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.
Holy crap! A neighborhood association actually published that? Ugh. I am gearing up to do battle in the Spring with a neighborhood association who is bringing the full weight (not much) of their power (to be very annoying) on some folks whom I've done some permaculture native landscaping for here in town. Turns out my native installations that require 3/4 less water, no chemical fertilizer and are pest resistant don't "conform" to their model of ugly plastic-looking shrubs, high-maintenance non-native grass and wimpy perennials.
Your projects sound very cool, even if we're the only two who think so. I'm slowly moving most of my research over to R (don't tell the people at Stata that!); I generally love it but sometimes the schizophrenic nature of development and maintenance of packages really makes me yearn for a nice, predictable, for-profit product. Of course if one existed that could do what I needed, I probably never would have turned to R in the first place!
I take it your focus is in American politics? Mine is variously IR or Comparative...increasingly that artificial distinction is being broken down. My job keeps me up to my eyes in research and statistics of all kinds, however...something for which I am quite thankful.
Okay, this has been bugging me since your last post. How come nobody knew what the penguin was?! It's a bruise, people! A BRUISE! Agggh.
Patrick: no, no...I made that up...but, I do think fear of ostracization has something to do with our assimilation. Plus, the streets do look cool on Xmas eve. Good luck with your battle!
And have you looked at S-Plus? I believe R is the open source version of S-Plus. My most recent frustration with R was trying to compile from source on a Windows machine. I sincerely hope you never have to experience that pain.
Yes, my concentration is American as well as F&Q (formal and quantitative methods).
Chicklet: yeah, that was an easy one. Perhaps people knew and didn't want to give away the answer.
S-Plus is one of my problem children. R is indeed the open source version of S-Plus; there are some things that I prefer to do on S-Plus, but I am a coder at heart, so I always end up writing syntax no matter what platform I use.
In my line of work I handle licensing for several of our core stat packages here on campus and S-Plus has been one of the more problematic ones since their decision to move to a node-locked licensing model using FlexLM. I despise this implementation of DRM because I feel that it treats legitimate paying customers as criminals. And it's very inefficient from our point-of-view.
I've compiled many times on linux and OS-X with regards to R but I've never been brave enough to try it on Windows!
Cool fields! You all have some great political scientists up there. My fields are comparative, methods and American. I'm thinking about adding a fourth field in theory simply because I'm so weak in that area, but my better judgement tells me I need to stick to what got me here and not try to spread myself too thin.
Best of luck to you in the New Year!