? is it consistent across species?

ooh - it would be fun to write about finch songs. plus ten thousand and three people are studying birdsong. now i see why... it brings together lateralization patterns, learning, communication modes, sound, evolution -> hell yeah.

galapagos, wherefore art thine standards?

excerpts from the cinematic underground's promo card:

Scene III. My Dear Self
Wherein we find, astonishingly, our agonist - driving his Self home.
...
Scene IX. The Face of the Girl [Like Glass]
In which He meets Her at a park and sees hope.

oh sad! in later scenes the Airport beckons him and, alas and lo, a decision is reached.

~

this could be interesting -- from jeffrey hutsler's web page -- music cognition vs. language cognition paper. was expected to be published in cognition; a cursory search didn't turn it up, maybe it's elsewhere? the blurb was from 2003, so don't know what happened.

more links for the frozen brain

apparently today's latte rewired me for happiness, not productivity. icelandic music links to be explored:

http://www.dotshop.se/ds/release.php?code=12TO08CD&rand=243226865

http://icelandreview.com/icelandreview/features/multimedia/?ew_news_onlyarea=&ew_news_onlyposition=12&cat_id=29473&ew_12_a_id=163734

http://www.tonlist.com/ViewAlbum.aspx?AlbumID=5579

http://www.mugison.com/Mugison/Music/albums/

defrosting

about that book idea: so i think the antarctic barber - or pastry chef, whoever - story will have to wait until i'm settled, famous, have an agent, and can do the whole book project in a month. because post-iceland i've decided that visual homogeneity aka complete sensory channeling into eery white and eery blue just won't work for an entire year. i mean, wouldn't that burn something weird onto your retina, like the way screensavers used to save your computer screen from getting shadowy icon tattoos? and what an experience it must be to then leave and see real red, real green for the first time. or maybe the underground world of antarctica is really colorful to compensate, like a psychedelic 60s rennaissance all year all the time. i wonder if there's rampant drug use -- it's not the kind of place where you'd want to get lost on a hallucinogenic whim.

yo. why doesn't anyone sell jakobinarina and/or thorir for cheaper than $40/cd?
http://www.rokk.is/
i'm still simmering in iceland (wait. simmering? iceland? crap.)

gingerly

would apple ginger bread be gross?
how about a banana walnut ginger kablammo bread?
ginger chocolate cake?

ideas of the 7am

how do you study the effects of forgetting on psychological health? want to pursue gazzaniga's idea that we spend so much time forgetting that the impact of memory-enhancing drugs might spur on a whole new set of mental disorders. That we create narratives through selective placement of experiences and events into a storyline that implies the rejection of incompatible memories. (and the related idea that at a certain point the number of incompatibles accumulate to the point of spurring a shift in perception. or understanding.) Well, I don't care so much about the rejected memories as I do about what a person does with what he/she does remember. Is there a link between mental disorder and really great memory? Probably not. What about areas of the brain that are activated when a person experiences confusion --- higher activation in memory areas (hippocampus? ug need to learn brain) as well? (if confusion can serve as proxy for narrative failure)
this whole idea of narrative is too conceptually distant from what you can measure, but it does give a more interesting shape to the musings on the possible impacts of better memory.

other thought - how can you write about emergent social properties from a scientific perspective? effects of caffeine on how people work. doctors working ridiculously long hours. being able to command your mind to pay attention on demand. what has this meant overall in terms of our ability to be productive -- and the pressures it places on others to similarly become superhuman caffeine sinkholes? if some people are relying on caffeine to raise their productivity levels, presumably there is some social pressure to also push yourself further and buy into the stimulus game. obviously this would translate into the cog enhancement debate, but how do you get anything concrete about caffeine and social patterns? look at consumption patterns.

start with studies on caffeine and negative side effects. that study of mice with improved learning and intensified susceptibility to pain.

heaving to action

guilt is a powerful motivator. so i apologize to the lady whose aerodynamic locks suffered my scorn - i'm sorry, i really did like your hair.

may cleanliness always be in vogue!