January 2006 Archives

As The Note hypothesized, polls really are "crack for the weak." Scientists asked political stalwarts on either side to watch videos of Kerry and Bush while they monitored the participants' brains:

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."
...
But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

Two important points: (1) this study did not have a control group (though sometimes subjects were asked to listen to Tom Hanks), and (2) both Democrats' and Republicans' brains reacted with disgust when shown pictures of John Kerry. (Okay, that second one is pure conjecture on my part.)

Finished off "Fall" term yesterday. Roomie had a grand plan to go skiing, and I certainly wasn't going to get in the way, so I finished off my papers Sunday night/Monday morning and handed them in well before the 5pm deadline. We checked the weather report and the rain at the mountain was supposed to stop around noon (and certainly before 1pm), so we adjusted our schedule to get there around midday. As we neared Pennsylvania, the rain turned into a drizzle, and while we had lunch at a quaint Italian restaurant the rain stopped and things were looking good. But then, as luck would have it, as we pulled into the ski area parking lot around 1pm, it started to rain again, hard. Darn weather forecasters....grumble.

Not to waste the hour-plus drive to our neighboring state, roomie and I headed to the outlet malls nearby, where I experienced the awesome wonder of "power shopping." We must have been hitting stores at a rate of about a dozen an hour. Good stuff. Roomie bought more items than I did, but I'm pretty picky person when it comes to clothes. If I'm paying 20-some-odd bucks for some fabric, there better be lots of fabric to keep me warm.

Next, we headed over to the "Delaware Water Gap," a national recreational area. We couldn't find the information center (it turned out that the center had been flooded and was closed), so we forged our own trail up the side of rocky hill/mountain. Good scrambling times. The snow made the conditions a bit slippery, but nothing too dangerous (perhaps just dangeresque).

Later that night it was off to game night with the Woody Woo folk. I avenged my previous scrabble loss, but my Taboo team faltered in the end and lost 76-72. I cost us two points late in the game for not knowing the definition of bigamist. Not my fault...that word definitely wasn't on my GRE study list.

Continued to celebrate the end of term by staying up late and watching the much-celebrated flick Garden State. To be honest, I'm not sure what all the hullabaloo was about. First, the movie had a very slow start; there was way too much front-matter that lacked Braff-Portman interaction. (Their dialogue was the highlight for me.) Second, the existentialist overtones were at some points overdone (the infinite abyss!), but most of the time, the characters didn't speak to (of?) the philosophy. What I'm attempting to say (and probably failing), is that Garden State didn't do anything for me that Fight Club didn't do better. After watching the deleted scenes, I think that the editors could have produced a much better film by including some of those cuts (especially the extended bath tub scene and the one with Andrew and his father). The movie is currently well under 2 hours and has room to grow. (Also, as a side note, 4-day romances do not convince me that "this is it." They convince me that Hollywood tries to distract people from "it.")

Lastly, the tentative intersession schedule is: New York, this Friday to Tuesday. Then Boston on next Wednesday, and probably New Haven next Thursday.

A Christian's take on a funny gender-role-reversal ad presentation. (Warning: the presentation itself has some mature, but mostly tasteful, pics.)

Procrastinating is fun....

Random Stuff

First funny H*R email to Strong Bad in a while.

Was just drunk dialed by a DC Deaniac reuninon...I miss DC.

December pics: pinyon haben and West Wing crew dinner.

Most obvious article of the month award goes to: GOP Contest Prompts Yawns Outside Beltway. Oh, and look at the byline: written by my second least favorite WaPo writer. (Unless Rosin doesn't count now that she's on book leave.)

Decided to procrastinate and cured the TiVo.

And it's not yet midnight, so: Happy Birthday, Meredith!

First Condi, today Hillary. Tickets were gone in a flash, so roomie and I watched the former First Lady on the Princeton cable network. The topic was the Middle East (which was Ms Rice's topic as well), and the two speeches couldn't have been much more different. Rice staunchly defended a specific, though internally-inconsistent, philosophy, while Clinton spoke in generalities and only rarely went negative on Bush. (To paraphrase, she accused Bush of "outsourcing" US diplomacy on Iran and North Korea. I don't know about you, but to me "outsourcing" is very 2004.)

I must give Clinton credit: she looked very Presidential. And it does seem that she has almost perfected the art of giving a policy speech without pissing anyone off (all "plantation" comments notwithstanding). She also stood by her vote for the Iraq war, and struck an optomistic chord on the future of our former colony--a tenor you don't hear from many Democrats nowadays.

On the topic of political speeches, I went to a Christine Todd Whitman address last week. She seemed certain that Rice would be the VP nominee for the Republicans in '08, a proposition which I'm willing to publically bet against right now.

And in other news: my TiVo is sick. The fan is spinning constantly (though it isn't disk-seeking continuously) and I'm getting "prebuffering pause" errors. As a result, MythTV is unable to change the channel (though I can change the channel through manual software) and playback is choppy. I don't think it's the video card since I can cat the output of /dev/video0 and that plays back just fine. Perhaps after finals I'll open it up and do a little surgery.

My favorite DC United player, Josh Gros, just re-signed with the team in a deal that triples his salary. After making a paltry $28,000 last year, DC is finally paying him a reasonable wage for the caliber of play he provides. Perhaps United's generosity was also a result of guilty consciouses for not playing him in their devastating 4-0 loss to the Fire in last year's playoffs. (In my opinion, Nowak's questionable lineup changes -- starting Jamil Walker?! -- had a large effect on the final scoreline.)

Courtesy of our Republican government, the deficit is back up in 2006. The federal budget is akin the classic MIT dilemma of of grades, sleep, and social life: choose two.

State-side, score a victory for the good guys as pro-Health Care legislation passes the Maryland legislature, overriding the Governor's veto (no thanks to the Washington Post). The legislation mandates that companies with over 10,000 employees in Maryland spend at least eight percent of their payroll budget on health care. Four companies are affected: Johns Hopkins University, Northrop Grumman Corp., Giant Food Inc., and Walmart: guess which one doesn't yet pay that eight percent!

Personally, I've been banging out code for the last week and only yesterday came up for air Thankfully, both projects are at a state where the professor is fine with the amount of work I've done. Now, I just have to actually write the papers!

After the largest private discrimination suit was filed against Walmart last year, and the "Two our of two ain't bad" story, now we find out that Walmart has been linking movies such as "Planet of the Apes" to African-American themed movies. With the help of the blogosphere and Wake-up Walmart, the story made it into the traditional media and Walmart quickly issued a formal apology.

These stories reminded me that J-Bird gave me a copy of the documentary Walmart: The High Cost of Low Prices in December. So, I just popped it into the DVD player. The movie is just a collection of interviews, without much of an overarching storyline. This format helps shield the filmmakers from accusations of "altering" reality, though of course the movie is one-sided. Unfortunately, this collection of facts and statements isn't very captivating. But if you're curious why people like me and Enjanerd boycott Walmart, the film (or it's website) is a great place to start. (Addendum: the union-busting segment is actually quite moving and persuasive.)

Best line: Wal-Mart is "like a Chinese Company with an American Board of Directors."

Christmas Eve, my father and I participated in the only "Christian" tradition our family chose to assimilate into: luminaries. I think my parents made this decision years ago to avoid seeing the following in the January Camelot Newsletter: "The streets of our neighborhood were brightly and beautifully illuminated Christmas Eve, except for the stretch of street on Guinevere Dr where our token Jewish family lives. Next year we may start an 'Adopt a Jewish street section' program to ensure the entire neighborhood is alight." Ah, conformity via ostracization: lovely.

My Aunt was in town from Chicago on vacation. We hung out by seeing the Capital Steps last Friday and the movie Munich on Christmas Day. The Capital Steps were hilarious (as always) and we even got a "Year in Review" treat, along with two Lirty Dies skits. I'm disappointed that I never got to hear a Lirty Dies about Chick Deney telling Lat Peahy to "Fo guck yourself" -- perhaps the Steps are aiming for a more child-friendly atmosphere. I only wish VPOTUS would show the same respect (on the Flenate Soor no less!).

Munich was good, but Transamerica (which I saw yesterday -- so much for this post going in chronological order), was incredible. I met up with my old friend Tiffany and her new boy, and after eating lunch at Peanut Butter and Co. -- which allowed me to eat a club sandwich for the first time in 10 years -- we headed over to the IFC Center. It was clear that Transamerica was doing well at the box office, as IFC had it running on two of their three theaters. I concur with the critics: this film is provocative, funny, insightful, and informative. (I.E., it'd be a +5 slashdot post ... oy, please ignore the fact that I just made that joke.) For those not in the know: transamerica is about a transsexual, pre-operation male and her journey across America with her newfound charge. Felicity Huffman (you know, the wife that actually works on Wisteria Ln) plays the protagonist exceptionally. We thought whether to cast of man or woman in that role must have been a difficult decision. I certainly can't argue with the result, but I'm curious if others who have seen the films have different opinions.

In other non-grad school related news, I went to the New York Historical Society's museum and saw their exhibit on slavery in New York City. New York State was the last state north of the Mason-Dixon to abolish slavery (Vermont was the first, paralleling our current civil rights struggle), mainly because a large portion of rich New Yorkers owned slaves as servants. To NY's credit, gradual abolition started in 1799, but the process was not completed until 28 years later!

For those wondering, and apparently I can count Patrick in that crowd (of one?), I've made some progress on my projects. Project #1: I've become pretty well-versed in the code I inherited from a former Princeton grad student (she's now a Harvard post doc). I've emailed her with my questions and advice and am collecting county-level data while I wait for a reply. And Patrick: the code is in C and R. Project #2: brute force solution works (for small- and medium-sized games)!!! (Being a brute force solution, it blows up on anything too complicated.) So I'll write my paper on these solutions and hope to see a pattern in the results that will enable me to write a more general solution.

Oh, and New Years, of course: HAPPY 2006! I was on Seth's rooftop apartment for the second year running. Good times had by all (except for the ones that threw up).

May you all have a healthy and fortuitous year.