I'd like to bring John McCain and his lovely wife a batch of home made choco.chip cookies

I'm not sure how sound the source is, but I recently learned that JOHN MCCAIN owns a condo in La Jolla about a 10 minute drive from my apartment (see map below).


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It is currently being said that he has not paid taxes on this property, or any of his many other California properties, for several years. I am shocked and surprised by this revelation because who has EVER heard of a rich white person cheating the state out of tax dollars? That sort of thing just simply does not happen. Nope. Unheard of.

George Carlin died

He was a comedic hero of mine back in high school. I haven't been keeping up with him recently, but he shall be missed.

Goodbye George Carlin.

Don't watch this at work!

I thought this video was really clever!
And it's got david byrne singing.

Do you believe everything your personal psychic tells you?

Proof that Canadians (Canadian EDUCATORS, no less) can be as mind-numbingly stupid as anyone else. Based on the advice of a psychic, a teacher's aid contacts child services regarding the possibility of sexual abuse of a child in her class. The result? No, the child was not being abused. Yes, the mother was plenty pissed off. People are beyond silly.

How I waste my time

I just spent 25 minutes of my life on this little java-based puzzle (I needed to get a perfect score on each puzzle because I have O-C tendencies and it took me that long to do it). Non-verbal IQ is usually based on puzzles similar to this one. An experimenter times how long it takes you to solve them and calculates an IQ score from that time. I've always been pretty good at these types of visual games but I'm skeptical of (or at least ignorant as to) how this ability translates to what we generally refer to as "intelligence".

I always assumed that it all has to do with memory and the ability to mentally manipulate complex ideas (like being able to rotate a set of cubes in your head, so that you can imagine seeing a shape from two directions at once). I think I'm an above-average map reader, I can orient myself toward a cardinal direction even within buildings, and have a great memory for places I've visited before such that I can retrace a path I had traveled only once, five years ago. But my memory for names, dates, places, and events is truly terrible. I will easily forget what I ate for dinner yesterday or when I was supposed to have a project done by when told just hours before. Even more alarming is the consistency with which I experience the 'tip-of-the-tongue' phenomenon on a daily basis.

I'd like to read more about what psychologists and cognitive scientists have learned about different types of memory (visual-spacial, procedural, etc) but I'm too busy trying to write a paper (and playing stupid little block puzzle games).

From the "funny-because-it's-true" file:

Excellent comic from xkcd (shocking!):


It's awesome when Mathematicians get their props.

The straight talk express

Left wing Propaganda!!!



Ignore the commentary and watch the video. I don't suspect that the clips were taken too much out of context.

I can't remember whether I've talked about impostor syndrome before, but it is a very real problem. This article summarizes it nicely.

Here is my Gist anyway: In graduate school, or any academic environment really, there is a tendency for people to feel inferior to their peers. This can escalate to the point where you feel that you really don't belong in the position that you have found yourself in. You get a feeling that you've fooled everyone into believing that you are smarter than you actually are and any second now they will all realize how incredibly stupid you've been all along.

I feel like an impostor all the time, but I've learned a while ago how get over it. I've simply forced myself to remember one simple thing: We don't all have the same skills. For example, if I had to rank my understanding of higher level statistics on a scale from 1 to 10, I would put myself at about a 6 thanks in large part to the ton of math courses I've taken througout my academic career (I would put the average High School Grad at about a 2 and the average linguistics professor at about a 5). However, I often interact with colleagues who are at about a 9 or a 10 and they make me feel like an idiot, even though I know that I'm more knowledgeable than a bunch of my peers.

But the key isn't really to remember that I'm still better than other smart people. This is because when I interact with those people I'll realize that their knowledge of something like the sounds or syntactic patterns of the world's languages is at a 9 where mine is at a 2. So when I need to talk about some aspect of linguistic typology with them, they make me feel like a complete moron (though certainly unintentionally). So no matter where I turn I find people who are better than me in everything, even though I might be pretty good at many of those things.

I suspect the way that some people deal with this issue is by picking one particular topic and striving for a 10. Then, whenever they need an ego boost, they steer the conversation toward their topic and blow everyone out of the water. I'll never be able to do that because I spend too much time sticking my nose in other fields like anthropology, astronomy, sociology, etc. (the very typical 'jack of all trades, master of none' syndrome). I can't seem to find the motivation or drive to focus on one particular topic for a very long period of time so I find myself achieving a rank of 5 in everything. Of course, I'll never be able to achieve this goal.

One simply can't be good at everything... I'll always be a poor group leader since I don't like telling people what to do unless they annoy me (and it's not good to be an annoyed leader). I'll never be a good musician since even to be mediocre on the guitar requires that you practice at least once a year. I'll never be a good marathon runner since there's simply not enough time in the day for me to piddle away on some circular track when the internet has a new article about never before contacted tribes in the Amazon and a new TED talk video about climate change.

So I wonder whether I should re-think my strategy. Maybe I need to seek out my 10. But then what if I get my 10 and it's not fulfilling? I seem to be happy doing what I'm doing now even though I know there will never be a conclusion...

My points are these: All of us experience a time when we feel stupid. But I'm pretty sure that we all experience a time when we all feel smart. We should always try to remember both of those times (I hate it when mechanically inclined people try to make me feel like a jackass about something like auto repair, that's such an assholish thing to do. Oh, and I absolutely hate the word noob for the exact same reason). Career decisions should only be made while keeping these things in mind.

Crime happens. Just don't let it get to you.

You take google maps and mash it up with some kind of crime database and you can get a pretty up-to-date map on all kinds of crimes that are happening in your neighborhood.

Here, for example, is a link to a map of homicides in the LA area.

People say that crime has been steadily decreasing over the past 10, 20, 40, 100, 1000 years (pick your favorite time span). But the reason we feel like things are getting worse is that our local news is much better at reporting crime, especially violent crime. Well, the internet is going to make damn sure that gullible fools like me never leave our homes, so we can spend more time on the internet. Oh sweet internet, your warm glow keeps me safe in the dark.

New York Times knows how to use flash

There is a pretty cool flash animated info-visualization of democratic supporter demographics available from the NYT. Here is the link.

exciting moments in the pathetic little lives of graduate students

I discovered this morning that a paper I co-authored with the wonderful Adele Goldberg has been cited 5 times. Two of those don't count because they come from the same journal that the paper was published in. 2 come from the same author in different papers (Gregory Ward, a man I could have had a chance to meet, but didn't, while he was visiting San Diego for a conference last year). The last was from a Korean author in a paper written in Korean. I'm very much interested to find out in what context I was cited in this paper, but I don't read Korean. I suppose it couldn't have been good since the author is proposing an analysis using a theoretical framework which is in direct contrast to the theoretical framework the paper I co-authored was using.

Anyway, I guess the good news is that a paper I was instrumental in putting into the world has been read by at least 4 people other than its two authors, one of which is from another country!

Fantastic!

Wanna be appalled?
Listen to this story about a Catholic being denied communion because he endorsed Obama.

Not appalled?

First of all, it is impossible to agree 100% on every issue with any candidate. You have to decide which issues are important to you and whether those fit with what the candidate offers. That's how we should all vote in a perfect world...

This Priest who denied the guy communion seems to not be able to realize this. What's worse, is that he is denying a member of his faith a very important element of that faith on the grounds of a personal disagreement about an issue which, as weighty as it may seem, is derivative in terms of the act of communion. I mean, denying communion, in parts of the world, is an act tantamount to excommunication, which is a pretty big deal.

Am I surprised by all of this? No. People are generally petty, even religious leaders.
But I'm sort of angry about it because many of my fellow human beings are blindly choosing to follow leaders of this caliber. Of course, this isn't as bad as child molestation, but what kind of leadership is the catholic church providing with idiots like this guy at the pulpit?

A list of things

Recent events for me to be somewhat pleased about:

• Obama has clinched the necessary number of delegates for the nomination
  
• I have gotten a poster accepted at a conference on the east coast
• I have now completed all obligations for my PhD EXCEPT qualifying and dissertation
• I finally finished playing the game GTAIV (though the game is so pretty that I can see myself playing it again just to explore the fake new york some more)
• I'm going to be an uncle for a second and third time

Things that are kind of irking me

• My netflix DVDs have not come in yet and I mailed them in on Friday. What the hell Netflix!
• The more I learn about McCain (even from his own website and his own speeches) the more I am shocked by how narrow minded he is despite his (nearly) 71 years of life. Although leaps and bounds more adequate than GWBush for a CiC role, I fear that his experiences have taught him nothing with respect to governance at home (I'll go into this in more detail in future posts as that critical Tuesday approaches) and that his main obama-sticking point of experience might actually win him the office despite this.
• I now have to prepare a poster for that conference on the east coast (with less than 2 weeks to do so)
• I have to write a paper for a class
• I have to grade a ton o papers as per my obligation as a TA
  
• I have to come up with a dissertation topic and I have to do that over the summer in order to qualify on time.
• I learned, despite what I had been told in my childhood by respectable elders, that the reason why public primary and secondary schools in this country are secular has very little at all to do with secularist policy makers.
  

More on that last point: Of course until the mid 19th century most schools were teaching children to read using primers and spellers written by clergymen and bursting with biblical passages and references. In high school (like university) intimate knowledge of many specific bible passages was a requirement at the time. This began to change because of two things: A) the ratio of protestants to catholics began to change with the influx of Irish and Italian immigrants in the 1800s, and B) the "Great Awakening" or evangelical movement sought to unify the splintered protestant churches by condensing what was similar and ignoring what was different about the various sub-belief systems of the reformed church.

Regarding B: This created a watered down version of biblical instruction since bible passages were interpreted differently by the different protestant churches. All such bible passages with conflicting interpretations, were taught to students devoid of interpretation. Everyone pretty much was reading the bible 'blind', that's assuming the particular school district could decide on which version of the bible was the appropriate one to use. I don't know if YOU've ever attempted to read the KJversion carefully and on your own but my experience is that it is not an easy task for the average high school kid, and from what I can tell, most adults with a high school education even have a hard time with it. Eventually this process evolved into the ditching of specific religious instruction and the incorporation of "moral" instruction in its place.

Regarding A: Christian (and Jewish) parents were not very happy about sending their kids to a public school which was indoctrinating their children in a belief system (Protestantism) not shared by them. Unitarians were sort of stuck in the middle and it ended up being a handful of them who came up with compromises. So after a spat of riots, murders, and church burnings both sides were happy to make the public schools completely secular and delegating the task of religious education to Sunday schools. The Catholic church actually STRONGLY urged members of their congregation to ignore public schools altogether and just have them pay for private catholic school. But that's another story.

I'm currently in the process of doing more research on that to make sure that the secondary sources confirm the facts, but the reason why this irks me is because I'd been made to sort of feel guilty by my elders for many years and, as it turns out, unjustly. I struggle with my views about religion and education because I think it is certainly ok for religious children to pray in school and I think that high schools should teach courses on religious texts (not just the bible) and religious philosophies (not just the christian varieties). Of course, there is nothing in the national constitution (or any state constitution that I know) that make school prayer illegal. Children are allowed to pray anywhere they'd like on school grounds during school hours, the problem is school sponsored prayer. Similarly, schools are more than welcome to provide courses on religious studies, but few want to try for either fear of complaints and litigation from uninformed parents or lack of interest from the students.

But many average religious Americans blame agnostics, atheists, and secular academics for the lack of God in our schools and this is just plain unfair. Most rational people, atheists secular or not, don't have a problem with kids practicing their religions in schools. They just don't want the teachers to be stuck in the position of inadvertently telling little Ming Tao Hsu or little Elizabeth Ebrahimi that they and their families are going to hell because they don't practice the one true religion. This is a very real and very serious problem in MANY schools around the country.

I guess I just wish that people in general were aware of the straw men they build and use in their arguments. This is one of the biggest straw men out there and one that I keep hearing over and over again in the media.

More british funny people

I would like to advertise, for a minute if I could, the excellent news satire podcast "the bugle"

I find it very funny. I listen to it on the bus ride to campus and I often laugh out loud, drawing looks from fellow passengers. Several of their very good jokes do require some basic knowledge of World History and British sports (football = soccer, cricket = baseball-1st2nd&3rd base+boring*10). It is not as funny as the daily show but certainly as clever as the onion given that it's just two guys writing the jokes. John Oliver, of the daily show fame, is one of the two writers/hosts.

If you have a bit of audio time to kill (you could listen to it as you cook or cut your toenails, for example) I do suggest you give it a shot. Try episode 2 for starters. Though episode 1 is equally good, episode 2 includes a guest segment involving the recurring character "The American" which is excellent.

What the "L"!

The CTA's 'L' (or elevated train system) made it on Wired's top ten most impressive subways. I guess the word 'subway' has grown to encompass any city-wide transit system?

Why teachers need more training

I've been often told that you should never believe everything that you read, especially on the internet. I hope that this article is exactly one of those times when the material must be untrue, because it is pretty unbelievable.

Let me summerize it for you. A weird little five year old boy (possibly autistic) was "voted out" of his class by his five year old classmates. The teacher, by organizing this tribal council, suggested that this was an appropriate method of dealing with a problem child. It's not clear how much of a PROBLEM this problem child truly posed, but that's quite beside the point. I'm less concerned with the psychological well-being of the child being voted out (though I suspect it is pretty horrible and that this might be the kind of trauma that might lead to severe problems a bit later on in life) but I think the lesson that all of the other children in the class learned that day was an unspeakably foul one.

Knowing what we know about the psychology of mob rule and conformity in the presence of authority I can't imagine in what universe a teacher would consider this situation an example of a positive education. Maybe she was attempting to teach them a lesson about democracy, though a terribly misguided one. Or maybe she was just fed up with having to deal with a socially awkward little boy.

Let's hope none of this is true. Or at the very least, let's hope this is as bad as it gets in the educational system...