a PhD in procrastination

apparently it was important for me to figure out the probability that the exam that i'm going to take will exclude the same topics that i've eliminated from my study plan. the odds aren't as good as they were before. it's unlikely that i'll have to answer questions on topics i've eliminated, but i won't have as many options when it comes to picking which of the exam questions i want to answer (i now pick 4 of 6; i was expecting 4 of 8). i'm trying not to feel bitter that i wasn't told how things would be in advance.

when doctors are chumps

do you think drug companies can track how often a particular doctor prescribes a given drug? they can. if you had asked me that question, i would have leaned toward the cynical and said yes, but i wouldn't know how they did it. according to this article, insurance companies sell the information about what drugs are prescribed, keyed to a number assigned each doctor by the drug enforcement administration (DEA). the federal government and the AMA sell a list of doctors which includes their DEA number. the drug companies buy this information, cross reference it, and whammo, they've got the goods.

the next part of the article is stuff i knew, about the gross tactics drug companies use (and doctors fall for) to convince physicians to prescribe more of the company's drugs. what is compelling is that the data collected by the drug companies proves that doctors are swayed by this advertising, and the denial that doctors maintain. it's like 80% of people thinking they're in the top 20% of drivers. from the article:

In one survey, 61 percent of the residents at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center reported that they themselves are unmoved by drug company gifts. But when asked if they thought their colleagues were swayed, 84 percent said yes.

i have sympathy for doctors. they're busy, and it takes time to keep up with the peer-reviewed literature. often, they want samples for their patients who struggle to afford medications. my old allergist was a great guy, and i was impressed with how he handled the drug reps. still, i think it's the fundamental arrogance of the medical profession that leads to doctors to believe they are not affected by the lobbying of the drug reps.

by the way, i renounce my previous paean to cold medicine. after 4 days of steady sudafed, i'm sick of the stuff. it makes me nervous and irritable. i'm still sick.

What's that hair for?

Isn't the lovely feathery hair in the bottom of his feet adorable?

Since I've been sick, I've been letting Mac lead our walks. He tends to want to stop and smell everything, and I'm happy to walk at a slower pace than usual. I've been a few places on campus that I haven't been before. Usually we just follow his nose, but every once in a while he looks at me to figure out where we are going. When he gets it in his head that I'm deciding, he can't be swayed. We'll stand there until I make a move in one direction or another.

the joy of (cold) drugs

my feelings about cold medicine have ranged from agnostic to antagonistic, but right now, i'm a big fan. i've got some cruddy sore throat, temperature regulation and headache-dizziness sickness. i've decided that if i can stuff myself full of medicine to at least prevent myself from getting a chest cold and making my sore throat worse, i will. here's my regimen. every 4 hours i take 2 advil or tylenol, two sudafed and use a zicam nasal swab. before bed i take two benedryl. the benedryl doesn't work as well as the sudafed, but i don't think i could sleep very well on sudafed. and of course i'm taking my everyday allergy meds: clarinex, advair, nasonex. i'd really like to find a decongestant to take at night, but it sounds like all decongestants are stimulatory.

the problem this is creating with my studying is not making me panic, although i don't know why not.

Beckman Institute

The focus is a little off here, but I still like the picture. I feel like a bit of a sucker when I photograph something that is designed to be appealing.

Recently I've spent most of my time studying for my upcoming advancement to candidacy exams, beating myself up for not studying more, and procrastinating. I went to San Francisco for kj's graduation. I was happy to get to be there, very happy to see kj, and acutely heartsick for San Francisco.

I hate LA

follow your web-nose

i'm procrastinating, so i went online. from a link on ayelet waldman's defunct blog, i went to a blog by a 20-something woman in calcutta who lived in the west but is now going to be in an arranged marriage. from there i went to an indian politico-blogger's site. eventually i tired of stories of unscrupulous debt collecting, and followed a link to sepia mutiny, which seems like a complete free-for-all, in the best sense. it discusses being gay in india, new airline routes from india to toronto, the new huffington post (no link due to the complete lack of content). it introduced me to the term ABCD's, which apparently stands for "American Born Confused Desis." It also took me to my last site of the night, yoga booty ballet. from sepia mutiny's description: a workout that combines the grace of ballet, the balance of yoga, and the thunderosity of one's booty. and where would you find such a class? los angeles, my home.

The studious pedicure

The written portion of my advancement to candidacy exam is a closed-book exam on specific topics in cell and molecular neurobiology. I have ten topics to study. I have set up meetings with people who are interested in or knowledgeable about the different topics. Today's meeting was on Alzheimer's. We met over brunch and then got pedicures. Better than golf, I'd say. By the time we got to the pedicures, I was done talking about Alzheimer's and so I read Vogue and chatted. They were showing an embarrassingly sexually explicit video in the store (salon?). The stylish looking middle-aged black women across from me were talking with each other about it. In the video, a Janet Jackson concert video, a man had been brought up from the audience, tied to a platform and then groped by Ms. Jackson. The women were feeling sorry for the guy. It was a very nice interaction.

When therapists fight

Does one throw the other one's furniture out of the office, in the way that drama-prone couples throw clothes out windows? Remember, this is the same building outside which I saw a therapist-looking woman having a very unbalanced interaction with a car that pulled too far into the intersection.

Geek pow-ah!

I took this picture surreptitiously. I cropped his head out to give him a little anonymity. Let me count the geeky ways: Birkenstocks with sandals, stripped computer, compressed air, computer on chair not cart, taking the whole deal outside.

agile puppy

the other day mac and i were at a garage sale. a man holding a rottweiler beanie baby saw mac and gave mac the toy. mac loved it; the guy proceeded to take a bunch of pictures of mac with the toy.

tonight mac and i drove to long beach for the third time. we've been going to agility classes there. bad dog is perfectly obedient and a great learner, but he doesn't yet have much drive to run the obstacles. he's more interested in finding treats that other dogs have dropped and looking at other dogs.

going to long beach has also given me a taste of LA's legendary traffic. so far it seems that getting to long beach at 6:15pm is one of those funny traffic things that is impossible. i can leave pasadena at 4:30 and get to long beach at 6pm, or i can leave pasadena at 5:15 or 5 and get there at 6:30. on my way home, it takes, wait for it, 25 minutes. that's three times as long with traffic as without. obviously this is not a viable long term proposition.

puppy hunting

i went with MK to look at 7 day old puppies at a breeder. MK heard about the breeder from a friend who has a dog from her, and has reserved a puppy from this litter. here are two of them:



click the image for more puppy cuteness. we met the dog-mom, who was a very nice dog too. it's weird being at a breeder's, even though i think she's a good breeder. the dogs aren't pets and don't get the kind of attention i think dogs want. the dogs aren't socialized to be attached to people. in any case, i saw nothing to worry about. i look forward to watching one of these little guys grow up.

ugly=fast?

this helmet was at the bike store, and AH and i couldn't resist trying it on. i was hoping to go on a supported ride from santa barbara back to LA this weekend, but i am overwhelmed with work.

Snoozin'

i convinced bad dog to snuggle with me. i dragged him into this position. what a tolerant puppy.

Biking the San Gabriel river

Los Angeles turns out to have an amazing bike path system. We rode 21 miles, all on bike paths completely separate from traffic. One could go much further. Of course, you're sucking in smog the whole way.

Hello Bratty

This "Hello Kitty" knockoff is called "Bratty Kitty." I found this at the 99 cent store, a weird and neat LA phenomenon. it really has everything - i bought a pair of pretty heavy wire cutters there.

Orange vine

i took this picture on a hike friday morning. i don't know what the orange stuff is, but i see it wrapped on these bushes. it seems to grow from the bushes themselves, which surprises me. click for a larger image.

Unbelievable: driving with no license, no insurance

This is the car that slowly backed into me in a parking lot. I was laying on the horn for a good 3 seconds before he hit me, but he didn't respond. He didn't speak english, didn't have a driver's license and didn't have insurance. License plate 3AGF461. Happily, I couldn't find a single thing wrong with my car and was spared the annoyance of calling the police on this feckless kid (not to mention the annoyance of car repairs). The situation managed to be plenty annoying as it was though.

operation "back to normal": step one

i went hiking saturday with the roommate and beastie. click the picture below for more pix, including a really cute one of bad dog. we walked up chantry flats road, which is closed to cars, for the reason you see below. it's a pretty spectacular slide.



one of the members of my advancement to candidacy exam committee was unpleasant in the exam. he's a very bright guy, and a good scientist, but he's generally perceived to be abrasive. i took a class with him, and although i always came away impressed with his lecturing and intellectual skills, i didn't feel that i benefited from the ways in which he tried to help guide us to the conclusion he was teaching. the class seemed roughly divided between people who got his way of thinking and people who didn't. i talked with someone who took the class a different year who had the same problem i did. so i think i'm going to replace him on the committee with someone who i am better able to understand. it might be a little bit difficult, politically speaking, but i'm sure it will work out. at first my adviser was opposed to my firing him, but she came around.

advancing

today, i passed one portion of my advancement to candidacy exam. i presented a proposal for my thesis work to a committee of four professors. they asked me questions, i left the room, they conferred, i went back in, they said i passed. i'm numb. the other portion is a written, general knowledge exam in june.

the neuroscience of economic behavior

As I've worked in research, my resistance to a lot of things has decreased. For example, my view of the morals of the pharmaceutical industry has become more nuanced and less negative. Similarly, taking money from DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to learn how the intention to move a limb is encoded seems ok to me, even though that research will ultimately probably be applied to some kind of prosthetic weaponry, either connected to the user or a remotely controlled robot-weapon. In part, I am sifting through the new moral universe in which I find myself, but in part I have learned enough to see the value in things I didn't value before.

That said, I'm really nervous about the study of neuroscience of economic behavior. A major application is advertising, understanding how people make decisions. Even when one has an intellectual knowledge of how and why sex, for example, sells, it's hard to resist. As we as scientists become more knowledgeable about the most basic decisions in the brain and become more knowledgeable about how to influence motivation, it seems that it will be even harder to resist the siren call of consumerism.

Here's an example of recent work ( caltech press release, pubmed entry) that on the face of it is warm and fuzzy. in the experiments, two subjects undergoing brain imaging repeatedly play a game in which trust is rewarded. they find that subjects risk increasing amounts as the game progresses.

"Neoclassical economics starts with the assumption that rational self-interest is the motivator of all our economic behavior," says Quartz. "The further assumption is that you can only get trust if you penalize people for non-cooperation, but these results show that you can build trust through social interaction, and question the traditional model of economic man."

"The results show that you can trust people for a fair amount of time, which contradicts the assumptions of classical economics," Camerer adds.

To me it suggests that people can be manipulated easily, building up their trust and then taking them for a big hit. This is supported by the large number of people who are swindled countless ways in confidence scams.

I suspect that my concern for the potential applications of this work may result primarily from the fact that I don't find most of the data intellectually interesting. I'm willing to deal with the devil to answer questions I think are important and compelling, but not for this.

Sin City and SRL

In a busy night, I went to the movie Sin City at the Arclight, and also to a Survival Research Labs (SRL) show. I enjoyed Sin City a lot. Visually, it was stunning. Mostly filmed against a blue screen (which I think was green in this case), the movie is almost entirely black and white. There are a lot of digital effects, which mostly work, but when they don't, it's jarring. The snow scenes were staggeringly beautiful. The image above is from the graphic novel the movie is based on. The author was the co-director. The plot was overwrought, which I guess is what you get with noir. The actors were good, even the sexpots.

I saw the movie with PI at the Arclight. The Arclight is the pinnacle of movie experience. You buy tickets in advance online for no extra fee (although the tickets are at a premium: $11). Your ticket reserves a particular seat. There are people in the parking structure guiding you to open parking. When you arrive, there is a quick and easy way to obtain your tickets. In the theater, an usher shows you your seat. The seats are incredibly comfortable, with lots of leg room. You don't have to get up, or even move much, for someone to get by. We saw the movie digitally projected. I don't know if it made a difference, but the movie was luscious looking.


SRL is a pyrotechnic robotics group that likes to make interesting artistic robots and set things on fire. If you click on the picture above, you'll go to a gallery of pictures from the show. They are not great pictures.

I was alerted to the show by my daily read of boingboing. I love when I read international blogs, and they talk about stuff going on near me. I've been reading boingboing since I lived in San Francisco, but I've found it to be a good LA reference.

For the show they closed off a street in the warehouse district just east of downtown LA. People climbed up onto the top of many of the surrounding warehouses. Given the amount of drinking in the crowd, that made me nervous.

I had a good time there, although I would have enjoyed myself more if I could have seen more of the show. There were 4 or 5 rows of people in front of me, and people around me, all of whose conversations I was subjected to before the show started. After all my complaining about how mainstream LA is, I was reminded that mainstream people haven't cornered the market on insipid conversations.

The best robot in the show had a horizontal auger that spun as it moved. Unfortunately, I think the auger was not the actual wheel of the robot. The show was also really loud, which I liked (I had earplugs), and there was lots of fire, which everyone liked. I could feel the heat of flames that were 40 feet or so away.

A piece of something came flying in my direction at one point, probably a piece of wood flayed off wooden the horse by another robot. It bounced off the ground in front of the barrier, then came flying upward. I had plenty of time to duck, but it was exciting.

I've been wanting to see an SRL show for a while, but I wasn't entirely happy to be at the show. Was it because I was tired? Was it because of the company? (My own.) I think it was mostly because I was surrounded on all sides by a crowd. So here's my advice if you're going to a show: Get there early enough to climb a warehouse or annex some other comfortable viewing place. Don't drink while you're on top of the warehouse (GP excepted, well, maybe not), because you have to climb down afterward. Bring earplugs. Bring eye protection. Enjoy.

I had a weird interaction with him a guy who I'm pretty sure was breaking into cars parked on the street I had parked on. I left the show early, but it ended right as I was walking away. When I got to the street my car was on, there was a guy sitting in a car, looking around with a flashlight. He was a nervous-acting guy who looked like he could use a shower, shave, haircut and laundry, and I made certain assumptions. He told me he was keeping watch on the cars, and I asked if he wanted to sell me a bridge too. OK, I didn't do that. He kept one hand in his pocket, and I wasn't too happy about that either. By then I had committed to walking down the street, and there were other people coming from the show. As I was getting into my car, the guy asked me for money. Idiot.

Earlier in the night, a man had held a door open for me and asked me for money. I was really annoyed by that, and it reminded me of how my daily experience has changed. It didn't used to bug me.

First day of school

HC insisted on taking a picture of me in what I wore for the first meeting of the discussion section I'm leading. She thought it was hilarious, and even funnier that I didn't get what was funny.

Spontaneous sculpture

At DM's birthday breakfast, HC ordered some kind of eggs benedict. The spout on the one on the left reminded us of Aplysia, pictured below, a sea animal that is commonly used to understand connections between neurons.

PJP2

The New York Times has a great (and brief) audio-visual retrospective of John Paul II's papacy, which includes this stunning picture, among others. For most of my life, John Paul II has defined the papacy itself. The possibility of a more liberal pope and/or one from a third world country is intriguing. I haven't heard anything about the possibilities of a liberal pope. Commentators do note that the selection of JP2 was a surprise. Choosing a pope seems rare enough that it's hard to handicap.

work work work

today i came into the lab at 9:50 am to toss some stuff on the burner, metaphorically speaking, and then i went to a birthday breakfast celebration for DM, a postdoc who helps me enormously. i enjoyed it, but i felt a little off the rest of the day. i messed up a couple of things, luckily nothing that i couldn't fix. one part of what i'm doing involves leaving something overnight, and i really want to get to that step. if i don't, then i'll have to do the few steps tomorrow and not continue until sunday. i'm not completely sure i will work all weekend, but it seems like a good idea, since it's the only weekend i'll be here between now and my advancement to candidacy exam.

in summary

it really bugs me when people say "in summary" and then introduce a new idea. i'm reading a generally great review in a stellar publication, but it has this bone-head error. i'm sure the review that we recently submitted also has some problems like that, so maybe i shouldn't get so chuffy.

the little corner grocery is closing for a while. it's a pathetic little place, stocked in the fashion of a third world store. there are wooden shelves painted white, mostly empty. it is staffed by a woman who looks beaten down by life, makes terrible sandwiches, and smells like cigarettes. i only go to this store when i'm desperate, and then only for ice cream. i'll be interested to see what happens with the store. you wouldn't think it would be hard to succeed as the closest convenience store to campus. all they have to do is stay open later than the on-campus mini-store, and they've got it made.

in summary, i'm going to walk the dog back to work later, run in and start some bacteria growing. it's a much nicer way to drop back to work than to have to drive. i'm glad for that.

biolunch

the students in my program have to give a lunchtime presentation once every two years. today i gave my first one. i practiced the talk in front of other people (well, with RS it was over the phone, but you get the picture) three times, plus a little informal touch-up with a couple people in the lab. i presented it alone to myself fully twice. these repetitions helped. i'm trying to put more zing in my tone, expressing excitement about the work and trying to make it infectious. that and talking smoothly are my major presentation goals.

the presentation itself went reasonably well. i was happy with it. i wasn't quite as 'on' as i would have liked to be. also, there were several transitions that weren't especially smooth, but generally i'm happy with it. i'm pleased at how the effort i put into it paid off.

i just took mac out for his evening walk. it's 63 degrees out tonight, and spring has arrived. the weather is perfect for putting on a light fleece and enjoying its softness on skin, but there is no chill. on our short walk down the block, we walked through several clouds of tantalizing and sweet scent, wafting from various trees and bushes. sublime.

tv: chicklets

tonight's tv viewing menu:

csi (rerun)
lost (new)
alias (new)
eyes (new)

i love jorja fox on csi, but she does this funny smile thing where her big two front teeth with a gap between them look like chicklets (big rectangular pieces of white gum).

this is a terrible picture of her, but it's the only one i could find that shows the chicklet smile.

on alias, the plot required the computer geek to go out and do action spying in the field. they put him in the nice leather jacket just like they usually put the hottie (michael vartan) in, and i swear they gave him the michael vartan haircut, gel, and stubble too. then they lit him the way they do michael vartan. most of it worked quite well, making the computer guy look better. unfortunately, when they put the dramatic lighting on him, it just emphasized his visually less appealing qualities.

i watched the premiere of "eyes." it gets two thumbs up from me. the writing and acting is terrific. the plot moves along and, for tv, is reasonably fresh.

warning: what follows is not a tv-related observation.

i was in a medical building today with a ton of therapists' offices in it. the elevator has instructions for getting help if it gets stuck. at the bottom of the instructions is "do not panic."

1 - does that help anyone?
2 - does the presence of that admonition have anything to do with the number of therapy offices in the building?
tv: chicklets

The Impala! The umbrella!

The tears are still drying on my face. Here's the story: six years ago a man was on the phone leaving a message about being late to a meeting when he witnessed a minor traffic accident. His hiccup-inducing narration of the aftermath was eventually converted to an mp3, and it's recently gotten a lot of attention. Really, you must listen to this voicemail message, but do not operate heavy machinery while you do.

the burn journals

procrastination is the name of the game right now. i've been making some progress on my presentation for wednesday, but i just had to post about this book, 'the burn journals' by brent runyon. i finished it over the weekend.

it's about a young teenager who repeatedly tried to kill himself and ended up burning himself terribly. the book focuses on the events leading up to the fire and the first year after the fire. it seems emotionally true, devastating, but true. i recommend it. i really like how it represents the difficulty of knowing one's own motivations, even while terribly regretting one's actions.

terry schiavo

it's painful to me to read the misinformed stuff people are writing about the schiavo case. there are several facts that are frequently ignored: 1) brain imaging shows that most of her cerebral cortex has atrophied; 2) there is no argument that she had told to multiple people that she would not want her life to be prolonged in this way; 3) her husband did not decide her fate. instead, he asked the court to evaluate what she would have wanted and this is what court after court decided and upheld.

her father reports that she followed a balloon they brought into the room. her mother reports that terry has smiled in response to her mother's presence. videotapes were made and "carefully viewed" by the court, which found that her responses were not consistent or reproducible.

"...despite the irrefutable evidence that her cerebral cortex has sustained the most severe of irreparable injuries, we understand why a parent who had raised and nurtured a child from conception would hold out hope that some level of cognitive function remained. If Mrs. Schiavo were our own daughter, we could not but hold to such a faith.

But in the end, this case is not about the aspirations that loving parents have for their children. It is about Theresa Schiavo's right to make her own decision, independent of her parents and independent of her husband."

-- The 2nd District Court of Appeal, June 2003

i'm pleased that all the courts have come to the same decision, even in the fact of such intense pressure from the executive and legislative branches. it makes me confident that the facts are strong. i can understand how terry's parents' reason could be overwhelmed by their emotion, but i'm really disappointed by the actions of congress. it's not supported by the majority of people in the US. is it a congressional kowtow to the religious right? that's the only explanation that makes sense to me.

in which I socialize outside of my home

last night i hung out with the lovely and talented MM, my design-y friend who lives in SF. he had just sent his mom and niece back to san diego.

we went to see D.E.B.S. which is a funny stupid movie, and just my style. that said, i think it's really likable in general, unlike most movies i like. so i recommend seeing it. hear me?

i really hate hearing anything about the plot of a movie before i see it, so i'm not going to talk about that here. one weird thing about the movie was how freakishly thin the leads are. i'm used to seeing thin girls, i thought, but these guys are scary thin. their thighs look like my arms. scary. also, they weren't toned, which i'm also not used to seeing. it looks like they don't work out.

after the movie, we went to hama sushi, on 2nd street between san pedro and central. it's downtown, just inches away from a sketchy neighborhood. but it's a very nice place. small. the sushi chefs are great. it seemed mixed pretty evenly between whities and japanese-speaking japanese people.

then i took MM back to his hotel (a lovely place that i recommend) and went home. funny how all the driving around was definitely part of the evening. we wanted to drive together so we could spend more time together. we got to talk a lot, cruising along the highways and thoroughfares of the city. i realized that i drove 72 miles last night though, not counting the times i missed my cross-street. i now see the advantage of having gps navigation system. not only do you know better where you are, but it facilitates your relationship with your passenger.

here's the list of mileages
24 miles to mike's hotel
4 miles to the movie
9 miles to the restaurant
11 miles back to mike's hotel
24 miles back to pasadena

Exercise Inflation and a moment of lab competence

From the abundant wittage at chez miscarriage:

The first thing I noticed when I exercised this week is that they've made exercise a lot harder since I last did it.

In spite of my recent mood improvements, I haven't exercised this week. I did take a nice long walk with woofie Saturday morning though. That was lovely and reminded me that I want to do more of it. It was raining. I was wearing a windbreaker. Bad dog and I got wet, but I didn't mind. In fairly warm weather, I like walking in the rain. My experiment from Thursday continued on its fantastically perfect route. Amazing. However, I'm having a problem with one readout: my kalirin antibody is giving me barely any signal. I can't really progress without that, so I'm increasing the concentration of the antibody and letting it incubate for the rest of the weekend. Take that!

I don't remember what day it was, but I think I may have had a breakthrough this week. I had a moment in the lab when I was looking at some inconclusive results. I thought, "you can't beat me. I can lick this problem." It was as if I had absorbed a threshold amount of confidence and knowledge. I was enjoying trying to figure out what was going wrong. Troubleshooting is something I like doing. Maybe I should consider being a method whore, learning and mastering a bunch of methods.

Crazy dog lady

I'm not a crazy dog lady. Really. Right? Isn't this picture of my beast so cute and funny that it doesn't make me a crazy dog lady to put it up on my blog?

critical television watching

casting: you know you're looking at an african scene shot in the us when many of the black actors are light skinned.

commercials: men looking for lawn care supplies pick up chain saws. i'm thinking, what? then, as i write this, i think about people like harriet whose yards contain trees. still, it seems like a good idea to hire a professional to do anything that requires a chain saw. and who is the audience of this show, anyway?

weight issues: on alias, substantially overweight male actors get to portray attractive, smart, active characters, e.g. the actors greg grunberg and victor garber. they do so convincingly; both characters are quite appealing. greg's character suffers a bit from the nice guy/fat guy conflation, but no one thinks victor's character has anything soft or kind about him. the actors get the full-on flattering treatment in camera angles, haircuts, and wardrobe. it would be nice if female actors had those kind of roles available in general and on this show in particular. there have been some great established actresses on the show, but as far as i can remember they've all had knockout bodies. i'm thinking of lena olin and patricia wettig in particular. i can't think of a heavy women who has been on the show.

lethal methods: on alias, an assassination was carried out using a method similar to the one i used on a mouse today. it's not the part where they wrap the wire around the guy's neck; it's the cervical dislocation. i wasn't happy about the mouse killing today.

bribery: also on alias, information is sought in exchange for a dvd. based on the bribee's reaction, the dvd presumably contains some kind of pornography. based on the audio from the brief clip the bribee is shown, it sounds like it involves airplanes. i'm thinking, airplane related porn? yeah, that's obscure, but probably not illegal, except in alabama. don't take the bribe!

trends in old 4x4's: since season one (it's season four now), alias has occasionally used old toyota landcruisers. while i gave them props for it originally, it's not so fashion forward now as it was then. after the article in the nytimes special fashion section, i'm declaring it played out for now.

Casting pearls before swine

A lovely phrase RS reminded me of. Thank you RS.

In other RS news, she's running a half marathon Saturday. Go, RS!

Coming to Dinner

Looks like it's a nursing female too. I'd feel a little heartless siccing Mac on her. The bottom line is that I don't think there's anything I can do to keep her from eating my porch plants. I really love having the big shade tree envelop the porch.

Potluck or Massacre?

I'm not feeling bleak, but bleak things are appealing to me. Somehow they are comforting when I'm somewhat down. Right now I'm feeling ok, not great, not good, but not bad, and that's an improvement.

Anyway, here's what inspired me to write. I was reading a New York Times article about Terry Ratzmann's killing of his pastor and other members of his church in Wisconsin. The article reads like a straight news article of a tragedy, as I would expect. But here's how it ends:

Tapes of several 911 calls from church members reveal chaos, with people wailing and screaming in the background.

"Oh my, oh no, oh no, oh no, Gloria is dead, oh no, oh no, oh no, there's at least - how many are on the floor? - 5 to 10," the woman says. "Five to 10 at least, oh my, one of my friends is laying on the floor, I think she's dead. This is a massacre."

"All of a sudden we heard bang like a firecracker, but it was so loud and then again and again," the woman continued. "My husband pushed me down to the floor, my son. We all went to the floor, everybody.

"Right after this we're having a potluck and then an entertainment show this evening," she added. "I think it's all on hold."

Tell me that the last paragraph doesn't add a completely surreal aspect to the story. Just tell me that.

The roommate and I watched the movie Napoleon Dynamite tonight. It wasn't as good as I had hoped. It was a little slow moving for me. Once I started viewing it as an absurdist piece, I liked it more though.

martha, coke mules, and mom

i've been reading a blog called eurotrash. the current tag-line is "the whole detached-irony thing is very 1999." Here's a quote:

How delicious to think of Martha as a coke mule. I feel sure she would embroider a seasonal coke tote-bag for the occasion.

eurotrash manages to be sympathetic even in her sniping. today's entry was about seeing people who are desperately down on their luck and thinking of your mother. most of the homeless women i see here in pasadena remind me of my mother. their weathered faces and sunken features remind me of how she looked after she lost her front teeth and how she looked when she was sick with cancer.

Huntington Gardens

More animal butt stuff

yesterday was an abysmal day. terrible, awful. enough said about that. today is better.

i saw a funny article about inseminating elephants. you'd think it would be a no-brainer, like inseminating cows. nope.

Anza Borrego

i went to anza borrego today to look at what is locally called 'the bloom.' my SFSU old office-mate, a plant chemist, would rhapsodize about anza borrego in the spring. as promised, it was quite beautiful. click the picture the whole set. the pictures don't convey the silence and space. i was lying in the car after eating an apple, spacing out, when i caught an irregular motion out of the corner of my eye. it was the first of a long series of butterflies that were flying up the creek bed i was in. it was wonderful. it made me wish i had a camp cot. i wasn't about to lie on the ground, with all the ants that i saw and scorpions and snakes that i didn't see. nature's fine, to a degree.

Scientific Measurement

Last night I dreamed that a friend, a colleague, was explaining to me how his lab was measuring the female menstrual cycle to many digits of significance. He was as proud of this as of determining more digits of pi. It didn't seem that he was aware of the variation among women.

AH told me about a dream she had. The world was taken over by aliens. She had been told not to take anything from anyone. A girl handed her something AH thought was her camera. It rang, and it turned out it was a cell phone. When AH answered it, the aliens blanked her memory and a chip popped out of her head with her memory on it. She didn't remember if the chip was compact flash or another format.

How to spend a Saturday night

17 pictures for you
Originally uploaded by _buttercup.

A crew of people from my lab went to a body building competition. It was a hoot. Click the picture to see the collection of pictures from the event.

It rained; we improvised

DM, LW, HB

motivational speaker

who do you think is the first google hit for "motivational speaker"? tony robbins? tom peters? deepak chopra? steven whoever, of the 'seven habits' series?

yossi ghinsberg. who the heck is that? never heard of him (?) before. the first speaker result with a name i recognize is result 16, which includes bonnie blair, the olympic speed skater. number 19 includes lance armstrong. when i say includes, i mean, their name isn't in the title of the page. finally, at entry 26, tony robbins is mentioned, again, not in the title.

why did i think about looking this up? i'm having a little motivational trouble. i'm presenting two papers tomorrow night in a class. it's my second presentation for the class. i was happy with how the first one went. part of my problem with focusing on the presentation is that i find the papers boring. i can tell the conclusions to someone with no neurobiology in three (long) sentences.

1) we're looking at two parts of the brain: the amygdala, an area that's involved in processing emotion, and the orbitofrontal cortex (the part in front (frontal) by the eyes (orbital)), an area that processes rewards and punishments.

2) if you measure the level of activity in the amygdala, for both taste and smell, you see changes corresponding to different INTENSITIES of stimuli (the thing that's being tasted or smelled), but you don't see changes corresponding to different KINDS of stimuli (pleasant, citrusy, icky (that's science right there)).

3) on the other hand, if you look at the orbitofrontal cortex, you see the opposite: changes corresponding to different KINDS of stimuli but not different INTENSITIES of stimuli.

ok, if you gave up on that list, here's the one sentence version: changes in intensity are reflected in activity in the amygdala; changes in kind of stimulus are reflected in activity in the orbitofrontal cortex.

those facts are somewhat interesting. it's interesting that the brain really can treat intensity and kind differently. these results also imply that the KIND of stimulus is more relevant to punishment and reward/orbitofrontal cortex and that the INTENSITY of stimulus is more relevant to emotional processing/the amygdala. that's interesting too.

neither of these results says much (that i can see anyway) about how effective olfactory cues are at eliciting memories.

you might say, surely you left stuff out that people with a brain science background would be interested in. well, maybe. there's the part about how we can't really know that the results are right for a bunch of technical reasons, and how they need to be repeated and confirmed using other methods. but that's it. i swear. i should go rogue and present the paper on monkey butts.

well, enough complaining from me. i'm going to walk the dog and get the laundry out the dryer. that'll liven things up.

guess what? monkey butt!

today i went to a presentation that covered two papers. the first paper uses a method called future discounting. you measure a person's level of future discounting by telling them to choose between, say, $25 now or $50 in a week. you have them make choices like this for a broad range of amounts and times (a week, a month, a year), until you've characterized their level of future discounting. generally smokers and heroin addicts, for example, discount future rewards more than other people - they prefer the bird in the hand to the two guaranteed birds currently in the bush. heroin addicts discount future rewards more and more as the time since their last use of heroin increases.

in this paper they characterized people's future discounting, then showed them a set of pictures. each set of pictures was of either people of the opposite sex or cars, and either attractive or unattractive people or cars. then the experimenters remeasured the person's level of future discounting. they determined that men who had seen attractive women increased their future discounting significantly (pretty women make me generally want things now), and women who had seen attractive cars increased their future discounting significantly (pretty things make me generally want things now).

there are obviously problems with this research (how do you pick pretty? are all the people straight?), but it's provocative.

the second paper was called monkey pay per view. the monkeys had to choose to look at one of two targets. for one target, they would get some juice. for the other target, they would get some juice and see a picture. some pictures, like those with monkey butt, were valuable to the monkeys, and they would choose the target that allowed them to see that picture even if they got much less juice than the other target gave them. other pictures, like the faces of low status monkeys, were not valuable to the monkeys, but they would look at the pictures if the picture was accompanied by significantly more juice than the target that didn't make them look at a picture.

this research is not at all like my research, but it's interesting anyway.

Chocolate is like crack

My presentation on Thursday is about the affective aspects of taste. I think it's interesting, but the data looks a little shaky. Maybe I'll be convinced after I've gotten into it in more depth. The best paper I'm covering is called "Changes in brain activity related to eating chocolate: From pleasure to aversion." How great is that?

mac and i go hiking

click here to go to the beginning of the story, then scroll up to follow the posts chronologically. remember, you can get a bigger image if you click on a picture.

i was wet to the thigh

it wasn't too cold out, so being wet wasn't a hardship.

these boots deserve an homage. years ago, GP convinced me to buy them from sierra trading post. amazingly, they fit perfectly and are fantastically comfortable. today alone, they probably prevented lots of damage to my ankles.

mac was wet all over. i'll be surprised if he isn't sore. his feet looked ok the whole way.

this was the pay-off. unfortunately, when i was at its feet, the spray was everywhere and i didn't want to risk the camera from there. so this picture misses a lot of what it looked like. also, it misses how amazingly loud it was. standing at the base, the wind and cold took away my breath.

we forded all kinds of stuff that looked like this. mac was a hero and a trooper. i learned a lot about hiking in a river. we crossed the river at least eight times. at first i tried to cross it on trees and stuff. at one point it was impossible, and we had to wade across. after that, i decided my camera faced better odds with me wading across the river than with me trying to cross more precariously but drier.

The hiking story begins here

this is the river in millard canyon. it normally is much more tame than this. it's swollen by our recent rain.

mac and i went for a hike a mile or so up the river to the falls. i have never been before. on our way there, we passed through the campsite where i stayed after i had accepted caltech's offer, when i came down to look for an apartment. it was the first time i'd gone camping by myself.

My gray hair!

Seriously, you have to click on this picture to see the larger version. My hair is finally ready for its closeup. I think it has a friend, but the friend isn't as photogenic. If I have a whole head of hair like that, it's going to fantastic. I'll shoot for my Andy Warhol look. The hair is not only white, it's very rough in texture and kinky. Having had smooth straight hair my whole life, I'm ready for something new. I wouldn't mind waiting until I have a tenure-track position before going gray though.

When setbacks don't overwhelm

This morning I planned to go by the lab and transfer some bacterial cells from a small container into a larger container with more growth medium. What would normally have taken 10 minutes took 45 and a series of alternative routes. The cells are usually grown in a shaker, something that looks like a chest-refrigerator with a window on the door, as above (with someone's idea of a scientist using it). It keeps the cells at a set temperature, often 37 degrees celsius, and rotates your flasks, usually at 250 rpms. I don't know why bacterial cells like to be grown at such vigorous rotation; it seems pretty violent to me.

The shaker that belongs to our lab was full of flasks from another lab. When I went to look at a shaker on the floor below us, it was broken, clearing up the mystery of why our shaker was full of another lab's stuff. Using other people's equipment is essential to smooth operations, and we have used theirs before in a similar situation just last week. I asked a bacteria maven in our lab for advice, and she loaded me up with adapters for the flasks and sent me to a shaker farther away that is known not to have adapters for the size flasks I was using (2 liter). Then we couldn't find a screwdriver to swap out the adapters. A screwdriver! After I had decided to try to use a too-big flat head screwdriver, I found the screwdriver hoarder and the appropriate screwdriver. Stuff like this makes me want to emulate HC and build up my own supplies of things. I carry a decent set of stuff from home in my purse, but I was just walking bad dog - I had keys and poop bags and that's it.

Next, I went to the shaker, which involved taking a cart with my two 2-liter flasks, adapters, screws, screwdrivers and my emergency brandy two floors down on the elevator. Just kidding about the brandy. Our adapters didn't fit in their shaker. I went to the lab whose shaker it is. They didn't know where the adapters were, but eventually we found them. Then, I installed the adapters and it worked. If this had happened yesterday, I would have folded at the first setback. I'm doing better.

the mood tailspin persists

ug. i had a helpful talk with HC today, but depression is on me like a fog. i got up and swam, and i've been productive in the lab, and i've eaten well, but still with the well of sorry behind my eyes. still with the worst possible interpretations of everything. still with the grim outlook. still with the difficulty reaching out to people.

rule #7034

don't wait until you know enough to feel comfortable doing something for the first time. when you do it for the first time, you shouldn't feel comfortable. prioritize learning the things you really must know, and then go experiment.

this is a very hard rule for me. i just spent a lot of time trying to figure out how i could copy files with long filenames to the file server. apparently no one else was having this problem. the documentation says that the program is supposed to support copying files with long filenames from windows. finally, i went into the configuration file for the server after making a copy of it to revert to if i broke things, and deleted the entire section on how it handles file names. viola!

me vs unix

a few times i've tried to install linux on spare computers. recently i bought a $200 computer from outpost.com with lindows installed. i'm finding it pretty simple; they try to replicate a windows interface. there were a couple of problems that i couldn't resolve without digging into text files. my plan is for it to be my file server; i'm leaving it in my office.

it has taken a while to get the file sharing going. the lindows box runs samba. i was unable to access it without giving it a fixed IP address. the next problem was that i couldn't restrict access. that's the first thing that took me into the configuration files. now i'm having issues with long file names; i can't copy a long file name from a windows computer to the lindows computer.

once i get the dvd drive installed in the lindows box, i should have a pretty great backup system. i'll probably have to experiment to get it running smoothly. my goal is to have backups immediately available, and also archived to dvd and offsite. i also want a copy of all current data on both of my windows computers, so that i can use it when i'm not online. i'm online almost all the time, and i plan to use the active files directly from the lindows computer. this should solve my problem of trying to share files from home and the lab, a problem which i mostly solve now by keeping all my files on my laptop and walking that back and forth to work.

McDonald's opens a new restaurant every four hours

today was dominated by an unfortunate mood tailspin, surely the result of a combination of missing my recently seen good friends and the (for me) general stress of socializing. hopefully tomorrow will be better.

spinster pointed out that mcdonald's has trademarked "i am asian" and has a website at http://www.i-am-asian.com/ with text like this:

Whether we're celebrating one of our cultural holidays or enjoying a Big Mac sandwich, we're helping make the magic mix called America become even richer. And McDonald's is right there with us, everyday! We are proud of our cultural heritage.

remember, don't forget to acknowledge mcdonald's trademark any time you use "i am asian." oh, did i forget? where's that TM symbol, anyway?

kj and mac

Hunter S. Thompson (1939-2005)

from boingboing:

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." - HST

The guy was a addict and a genius. I love his resilience, his ability to maintain his criticism at full volume year after year. From my own experience with angry addicts, I fear that the addiction and the resilience are interrelated. It is uncomfortable to be so angry for so long. Surely booze and other substances mask the discomfort, as well as generating their own tendencies toward anger. It's something we've seen with other great artists: madness or addiction, or both, limiting the impact of social marginalization, and facilitating access to creativity, vision, and righteousness. The social marginalization can even facilitate the artists' drive, with madness or addiction transmuting disconnection into persecution. I believe that we as a culture benefit from having artists and firebrands around. The question of personal cost is tricky. Do we lose artists in rehab, through medication? Do artists have access to rehab and medication? I have a friend who doesn't want to be happy, who says that his discomfort with the world feels authentic. I know that when I am not depressed, I am more resilient to the slings and arrows. Surely that resilience, the absence of extended meditation on the sorrows, limits my ability to address them.

Here's another quote, from his 2003 book "Kingdom of Fear."

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the
whole world--a nation of bullies and bastards who
would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not
just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with
hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and
that is how history will judge us...No redeeming
social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or
we'll kill you.

Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who
among us can be happy and proud of having this
innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine?
These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and
fooled by stupid rich kids like George Bush?

They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali
locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for
all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the
American character. They are the racists and hate
mongers among us--they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss
down the throats of these Nazis.

And I am too old to worry about whether they like it
or not. Fuck them.

Well, Hunter, goodbye. You have my thanks and my sorrow for your pain.

A 24 hour trip to the Bay Area

The best place to start is here. Don't click on anything until the page is fully loaded and has moved the view away from the top of the page. Navigate up from there.

The rain was fierce from here on in.

The approach to Tejon pass, about 90 miles from LA.

The car doesn't have a name yet.

Later I stopped and took this picture. I was on top of a hill. It was identified by a "scenic overlook" sign on the highway. There was a semi-trailer and a pickup truck on the hill. Neither showed signs of life. I didn't feel unsafe, but It made me think of the luxury of traveling with a big dog.

Hey, whose car is that? It's mine! I wanted an Element with manual transmission, all wheel drive, side airbags, and silver paint with blue panels. Apparently people in LA don't want to drive stick shift cars. The the only Element in the state that matched my specs was in Berkeley. I flew up cheaply on Saturday afternoon, bought the car, socialized and drove back the next morning. Happily, I got to see Galen and Natalie, kj, and Mike, along with a little bit of International Bear Rendezvous weekend. Mike took me to Lone Star. I was the only woman at Lone Star, among probably 150 or so men. Being, as Mike says about himself, a hundred pounds lighter than everyone else in the room sure made me feel little and feminine.

Mike and I agreed that this is not nature (the trees with the pink blossoms are cultivated), but it was pretty enough to get me to pull of the highway.

I love the windmills. There are miles of them.

The weather on the 580 toward Modesto was good, and I got a preview of the green that was along the whole drive.

Waking up in San Francisco

The big picture

Today I finished one experiment and started another. That sounds like a logical progression, but really I started the experiment before I finished the one before it. I had gotten enough results from first one to know that I only got half the results I needed. I screwed something up with the other half, and I don't know what. You might say, think back. Did anything seem confusing? Well, happily (?), figuring out whether I screwed something up is not hard. Yes, I screwed something up. I screwed many things up. None of them really explain the fact that half of the experiment produced data and half didn't. HC and I have one plausible theory. In any case, I repeated the first half of the experiment today. I may never know what went wrong.

The picture above is an image of some of my results. They are part of the good half. There are two things a person might mean by "good results." One is that they get an answer to the question they ask. Here, I am asking, does this protein exist in this part of the brain? My question is answered. The bad aspect of the bad results I got was that they were completely uninformative. I did something wrong and didn't get any bands on my image. The other kind thing a person could mean by "good results" are results that agree with a person's hypothesis. It's understandable to have a pet theory, but, as MK says, you have to trust your data. If it's telling you something that's not what you expected, you need to re-think things. There's a middle ground of "good results," the kind that are confirming preexisting knowledge. Again, it's understandable to want your results to conform to accepted dogma, but if they don't, that's interesting too.

Just the Facts

This is a version of the picture above, cropped and manipulated to emphasize the difference in the three bands.

polyanna now?

i've been feeling definitively better, depression-wise, for the past couple days. looking back, it's amazing how depression twists my thinking and perceptions. i can appreciate people for who they are instead of blaming them for what i'm missing. case in point, SM, my office-mate. yesterday he was talking about syria and lebannon, laughing at how the US was trying to spin things to its advantage. i appreciated his view, and thought about what a luxury it is to be around people from all over the world. i get to hear interesting viewpoints without trying very hard. when i was depressed, this was completely overshadowed by my longing for people weirder (in a good way) than i am. i still think it would be good for me to meet some more people, but the need has a different tenor now.

emergency response time

my place is 4 blocks from a fire house. today AH and i were home for lunch when we heard a car crash. we looked outside and saw the cars in the intersection in unexplainable positions. ten minutes later, when i walked through the intersection on my way back to school, there were four emergency vehicles there and more arriving. it made me glad to live so close to the fire house. surprisingly, we don't get too much siren noise. my friend SM lives on the same street as the fire house and said that they often turn on the sirens directly outside his house, which is more disturbing than the steady approach and departure of the noise.

what to do on valentine's day

1) enhance the sex life and general well-being of mice.
holly, who is sweetly concerned for the well-being of our mices [sic], has picked the mice that are alone in a cage as the ones we're going to kill tomorrow, because living alone is very stressful for a mouse. we have three males and one female. you can't put males together in a cage without them fighting, but she did put the female in with a male for tonight. have a good night, little mice.

2) torture a loved one.
the ear medicine arrived today, and, with AH's help, i treated bad dog's ears. he was quite patient, but i know it hurt. hopefully they'll get better quickly.

3) find out that you've got no soul.
and i don't mean i can't dance. DM, who went to Aida with us yesterday, talked about getting chills during the performance. i was not that swept up in it. i liked it, but more cerebrally.

4) get sweet valentine's day cards from your family.
i was touched.

5) listen to the police helicopters of Los Angeles circle while you walk the dog.
unfortunately, this activity can only be carried out in los angeles. when i was considering moving here, a LA native warned me about the high amount of police helicopter (not black helicopters) activity here. tonight, mac and i were temporarily lit up by the spotlight which made 4 circles around the area during our short walk. they seem to have found what they wanted a few blocks from here.

ok, so 3 and 5 weren't so valentine's day oriented, but i like lists.

you've gotten tough, says ani

i just came from seeing ani difranco in concert. that woman can make some noise. it was just her and a guy playing the upright bass. she was really energetic. it was a fun excuse to get dressed up and see some flavor of "my people," people i might imagine to be rare in LA. there were girls who looked like they could have been at a brittany spears concert, lots of women wearing kind of drab clothes, and some women wearing clothes that i was excited to see: clothes that said queer, or fashion forward, or both.

there was a very loud woman behind me who would shout out in the middle of quiet slow songs "i love you ani!" and "i love the way you play guitar, ani!" i actually cringed the first time she shouted. i told myself it was ridiculous to cringe on her behalf, and that i should be able to let other people do their thing. but i cringed again in response to her next outburst.

there were a lot of lesbians at the concert. some of the brittany girls were hanging on each other, and i had the uncharitable thought to wonder if their motivations went beyond increasing their attractiveness to boys. something about their behavior suggested that its display was the most gratifying part of it.

the smoke (from the stage and a little from pot smokers) didn't kill my lungs or well-being. i did get a headache, but some advil helped that. again, my improved asthma meds come through. amazing.

although i was fairly misanthropic throughout the concert, i was happy to be there. there was no seating, but there was room to stand away from the crush of the crowd and still see ani. i think it was really good for me to go to the concert, given how stifled i've felt by pasadena lately. i really need to broaden my social circle. i need to hang out with some people who are weirder and more out-there than me in some hard-to-define way, people who will inspire me and let me feel on the normal side every once in a while. in the past i've found people through volunteer organizations, political organizations, karate, school. to accomplish it here, i think i must become part of an institution that is physically located closer to the center of the city. until i have a car, i'm not going to be able to commit to it. i don't even know what 'it' is yet.

bad dog, who i fed and walked before the concert, needs a quick walk. here i go out into the pasadena night, in my leather pants, mirror ring, and sparkly jacket. tomorrow i go to the opera. what a weekend.