Pic o' the Week

Couresty of Christastrophe. This is just brilliant. I'm gonna go ahead and leave it caption free and hope the people get it.

The Royal WEfnuk: Week III

Short and sweet: we gotta lot of short field turnovers from these guys and took pretty good case of the disc en route to a rout, taking half 8-0 and waltzing our way to a 15-3 win over the infinitely cleverly named "Swinging Huckers" (including stalwarts like Nappi, 6'9" Dustin, and Byron). Ho-stack worked extremely well. We only had two women (Gen and Teri, and Teri was sick!), but they ran all over our opponent's women - Teri must have caught 8 or 9 goals, actually, and Gen caught a few as well. Crazy.

I personally played just fine, throwing 6 goals, scoring none (yikes!), getting five (!) Ds and turning over two reasonable-shot hucks. So 17/4/6/9 (thr/sc/tur/d) on the season so far, not shabby.

The game was unfortunately marred a bit by the usual bitch-fest that occurs when one team is up by ten goals. I had an exceptionally clean poach D on Byron - I intercepted the disc a good two steps before he even got there - and he reached out for the disc which was already in my hand, slapped *the disc* and called a foul. I rightfully gave him the "you've gotta be kidding me" line, and he acquiesced, but qualified it with "you guys have been calling every little thing." I think there may have been three calls total in the first half of the game, so I didn't know what he was talking about, but I said "Okay, we'll try not to make ticky tacky calls." Of course, having been framed by Byron's odd account of the first half, every call after that point was suspect - and yes, some of them were by our team and were ticky tacky, but sheesh, it became an excuse-away for the other team. "We're only losing because of their bad calls." Sure, fine. So the whole thing turned sour, as blowouts often do, but I really feel in this case it was prefaced by Byron creating a situation with a wickedly bogus call and then accusing us of something that I'm pretty sure really hadn't occurred up to that point. Great, really awesome, and the whole thing just got colored stupidly. Thanks homes.

So not the most fun game ever, but we certainly played well. Tune in next week when we take on Wii Huck, aka Tricky's team. Note that this will be a WE/Wii battle. Until then...

La Première Ballade des Fleurs

Quickly because I've got a big stack of Naturalists staring me down - I'll explain that at some point, maybe - but this is the official announcement that Beck and I have moved and thus, this is the first post from our Flower House. Huzzah! Clearly the internet is hooked up, computers set up, and otherwise... nothing. There are 700 billion boxes strewn about the house. We've been living off of a steady diet of pizza, beer and McGriddles. And perhaps KFC. These are not the meals we will report on future long-range epidemiological studies, rendering them useless.

But suffice it that things are good. We have a long list of things to do - lawn mowing being very high on said list, yikes - but some semblance of permanence has been set in motion. Good deal. I will try to post some pics of the new place in the not distant future (but that, natch, would require me to figure out where the hell the camera and cables are).

Okay - I'll try and catch up on some of my remiss posting as study breaks as the day progresses. I clearly owe week 4 and 5 accounts of school, and a week 3 account of the awesome that is the Royal WEfnuk. Until then...

"Finding" Nemo

Real quick as a reading break: I'm reading a book by a guy named Francis called Why Men Won't Ask for Directions, a sort of polemic against the pure adaptationist approach to explaining features of organisms as purely due to selective advantage. Combine that with a little snippet I read from friend Katherine's blog last night about how she doesn't like unreality, even in comic book science fiction (she was specifically referring to how the Joker and his minions in Dark Knight could easily plant rigged explosives on ferries with no one noticing or checking the hull before embarking), and I'm getting an odd scene in my head. See, it turns out that clownfish, the little critters who like to hang out in sea anemone for protection, have the interesting physiological ability of being able to change sexes when circumstances dictate. A male and a female mate and hang out in the same anemone their entire life. And if the female of the couple should happen to get eaten while out hunting, no problem, the male just turns into a female, and then mates with one of his/her juvenile fish (who can convert from pretty much no-sex to male for the occasion). And they have more juvies, and Elton John sings "The Circle of Life" and everything's good. One problem: this is what a clownfish looks like:

Alls I'm saying is, that little factoid did NOT come up in the movie.

Conversational Dynamics: Social Interaction in the Ethics Lab

Nyet sees a funny political website. Nyet e-mails the link to his officemate Jenny.
N: I sent you a funny e-mail.
J (checking e-mail): I don't see it. Must be lost somewhere in cyberspace.
A minute passes. Jenny checks her spam folder.
J: Oh, I got it. It was in the junk folder.
N: Why was it the junk folder?
J: That's an existential question I can't answer for you.
Nyet weeps into his lean pocket.

And... scene.

ASU Underclassmen 2.0

A class-to-remain-nameless was given a lecture today on the precautionary principle, which I in my limited understanding believe is the general idea of erring way on the side of caution when deciding policy for things scientifically unknown. In an attempt to accentuate the difference between "known" and "unknown," the professor capped the class with the following quiz:

"Jill is married and lives south of a large lake. Every day when her husband leaves for work, she takes a ferry across the lake to her secret lover's house. The ferry man is peculiar in that he has a no exceptions policy of only accepting exact change for the ferry ride; as a result, Jill has to bring exact change both for the ride to and the ride from her lover's house. Incidentally, her lover's house is a cabin in the woods, and in those same woods, there is a man named Butch who is known to murder people he finds int he woods after dark. One day, Jill is leaving her lover's cabin and realizes she doesn't have exact change. She asks the lover for exact change, but he doesn't have it. Jill can't stay at his cabin overnight as both she and the lover are worried the husband will notice her missing. So Jill walks to the ferry, but because she does not have exact change, the ferryman (knowing full well about Butch) denies her the ride. The sun sets, Jill attempts to walk back to the cabin but runs into Butch, who kills her in stereotypical fashion with an axe.

So, given that everyone knew about Butch (except for, perhaps, the husband), who is responsible for Jill's death and why?"

A. The Husband
B. Jill
C. The Ferry Man
D. The Lover
E. Butch
F. "Other"

So, put on your culpability hats and decide this one. Wait just a second and we'll reveal that...

In a class of 200 people...

All high school educated...

Perhaps registered to vote...

And therefore eligible for jury duty...

151 people said....






















JILL.

That's 75.5%!!!!!!!! Over three fourths blamed a corpse for her own death!

18 said Butch.

11 said the Lover.

7 said the Ferry Man.

5 said the Husband.

8 said "Other," whatever the hell that means.

So (and admittedly, I'm apparently holding a severe minority opinion here) I'm gonna go ahead and throw out that the standard JudeoChristian ethicolegal system answer to the question "who is responsible for the death of the murdered woman?" is THE GUY WHO MURDERED THE WOMAN. Butch, in this case, just to make that clear. Sheesh.

And the justifications for blaming Jill for her own death were equally outstanding. They ranged from the standard rape "she had it coming" defense to the quasi-Victorian "an affair? She deserved to die!" logic. And in between were some attempts at incorporating the concept of precaution, that since she "knew" about Butch she is ultimately responsible for the outcome. Exciting. The two best responses, though, were the one that blamed the husband (He should have done a better job satisfying his wife; he started the whole chain of events) and one that tried to split the blame: "Both Jill and Butch are equally responsible, though only Butch is punishable." Yes, I suppose incarcerating the corpse would seem a little gratuitous.

I would like to think that at least part of this was a weird sort of gamesmanship, that the lecture had so put these students in the "look for unobvious answers" mindset that they were a bit duped into forgetting that the actor is generally most responsible for the act. But still, wowsers - this puts it over the top, very uncomfortably, for me. People apparently think this way, or are at least willing to submit quizzes that indicate as much.

(And if I'm just really off on this and not seeing why Jill is truly responsible for her fate, please, let me know. I think the most you can say about Jill is that she behaved recklessly, but when another agent is involved, you can't pin responsibility on her reckless behavior. Maybe that's just me).

The Royal WEfnuk: Week II

Nothing much to report here - game 2 was against "Blue Goo," a team captained by Tim, a good player/handler type and all around nice guy (even if he occasionally inspires 'why so serious?" type questions). Wade was out of town for this one, and players Teri, Amber and Justin were in town. Sweetness. We dragged out the ho-stack for this game, and after sputtering for the first couple of points, we worked it quite well. Traded a little bit at the beginning and let them get behind us just a little too much; started out 3-3, and then they ran off a bunch in a row to make it 7-3. Shades of last week, uh-oh.

Not so much - we really turned on the D, got a tad more careful with throws, got our stuff together and ran off 5 straight to take half. YEAH. And then traded a little bit after the new half started, found ourselves down 10-9, but ran off another 5 in a row to seal the game. 14-10 victory for the good guys, and people were much happier this week than last.

Justin is a dynamo, and Pat had a much bigger impact this week than last. Paul played great, Josiah played great, Ned played great - just an all around great performance by the menfolk. G and Teri were cutting / D-ing like mad women, and Alex and Brenda burned around the field quite a bit, too. Really, the key to this game was a shutdown D that slowly revealed itself - that, and the other team had approximately 2.4 people with the endurance necessary to hang with our squad aplenty.

Personally played pretty well - one bad turnover, a miscommunicated scoober to Justin that fell achingly short after he realized that it had gone up to the corner away from where he was cutting. Otherwise hit Genvieve a pair of times for goals, hit Teri a couple of times deep deep for goals, hit Pat numerous times deep (though not all for scores) and time on an endzone play, and caught three goals I can remember (deep, short layout, deep). No Ds, though I think i actually played reasonable D - actually had a nice clean poach D that got imho erroneously foul-called, what can you do. So we'll call that a 7/3/1/0, bringing me to 11/4/4/4 for two games. Me, me, me, I know.

All in all a good team effort. Things got a little testy at the end - chippy foul calls, highlighted by a sick layout bid by Justin that the guy called a foul on and then pointed at a spot on his off arm where J had brushed him. Pretty ticky tacky, but 10-10 late in the game can do that, I suppose. We actually kept things relatively civil, even when a certain little person screamed (cursed, actually) at me for trying to clarify call on the field - a guy had turned to dump, faked his throw, let go of the disc and caught it again; i.e. he caught his own throw, auto-turnover. So yay me for being civil.

Nicole, Big Nate and Bill stuck around to heckle us after their laugher of a game - sheesh, they were practically done before our halftime. Yikes. But they kept things lively, and got extra funny when the game got tense at the end. Fun times.

Okay, I'm sure I've lost ALL of my readers with this lame recap - suffice it: played generally better, starting to gel, hopefully we will continue to build on this. Good stuff.

from Life of Pi

some of the wisdom of Yann Martel, from his book Life of Pi,

"All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive."

(That first nugget reminds the Clarion of the brilliant, under-read, under-utilized Gavin De Becker book, The Gift of Fear.)

More from the Life of Pi,

"People move because of the wear and tear of anxiety. Because of the gnawing feeling that no matter how hard they work their efforts will yield nothing, that what they build up in one year will be torn down in one day by others. Because of the impression that the future is blocked up, that they might do all right but not their children. Because of the feeling that nothing will change, that happiness and prosperity are possible only somewhere else."

"I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent."

(This third one goes on for four more insightful paragraphs.)

The book is well worth the read. Yes, we know, everyone else read it years ago.

Week 3

This will be a seat of pants hack job, as blogging time is getting harder and harder to come by these days, and I really more than anything want to be sure I get the events down. Por supuesto, so I can look back at these entries someday and laugh at the inanity of my youth middle-agedness. Ha, future me, you were a chump!

(Speaking of lame time-travel jokes: my otherwise tres cool fellow student and office mate Jenny has ring tone of "Out of Touch" by Hall & Oates. Jason starting making fun of her the other day - "you really are out of touch" - and I added that someone was calling her from the 80s. I then yelled towards Jenny's phone "Buy stock in Google!," something I thought was a fairly standard / obvious Back to the Future 2-esque joke, but Jason nearly had a heart attack from laughing. Good times in the Ethics Lab).

Monday, we heard a talk from Mary, a soon-to-be PhD with a fellowship at Cal Berkley (and by soon, I mean SOON; she's defending in approximately one month). I think the aim here was to give us a little "here's you in four years!" vantage point, to convince some of us that the abstract tomorrow is not so abstract. Mission accomplished - Mary is very sharp / cool / nice and a generally great role model. Her research is in model organisms and the history of the study of regeneration, and she gave a great overview of her time at ASU and a little Q & A afterwards. Good times.

That afternoon, we continued our S, T & L class talks on expert witnesses and advisory panels, specifically focusing on the silicone breast implant / auto-immune mediated disease cases prevalent in the 1980s. The general vibe is that expert witnesses are hopelessly biased, panels are hopelessly biased, and that juries don't listen anyways. We then watched a video of a landmark civil suit where a jury awarded a suffering old lady 5.4 million dollars, despite the fact that both JAMA and the New England JoM had published epidemiologic studies showing no association b/w the implants and the scleroderma that the lady had. The two jurors were interviewed afterwards and explicitly stated that the silicone didn't cause her problems, but "we thought she could use the money. She's just a poor old lady, and the big company has bucks to spare." Ugh. Quick cut to an episode of Oprah, where the CEO of Dow Chemicals is trying to defend his company, and the morons in the audience start chanting "we're the evidence." The overall effect of this lecture was a veil of disappointment: between the constant no-solutions offered polemic in the course and the absurdity that is our legal system picture that the prof is painting, the whole thing makes all efforts feel worthless. Whadya think of that, Mike NTPB?

Tuesday's big accomplishment was a meeting with John Lynch, a superstar prof who's half-time at the Barrett Honors College (for Undergrads) and halftime a SoLS. Here's his blog. He researches the history of anti-evolutionism in America, so I met with him to talk about a potential paper for my SL&T class regarding cultural values / narratives motivating the ID / Evo debate. Fantastic meeting; really got me going in the right direction and was just a schwank guy to talk to generally. Interdisciplinariness is a big strength at ye olde ASU, but his strength is really just cross-disc: he also teaches "The Human Event" for Barrett, which from what I can tell ranges over all kinds of great lit and history and you name it. Very cool guy.

Wednesday featured a meeting with Andrew Hamilton, an STS superstar at ASU and one of the professors from my core seminar HSD class. We got coffee, chatted about a variety of things, and centered in on popular conceptions of the Sociobiology debate of the 70s-80s (today?) as a research topic. Cool stuff.

Which reminds me - this week for that class, we read articles by Gould, Alcott, and Sergerstrale, all centered around E.O.Wilson's coffeetable classic Sociobiology (of which we read selected pertinent chapters). The basic story is that Wilson wrote a book with a very throwdown "Let's establish a new discipline as the root of all these other disciplines" opening chapter, a middle 25 chapters of fairly high quality cited research supporting a biological basis (read: genetic) of social behavior in everything from ants to apes, and a final chapter that essentially said humans are just another animal and our social behaviors are grounded in our biology / evolutionary history, too. Nowadays, it's actually a pretty commonplace and relatively accepted idea, but in the 1970s, coming out of the Civil Rights era and on the cusp of some controversial work regarding inherent IQ differences between the races (call it The Bell Curve, Version 0.0), this was big time controversial, at least amongst hot shot scientists in the US and Britain. I won't go into particulars here, but Wilson got pretty accused of being a ultra-con racist by some Marxist folks, people called one another bad scientists, and a whole wealth of debates erupted over what constitutes good science (some felt Wilson had way over-conjectured; some felt you have to have models in place before you can test hypotheses) and how moral behavior and scientific practices are interrelated. I'm currently reading Segerstrale's Defenders of the Truth, a thoroughly excellent account of the event, its aftermath, the subsequent history, etc., and it's a fascinating vignette of what happens in so-called scientific / academic discourse. BUT the thing I am finding interesting thus far is that there has been little to no articulation as to who exactly the lay public is or how this science is supposed to corrupt them. Hence the potential research paper topic. We'll see.

Wednesday afternoon featured another SL&T class, this time outlining how brutally inefficient and troubled Congressional Agencies are in times of uncertain scientific data. Smell a theme in this class thus far? This time it was re: BPA, that plastic in your Nalgene bottle that is going to kill you dead. Pretty thoroughly uninteresting.

Thursday I checked out a huge pile of books for research, and Friday we had our seminar class which went well. I also went to a burger joint with Andrew, Johnny and Kathy and ate a stupidly good cheeseburger. Good times.

I'm fading here, but I'll mention real quick that we were supposed to have dinner with Elaine on Friday, but Hurricane Ike derailed her plans. So we ate with D&C instead at a restaurant that strongly resembled Richardson's. We were lucky enough to sit next to a tableful of drunk-as-hell real estate types who quietly discussed the virtues of Helvetica vis a vis Arial font. SO ANNOYING. Geez, get a room, people.

And Saturday Dan & I played golf - woohoo - and I managed to shoot a 42 on the front nine (par 31) and then lost all ability to chip and went to 46 on the back nine. Sigh... very cheap course, and I didn't lose too many balls, so all was good. Don't think I'll be making a habit out of expensive courses, though hanging with MC "25 foot putt" Dan works pretty well. D&C came over for pool-sittin' later, and Beck and I capped the evening by having a good dinner at Zipp's.

Beck and I hit up the McDowell Mts. on Sunday, and I played a fun game of pickup later in the day. Spent the remainder of the weekend reading Politics in the Laboratory: The Constitution of the Human Genome and also hearing the aforementioned terrible news that I will write about at some point soon.

And that was the week. Okay, back to the Defenders...

No.

DFW, 1962-2008.

The Royal WEfnuk: Week I

Last night we played "Offshore Swilling," a team featuring Vince, Pauline, Jason T. and a relative newcomer to the area Damon (whom I think is SWEET and other people don't quite appreciate appropriately yet). And the most germane fact is that they feature more or less only those people - their captain Roland had an advantage in the draft (getting the first pick in EVERY round) and he intentionally used his lower picks to grab players who would be showing up sparingly. While that's a pretty shrewd move in the win-at-all-costs mode, it's not entirely in the spirit of things, but to each his or her own. Suffice it to say that they are quite a juggernaut team anyways, but when they are playing only their top players the entire game, they are that much more impressive.

To that end, we were missing one of our top pics Justin and our top female pick Teri. But we had all of the rest of our players (minus Amber), so we had to split playing time accordingly. I think we did a good time being egalitarian about that, but maybe to a bad "win the game" effect; we routinely ended up with some relative newbies guarding their superdudes, and that caused a lot of problems for us.

The game can be summed up quite simply - we turned it over within 20 yards of our own goal line far too frequently, and they capitalized really well. They basically just didn't turn it over, and when you've got advantages at every spot on the field (and a bunch of guys who know how to get open and not turn it over), that makes for a pretty brutal and disheartening game. We ran hard, but didn't do the world's best job of holding the mark, playing defense or making cuts on offense. Combine that with a few bad decisions, and you've got a recipe for a blowout; a blowout it was.

We lost 15-8, and considering an 8-2 start, that wasn't actually so bad. (You'll notice we played them 7-6 in the second half). We just had trouble getting things going and as mentioned, they were brutally efficient. They're going to be the team to beat if you ask me. We need to be vastly more aggressive on making cuts and otherwise just get a little better on our D technique - again, the bulk of their scores were quick, transition points coming from our bad short field turns, so avoiding that will be paramount as well.

I played okay myself; had one bad turnover on a windblown disc and a couple on emergency stall 9 hucks, but otherwise took care of things on O just fine. Had at least four Ds that I can remember and one super "not my guy" D that I unfortunately macked up - he caught it for a score as the rest of our team seemed to have given up on the play. Ah, well. Caught a score, threw four, but really my accomplishment of the day was hanging reasonably well on defense against the likes of Vince, Damon and Jason - they didn't get open easily and I don't remember getting burned (though admittedly, at least part of the time they just took themselves out of the play, recognizing that their other matchups were better. Smart dudes).

So, self-centered score on the season: 4 goals thrown, 1 goal caught, 3 turns, 4 Ds. We'll report this type of things as 4/1/3/4 from here on out.

Captaining wise, I think G and I did a good job - met before the game to discuss some basics, ran a drill, worked with the new players. As the score got more lopsided, people seemed to get a bit dejected, but we picked up the energy as we went. We conveyed some info, kept things positive, and despite getting blown out, kept our spirits up. So that was cool. We've got a brand-newbie in one of our women, Alex, and she just did a fantastic job of staying positive - I'm not sure she even got the disc in the game, as we were having trouble getting it to anyone let alone someone just learning that cut. To try to at least get her a taste, I called a play for her on one of the last points of the game; of course Damon came flying in with a poach D on her. Sigh. Oh, well, we'll keep working; she did have a great aggressive go at a D and seems to have an intuitive grasp of cutting, so that's cool.

So that's about it - a little disappointing opening week, but we had a good time and can only get better from here. We did get a little revenge during the cheer by busting out our clever stick. Here it is for posterity:

We are the Funk that's oh-so-Royal
We're tired of dependance on foreign oil
You really worked us with your forehand force,
But now it's time for an alternative fuel source
Fusion? Solar? Cool windmillin'?
Aw, funk that: Offshore swilling.
Swill. Baby. Swill.

Before there were X-gamers

It was a different time. It was before the cost of liability insurance had been driven through the roof by a lawsuit mad culture. It was before cable TV, let alone the internet. It was before Super Dave Osborne, let alone Tony Hawk.


Behold Evil Kneivel




Daredevil for real

For the iPJ Especially

Want to know what the heck Nyet studies and reads on a daily basis?

Here's a great podcast: The CBC's How to Think About Science (Here's link to mp3 downloads of the podcasts, and you can always subscribe to it in iTunes). I've listened to the first couple of episodes (Schaffer and Daston), and so far it's quite excellent. It's been primarily sociology stuff thus far - not so much philosophy / epistemology / cultural trends stuff I aim to do - but it will give you a solid flavor of what's going on. Plus, the second one may have the most exact archetype of "annoying academia voice" I have ever heard - her take on prima facie is first rate.

Seriously, people, listen, you will dig this, and it will undoubtedly sharpen your concept of "what science is" in the 21st century.

Week in review, Ultimate review, coming later.

Dr. K-araoke & the Pool of Candy Goodness

GREAT time at the party last night. Dr. K's wife Sharon had busted out their blendertron 5000 and some kind of tequila-bot 9000 because wowsers, were those some effective margaritas. Before we even got to the karaoking, we had already gone down water slides, shot baskets, and played a seriously one-sided game of water volleyball 21-4, I believe). Beck had forgotten that it was going to be a swim party, so we didn't actually have suits with us - fortunately, our hosts graciously lent us some. Amazingly enough, as Dr. K is quite a bit skinner than Nyet, I fit into a pair of Dr. K's swim trunks - at least in the waist anyways; my thunderous thighs were a little tight, but it got the job done (and more importantly, didn't rip or fall off).

Dr. K kicked off the K-festivities with a sterling rendition of the Jackson 5's "I'll Be There," and he even pulled off the whole song in falsetto, no mean feat. I contributed a few songs from my staple collection - "Here I Go Again," "Sweet Child O'Mine," "The Greatest Love of All," and even a little bit of an encore Madonna dance while Shelly was singing "Like A Prayer." I also assisted Beck and Traci on - and if you guessed this, you win the free Ballad - Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer," and Beck and I teamed up on "Eternal Flame." Good times, and with all apologies to Tad, I'm pretty sure I won the looniest spouse award. Though on second thought, that may have gone to Katy, who was in full on talkative mode, having no correlation whatsoever with the number of times Tad topped off her margarita.

Like I said, just a really good time, fun crowd; I think they have quite the nice dynamic up there at Beck's clinic. Definitely not the typical "dragged to your spouse's office party" experience.

Beck and I managed to waste a lot of Sunday watching the BrettsJets game and trekking around to the local libraries and hanging by the pool. I got all of my law reading done for tomorrow; some spectacularly uninteresting stuff about law cases involving the health effects - or really, lack thereof - of silicone breast implants. The point is to discuss the relative merits of expert witnesses vs. judge appointed neutral panels, but the arguments were pretty clear after the first article and didn't *really* require the following five. Oh, well, it'll be better after discussion in class tomorrow anyways. Big day tomorrow, actually, now that I mention it, as I have a couple of meetings which will hopefully give me some direction for some papers and research projects this semester.

Ultimate this afternoon, and despite the 108 degree reading on the thermometer, something like 30+ people showed up. Great times; things seem primed for the start of League this week. I had quite the nice back and forth with Vince this afternoon; he's super awesome, as I have gushed before. BIG FUN on the way; we'll see how things go. I will undoubtedly keep you posted.

Beck and I capped the night with some "football food" - sausage from the grill - as we watched Peyton suffer an opening night defeat. I don't know about the rest of America, but I am not really feeling the football this year - other than to say that if the rumors that Chad Johnson *legally changed his name* to "Ocho Cinco" are true, then I have to say: well done, sir, well done.

Alright - Beck just challenged the factuality of my claim that I would "be there in two seconds," so I am going to cut this off and go to bed. I may drop out for a few days again here, so don't get disappointed if I go poof. More hilarious stories and things that give your absurd existence meaning are on their way. Maybe.

Saturday Fright

So, continuing the Ultimate vein, this morning I biked up to the local high school track to do a little mini workout - warm up, 8 100 meter dashes, 4 200s, a medium paced mile and a cool down lap. I felt pretty good, thanks for asking. But the big weirdness worth blogging was that there was a pop warner football game going on that had morphed into a little suburban microcosm: ridiculously overweight parents, surgeried cougar scottsdale moms, barking coaches, kids dressed head to toe in Underarmor, brand new cleats, you name it. I swear, every kid walking by me had to have on a cool $500 of equipment and clothes. Crazy. But what pushed it over the top into a post-apocalyptic nightmare was the fully decked out corps of eight year old cheerleaders. All of this taking place at the site of future high school football games; I swear, it was like watching enculturation in action. Please kids, think for yourself! I won't be there for you.

And to that end, Beck and I are now going to leave for Dr. K-gorium's Magic Emporium and a big ol' Karaoke Party. I see no irony in this whatsoever. O! Suburbia! I mock your structure yet reap your rewards. There ain't no nothing nowhere.

(And yes, there will be a post-bash post. The forecast calls for a 90% chance of a "Sweet Child" with a very probable "Of Mine." Stay tuned).

(Please your bets on whether the Beck will deign to sing tonight. If anyone calls the song, you win a free... copy of the Ballad? Ugh).

(Random side note, and then yes, it's Dr. K-araoke time: the other day in class, when the aforementioned poli student kept dropping names, I wrote in my notebook, "He's very well read; it's well known." The person sitting next to me looked at my notes and gave me a very quizzical look. Sigh...)

The Frisbee Week III: The Inanity of Politics

Full disclosure: this is not original material for The Ballad. I explained the misspelling to my team and did a reasonable job, so I decided I would not reinvent an expression for reinventing the wheel. Here's why we are The Royal WEfnuk:

Regarding the spelling, and feel free to ignore this if you're not interested, but I thought I'd disclose it to the team:

There was a contest for the shirt designs for this year's VOTS league. The choices were between three shirts, one of which was a parody of the french connection logo (fcuk). You've probably seen these shirts; they're black with white or silver lettering that says "fcuk." The parody read "hcuk" on the front and and that was pretty much it; the other two shirts were more traditional pictures of frisbee players and cactus and a phoenix. The "hcuk" design won, but powers that be decided out of hand, sans debate, that vots would not print "that" on a shirt. Pressed for explanation, "it's inappropriate" and "think of the children" were proffered.

So, I found that kind of ridiculous - I mean, sure, the french connection logo can be misread, but if you misread the parody it just says "huck." Obviously the parody is a reference to a "bad word," but I disagree with logic that says that a reference to a reference to a bad word is somehow "inappropriate." And all of this generally goes against Ultimate's hippie roots, free expression and the whole nine. AND there was a shirt last year for a team called "Come From Behind," which to me is more of a direct reference. So there seems to be some inconsistency here.

So when I was thinking of the awful cheers that we'll be doomed to receive with the name "funk" in our name, I started wondering why "funk" is okay but "hcuk" is not. Seems pretty inherent that "funk" is a lot closer to the offensive word than "hcuk" is, but that's just me. And then I thought maybe "fnuk" is even MORE offensive than "funk", since it's a direct reference to the fcuk shirt. Hmmmm. And so, as a form of mild and possibly passive aggressive protest, we're gonna spell "funk" as "fnuk" and see what happens to the children.

Plus, you know, it's just so FNUKY!!!

So that's it. Some people fly to China to protest human rights violations, I misspell team names. We all play our part.

This is what I do in between philosophy articles, btw. I am pretty much a waste of oxygen.

The Frisbee Week II: The Draft

I partnered myself up to captain with Genevieve, an Ultimater Extraordinaire who just came here from Colorado about six months ago and knows my buddy Dave Samuels from the Rice Ultimate days. We played together in a league this Spring, and she is supergood at Ultimate and a supercool individual besides. She is also doing a post-doc fellowship in CSPO, the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes, on campus - we ran into each other at a HSD / SoLS B&S / CSPO barbecue a couple of weekends ago and both had the "Don't I know you?" experience, very common to Ultimate players (when you only ever see someone in shorts, t-shirts and sweatiness, it's kinda hard to recognize them in civvies. You think I'm kidding, but really, it's jarring - I ran into Ultimate bud Eric in the MU a week ago and was barely able to remember his name. Odd). So we're teamed up, both relatively new to the area, determined to pick our team on Wednesday, only we barely know anyone in the area... and we have to draft by name. Whoops.

Enter saviors Nicole and Eric - I consulted with Nicole pre-draft to get an idea of who people were, and Eric helped me out during the draft. Thank goodness. I went in with the goal of picking a well-mixed team, hoping to grab at least one of three guys whom I had scouted as ringers of sorts (ringers in the sense that they were more valuable than the round in which I could get them on the basis of their unknown-ness). Things turned out pretty well - on the women's side, Genevieve grabbed an all-around solid squad, not too much handling / not too much runners, and ditto on the men's - and I got two of my three guys, and would have gotten the other if a certain butterfly hadn't spread the word about Damon. Drat. Oh, well, you certainly cannot win them all.

Here's the team:

Nyet - The Balladeer
Genevieve - The Awesome
Wade - good handler who recently broke his arm. Hopefully it's healed, and if it has, he was a steal where I drafted him.
Alex - Don't know much, but Nicole told me he's FAST, and with inexperienced players that's huge.
Brenda - Super solid female mid-type. Played with her in the spring.
Chunlang - Veteran player who can throw / catch - again, better a known solid than an unknown could be terrible.
Amber - Athletic mid-round pick, heck yeah.
Justin - New to the area, and obviously a former club player. May "shock the world."
Nate - Ned's son, young guy who is learning well. Another solid late round entry.
Ned - Older guy who is still super quick and makes excellent decisions.
Patrick - Supposed to be tall, fast and "unstoppable on offense" according to Eric. We'll see.
Paul - Another one of my steals - he's raw, but athletic / aggressive and already has throws. Ha!
Alex - newbie who, at least based on her e-mails, is tres cool.
Josiah - experienced handler who plays for Sprawl. Good times.
Drew - new guy about whom I know nothing.
Teri - very good all around woman.

So yes, good all around team. I am excited. Fun times ahead. G chose us very, very PURPLE shirts, and so I had no idea what to name our team - Ultimate crowds have a bad tendency to go with obvious and overused ideas like "Purple People Eaters" or "Grape Ape." So I looked up purple on wikipedia and it said: "purple is associated with royalty, imperialism, funk, nobility, and upper class." Hmmm, one of those things is not like the other... so clearly it has to be the center of our team name. I put on Parliament, listened to the first track on mothership connection and came up with:

The Royal WEfnuk*

So groovy that I dig me. Gonna be a good season, looking forward to it.

* - Pronounced "Wee FUNK!" The explanation for the misspelling gets its own post.

The Frisbee Week I: Clinics

While not schooling, I got knee deep in Ultimate this week. The big Fall League starts next week, and so this week we had a couple of clinics for beginner players and the big draft night. Much to tell.

First, I've been playing a lower level pickup game on Saturdays the past couple of weeks for a couple of purposes. One was to get some more Ultimate in - it's my favorite sport, and I want to play it as much as possible. Plus it'll help me get in shape for league. Two was to see if I could recruit some of the more serious players to the VotS league. Three was to intentionally expose myself to some, um, let's say "creative" play and practice not getting upset over it. This worked well. I still tend to get a little miffed when people do things that are "creative" and "violent" - like hand-checking you, putting their head down and running around the field with no regard for where people are - but w/r/t what you might be tempted to call "stupid decisions" or "bad throws," I had a lot of opportunities to have it happen to me, feel the anger and then let it go.

I was doing that last one because I volunteered to captain this league, and I've decided to try to take a chillier approach to things and see how it works out. I thought that would be exceptionally important as a captain, and so I wanted to get some solid Pavlovian action before league started to make sure I could endure mind-numbing Ultimate inanity without getting mad. So hopefully that helped a bit; we'll see. Three was at least a minor success. Two was a success as well, because I met a couple of players who were coming out to league and managed to convince a couple of others as well. Sweet. And one was nice, because I did get quite the workouts. I weighed myself at the gym the other morning (after a Wednesday Ultimate game) and checked in at a cool 190. So things continue to head the correct direction.

Second, I decided to make an effort to welcome people to the league, hopefully help them get their kinks out and introduce them to the game a week before we throw them into the lion's den that can be the VotS leagues. I had been talking with Jose, a bigwig in VotS, about how we seemed to do a poor job of recruiting / keeping new players, and that people in the community had a tendency to form cliques and not welcome newbies. In order to get people to come out and make a better effort, I sent this out to the vots listserv on Monday:

Who's Alfonso Acosta? Emeka Koren? Chris Coco? Damien Scott?

Alfie is the guy who called me out of the blue back in 1996 to see if I wanted to come to a tournament with some Rice guys before I had even set foot on campus. Alfie and Emeka had gone through every single incoming freshman's info sheet and called everyone who so much as mentioned Ultimate. Emeka (a five foot five spitting image of Bob Marley, incidentally) even stopped by people's houses on a cross country trip, scaring the crap out of many a parent. Alfie drove us up to Dallas, showed us the art of crashing on sofas for weekend-long tournaments. Coco showed up during orientation and stopped by my room every day to "go out and toss" - he kept this up all semester long until I could throw an upwind flick like him. Damien (despite being easily the best player I have ever seen), took time out to attend B-team practices and talk about zone, or perhaps more importantly, demonstrate that yes Virginia, a disc CAN hold five beers.

I bring this up not to get everyone interested in the fascinating history of Rice Ultimate, but to point out that here I am twelve years later, and if I think at all about why I play or what Ultimate means, those are the guys that pop to mind. Were they recruiting? Of course. But they were recruiting to the team with open arms, welcoming new players, teaching people the basics of both playing and partying, and more than anything, going out of their way to make strangers feel welcome. And it *worked* - people not only came out to play and got better, they stuck around.

The clinics this Tuesday and Thursday are a fantastic chance to do the same for new players in the local scene. You can be somebody's Alfie, Emeka, Chris or Damien; you can be the person that someone will always remember as "that guy who took me aside to show me how to cut, how to throw a forehand, how to heckle." It's a great chance to share some of the basics and to get people hooked on the game - Ultimate is in a sense an implicitly great "product," but it becomes that much better when people make a conscious effort to welcome others into the fold.

So please, come out to clincs! Encourage players new and old to make it out. If you're new, just grab somebody and say "show me how to X." If you're old, show someone how to do X. If you're somewhere in between, do both! If nothing else, it's a chance to get those legs (or in Dave Abdoo's case, mouths) running for the upcoming league.

We've got a good scene; we all know it can be better. Let's make it so.

I thought it was better to give a little motivational narrative than to just say "come to clinics," so that e-mail resulted. Lots of people showed up on Tuesday, young and old, and more than a couple said they were "pumped by that e-mail!," so that was cool. We did a little presentation on the basics of the game, partnered new people with old to go over a little throwing, and then played a scrimmage for the remaining hour and a half or so, stopping to point out various rules / infractions / strategies. Fantastic - I had actually gotten there early and played with the Sprawl guys (our local club team) for a bit, so by the end of the evening I was quite gassed, but we had a solid 12 new people who got a significant chance to play and learn in a not-really-competitive setting. Great.

And even greater was that more or less all of them came back on Thursday. That night we had fewer vets because we were practicing at the same time as the Phoenix mens and women's club teams, but there were about four of us, which was nice because the newbies got even more chances to catch, throw, cut, etc. So a pretty decent success, and a good start toward the general atmosphere of League for the fall.

Inbetween those two fun experiences came the draft, but I'll save that for another post.

Week 1.8

Lots of stuff stirring in the Nyetverse these days, and unfortunately not a whole lot of time to record it. Though, to be fair, I think someone once said that if I try to observe it, it changes, so it would be an inaccurate recording anyways. Or if I try to determine exactly how good or bad it is, I'll have no ability to determine what it is I'm doing? Maybe. Me Science Pretty One Day, hopefully, but not just yet. Anyways, sorry if I drop off for days at a time here and there; I'm not about to blog at school, and as you'll learn in other posts, miscellaneous other duties have kept me away from the keyboard at night. So it goes.

So I'm going to try to be a little less me-like here and impose a little categorization on the past week or so. It's going to be entirely artificial, not that any kinds of categories are really all that authentic, a little dilly I just read a book on a couple of days ago. It's called nominalism, folks, the basic argument that our systems of knowledge impose an order on the world that is not necessarily there (and I mean necessary in the philo sense - in other words, I'm not saying it's not there, just that it's not de facto, by definition there. Don't worry, it's not just you - I'm finding myself hard to talk to lately, too). A basic example would be the color spectrum: we make all kinds of divisions (red v. orange, visible v. invisible) which have a lot to do more with our cultures and biological circumstances than any real categorical divisions of light. Getting back to the point, The Ballad is a rambling song containing everything under the sun, but I'm gonna try to impose some "school" and "Ultimate" divisions that aren't inevitable (and, as you;'ll see, not even really very applicable).

So it was a short week on campus, just the four days thanks to the holiday. (On Monday Beck and I went to see Wall-E with a slew of four year olds and their unskilled parents who let them blabber throughout. Review pending, but really, people, in a movie with no dialogue for the first half-hour or so, SHHHH YOUR KIDS! Thanks). I spent part of the weekend catching up on some articles for my Human and Social Dimensions of Science & Tech seminar and reading a book called Leviathan & the Air Pump. Besides having a silly title, the book is a historical account of a sort of debate on knowledge acquisition between Thomas Hobbes (he of social contract / enlightened despot fame) and Robert Boyle (He of P1V1 = P2V2) against the backdrop of the Reformation. Leviathan is Hobbes's seminal work; the Air Pump was essentially a suction chamber with a glass bulb which Boyle used to demonstrate some phenomena that he construed as "the spring of the air." Boyle was a proponent of "experiemental method" - probably more accurately described as "demonstration" method, as he wasn't exactly testing hypothese and such - while Hobbes preferred logical / rational methods, more akin to geometric proofs. Hobbes was a bit dogmatic about this and thought not only was the experimental method unreliable (what with human senses being fallible and all) but that only reason would be strong enough to undoubtedly convince people of knowledge that would lead to social stability. Boyle favored a "democratic" approach that allowed for dissenting opinion - "democratic" because it favored knowledge production by a select few who had membership in the Royal Society - and believed that consensus forms of knowledge, not handed down from on high axiomatic proofs, were the way to generate social stability. If you're interested, the wikipedia article is quite thorough. Interesting stuff - not a perfect text by any means, but it's a soilid foundation in some historical methods that allow us to see the social development of scientific institutions. Boyle ultimately "won" in the science context (maybe noit so much in the political context, where Hobbes is still largely The Man), but some of Hobbes's accusations - that the Royal Society was essentially functioning as a a priesthood - still apply to our scientific knowledge structure today. (The book humorously ends, after several hundred pages of detailed - oh the details - debate with "Hobbes was right").

Also this week, we read a book called The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking. It's a semi-analytic philosophy attempt to define and outline exactly what people mean when they claim things are socially constructed and what they are trying to accomplish. Highly recommended, if for no other reason than so you can understand where people are coming from when they say seemingly nutso things like "electrons are socially constructed." And, thanks to a delay in my professors getting me the syllabus for the course and a delay in shipping, I now have a spanking new copy for anyone interested. Great book, and it engendered some great discussion* in class this week.

Otherwise a lot of miscellaneous reading at school. I had a law, science and technology class on Wednesday in which we continued to talk about expert witnesses, their effectiveness and admissibility in court cases. Pretty cool, though the prof did give a very cursory take on stats which contained, imho, some inaccuracies**. The whole lecture was predicated on a sort of "well, now we HAVE to talk about statistics, I'm sorry," that nice anti-math attitude that permeates. I don't really agree with that academic approach, though he is somewhat constrained by the fact that this is a law class. That, and it's the second time he's presented something pretty near and dear to me with a very dismissive sentiment - last week we were discussing philosophy of science and he approached social construction with in science with a sort of "get a load of these bozos" attitude. Again, not that it's really an atypical attitude, and it could be argued that law has to take such an attitude to function. Still, me no likey.

Interlude: A quote that came up more than once this week:

"I guess you can tell I'm into language. Language is kind of my thing, being a comedian. If you don't have a command of language it's nothing to be embarrassed about, but let's face it: some people have a way with words, other people...

Um...

Oh...

Uh, not have way, I guess."

Classic. That's Steve Martin, if you're unaware.

And yeah, lots of reading. That's going to be the rule around here for awhile. Okay, next post.

* - Actually, there was a rather bizarre event where a student tried to argue that Hacking himself was a constructionist but used a blatant misquote to prove his point. Wowsers. He got called out on it rather harshly by the professor, too. Pretty awkward. But then, THEN we had some great discussion. The offending student, incidentally, casually dropped Lyotard in his discussion in an attempt to name drop, and quoted The Postmodern Condition. Which was reviewed here on the Ballad! So I knew exactly what he was talking about. Sweet.

** - Specifically with regard to how to use p-values. I've got a nice post on it from the SASI days here. He missed the fact that you have to include the entire end of the bell curve, not just the exact point. I explained it elsewhere thusly:

Example: I hand out 1,000 lottery tickets to 1,000 people. I want to test if the lottery is rigged. I run the lottery. Jane wins the lottery. There was only a .1% chance that would have happened. That's less than 5%, so scientifically, the lottery is rigged. Right? Um, no - in order to make that claim, I have to predict that Jane will win ahead of time. Obviously, every time I run the lottery, the person who wins only had a .1% chance of winning. But if I predict Jane ahead of time and she wins, i have much greater statistical grounds to be suspicious.

It's pretty clear in that example, but less clear in others. Take the coin-flipping example from class: if you flip the coin 10 times, get 8 heads and after the fact say, "there's only a 4.4% chance that would have happened," you are doing something akin to looking at jane after the fact in the lottery example above. You have to make a specific prediction beforehand (e.g., "this coin is not a 50/50 coin") and then evaluate what happens. Again, I don't want to delve too much into the math of the stats, but if your prediction is just "this coin in unfair," then you have to account for the fact that you would be equally surprised by 8, 9 or 10 heads OR 8, 9 or 10 tails. When you flip a fair coin, there's actually a 112/1024 = 10.9% chance that you'll get 8 or more heads or tails. This is one of the reasons you have to do more than 10 trials to show an effect like this.

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Now playing: Pavement - Elevate Me Later

Cat power

An Arizona cat survived a 70 mile trip under a pick-up truck, sitting on a spare tire yesterday. Bella traveled shaken but uninjured from Gilbert, AZ (upper left of map) to Kearny, AZ (right center edge.)

A look at the photo in this article suggests the cat may be smarter than the owner.

Book Review : Un Homme et Une Femme

Title : Un Home et Une Femme
Author : Stanley Dirgapradja
PT. Gramedia Pustaka Utama
Desember – 2007

Mungkin tahun ini adalah tahun terbanyak saya membeli buku. Heheheh, sekedar mencari kembali romansa yang telah hilang dan mencoba mengikis sedikit demi sedikit rasa apatis yang sudah lumutan di dalam diri. Dan inilah salah satu buku yang sempat masuk dan sampai sekarang masih menjadi a must read book for this year.
Melihat judulnya sendiri saya sebenarnya kagak ngerti dengan arti judulnya. Kalo dilihat dari kata-katanya kira-kira cuman 2 hal yang bisa dimengerti yaitu Homme dan Femme. Hmm, lakilaki dan perempuan. 2 buah subjek yang cukup menarik untuk dibahas. Dan satu lagi yang menjadi stopping power buku ini adalah sunset yang ada di covernya. Dahsyat! Sebagai salah seorang pencinta sunset, this is great!
Di awal cerita kita akan diajak berkenalan dengan sosok lara dan bayu. 2 tokoh utama kita. Lara masih tidak percaya apakah sang kekasih, krishna, kakak bayu memang sosok yang tepat untuk mendampingi dia. Apakah memang soulmate itu harus bisa dibuktikan dengan jalur-jalur yang ekstrim kalo perlu. Sekedar untuk mengetahui kebenaran pepatah kalau cinta tak akan lari kemana. Sedangkan bayu. Sudah menjadi apatis dan sarkastis tehadap cinta. Semenjak ditolak oleh shanice, sahabat lara. Cinta tidak akan pernah ada, untuk mereka yang terjebak dalam ambiguitas perasaan masa lalu.
Lara kemudian membuat sebuah gambling yang besar dengan melakukan time out untuk krisna. Time out yang bahkan dia sendiri tidak tahu sampai kapan. Dengan bantuan bayu, dia berusaha menyusun rencana dan terus melontarkan percakapan-percakapan yang serius mengenai arti sebuah hubungan. Tentu saja gambling ini harus ditambah sensasinya. Datanglah anggi. Teman sepermainan bayu dan krisna di masa kecil sewaktu masih di bali. Sudah cukup? Belum. Karena anggi adalah cinta monyet krisna di masa lalu. Sekarang permainan tinggal dijalankan. Apakah lara berhasil memenangkan gambling ini? Dan tetap mendapatkan krisna sebagai jackpotnya?
Bayu sendiri perlahan terjebak di dalam perasaan yang bernama ”cinta”. Cuman, oh dear, dia mendapatkannya dalam diri seorang rio. Cowok yang ”tidak sengaja” mereka temui di tempat nongkrong favorit mereka. Dan rio juga ternyata sudah cukup lama ”melihat” bayu di salah satu club yang ada di yogyakarta. Dan kebetulan lara menjadi ”makcomblang’ yang sangat tepat di waktu yang tepat. Apakah memang bayangan shanice bisa hilang dari pikiran bayu, ataukah dia harus menolak rio. Lelaki yang akan menawarinya janji-janji dunia dan surga tentang cinta dan kebahagiaan?
Sebenarnya sangat tidak adil membagi cerita mereka berdua menjadi seperti itu. Karena keempat tokoh dalam buku ini sangat kuat dan bisa berdiri sendiri-sendiri. Bayu, lara, krisna, dan rio menjadi sangat nyata. Sampai kita bisa membayangkan bahwa mereka adalah teman-teman kita. Teman yang berada di sekitar kita. Kehidupan mereka pun tidak bisa dipisahkan satu sama lain. Karena cinta mereka merupakan cinta yang sangat besar kepada pasangan mereka. Cinta yang sebenarnya mereka inginkan. Lara selalu ada untuk bayu. Begitupun sebaliknya. Kehangatan persahabatan mereka terlihat dari percakapan seperti ini,

”if anything might happen while you’re in Jakarta, don’t resist it.
“kamu nggak perlu jadi straight seperti laki-laki lain untuk menemukan cinta. Ntar kalau cinta itu lewat, nyesal kamu…”
ini kata lara kepada bayu, hanya seorang sahabat yang bisa mengeluarkan kata-kata seperti ini.

“... you love don’t each other, don’t you? Tapi kenapa semuanya kalian jadikan sulit? Salah... kenapa semuanya kamu jadikan sulit? Kalau begini caranya, kupikir kamu memang tidak mengizinkan nasib mempertemukan kalian.”

Perkataan sejujur ini hanya bisa keluar dari seorang sahabat. Sahabat yang mau mengerti dan mau berbagi.
Stanley sendiri berhasil memikat saya dengan banyak sekali percakapan-percakapan cerdas, sakastis, penuh cinta, marah, sakit hati. Semuanya terkumpul dalam perbincangan yang membuat kita mengehela napas lega. Lega karena cinta masih berada disekitar mereka. Suasana kota yogyakarta, bali, jakarta pun bisa di gambarkan dengan jelas. Bahkan untuk coffeshop krisna, saya sudah mempunyai bayangan gambarnya di kepalaku. Hehehehe. Perjalanan mencari cinta antara singapura (loh kok? Siapa yang pergi ke singapura? Cari tau aja sendiri, hehehehe) dan yogyakarta. Sampai perjalanan dari jakarta dan yogyakarta dan bali semuanya terekam dengan jelas. Jumping-jumping waktunya pun sangat cerdas! Dengan menggunakan email yang terus menerus dikirimkan antara lara dan bayu dari awal sampai akhir buku ini, memperlihatkan betapa cinta telah tumbuh dan menjadi sebesar itu. Kita pun menjadi menikmati perubahan waktu tanpa perlu merasa kaget. Mulai dari moment sidang skripsi krisna, proyek magang lara, pembuatan film rio, sampai pencarian untuk gallery art milik rio. Hal ini semakin memperjelas bahwa stanley adalah seseorang yang nyaris gila dan mempunya kepribadian yang beragam. Hehehehehe.
Last of all, menurut saya inilah 2 percakapan paling berarti dalam buku ini.

... krishna bangkit dari posisinya. Ia hampir sampai di pintu saat Lara memanggilnya.
”Na,...” panggil Lara lembut dari atas tempat tidur.
”Ya?” sambut krishna.
”Kenapa kamu tidak pernah menyerah soal aku?” tanya Lara pelan.
”Aku tidak akan pernah menyerah soal kamu. Tidak akan sayang,” Krishna mengecup lara. ”Maaf aku selalu menyakiti kamu...”
Krishna tersenyum, ”Mungkin itu caranya agar kamu akhirnya bisa datang padaku. Selama ini aku yang mengejar-ngejar kamu, berusaha untuk mengeryi apa yang kamu inginkan, untuk tampil sempurna di mata kamu, tapi kamu nggak pernah datang...’

Itu milik krishna dan lara. Sedangkan milik milik bayu dan rio,

... ”ibuku bilang, saat kita sedang mencintai seseorang, kita belajar segala sesuatu tentang orang yang kita cintai itu begitu cepat, seperti mencintai diri sendiri.” Bayu berkata.
”And what do you think about me?” Rio menekuk alisnya sekali lagi.
“It was a trip with a concorde,” Bayu menggigit bibirnya dan tersenyum.
“Sebenarnya dari awal kita ketemu, kamu tahu aku udah suka?” Tanya Rio sambil tersenyum.
“It was too obvious too ignore. Mungkin selama ini aku nggak jujur pada diriku sendiri…”
Jadi ketika cinta menjadi sesuatu yang masih perlu ditanyakan keberadaanya ataukah bentuknya. Cari buku ini! Dan silahkan menikmati sajian yang penuh cinta dari seorang Stanley Dirgapradja.

Pithy F*rging Sayings (8th ed.)

"Familiarity almost inevitably breeds indifference." ---Marc Bloch

"Aging comes at you like the tide. It only feels like waves because of the way humans measure time; birthdays, anniversaries, seasons."---staff

"An attempt to rest political equality on religious truth is simply a recipe for social disaster and political failure." ---Andrew Sullivan

"He hungered to explain who he was...an orphan boy...who had been poor all his life, had grubbed for a living, and was poor in other ways too- if he was that one what was he doing in prison? Who were they punishing if his life was punishment?"---Bernard Malamud in The Fixer

"Sometimes things that go without saying should go unsaid."---staff

"Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations."---Dorothy L. Sayers

"Bad data is a far worse problem than no data."---staff

"It is...chimerical to build peace on the economic foundations which, in turn, rest on the systematic cultivation of greed and envy, the very forces which drive men into conflict."---E.F. Schumacher

Link to other Clarion sayings posts.

Its Own Post

I'll not name the names here, but the following story illustrates something about the undergrad mindset here. I don't know that this is necessarily all that different from the undergrad mindset anywhere, and note 1, that my own undergrad experience at Rice was probably atypical, and 2, that I in particular am a big nerd and did all of the reading for all of my classes in college.

A professor is running a course for 200 students. The first class meets on Tuesday with effectively perfect attendance, every seat in the auditorium full. They ran through the syllabus in typical fashion, and there was a single 15 page reading assignment for Thursday. ASU utilizes a program called Blackboard, and the pertinent feature is that you can log into your ASU account and download documents - like the reading for Thursday - from the class's Blackboard website. Of course, since each student is logging in and then downloading the document, Blackboard can easily track who has and who has not at least downloaded the article (Blackboard can't, sadly, probe into minds and determine whether students read the article, just whether they clicked the link or not). The professor can get these stats from Blackboard easily, too.

So the hour before class rolls around on Thursday, the professor checks the stats, and only 80 people have even clicked the link, let alone read the article. Our professor is an angry professor, so the first thing he does in the following class is ask who did the reading. A couple of problems: there are only 130 or so people present, and essentially all of them raise their hands. The professor then explains that some people in the room are clearly lying, asks the question again, and again gets raised hands from nearly the entire room. The professor then explains as I have above that he knows for a fact that only 80 people even clicked the link, and again asks the question; still, 100 or so people raise their hands. The prof drops a pop quiz on them (which he has no intention of grading or reading through, only to use to record attendance) and gives off some Voldemortish kind of laugh as he does so*.

So this story was related to me as fairly typical, which means there's a very prevalent mindset of not attending class and not doing reading assignments. Big state school big class, fair enough. But what's interesting is the prof's response - in order to combat the mindset, he has to resort to goofy, scary in-class antics to get them to do the reading. The student body has fostered an attitude of distrust. Again, perhaps unsurprising, but it's only going to serve to create all kinds of negative perceptions of the undergrads that are not really going to inspire anyone to teach. And of course, the professor's response, while to some degree necessary, antagonizes the few students who are doing the reading (I suppose it antagonizes all of the students who didn't read, too, but they deserve what they get to some degree). So the class is turn hates him. And so the entire scene fosters an antagonistic attitude - and I'm no pedagogy expert, but I sincerely doubt that's the best launching point in the first week of class.

I agree with the assessment here that the prof has little to no recourse other than to threaten grades, and by and large that is the purpose behind those grades anyways. But when things become so overtly antagonistic, it's no wonder that educating the undergrads becomes a low priority**. Grad students benefit from this big time - if anything, I think we're a source of relief - but that hardly rectifies the situation, especially since same grad students TA these classes and can bear the brunt of the students' chagrin.

Anyways, that's a little taste of some of the bigger issue mass education obstacles that we face here. I'll keep this topic in mind as I progress, but so far, it's been a pretty clear indication that things like the Rice honor code and such would be horribly impractical here (and sure, it's debatable how real that was at Rice, but at least within a small community you could posit that it at least might be followed; here, no way).

* - a wise, feminist ethics oriented friend of mine pointed out that this would be nigh impossible for a female professor to pull off without instantly being labeled "bitch." I am curious as to the parallel (or, I suppose, entirely unparallel) reaction to this male prof's act - does his "take no bullshit" attitude win him praise, or does the epithet "he's a dick" carry equal weight? Probably both, I suppose, but does the balance fall in his favor?

** - That said, the honors college students I have met, and a lot of the "regular" undergrads, have been great so far. And there are a lot of professors who are seriously dedicated to undergraduate education in the face of such obstacles. So I don't mean this to be some kind of indictment; more of an observation on the realities of large scale state education.

One Week In

But first, a rewind to orientation:

My official foray into school was the general orientation within the school of life sciences. On a fundamental level, the orientation was very good: big fat packets with all kinds of information / resources, great organization, tours of the buildings, and speakers galore. The obvious problem: 90% of that which applies to the school of life sciences students at large does not entirely apply to the minority of us involved strictly in the philosophy / history / sociology etc. of the life sciences. So we ended up sitting there for two hours trying to sift the relevant information (this is who you contact if you lock yourself out of your office) from the irrelevant (this is who you contact if you need anti-venom). This on top of the fact that "being oriented" is something that I contest the validity of - the resources are nice (great, actually, our admins are on top of their stuff), but the bulk of the information is going to be forgotten and or more appropriately picked up on the fly. So while it was nice to spend 10 minutes chatting with all of the new students, all of whom wearing a fairly perplexed look, the two hours of being talked at... yeah.

But the value of that two hours towered over the value of the next hour and a half, which consisted of chemical safety training. What a friggin' farce. This is the textbook "liability aversion" mentality that drives us. The points were obvious (don't mislabel your chemicals! Don't block access to the eyewash!) , the lecturer's attempts at humor lame, and the whole thing was just stupid - we were subjected to a class quiz at the end, but it consisted of questions like, "What was the name of the document that...". Blar. Hrrrmph.

I then had a few hours to kill on campus with errands and errata - getting a shiny student ID (which cost $25 for completely unspoken reasons), keys for the office, setting up loan deferment and such. At 3 there was a campus wide "Welcome Grad Students" party, only my prevailing thought was "This ain't no party I ever heard of." They had ice cream - sandwiches - and water. Oh, and popcorn. WOOHOO. I mean, a grad student party without beer, on campus or no, is incomprehensible, but even a diet coke would have been nice. A raffle was the only form of entertainment besides the acoustic stylings of a proto-typical sensitive guy with guitar and Lia-Loeb-glasses girl vocalist. They interspersed their own brand of laid-back adult contemporary music and unique bittersweet folk rock with complaints of the heat. The surrounding booths offered plenty of free schwag - I felt like I was at a late nineties techie recruiting fair at Rice (where's the "Entry Level register Engineer table again?), only everything was chincy and there were many more booths aimed at on-campus cultural groups. Verdict: LAME.

Then I met with my advisors to discuss my schedule for the semester - if I haven't mentioned it already, I'm taking Science, Technology and Law, the core Biology and Society Seminar, and the core Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology seminar. Lots and lots of reading, unsurprisingly. Pretty good thus far, though I am a little frustrated by the treatment of science within the context of the law class - it is a straight-up Law class, so it'll be interesting to talk to Mike NTPB along the way. Anyhoo, the meeting went well, my class schedule was all set... now what remains is figuring out how to schedule the remainder of my unscheduled time.

Friday, I had to go back for Fire & Safety training, another exercise in school sanctioned liability prevention. It turns out that ASU actually did have a big fire in their memorial union last year, a fact referenced no fewer than fifty times in the meeting. Obviously it's not that fire isn't a problem, it's that an hour-long lecture of pointing out the obvious doesn't really accomplish what it purports to. With the possible exception of temporarily rendering you hyper-aware of blocked exits.

Friday at 1, we had the official orientation just for the B & S program, and as I may have mentioned, I walked into a roomful of professors as the only grad student who was on time. And silence ensued. Really, it was just an awkward space to begin with - we had twenty people jammed into a lab space that could comfortable seat four, so no one could get over to the table for cookies and sodas. It really was a little anthropological exercise: lacking cocktails in hand, cocktail party conversation proved impossible. Eventually all of the other students showed up, and for the first of what turned into six times over the past week, we all introduced ourselves and what we were interested in studying. This, it turns out, is a prime format for dropping vocab on the crowd, as it turns out "I'm interested in how reliable brain scans are and how we use them" can quite readily turn into "My work regards the epsitemological status of brain imagery with regards to the taxonomy and etiology of constructs of psychological disease." I'm picking on one particular person here, a new student named Melissa, and I'm doing it in jest; she certainly wasn't the only one - as you can imagine, some of the profs were even worse - and she herself has pointed out the absurdity of such introductions. It gets extra funny when you hear the same people giving the same riff in repeated situations over the course of the week - we had a barbecue on Sunday, a seminar on Monday, another seminar on Friday, and a biology school brown bag lunch on Friday all of which featured M delivering versions of the sentence. Anyways, here's a sample construction of the sentence I've been delivering of late, necessarily doomed to change over the next year or so:

"I'm interested in the structure of concepts involving complex knowledge, the distortion involved in necessarily simplifying complex concepts in order for other experts and/or lay people to communicate those concepts, and the resultant social narratives involving said concepts, both in how the science affects the popular concept and how the popular concept in turn affects the science."

And I didn't even have to drop "epistemological" in there! More specifically, incidentally, I'm hoping to look at the phenomenon of popular science literature. This is all down the road from here.

So that meeting was good if a little miscellaneous - it was clear that the professors had other work to do than to sit and hang out with new grad students, so the room cleared pretty quickly. I met some of the other students in my program, all of whom seem nice and eager to cooperatively explore our areas of interest. I'm interested to see if that trend persists.

On Sunday we had a barbeque with all of the various departments connected to ours; the categorization is uninteresting, but just trust that there are lots of different departments taking subtly different approaches to the problems we all discuss. I dreaded the barbecue a bit - just not wanting to partake of the usual chat about the weather dynamic. The Beck graciously came with me, and thankfully Jason (my advisor) showed up with his wife Wanda, so we could sit and chat with people we knew rather than exchanging miscellaneous pleasantries. I had Ultimate that afternoon - trying to get back in shape for the upcoming fall season - so we ducked out a bit early, but despite y apprehensions, we had a pretty good time, and Beck got to meet a few people. (I also found out that an Ultimate friend of mine - Genevieve - works in the consortium for science policy and outcomes (aka CSPO - oh lord, the acronyms) , so it was fun to find a kindred frisbee soul in the program.

From there it's been on into the first week - classes are good, people are good, office set up is good. If I had a list of complaints, it would be:

1, ASU is a total flesh factory. It's ridiculous, distracting, and a microcosm of the absurdity of the American education system at large. My victorian sensibilities are, like, so aflush. No - that is not the real point. I am all for free expression, the let your freak flag fly lifestyle. The real point is that it's a flesh *factory*, a thoroughly uninteretsing aesthetic derived from, I don't know, Glamour magazine. My kingdom for a sexy goth princess! Not really. But the whole thing just gives a vibe of bright sunny sadness. Oh Yoshimi, please don't let those robots defeat me.

2, More to the point, a large portion of the undergraduate population here is decidedly un-academic. This is a topic for a separate post, but the effects of this are prominent.

3, My personal program is WIDE open. This is not so much a complaint as noticing the two-edged swordedness of it - awesome that I am free to pursue, terrifying that no one is telling me what / how to do it. That second part is not entirely true - I would have to give my advisior an A+ so far - but I do feel a little lost at sea some of the time.

4, Lonely! My labmate and advisor are often not in the office, leaving me in a room with nothing but readings to comfort me. I made an effort to combat this Friday and went more out of my way to stop by people's labs to say hey. It seems that the propensity to hole oneself up is inherent, though, so I'll have to consciously avoid that.

5, Almost forgot - big university = impersonal university = bureaucratic nonsense. On Monday, we figured out that I needed a certain account access so I could check my advisor's schedule - and after multiple steps, phone calls, chat sessions, etc., the issue is still not resolved. I completely understand that the IT department has a billion people demanding their time, but I suspect this particular problem would take five minutes to walk through if someone would just sit down and do it with me. And it's not going to be a kinda "hey dumbass, plug in your computer" answer I need, it's just that I don't have authority to add myself to certain servers on campus. Tres frustrating, though I suppose it's a factor I'll have to get to used to.

Otherwise, all systems are go. I finished a book, Leviathan & the Air Pump, kinda a seminal History of Science text, in a day. Lots more to read before this coming Friday, too. In the words of Mitch Hedberg, I've got to learn to read faster. But, in sum, things = good, better in this whole "career" respect than they've been in quite some time. Hollah.

More later - got a hot date with Beck and a movie about a robot in a little bit. Happy Lack of Labor Day to US!!!