Scottsdale Softball Friday Night C-League juggernaut NO DRAMA won its third consecutive league championship last night! The second of which I've been a part! YEAH, THAT CHAMPION FEELING.
We futzed around in the regular season, sweeping two teams 2-0 and splitting with the rest to give us a 9-5 record, good for the third seed. The tournament was standard issue, 8 team single elimination, and we drew the 6th seed to start the day. We came out mashing, winning that opening game 19-4 on a run-rule. I got to play all kinds of different positions - 3rd base, SS, left-center, right-center - and fielded well (except for one ball that i pulled up on so as to not run over our RF; ended up missing that one as a result). I also came out mashing - big line drives to left and right field, and in my third bat one-hopped the wall with a line drive. So i was feeling pretty good, and some of my spotty hitting struggles of late seemed non-existent.
Unfortunately, there are only two fields for the playoffs, so the 3-6 and 4-5 games happen at 6:20, and the 1-8 and 2-7 games happen at 7:15. We had to wait an hour before our next game. This being softball, several of our team members went to various fast food establishments to get things like Baconators and five dollar footlongs. Oh, dear. I stayed put to watch the 2-7 game as the winner would be our semi-final opponent. The 7 team only brought 8 people, so that laugher ended quickly with the 2 seed - our arch nemesis and team o' jerks Beer Goggles - winning 20-something to 1.
So this team has historically been gripey with us and with the umps - they're good, can hit and field and all that, but really are just not pleasant to play against. There's been something of a long standing rivalry between this team and mine, NO DRAMA, since well before I came to the team, no love lost, the whole thing. The only real connection i have to the beer goggles, aside from the couple of times I've experienced their gripey attitude, is that one of their players named D_____ is a cantankerous Ultimate player who has stormed off the field on occasion. Not a fun person, one of the people I cross off on my draft lists. So we were hyped for a second round matchup.
OH SNAP - I don't know, I can't explain, have no idea what happened, but we came out STROKING. Were up 4-0 after one and got them out 1-2-3, then came the inning that would not stop. We batted around twice - with 12 batters - and after the mayhem, it was 21-0. They were the hometeam and scored 4 to avoid the 2nd inning run rule, but we tacked on 6 more in the top of the third to go up 27-4 and then shut them down in the last inning to walk away with an embarrassing, ass-kicking run rule win in the SEMIS! Unsurprisingly, as they fell behind by a ton, they got gripier and gripier with one another, at us, at the umps, at everybody. Eric slid into second, accidentally bumped their secondbasewoman, and immediately came up apologizing, but that didn't stop their pitcher from cussing at Eric. Ed took a walk late in the game - on four terrible pitches - and their SS griped about Ed being a "big pussy" - this after their team took multiple walks in their game against eight people. Ha, ha, ha is all I have to say. Their pitcher quick pitched me - he threw a pitch when i only had one foot in the batter's box, which isn't really the biggest thing in the world (or necessarily illegal), just discourteous. I responded by smashing a double to left on the next pitch. I hit well - we all hit RIDICULOUSLY well in this game, just screaming liner after screaming liner. Anyways, to wrap up the semis account, it was a total humiliating laugher, and here's the quote from one of the umps:
"I know we're not supposed to root for or against teams, but I loved watching Beer Goggles getting it handed to them."
Ha! Personal triumph and schaudenfreude wrapped up in one!
On to the finals against the cleverly named "Master Batters." Not a whole lot to report - they had a tall pitcher with a weird hitch delivery who threw knuckle balls. He gave us a touch of trouble at the start, but we figured him out well enough after an inning or two. They were good and nice - lots of joking around on the field, and good competitive play. We fielded GREAT - Brock in particular played out of his head at SS - and came up with some huge clutch hits. An 8-4 victory with Ed running down the last flare to right field - NO DRAMA CHAMPS!!!
Great night of softball. I hit just fine, and didn't really have to make very many plays in the outfield - the better teams tend to not hit it in the air as much, so I think I only had one or two plays out there all night. NEhoo, fun times, and I think we're officially on the books as a dynasty. Do I smell a B league in our future? (Hopefully NO!).
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Sparkleberry Alarm Clock
Good sense? NO.
Innocence? NO.
Crippled? YES.
Kind? HELL NO.
I'm basically missing the skin on my elbows and knees due to a bevy of layouts on Wednesday night. This morning, Wrigley comes into bed and is being excessively cuddly, snuggling against me and avioding all my sore extremities. Aw shucks. And then Sparkle comes in and lies more or less on top of Wrigley to cuddle, too. Awww, double super cute. We're all in a half-asleep slumberville of adorability. I even started humming "Together Again" from The Muppets Movie. But then S-dog decides she wants to be petted and rakes her evil, pointy claws against my skinless arm. YOWSERS. The train has left slumberville; I am wide awake and it's not alright ma i'm bleeding. More effective than time to make the donuts: Sparkle T. Dog.
Innocence? NO.
Crippled? YES.
Kind? HELL NO.
I'm basically missing the skin on my elbows and knees due to a bevy of layouts on Wednesday night. This morning, Wrigley comes into bed and is being excessively cuddly, snuggling against me and avioding all my sore extremities. Aw shucks. And then Sparkle comes in and lies more or less on top of Wrigley to cuddle, too. Awww, double super cute. We're all in a half-asleep slumberville of adorability. I even started humming "Together Again" from The Muppets Movie. But then S-dog decides she wants to be petted and rakes her evil, pointy claws against my skinless arm. YOWSERS. The train has left slumberville; I am wide awake and it's not alright ma i'm bleeding. More effective than time to make the donuts: Sparkle T. Dog.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
The Mark of Zorro: 1-1
"Sunrise doesn't last all morning / A cloudburst doesn't last all day"
The Zorro lost our game tonight, 14-13 on hard cap, bringing a reasonably glorious Nyet /Genevieve-captained team winning streak to an end at 15 glorious games. So it goes.
We drew a second game match-up with the team that I think most people out of the gates regard as favorites, Dustin and P-Mo's "Premature Huckulation," and yes, that is exactly as funny as anything would be if you took a sexual phrase and stupidly substituted an Ultimate term in for one of the words. Dustin is a 6'9" mega-goon whom I'm sure I've mentioned before, and goon is not necessarily a pejorative, it's just a in-my-circles term for a really tall Ultimate player. Dustin fancies himself a handler oddly enough, as being 6'9" generally makes him unstoppable on high throws. It's usually a little weird, though tonight he played pretty well at the handler spot (and might I add that he can be kind of hard to defend - a couple of times I laid out on discs which I thought I had a chance, but Mr. five foot arms just reached way the hell out in front of himself and made me feel stupid for even thinking the possibility existed). PMo is Pauline, our starlet from last league's finals. I made an effort to play nice with her tonight, giving her some compliments and hopefully letting bygones be bygones; she is a pretty solid player and it's no fun to run into people constantly with bad air betwixt you.
So the reason they are favored out of the gate is that they grabbed Damon, very athletic good throwing Canadian import, and Jason Trant, solid tall jumping all-around player if a little attendance unreliable in the playoffs / finals (you may recall that we could have grabbed this guy with the seventh pick in the first round, but he dropped all the way to fifth pick in the second round because people didn't want him missing the playoffs for their team). They then proceeded to grab nothing but 6'1" and taller players for the rest of the time, resulting in a forest of goons. So between a GIANT captain, a great player female captain, two great players and an army of gigantism-suffering clones, they are a tad imposing to say the least. Very athletic and anchored by some leadership and skill - Viral asked me at one point, "how did they get so many athletic people?"
The most notable thing about the game, particularly early on, was that neither team was being careless with the disc - flashes of club. They pulled to us to start things off, and we just buzzed it down the right sideline with a series of crisp throws and catches. Kelly put up a little bit of a goofy throw (she basically just threw a flick even though I wasn't cutting toward her and Jason was between me and the disc; I nonchalantly reached around his head and snagged it), and I followed up with a goofy IO scoober to Miller for the score, 1-0, us. We pulled to them, and within a couple of throws Damon put it up deep for (???) and they came down with it.
We figured, what with their DNA-based altitude advantages, that they would try to huck it all night long, so we converted to a straight up mark for the rest of the game. We still need to work on this a bit, but generally speaking, the straight-up mark is standing head up and about 3 yards off the person on the mark with your only intent being to stop hucks. And this worked great - we really made them work it up the field instead of just sending it to big guys, and it paid off in a lot of good defense from us and a lot of turns. As mentioned, it wasn't 100% effective because a few of our players bought some fakes and let hucks off, but overall we had a good working strategy for them.
On the next couple of points, I beat a guy deep for a flick huck from Rich, they came back and had to work it hard up the field but eventually scored. 2-2, and no turns after four points! Tres exciting. We finally cracked first, and they took advantage of a short field to go up 3-2. Craig put up a horrendous blade huck to me on the next point, and I skyed Burger to rescue the score. 3-3, and thus far just a tight, intense game with good decisions coming from both sides.
We got a couple of breaks on the ensuing points and nabbed a two point lead that lasted til 7-5. It's hard to remember all of the chicanery that went on here, but big plays to remember were a nutsoid huck from Craig that went sailing out of bounds toward the right corner of the endzone. I made a lay out greatest attempt on it - laid out out of bounds, caught the disc and sent it back over my shoulder before I landed - but unfortunately, in a addition to doing all of that, I couldn't break Jason's "mark" as he caught the disc in front of Kelly. Ah, well, 'twas still a valiant effort.
Best part of the night happened somewhere in here - Jeremy got the disc in the middle of the field about twenty yards out from the endzone, and I cut in hard and got the disc. Turned around, and wide open cutting to the corner was Beck - sent her the flick, and SHAZAM! A Love Connection! For the Score! Nothing quite as fun as seeing Beck grab the disc out of the air and touch it to the ground to indicate "I'm in." Aaron, if you're reading, she SIGNIFIED.
Beck also played great defense all night - all our women did, actually. Our whole team did, *actually.* Just ran hard. Sub plot #1 of the night was that Jason and especially Damon ended up having to stay in from about that 7-5 point on, and not only did they stay in, but they were touching the disc every other throw. Not to take anything away from their other players - Dustin played great and chilly at handler, Pauline moved the disc well, and a couple of other people (Rob tolar in particular made a huge number of possession catches for them) got reasonably involved, but especially down by the endzone, it turned into the Damon show. We forced them to throw it a gerbillion times, but - especially since we were doing a fairly even steven rotation and not trying to match our top picks with theirs all night - you know, in the interest of letting people have equal playing time and all that - our great defense broke down at times. We took half 8-5, but had to pull to them to start the second, and hit a pretty significant lull.
To the tune of a five point run from them. Ugh - maybe we should have played zone or something, but I don't know if it was our D so much as our horrendous offense. It's hard to remember precisely what went on here other than that our crisp decision making left the building and we obviously got tired - or, I should say, our men got tired. Again, our women rocked out - Beck and new girl Selina (pronounced Suh-lye-nuh) typically took their second woman and honestly, I can't remember their second women touching the disc (and they were not shabby players - Megan and Irina!). Allyson, Kelly and G usually had to take Pauline, and while Genevieve giving Pauline trouble is to be expected, Allyson and Kelly both took it to her as well, Allyson even beating her deep for a score. Hiya! But... back to the boys. We got a little tired, and again, with Damon, trant and Dustin out the for all but MAYBE three points in the second half, we started to have problems - and even when we slowed those guys down effectively, they were getting a lot of easy resets to other players.
Our effort stayed high the entire time, though, which was just huge. This really was your classic knock-down drag out, with both teams having to runrunrunrunrun. And at this point I'm badly repeating myself, but we picked our poison against that team with the straight-up mark, and it really paid off. Yeah! Still, tired defense corresponded with tired offense, and what had been a crisp, flowy offense sputtered a lot in the second - a few handlers to rename nameless put a lot of deep throws up for incompletions, and it killed us. They took the lead 10-8, and the rest of the game we fought and clawed, always one point behind - in fact, I think the game went 10-9, 11-9, 11-10, 12-10, 12-11, 13-11, 13-12, 14-12, 14-13... the soft cap went on at 13-11 and the hard went on (obviously) on the last point, so this was really a game that didn't end and was separated by (I suppose) two breaks.
Case in point of the attack of the tireds - I got a big D when it was 12-11, tossed it to Viral and headed for the endzone with no one around. But he just didn't step into his throw, and it floated way up. So Jason, Damon and Todd all closed in while I'm camping under the disc - I had to jump and grab for it at its highest point because of the oncoming traffic, and I had another "hit the broken tip of my finger" experience, just couldn't get up high enough / couldn't close my fingers around it. Really should have had it, another drop - BUT, there's no reason I should be having to sky three people for that catch in the first place. Frustrating, and it's not to pick on Viral for that particular play, just an instance of where being worn out led to a bad throw led to a bad catch. They scored, so instead of 12-12 we were still down 13-11. Nuts.
On a completely different point, though, either Jeremy or Viral put up a swilly throw to the endzone, and who read it correctly and grabbed it? Your favorite new Ultimate player, BECK!!! Her second goal - fantastic!
Some frustrations in the game, nearly all occurring in our bad second half - we stopped dumping the disc, kept trying to put up laser hucks... I beat my guy deep a bunch of times and our handlers (Craig, Tom) had trouble putting up nice hucks; on another one of those late 13-12 points, I had jason by 20 yards and Craig fired a laser past me on which I had no chance. Genevieve caught a lasery blady huck from Tom... about a foot out the back of the short endzones. Somebody dropped their mark on Damon while I was guarding Jason for an incut, and Damon somehow managed not to just get a huck off but an IO backhand huck - against a straight up mark! So I sprinted and actually caught Trant, but my big lay out came up about a foot short. Devastating, but it was a pretty perfect huck against a great receiver; just gotta tip your hat to that (and mutter under your breath about whoever let the throw go off). Just a ton of missed opportunities, and I'm sure the other side had them, too, but it felt like we lost our legs and minds together.
Damon toward the end of the game did not get so much chippy as whiny - something happened between Jack and him, and whatever it was put him in a mode where he just complained and made whiny, nothing touch foul calls. He called a foul on the mark on me on a play where yes, there was contact, but it was a step through break mark throw and he really just threw it away. This was on the goalline at 13-12, and I wasn't the only one - and not just people from our team - who found it a little cheesy. Whatever, didn't contest it because I was not interested in the ensuing hissy fit. P Mo cheated a little bit earlier in the game with a pick call, too - it was actually seventh level cheating, but I made the smart decision and didn't even bring it up with her.
But I'll bring it up here - Jeremy cuts deep to right side of the endzone and smokes his guy. Pauline poaches off on Jeremy - a totally reasonable play - but she without a doubt leaves Allyson. Allyson cuts in, and is now wide open in front of me, a solid 8 yards away from Pauline. Meanwhile, the guy trying to guard jeremy runs into Pauline - and Pauline calls a pick! So not only is it your usual controversial not-within-three-yards pick call, she actually SET the entire thing up - she called a pick on a player who was guarding the same player she was guarding!!! STUPID! EGREGIOUS! I take umbrage.
But like I say, just blew it off, and generally had a very congenial, even positive night of interactions with the PMo. Huzzah for good sport. Actually, i was just beaming after the game - this was probably the best all-around VOTS game I've played in terms of featuring hustle, smart play (for most of it) and mutual respect in the midst of fierce competition. Good times, PH.
So anyhoo, a great game, we scored the final point on hard cap leaving us to never know whether they actually would have scored that 15th point. I was very proud of our team though think there is a lot of room to improve. Proud of the Beck for scoring and playing great, hustling D. Proud of myself for remaining above the fray despite an intense, emotional and hotly contested game. Not so proud of yet another drop and have wasted a lot of time wondering what the hell is going on - but all I can do is maybe practice some more jumping one handed grabs and hope this finger issue subsides soon. Also not so proud that this ended up being some 2300 words and I still don't think I captured what a fun night it was - I hung / played tight defense on taller and faster guys than me all evening, and our team really showed that it's got BIG TIME potential if we can work out the kinks. We shall see - thanks for reading if you did.
p.s. Also - disappointed that i was off with both Jack and Genevieve last night - just wasn't on the field at the same time they were. They both played great, just not with me. Sigh...
The Zorro lost our game tonight, 14-13 on hard cap, bringing a reasonably glorious Nyet /Genevieve-captained team winning streak to an end at 15 glorious games. So it goes.
We drew a second game match-up with the team that I think most people out of the gates regard as favorites, Dustin and P-Mo's "Premature Huckulation," and yes, that is exactly as funny as anything would be if you took a sexual phrase and stupidly substituted an Ultimate term in for one of the words. Dustin is a 6'9" mega-goon whom I'm sure I've mentioned before, and goon is not necessarily a pejorative, it's just a in-my-circles term for a really tall Ultimate player. Dustin fancies himself a handler oddly enough, as being 6'9" generally makes him unstoppable on high throws. It's usually a little weird, though tonight he played pretty well at the handler spot (and might I add that he can be kind of hard to defend - a couple of times I laid out on discs which I thought I had a chance, but Mr. five foot arms just reached way the hell out in front of himself and made me feel stupid for even thinking the possibility existed). PMo is Pauline, our starlet from last league's finals. I made an effort to play nice with her tonight, giving her some compliments and hopefully letting bygones be bygones; she is a pretty solid player and it's no fun to run into people constantly with bad air betwixt you.
So the reason they are favored out of the gate is that they grabbed Damon, very athletic good throwing Canadian import, and Jason Trant, solid tall jumping all-around player if a little attendance unreliable in the playoffs / finals (you may recall that we could have grabbed this guy with the seventh pick in the first round, but he dropped all the way to fifth pick in the second round because people didn't want him missing the playoffs for their team). They then proceeded to grab nothing but 6'1" and taller players for the rest of the time, resulting in a forest of goons. So between a GIANT captain, a great player female captain, two great players and an army of gigantism-suffering clones, they are a tad imposing to say the least. Very athletic and anchored by some leadership and skill - Viral asked me at one point, "how did they get so many athletic people?"
The most notable thing about the game, particularly early on, was that neither team was being careless with the disc - flashes of club. They pulled to us to start things off, and we just buzzed it down the right sideline with a series of crisp throws and catches. Kelly put up a little bit of a goofy throw (she basically just threw a flick even though I wasn't cutting toward her and Jason was between me and the disc; I nonchalantly reached around his head and snagged it), and I followed up with a goofy IO scoober to Miller for the score, 1-0, us. We pulled to them, and within a couple of throws Damon put it up deep for (???) and they came down with it.
We figured, what with their DNA-based altitude advantages, that they would try to huck it all night long, so we converted to a straight up mark for the rest of the game. We still need to work on this a bit, but generally speaking, the straight-up mark is standing head up and about 3 yards off the person on the mark with your only intent being to stop hucks. And this worked great - we really made them work it up the field instead of just sending it to big guys, and it paid off in a lot of good defense from us and a lot of turns. As mentioned, it wasn't 100% effective because a few of our players bought some fakes and let hucks off, but overall we had a good working strategy for them.
On the next couple of points, I beat a guy deep for a flick huck from Rich, they came back and had to work it hard up the field but eventually scored. 2-2, and no turns after four points! Tres exciting. We finally cracked first, and they took advantage of a short field to go up 3-2. Craig put up a horrendous blade huck to me on the next point, and I skyed Burger to rescue the score. 3-3, and thus far just a tight, intense game with good decisions coming from both sides.
We got a couple of breaks on the ensuing points and nabbed a two point lead that lasted til 7-5. It's hard to remember all of the chicanery that went on here, but big plays to remember were a nutsoid huck from Craig that went sailing out of bounds toward the right corner of the endzone. I made a lay out greatest attempt on it - laid out out of bounds, caught the disc and sent it back over my shoulder before I landed - but unfortunately, in a addition to doing all of that, I couldn't break Jason's "mark" as he caught the disc in front of Kelly. Ah, well, 'twas still a valiant effort.
Best part of the night happened somewhere in here - Jeremy got the disc in the middle of the field about twenty yards out from the endzone, and I cut in hard and got the disc. Turned around, and wide open cutting to the corner was Beck - sent her the flick, and SHAZAM! A Love Connection! For the Score! Nothing quite as fun as seeing Beck grab the disc out of the air and touch it to the ground to indicate "I'm in." Aaron, if you're reading, she SIGNIFIED.
Beck also played great defense all night - all our women did, actually. Our whole team did, *actually.* Just ran hard. Sub plot #1 of the night was that Jason and especially Damon ended up having to stay in from about that 7-5 point on, and not only did they stay in, but they were touching the disc every other throw. Not to take anything away from their other players - Dustin played great and chilly at handler, Pauline moved the disc well, and a couple of other people (Rob tolar in particular made a huge number of possession catches for them) got reasonably involved, but especially down by the endzone, it turned into the Damon show. We forced them to throw it a gerbillion times, but - especially since we were doing a fairly even steven rotation and not trying to match our top picks with theirs all night - you know, in the interest of letting people have equal playing time and all that - our great defense broke down at times. We took half 8-5, but had to pull to them to start the second, and hit a pretty significant lull.
To the tune of a five point run from them. Ugh - maybe we should have played zone or something, but I don't know if it was our D so much as our horrendous offense. It's hard to remember precisely what went on here other than that our crisp decision making left the building and we obviously got tired - or, I should say, our men got tired. Again, our women rocked out - Beck and new girl Selina (pronounced Suh-lye-nuh) typically took their second woman and honestly, I can't remember their second women touching the disc (and they were not shabby players - Megan and Irina!). Allyson, Kelly and G usually had to take Pauline, and while Genevieve giving Pauline trouble is to be expected, Allyson and Kelly both took it to her as well, Allyson even beating her deep for a score. Hiya! But... back to the boys. We got a little tired, and again, with Damon, trant and Dustin out the for all but MAYBE three points in the second half, we started to have problems - and even when we slowed those guys down effectively, they were getting a lot of easy resets to other players.
Our effort stayed high the entire time, though, which was just huge. This really was your classic knock-down drag out, with both teams having to runrunrunrunrun. And at this point I'm badly repeating myself, but we picked our poison against that team with the straight-up mark, and it really paid off. Yeah! Still, tired defense corresponded with tired offense, and what had been a crisp, flowy offense sputtered a lot in the second - a few handlers to rename nameless put a lot of deep throws up for incompletions, and it killed us. They took the lead 10-8, and the rest of the game we fought and clawed, always one point behind - in fact, I think the game went 10-9, 11-9, 11-10, 12-10, 12-11, 13-11, 13-12, 14-12, 14-13... the soft cap went on at 13-11 and the hard went on (obviously) on the last point, so this was really a game that didn't end and was separated by (I suppose) two breaks.
Case in point of the attack of the tireds - I got a big D when it was 12-11, tossed it to Viral and headed for the endzone with no one around. But he just didn't step into his throw, and it floated way up. So Jason, Damon and Todd all closed in while I'm camping under the disc - I had to jump and grab for it at its highest point because of the oncoming traffic, and I had another "hit the broken tip of my finger" experience, just couldn't get up high enough / couldn't close my fingers around it. Really should have had it, another drop - BUT, there's no reason I should be having to sky three people for that catch in the first place. Frustrating, and it's not to pick on Viral for that particular play, just an instance of where being worn out led to a bad throw led to a bad catch. They scored, so instead of 12-12 we were still down 13-11. Nuts.
On a completely different point, though, either Jeremy or Viral put up a swilly throw to the endzone, and who read it correctly and grabbed it? Your favorite new Ultimate player, BECK!!! Her second goal - fantastic!
Some frustrations in the game, nearly all occurring in our bad second half - we stopped dumping the disc, kept trying to put up laser hucks... I beat my guy deep a bunch of times and our handlers (Craig, Tom) had trouble putting up nice hucks; on another one of those late 13-12 points, I had jason by 20 yards and Craig fired a laser past me on which I had no chance. Genevieve caught a lasery blady huck from Tom... about a foot out the back of the short endzones. Somebody dropped their mark on Damon while I was guarding Jason for an incut, and Damon somehow managed not to just get a huck off but an IO backhand huck - against a straight up mark! So I sprinted and actually caught Trant, but my big lay out came up about a foot short. Devastating, but it was a pretty perfect huck against a great receiver; just gotta tip your hat to that (and mutter under your breath about whoever let the throw go off). Just a ton of missed opportunities, and I'm sure the other side had them, too, but it felt like we lost our legs and minds together.
Damon toward the end of the game did not get so much chippy as whiny - something happened between Jack and him, and whatever it was put him in a mode where he just complained and made whiny, nothing touch foul calls. He called a foul on the mark on me on a play where yes, there was contact, but it was a step through break mark throw and he really just threw it away. This was on the goalline at 13-12, and I wasn't the only one - and not just people from our team - who found it a little cheesy. Whatever, didn't contest it because I was not interested in the ensuing hissy fit. P Mo cheated a little bit earlier in the game with a pick call, too - it was actually seventh level cheating, but I made the smart decision and didn't even bring it up with her.
But I'll bring it up here - Jeremy cuts deep to right side of the endzone and smokes his guy. Pauline poaches off on Jeremy - a totally reasonable play - but she without a doubt leaves Allyson. Allyson cuts in, and is now wide open in front of me, a solid 8 yards away from Pauline. Meanwhile, the guy trying to guard jeremy runs into Pauline - and Pauline calls a pick! So not only is it your usual controversial not-within-three-yards pick call, she actually SET the entire thing up - she called a pick on a player who was guarding the same player she was guarding!!! STUPID! EGREGIOUS! I take umbrage.
But like I say, just blew it off, and generally had a very congenial, even positive night of interactions with the PMo. Huzzah for good sport. Actually, i was just beaming after the game - this was probably the best all-around VOTS game I've played in terms of featuring hustle, smart play (for most of it) and mutual respect in the midst of fierce competition. Good times, PH.
So anyhoo, a great game, we scored the final point on hard cap leaving us to never know whether they actually would have scored that 15th point. I was very proud of our team though think there is a lot of room to improve. Proud of the Beck for scoring and playing great, hustling D. Proud of myself for remaining above the fray despite an intense, emotional and hotly contested game. Not so proud of yet another drop and have wasted a lot of time wondering what the hell is going on - but all I can do is maybe practice some more jumping one handed grabs and hope this finger issue subsides soon. Also not so proud that this ended up being some 2300 words and I still don't think I captured what a fun night it was - I hung / played tight defense on taller and faster guys than me all evening, and our team really showed that it's got BIG TIME potential if we can work out the kinks. We shall see - thanks for reading if you did.
p.s. Also - disappointed that i was off with both Jack and Genevieve last night - just wasn't on the field at the same time they were. They both played great, just not with me. Sigh...
Revolution No. 20
This has leaked onto the interwebs in the past couple of days, and I suspect it will be taken down by Michael Jackson or Nike or Apple Records or EMI or whomever owns the rights to these things. Ladies and Gents, new music from the Beatles: studio take 20 of Revolution No. 1 / 9.
You can just listen to it online via this site, or you can also find it in mp3 format if you're a little crafty (or if you e-mail me and I, um, don't send you an mp3 link because that would be wrong).
You can just listen to it online via this site, or you can also find it in mp3 format if you're a little crafty (or if you e-mail me and I, um, don't send you an mp3 link because that would be wrong).
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Empirical Evidence
On a certain fantasy basketball board, the question recently arose as to whether our buddy Andy, given 30 minutes, would be able to score on Lebron James. After much speculation regarding vertical jumps, angle of release, etc., the empirical test was finally called for: a computer simulation. Speculate no longer, gents - Andy gets it done:
Slump / Slumdog / Slump Dogged
Had a really, really bad pair of softball games on Friday night. Not only did I top the ball every time up (still managed to get on base 5 of 6 times, but still, damn), I overran a ball in the outfield and made a big fat error. No good. We did win both games which puts us in good shape for the playoffs - first game's Friday at 6:20; I'll let you know how it goes. Man, a bad streak in softball lately, but I did a good job of keeping my head held high and a positive attitude for the future. Hooray for small victories.
Beck worked on Saturday, and so did I - headed over to Mama Java's, read four articles AND wrote my phil paper for this week (posted earlier). Yeah productivity! Met Beck at home, had some crunchy turkey burgers (Cajun style!), and went to see the super-Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire at a local cineplex.
So, the Slumdog... I did enjoy the story-framing, the soundtrack, the cool multi-locale, the must-have-been-technically-challenging cinematography, and the overt attempt to enlighten mainstream Western audiences as to the plight of a huge chunk of the world's population. And the kids were fantastic - charismatic, pulled off the street urchin charm with aplomb. There was just something - and maybe this is more of a product of post-hype effect - lacking about the movie for me. Ebert pointed out in his review that behind the above-mentioned aspects and the fact that it's a mainstream American movie in India with Indian characters, this is a film with a rather traditional plot: brothers with a protective yet conflicted relationship, a wet-blanket love interest who inexplicably inspires deranged loyalty from the protagonist, a severely Westernized gangster motif of late redemption, and the requisite happy ending. So I see it as a movie with some fantastic moments, some beautiful story-telling, but ultimately a hiddem fomulaic-ness that seaps through if you pay attention.
Side note - some triumph of the human spirit commentary has accompanied this movie, and I just don't know how to respond to that. For every ounce of credence that I want to credit to the characters' perseverance, I want to equally note the horrors of a culture that permits that sort of stratification and abuse, worse that we feel there is somehow a possible happy ending offered by a game show. Don't want to delve too much into this - again, I did enjoy and appreciate a lot about this movie - but I question the ability of at-least-somewhat formulaic fiction to give me elated feelings about a reprehensible set of cultural circumstances.
Fast forward to Sunday - Beck and I hit up the circumference trail at Squaw Peak, ate a delicious brunch, did some house work, then headed to pickup. Went extraordinarily well - Beck had a great afternoon with some good catches and throws, even a jumping above-head catch on a deep throw - good times! I had a pretty great session, too, with a crazy layout on the very first point of the day, a bunch of skies and Ds, no turns (except for a ridiculous joke thumber I threw at one point) and several just spot-on hucks. I brought it, for whatever reason, and other than getting charley-horsed by Nipar on a skying catch, the day went perfect (my quad is really sore, but pretty much better now (Tuesday evening)).
Next stop: softball, after a healthy dinner at Tom's BBQ in Tempe. Delicious sausage sandwich and red beans and rice; I may have to get back there soon. The softball game: not so delicious. The other team consisted of reasonably good female players backed by a bunch of 6'3" and over men who could all mash. Those guys had no business being in an E-league or playing on a field that small - one of their guys hit a HR, but it was a 252' blast - not exactly something to be too excited about. Just a waste of time, and they effectively kicked our arse. Beck hit the ball well, and after slamming another couple of ground balls, I finally hit a line drive triple to right center toward the end of the game. Yay! Of course, I followed this up by making the last out of the game by inadvertently crossing the commitment line, and I know there's some serious marriage joke in there somewhere. Still, it was an effectively athletic slump-evidence-free double header, and I'll take it.
So a fun weekend. Back to the grind the past couple of days - I had a full day of reading / meetings yesterday, and another full day of reading, a presentation, a class, and general exhaustion today. Curenty waiting for the beck to get home from surgery, but that may not happen anytime soon. The Zorro has a matchup with the tallest team in Spring League tomorrow; I'll be sure to let you know how that goes.
Beck worked on Saturday, and so did I - headed over to Mama Java's, read four articles AND wrote my phil paper for this week (posted earlier). Yeah productivity! Met Beck at home, had some crunchy turkey burgers (Cajun style!), and went to see the super-Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire at a local cineplex.
So, the Slumdog... I did enjoy the story-framing, the soundtrack, the cool multi-locale, the must-have-been-technically-challenging cinematography, and the overt attempt to enlighten mainstream Western audiences as to the plight of a huge chunk of the world's population. And the kids were fantastic - charismatic, pulled off the street urchin charm with aplomb. There was just something - and maybe this is more of a product of post-hype effect - lacking about the movie for me. Ebert pointed out in his review that behind the above-mentioned aspects and the fact that it's a mainstream American movie in India with Indian characters, this is a film with a rather traditional plot: brothers with a protective yet conflicted relationship, a wet-blanket love interest who inexplicably inspires deranged loyalty from the protagonist, a severely Westernized gangster motif of late redemption, and the requisite happy ending. So I see it as a movie with some fantastic moments, some beautiful story-telling, but ultimately a hiddem fomulaic-ness that seaps through if you pay attention.
Side note - some triumph of the human spirit commentary has accompanied this movie, and I just don't know how to respond to that. For every ounce of credence that I want to credit to the characters' perseverance, I want to equally note the horrors of a culture that permits that sort of stratification and abuse, worse that we feel there is somehow a possible happy ending offered by a game show. Don't want to delve too much into this - again, I did enjoy and appreciate a lot about this movie - but I question the ability of at-least-somewhat formulaic fiction to give me elated feelings about a reprehensible set of cultural circumstances.
Fast forward to Sunday - Beck and I hit up the circumference trail at Squaw Peak, ate a delicious brunch, did some house work, then headed to pickup. Went extraordinarily well - Beck had a great afternoon with some good catches and throws, even a jumping above-head catch on a deep throw - good times! I had a pretty great session, too, with a crazy layout on the very first point of the day, a bunch of skies and Ds, no turns (except for a ridiculous joke thumber I threw at one point) and several just spot-on hucks. I brought it, for whatever reason, and other than getting charley-horsed by Nipar on a skying catch, the day went perfect (my quad is really sore, but pretty much better now (Tuesday evening)).
Next stop: softball, after a healthy dinner at Tom's BBQ in Tempe. Delicious sausage sandwich and red beans and rice; I may have to get back there soon. The softball game: not so delicious. The other team consisted of reasonably good female players backed by a bunch of 6'3" and over men who could all mash. Those guys had no business being in an E-league or playing on a field that small - one of their guys hit a HR, but it was a 252' blast - not exactly something to be too excited about. Just a waste of time, and they effectively kicked our arse. Beck hit the ball well, and after slamming another couple of ground balls, I finally hit a line drive triple to right center toward the end of the game. Yay! Of course, I followed this up by making the last out of the game by inadvertently crossing the commitment line, and I know there's some serious marriage joke in there somewhere. Still, it was an effectively athletic slump-evidence-free double header, and I'll take it.
So a fun weekend. Back to the grind the past couple of days - I had a full day of reading / meetings yesterday, and another full day of reading, a presentation, a class, and general exhaustion today. Curenty waiting for the beck to get home from surgery, but that may not happen anytime soon. The Zorro has a matchup with the tallest team in Spring League tomorrow; I'll be sure to let you know how that goes.
Late entrant for the Darwin awards
See the drunk bus can be fun...
How's this for getting arrested? The cops take you to a bus stop and say you can get on the bus and leave drunky, but if you don't, we are going to have to arrest you.
Daniel Trimm, 43, of Seminole, Florida, said, "Oh yeah, try to arrest me! I'll call the cops on you." And subsequently called 911 to explain that the cops were arresting his publicly intoxicated ass and kicking him out of Tampa International Airport. Needless to say, he is still in jail this morning, charged with not only trespassing and disorderly conduct, but also a special bonus count of making a false 911 call. Genius.
Ha.
Saw this New Yorker cartoon in the hallway at SoLS and it made me laugh. It's no nun with a spear through her head, but a pretty solid entry in the sadistic comedy genre:
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Have you heard about the bacon explosion?
We are not saying that a bacon packing plant exploded. Nor are we saying that the popularity of bacon has suddenly increased, blown up, as it were. No, rather the "Bacon Explosion" is a recipe. It is a 5,000 calorie, 500 grams of fat plus bacon log.
Let us explain, it is a tube made out of a mat of 2 lbs. bacon, woven together around 2 lbs. of sausage. The New York Times reports that the creators, BBQAddicts.com, "bought about $20 worth of bacon and Italian sausage from a local meat market. As it lay on the counter, [they] thought of weaving strips of raw bacon into a mat. The two spackled the bacon mat with a layer of sausage, covered that with a crunchy layer of cooked bacon, and rolled it up tight." Voilà! Bacon-loaf. It can be cooked in either an oven or a smoker.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Singin' "Don't Worry:" Three Little Words
Philosophy.Of.Science.
I got called for jury duty on Wednesday. The major benefit was that I got to skip a week of Evo Psych pain; I'll be back in that class next week, but we'll be back to talking about cultural psychology which is not so flagrantly anti-biological. Yay! The major deficit was that I had to be downtown by 8:00 in the A.M., ready for an entire day of sitting around and waiting to be called. I got there just fine, walked to the courthouse, headed down to the juror assembly room and camped in my chair with a couple of books to read for class. The juror assembly room was huge - they bring in about 50 prospective jurors per trial, so there was space enough for about 400 people at a given time. Just a bureaucratic nightmare.
They started off the day with an orientation session that involved watching a ten minute ridiculo-video. After giving us a Law & Order-level explanation of what was happening and repeatedly insisting that "the process can't occur without you, so you are making JUSTICE happen, and it will be AWESOME," we were then treated to testimonials from people who claimed that it was all "really interesting" and you get to "see the process" and "feel proud to be an American." I mean, it's not exactly shocking that a government institution would throw out some nationalistic sentiment or that they would spend a large amount of time convincing you that this was not so much inconvenient as it was AWESOME, but it was a little dumb - way too much positive attitude insistence when really, it's your duty - it's not going to be SUPER FUN, it's going to be inconvenient, and you are required to do it: deal. I don't mean to poo-poo a positive attitude, it's that nine out of ten minutes of the orientation video were spent adjusting my attitude rather than giving me a little insight into the process of jury selection.
Ah, well. Eventually, the orientation video ended, and they decided to put on a DVD in the main juror assembly room to entertain us while we awaited bailiffs to escort us to courtrooms (if we were so lucky). And you'll never guess what the movie was: Miss Congeniality! I will flash forward and reveal that later in the afternoon when I ended up back in the juror assembly room, the in-wait entertainment was Madagascar! So the same movies that Beck uses for airplane flights are used to pacify angry waiting jurors. I will permit you to draw your own conclusions...
There's a quiet room in the JAR if you aren't inclined to see MC for the eighteenth time, and since I had a lot of reading I should have been doing, I booked it over there. And here's the catch of the day - even though you have to wait around for HOURS, you can't get any reading done, because bailiffs are coming in and grabbing groups of fifty - so the receptionists have to read off fifty names over the loudspeaker. Even when the bailiffs aren't there, the receptionists are welcoming the new jurors as they arrive. So there were ten minute stretches in which I can read, constantly interrupted by welcoming messages and then reading of lists of names that I had to pay attention to lest I miss my calling. On about the fifth bailiff who came in, I was called third in the group. Having read maybe 20 pages in the two hours I had been there, I joined a mass of people and prepared myself to be herded to the courtroom. Lots of stupid jokes, Southwest Airlines stewardess humor, really, employed by the bailiff with the mass of people as we made our way across the courthouse.
We finally got to the courtroom, and the bailiff explained the procedure a bit more - we each had a placard with our number, and if we were answering a question, we were to raise our placard and not use our name in order to keep the process moving along. We then filed into the courtroom, and since I was third in line, I got to sit in the real life juror box. I quickly figured out that being in the first 12, I was much more likely to be selected - they brought in all the extra people in case jurors needed to be excused, but had we all been found acceptable, the first twelve would have been taken. Super duper, I thought, as I really didn't want to spend the next week there.
In the courtroom sat a clerk, a court stenographer, the bailiff, a prosecutor and his assistant, and the defense lawyer / defendant. It took approximately 0.14 seconds to figure out who the defendant was - everyone had their stereotypes on in full force, with the lady in a power suit, the stern man in a three piece, and the strange-faced man in crumply khaki next to the power-suited lady all being exactly who you might think. There were a good few awkward minutes of staring in silence as we waited for the judge to appear. Very modern looking courtroom with computer monitors in front of the jurors, the bench, the witness stand, and the lawyers; PA system with mics mounted everywhere. A little more sharper imagey than your average scene from Law & Order - even the jurors' chairs were captain's deck worthy.
The judge walked in and said "Be seated" before the bailiff had a chance to finish saying "session." This guy was all business, a buzz-cut coke glasses-wearer straight out of a 1950s engineering firm. He gave us a quick summary of what was to happen - he would ask us yes or no questions, and if the answer to any of them were yes, we were to raise our placard and explain. Then he would ask each of us questions individually, and then if the lawyers had any questions they would ask us. He quickly ran through the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" and then let us know that if we had to vote right now, we'd have to find the defendant not guilty. He quickly explained the crime of which the defendant was accused - it was a burglary charge at B______________. Interestingly, the judge thought the trial would only take a couple of days, something I could have done with minimal interference to my studies. So I was not as opposed to serving as I otherwise would have been. Then he hit us with the gamut of questions:
Do you recognize the defendant? Do you recognize any of the lawyers or court officers? Do you know any of the other jurors? Do you know the police officers involved? Do you have any relationship to B_____________? Have you ever been convicted of a crime? Have any of your relatives been involved in a burglary? Have you ever been the victim of a burglary? Are you a lawyer, or do you study law? Are you not a U.S. Citizen, a citizen of Maricopa county, etc.? Is there any other reason you could not be a fair, impartial member of a jury? There were a slew of other questions, but they all had the "obvious reasons someone would be biased flavor." The judge qualified as all of this as not an act of prying into people's lives, just trying to ensure that jury is as fair as possible.
The amazing thing is that the ocean of human tragedy, invited, relevant or otherwise, quickly hit high tide. Prospective jurors started telling tales of their children being in jail, being arrested for DUI, being held up at gunpoint, daughters being convicted of narcotics possession, having brain damage, not speaking English well, you name it. I couldn't begin to detail the litany of private, typically socially regretful information that poured out of people. Terrible stories, and a brutal sensation of seeing state power in action - the judge had oh-so-passively forced the tales of woe out of people. We were under oath, true, but the level of detail that came out was certainly not required. Some of it was frivolous - we got to hear about how a man had his snow board stolen out of his garage 30 years ago - but most was just sad and overtold: friends murdered, broken families, cousins with meth problems, egads. I've often gotten the feeling walking around campus that when you see a huge mass of people, you start seeing statistically determined "all kinds" - people with broken bones, foreign accents, different styles, heights, weights, etc., you just see the whole bell curve at once, so when you run into the 6'8" guy with a mohawk, there's something about it that just isn't all that shocking. But this was narrative overflow straight from the horses' mouths - at times, I forgot I was in a jury selection process and just thought I was witnessing mass confession, mass therapy.
The judge, of course, followed up every tale with, "Will this make you unable to be fair while serving on this jury?" All business - there seemed to be a certain level of probing he was required to do, but once he got there, he just stopped. The most painful part of the entire experience was a gentleman with brain damage - he clearly had no business being involved in jury selection, having sustained head trauma two months before which had left him with a bad speech impediment, but the judge had to get details of the circumstances to clarify that he was unfit to serve. That he was unfit was clear by the time it had taken fifteen seconds for him to get three words out - but we all sat there and watched as this man struggled to explain his circumstances in front of a judge, lawyers, and 49 other strangers / prospective jurors. Eventually the exasperated judge muttered something along the lines of, "Okay, I think get it..."
My favorite part of the ordeal came after the general questions, when the judge began asking us one by one "what do you do, what does your spouse (if you have one) do, and have you ever served on a jury before?" I was third in this process - the people in front of me were a grocery store cashier and a retail salesman, respectively. I had pretty much dreaded this part the entire time, knowing that explaining my particular program was going to be challenging. And with all the severe truth-telling going on in the room, there was a tense atmosphere before I began responding to the qs - yeah, I could feel my heart beating. I'll try to give the conversation accurately:
"What do you do? * I am a PhD student at Arizona State in the philosophy of science. * What's that? * (Struggling mightily not to use words like "epistemology" or "meta-ethics" and the like, knowing these would just beget more "what's that?" type questions) I study how scientists justify their claims, how they convince others that they know what they claim to know. * Like the Theory of Evolution? * Right - we would look at the historical development of the theory and particularly how scientists use EVIDENCE to justify their claims * And what do you do with that? * Usually academia: education and research. It also interacts with justifying government research grants and the like. * And your spouse? * She's a veterinarian, and no, I've never served on a jury before. * Okay, thank you."
I capitalize EVIDENCE not because I shouted it, but because if "philosophy of science" got the lawyers' attention, the word EVIDENCE hit the resonant frequency of their brains. The judge continued to ask everyone in the room questions, and there were no other academics in the room - everyone else was the predictable mix of teachers, engineers, salespeople, clerks, administrative assistants, unemployed, the usual. After everyone had answered the questions, the judge tossed out a few jurors on face - some who couldn't speak English, the man with brain damage, one lady with fifteen relatives who had done everything from burglarize to deal crack. Then the lawyers asked to approach - and as they whispered to the judge, he clicked a button that turned on a white noise machine over the PA so we couldn't hear. 21st century law baby - they don't do that on Law & Order, no they do NOT!!!
So the lawyers then got to ask questions, and the prosecution decided to interrogate only one person. Guess who...
"Do you think your studies will affect your ability to render a verdict? * Well, different contexts require a different set of standards - I recognize that you can't use the same sort of standards in in a courtroom or everyday life as you do in philosophy. So no, I think I can render a verdict according to the appropriate standards of the courtroom. * What standards do you use?1 * Um, that depends on the context - again, I know the standards in a court room are different from that of rigorous philosophy, so i would follow the rule of "reasonable doubt." * So you could put aside your studies and consider the evidence in the way that the judge instructs you? * Certainly. * Can you give me an example of how you might study evidence that pertains to a criminal trial? * Sure, I took a law, science, & technology course, and one of the things we studied was how expert witnesses verify their expertise. * So would you be inclined to believe an expert on the witness stand? * Well, that would depend on the kind of expert, their credentials, etc. * Okay, thank you.
And then the prosecution rested. Awesome. And then, the defense's turn. And guess who... ah, you already know.
So you study scientific evidence - what kinds? * My department is within the biology department, but really, all kinds of scientific evidence. * So you're familiar with fingerprint analysis and DNA testing? * Yes, I mean, not directly - but I've taken genetics courses and know the rationale behind them, nucleotide polymorphisms and such. * So would you be inclined to believe an expert witness on DNA analysis? * Um, again, it would depend on the type of witness, credentials, how the samples were collected, * Okay, thank you.
And she talked to one other juror who had mentioned possibly being biased against an alleged burglar, but then stopped. So of all those witnesses, my "philosophy of science" and "evidence" lines grabbed by far the most attention. And both sides seemed not to want me around - the prosecution, I presume, because I was never going to believe their evidence, and the defense because I would know exactly what was going on with whatever DNA evidence was going to be presented against her client. Rather than throw me out of there on the spot, as would have made ABSOLUTE SENSE, the judge called an hour recess for lunch. So I got to hang out in the courthouse cafeteria for an hour, awaiting my already known fate.
We were instructed to meet back at 12:58 for the 1:00 trial - and just to up the goofiness of the day a little more, when I got to the lobby with the other jurors, there we all were standing in maybe a 200 square foot space... along with the defendant and his family. HUH? They don't control this type of thing? No one was there instructing us not to speak with him, not to watch his tearful family as they hugged him goodbye... whatever, court.
We walked back in the courtroom, another "All ri /Be seated," and the judge proceeded to read off the list of selected juror numbers. Juror 1 had been tossed under the 15 criminal family member clause of jury duty, I suppose, so the list started with "2" and then went something like "4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,14,15." I had been, predictably, tossed out on the basis of my high-falutin' ideas about evidence and DNA. The judge dismissed the rest of us, and told us we could go home. HUZZAH!
Not so fast - we got back to the jury assembly room and were informed that we had to wait to see if we were needed for another trial. UGH. Super-Ugh, because when I sat down at a table with my book - which I was READING - one of the other rejected jury members sat down by me and said, "You study science, right? Well, let me tell you about my boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend and their baby so you can tell me about his psychology I'm 7 months pregnant and I just think you can't live in the future if you live in the past I mean how can you move forward if you're still thinking about her and he used to drugs and I told him if he ever fell back that it was over but he hasn't but now he's living in the past again and I think it's just a matter of time and how long have you been married, do you have up days and down days because we do but I love him but just sometimes AGH and don't you think that's fucked up because I mean I told him no sex ever again if you don't stop living in the past..."
Oh. My. Goodness. I am not exaggerating; like my courtroom dialogues, those are not the exact words in the exact order, but they are very close. Luckily, after about half an hour of this CRAZY LADY they called us up and dismissed us - I think I actually said "YES!" when they did, not because I got to go home but because I got to get away from that lady who apparently thought courtroom therapy time was still in session. I walked briskly to my car and left the world of jury duty behind - I am off for at least 18 months now by law.
So that's the tale, and the take home message is that if you want to get tossed off a jury during the selection process, just say you have a passing interest in philosophy of science and evidence and apparently you will be a potentially prejudiced wahoo to lawyers on both sides. But try to do it in a way that does not make psychotic strangers think you want to talk to them about every excruciating detail of their life. Because wow, you don't.
1 This may have been my favorite question, because I still have no idea how I was supposed to answer this. I mean, outside of "reasonable doubt" or "absolute doubt" or something like that, how do you answer "what standards do you use?" Um, the blue ones? WTF?
I got called for jury duty on Wednesday. The major benefit was that I got to skip a week of Evo Psych pain; I'll be back in that class next week, but we'll be back to talking about cultural psychology which is not so flagrantly anti-biological. Yay! The major deficit was that I had to be downtown by 8:00 in the A.M., ready for an entire day of sitting around and waiting to be called. I got there just fine, walked to the courthouse, headed down to the juror assembly room and camped in my chair with a couple of books to read for class. The juror assembly room was huge - they bring in about 50 prospective jurors per trial, so there was space enough for about 400 people at a given time. Just a bureaucratic nightmare.
They started off the day with an orientation session that involved watching a ten minute ridiculo-video. After giving us a Law & Order-level explanation of what was happening and repeatedly insisting that "the process can't occur without you, so you are making JUSTICE happen, and it will be AWESOME," we were then treated to testimonials from people who claimed that it was all "really interesting" and you get to "see the process" and "feel proud to be an American." I mean, it's not exactly shocking that a government institution would throw out some nationalistic sentiment or that they would spend a large amount of time convincing you that this was not so much inconvenient as it was AWESOME, but it was a little dumb - way too much positive attitude insistence when really, it's your duty - it's not going to be SUPER FUN, it's going to be inconvenient, and you are required to do it: deal. I don't mean to poo-poo a positive attitude, it's that nine out of ten minutes of the orientation video were spent adjusting my attitude rather than giving me a little insight into the process of jury selection.
Ah, well. Eventually, the orientation video ended, and they decided to put on a DVD in the main juror assembly room to entertain us while we awaited bailiffs to escort us to courtrooms (if we were so lucky). And you'll never guess what the movie was: Miss Congeniality! I will flash forward and reveal that later in the afternoon when I ended up back in the juror assembly room, the in-wait entertainment was Madagascar! So the same movies that Beck uses for airplane flights are used to pacify angry waiting jurors. I will permit you to draw your own conclusions...
There's a quiet room in the JAR if you aren't inclined to see MC for the eighteenth time, and since I had a lot of reading I should have been doing, I booked it over there. And here's the catch of the day - even though you have to wait around for HOURS, you can't get any reading done, because bailiffs are coming in and grabbing groups of fifty - so the receptionists have to read off fifty names over the loudspeaker. Even when the bailiffs aren't there, the receptionists are welcoming the new jurors as they arrive. So there were ten minute stretches in which I can read, constantly interrupted by welcoming messages and then reading of lists of names that I had to pay attention to lest I miss my calling. On about the fifth bailiff who came in, I was called third in the group. Having read maybe 20 pages in the two hours I had been there, I joined a mass of people and prepared myself to be herded to the courtroom. Lots of stupid jokes, Southwest Airlines stewardess humor, really, employed by the bailiff with the mass of people as we made our way across the courthouse.
We finally got to the courtroom, and the bailiff explained the procedure a bit more - we each had a placard with our number, and if we were answering a question, we were to raise our placard and not use our name in order to keep the process moving along. We then filed into the courtroom, and since I was third in line, I got to sit in the real life juror box. I quickly figured out that being in the first 12, I was much more likely to be selected - they brought in all the extra people in case jurors needed to be excused, but had we all been found acceptable, the first twelve would have been taken. Super duper, I thought, as I really didn't want to spend the next week there.
In the courtroom sat a clerk, a court stenographer, the bailiff, a prosecutor and his assistant, and the defense lawyer / defendant. It took approximately 0.14 seconds to figure out who the defendant was - everyone had their stereotypes on in full force, with the lady in a power suit, the stern man in a three piece, and the strange-faced man in crumply khaki next to the power-suited lady all being exactly who you might think. There were a good few awkward minutes of staring in silence as we waited for the judge to appear. Very modern looking courtroom with computer monitors in front of the jurors, the bench, the witness stand, and the lawyers; PA system with mics mounted everywhere. A little more sharper imagey than your average scene from Law & Order - even the jurors' chairs were captain's deck worthy.
The judge walked in and said "Be seated" before the bailiff had a chance to finish saying "session." This guy was all business, a buzz-cut coke glasses-wearer straight out of a 1950s engineering firm. He gave us a quick summary of what was to happen - he would ask us yes or no questions, and if the answer to any of them were yes, we were to raise our placard and explain. Then he would ask each of us questions individually, and then if the lawyers had any questions they would ask us. He quickly ran through the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" and then let us know that if we had to vote right now, we'd have to find the defendant not guilty. He quickly explained the crime of which the defendant was accused - it was a burglary charge at B______________. Interestingly, the judge thought the trial would only take a couple of days, something I could have done with minimal interference to my studies. So I was not as opposed to serving as I otherwise would have been. Then he hit us with the gamut of questions:
Do you recognize the defendant? Do you recognize any of the lawyers or court officers? Do you know any of the other jurors? Do you know the police officers involved? Do you have any relationship to B_____________? Have you ever been convicted of a crime? Have any of your relatives been involved in a burglary? Have you ever been the victim of a burglary? Are you a lawyer, or do you study law? Are you not a U.S. Citizen, a citizen of Maricopa county, etc.? Is there any other reason you could not be a fair, impartial member of a jury? There were a slew of other questions, but they all had the "obvious reasons someone would be biased flavor." The judge qualified as all of this as not an act of prying into people's lives, just trying to ensure that jury is as fair as possible.
The amazing thing is that the ocean of human tragedy, invited, relevant or otherwise, quickly hit high tide. Prospective jurors started telling tales of their children being in jail, being arrested for DUI, being held up at gunpoint, daughters being convicted of narcotics possession, having brain damage, not speaking English well, you name it. I couldn't begin to detail the litany of private, typically socially regretful information that poured out of people. Terrible stories, and a brutal sensation of seeing state power in action - the judge had oh-so-passively forced the tales of woe out of people. We were under oath, true, but the level of detail that came out was certainly not required. Some of it was frivolous - we got to hear about how a man had his snow board stolen out of his garage 30 years ago - but most was just sad and overtold: friends murdered, broken families, cousins with meth problems, egads. I've often gotten the feeling walking around campus that when you see a huge mass of people, you start seeing statistically determined "all kinds" - people with broken bones, foreign accents, different styles, heights, weights, etc., you just see the whole bell curve at once, so when you run into the 6'8" guy with a mohawk, there's something about it that just isn't all that shocking. But this was narrative overflow straight from the horses' mouths - at times, I forgot I was in a jury selection process and just thought I was witnessing mass confession, mass therapy.
The judge, of course, followed up every tale with, "Will this make you unable to be fair while serving on this jury?" All business - there seemed to be a certain level of probing he was required to do, but once he got there, he just stopped. The most painful part of the entire experience was a gentleman with brain damage - he clearly had no business being involved in jury selection, having sustained head trauma two months before which had left him with a bad speech impediment, but the judge had to get details of the circumstances to clarify that he was unfit to serve. That he was unfit was clear by the time it had taken fifteen seconds for him to get three words out - but we all sat there and watched as this man struggled to explain his circumstances in front of a judge, lawyers, and 49 other strangers / prospective jurors. Eventually the exasperated judge muttered something along the lines of, "Okay, I think get it..."
My favorite part of the ordeal came after the general questions, when the judge began asking us one by one "what do you do, what does your spouse (if you have one) do, and have you ever served on a jury before?" I was third in this process - the people in front of me were a grocery store cashier and a retail salesman, respectively. I had pretty much dreaded this part the entire time, knowing that explaining my particular program was going to be challenging. And with all the severe truth-telling going on in the room, there was a tense atmosphere before I began responding to the qs - yeah, I could feel my heart beating. I'll try to give the conversation accurately:
"What do you do? * I am a PhD student at Arizona State in the philosophy of science. * What's that? * (Struggling mightily not to use words like "epistemology" or "meta-ethics" and the like, knowing these would just beget more "what's that?" type questions) I study how scientists justify their claims, how they convince others that they know what they claim to know. * Like the Theory of Evolution? * Right - we would look at the historical development of the theory and particularly how scientists use EVIDENCE to justify their claims * And what do you do with that? * Usually academia: education and research. It also interacts with justifying government research grants and the like. * And your spouse? * She's a veterinarian, and no, I've never served on a jury before. * Okay, thank you."
I capitalize EVIDENCE not because I shouted it, but because if "philosophy of science" got the lawyers' attention, the word EVIDENCE hit the resonant frequency of their brains. The judge continued to ask everyone in the room questions, and there were no other academics in the room - everyone else was the predictable mix of teachers, engineers, salespeople, clerks, administrative assistants, unemployed, the usual. After everyone had answered the questions, the judge tossed out a few jurors on face - some who couldn't speak English, the man with brain damage, one lady with fifteen relatives who had done everything from burglarize to deal crack. Then the lawyers asked to approach - and as they whispered to the judge, he clicked a button that turned on a white noise machine over the PA so we couldn't hear. 21st century law baby - they don't do that on Law & Order, no they do NOT!!!
So the lawyers then got to ask questions, and the prosecution decided to interrogate only one person. Guess who...
"Do you think your studies will affect your ability to render a verdict? * Well, different contexts require a different set of standards - I recognize that you can't use the same sort of standards in in a courtroom or everyday life as you do in philosophy. So no, I think I can render a verdict according to the appropriate standards of the courtroom. * What standards do you use?1 * Um, that depends on the context - again, I know the standards in a court room are different from that of rigorous philosophy, so i would follow the rule of "reasonable doubt." * So you could put aside your studies and consider the evidence in the way that the judge instructs you? * Certainly. * Can you give me an example of how you might study evidence that pertains to a criminal trial? * Sure, I took a law, science, & technology course, and one of the things we studied was how expert witnesses verify their expertise. * So would you be inclined to believe an expert on the witness stand? * Well, that would depend on the kind of expert, their credentials, etc. * Okay, thank you.
And then the prosecution rested. Awesome. And then, the defense's turn. And guess who... ah, you already know.
So you study scientific evidence - what kinds? * My department is within the biology department, but really, all kinds of scientific evidence. * So you're familiar with fingerprint analysis and DNA testing? * Yes, I mean, not directly - but I've taken genetics courses and know the rationale behind them, nucleotide polymorphisms and such. * So would you be inclined to believe an expert witness on DNA analysis? * Um, again, it would depend on the type of witness, credentials, how the samples were collected, * Okay, thank you.
And she talked to one other juror who had mentioned possibly being biased against an alleged burglar, but then stopped. So of all those witnesses, my "philosophy of science" and "evidence" lines grabbed by far the most attention. And both sides seemed not to want me around - the prosecution, I presume, because I was never going to believe their evidence, and the defense because I would know exactly what was going on with whatever DNA evidence was going to be presented against her client. Rather than throw me out of there on the spot, as would have made ABSOLUTE SENSE, the judge called an hour recess for lunch. So I got to hang out in the courthouse cafeteria for an hour, awaiting my already known fate.
We were instructed to meet back at 12:58 for the 1:00 trial - and just to up the goofiness of the day a little more, when I got to the lobby with the other jurors, there we all were standing in maybe a 200 square foot space... along with the defendant and his family. HUH? They don't control this type of thing? No one was there instructing us not to speak with him, not to watch his tearful family as they hugged him goodbye... whatever, court.
We walked back in the courtroom, another "All ri /Be seated," and the judge proceeded to read off the list of selected juror numbers. Juror 1 had been tossed under the 15 criminal family member clause of jury duty, I suppose, so the list started with "2" and then went something like "4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,14,15." I had been, predictably, tossed out on the basis of my high-falutin' ideas about evidence and DNA. The judge dismissed the rest of us, and told us we could go home. HUZZAH!
Not so fast - we got back to the jury assembly room and were informed that we had to wait to see if we were needed for another trial. UGH. Super-Ugh, because when I sat down at a table with my book - which I was READING - one of the other rejected jury members sat down by me and said, "You study science, right? Well, let me tell you about my boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend and their baby so you can tell me about his psychology I'm 7 months pregnant and I just think you can't live in the future if you live in the past I mean how can you move forward if you're still thinking about her and he used to drugs and I told him if he ever fell back that it was over but he hasn't but now he's living in the past again and I think it's just a matter of time and how long have you been married, do you have up days and down days because we do but I love him but just sometimes AGH and don't you think that's fucked up because I mean I told him no sex ever again if you don't stop living in the past..."
Oh. My. Goodness. I am not exaggerating; like my courtroom dialogues, those are not the exact words in the exact order, but they are very close. Luckily, after about half an hour of this CRAZY LADY they called us up and dismissed us - I think I actually said "YES!" when they did, not because I got to go home but because I got to get away from that lady who apparently thought courtroom therapy time was still in session. I walked briskly to my car and left the world of jury duty behind - I am off for at least 18 months now by law.
So that's the tale, and the take home message is that if you want to get tossed off a jury during the selection process, just say you have a passing interest in philosophy of science and evidence and apparently you will be a potentially prejudiced wahoo to lawyers on both sides. But try to do it in a way that does not make psychotic strangers think you want to talk to them about every excruciating detail of their life. Because wow, you don't.
1 This may have been my favorite question, because I still have no idea how I was supposed to answer this. I mean, outside of "reasonable doubt" or "absolute doubt" or something like that, how do you answer "what standards do you use?" Um, the blue ones? WTF?
Friday, February 20, 2009
Chris Brown
If Chris Brown really did this to Rihanna he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If he still his fans out there, they need to have a serious re-think. Allegedly she was found alone and visibly battered on a street in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Slumping
I made a joke in an e-mail I sent to The Mark of Zorro about my dropped disc last night. Beck, ever the pragmatist, read this, pointed at it, and said, "it's over. It's done. You need to move on." And she's right.
Genevieve, co-captain, reads this, and says, "That was funny. You drop one disc and you act like you've personally offended the team. Of course, that's probably what makes you good, you don't blow things like that off." She's right, too.
I've hit a little bit of a slump in the sports department - not huge, but I've popped up a couple of times in key softball situations, and now have dropped 3 discs in the past 2 and a half weeks (and dropped discs are pretty rare for me). Part of it is nagging injury stuff - still not quite 100% with my shoulder, my fingers all mashed up - but it's really just mistakes, and it bugs me quite a bit. Still, in the grand scheme of things, I hope my obsessing is effective obsessing; it's not like it's keeping me up at night, I just want to get back into better focus to avoid this stuff.
(The sabermetrician in me notices that this is probably just undue pattern imposition on my part, that this crap just happens every once in a while and it's easy to perceive it as clustering when it's just unfortunate coincidence. So, you know, maybe my nervous system isn't failing me after all).
Just reflecting a little on the role of self-scrutinziation is sports performance. There are sweet spots where the obsession can motivate and not-so-sweet ways of overdoing it such that it becomes detrimental obsession (and worse, gets you "thinking about it" the next time a disc floats down). I'm not going to pretend I have this down by any means; it's nice to have Beck to keep my perseverations in check.
Genevieve, co-captain, reads this, and says, "That was funny. You drop one disc and you act like you've personally offended the team. Of course, that's probably what makes you good, you don't blow things like that off." She's right, too.
I've hit a little bit of a slump in the sports department - not huge, but I've popped up a couple of times in key softball situations, and now have dropped 3 discs in the past 2 and a half weeks (and dropped discs are pretty rare for me). Part of it is nagging injury stuff - still not quite 100% with my shoulder, my fingers all mashed up - but it's really just mistakes, and it bugs me quite a bit. Still, in the grand scheme of things, I hope my obsessing is effective obsessing; it's not like it's keeping me up at night, I just want to get back into better focus to avoid this stuff.
(The sabermetrician in me notices that this is probably just undue pattern imposition on my part, that this crap just happens every once in a while and it's easy to perceive it as clustering when it's just unfortunate coincidence. So, you know, maybe my nervous system isn't failing me after all).
Just reflecting a little on the role of self-scrutinziation is sports performance. There are sweet spots where the obsession can motivate and not-so-sweet ways of overdoing it such that it becomes detrimental obsession (and worse, gets you "thinking about it" the next time a disc floats down). I'm not going to pretend I have this down by any means; it's nice to have Beck to keep my perseverations in check.
The Mark of Zorro: 1-0.
Won our first League Game last night against Kevin / Eliza's team "The Champagne Room All-Stars," featuring the likes of Jesse, Al, Wade (former fnuker), and Pete. Eliza and Ryan were out of town which probably took any betting on the game off the table - definitely took their women's game down a notch and gave them one fewer big guy to whom to huck.
Not that it influenced their gameplan at all - I think Wade must have sent it deep 90% of the time he touched the disc. And 75% of those were to Jesse. Once we got it in our heads to prevent Jesse from going deep, they were at a bit of a loss for offense.
They played some zone against us - normally I try to make an agreement with the other team's captain ahead of time that we not play zone in the first game of the season, but I forgot to mention it to Kevin, and they came down Z on the very first point. Kevin thought they were overmatched personnel-wise and that it was their best chance to compete, so I didn't mind, though it did force us to teach everyone zone on the fly. We ended up just absolutely shredding it, so they gave up on it eventually.
Beck played well - got the disc a few times in the zone, almost got a D by running past her girl at one point, made a nice bid on an errant throw and generally didn't let her girl get open or turn over the disc. Not bad at all for a first time out! I'm still worried that she has fun and that we do a good job of explaining offenses / defenses and the like; these hat leagues can be pretty chaotic and not fun if you can't tell what's going on. But Beck's doing an excellent job, and we have a ton of nice teammates who are all making an effort to help her out. Good deal.
We played pretty fantastic as a team for the first time out - tons of hard running on defense, and we were (for the most part) patient on offense and didn't make the ridiculous turns one normally associates with the first time a team gets together. There were a couple of overly ambitious throws in the mix, but they were few and far between. Learned a about some of our players - Rich is an older guy who I already knew (just didn't know his full name) who is very solid; Viral is a super-steal late in the draft: can play mid, handler, and had a big sky for a score; llyson is a wicked athletic player who is picking up the game; Kelly is a very enthusiastic player who made a sick catch and played great D all night. Two folks were missing - Salina and Greg - but all of our unknowns have thus far turned out great (AND our injury risks, Nat and Miller, looked A-OK).
I had a couple of bad plays in the game - one on a huck to one of their tall dudes; I read it way too late and just couldn't get around him to make a play on it. The other was EPICALLY BAD - I cut deep for Craig, he didn't throw it, so I started to head back in, but then Craig put up a big backhand - my guy was in perfect position to D it, so I gave up almost right away, but then my defender didn't move - seemed he didn't see the disc go up at all. So I coasted back, the disc floated in and as I reached to grab it, it nailed me right in the tip of my probably broken finger. Ouch, and I bobbled it, then tried to grab it with my off hand, missed it, then tried to grab it again and ended up swatting it out the back of the endzone. Just a terrible, terrible drop - there was a confluence of give-me-an-excuse factors - bad lighting, weird throw, thought my defender was just going to catch it, these odd broken-ish fingers in both of my hands - but it really was just a horrendous, embarrassing drop, something that I don't do very often on hard-to-catch discs, let alone floaty hucks. On the plus side, the thunderstorm of heckles included things like "He's human!," so I must be doing some other things right.
Yeah, accentuate the positive: I killed their Z, and threw a ton of scores - hammer to G, flick huck to G, scoober to Viral, flick to Paul, hammer to Rich, hammer to Jack, hammer to Miller, hammer to jeremy, and a s-i-i-i-ck inside out, perfect float in front of him forehand huck to Tom. Dropped that one goal, but caught another off a Ded throw by Genevieve, and I Ded a huck somewhere in there, too. Sorry to report all of this, but in light of that terrible play, I have to remind myself that I did anchor our team's offense a little bit. I'm not worthless... on another perhaps interesting side out, I did not even come close to laying out in this game, largely because 1, our team didn't put up any bad throws to me, and 2, I defended my guys well enough that throws did not go to them. So yay for that.
Great game ZORRO. Lotsa speed on this team - we don't have any shutdown stand-out stalwarts like Justin (even though Jack is a total stud and SUCH a great guy to have on our team), but everyone on the field at any time is solid and dependable. Our 5th-8th picks on the guys side - Paul, Craig, Jeremy, Viral - are all STEALS, and it's just silly that people let us get away with that. Of course, this is after one game, so I suppose we'll see. Stay tuned.
Not that it influenced their gameplan at all - I think Wade must have sent it deep 90% of the time he touched the disc. And 75% of those were to Jesse. Once we got it in our heads to prevent Jesse from going deep, they were at a bit of a loss for offense.
They played some zone against us - normally I try to make an agreement with the other team's captain ahead of time that we not play zone in the first game of the season, but I forgot to mention it to Kevin, and they came down Z on the very first point. Kevin thought they were overmatched personnel-wise and that it was their best chance to compete, so I didn't mind, though it did force us to teach everyone zone on the fly. We ended up just absolutely shredding it, so they gave up on it eventually.
Beck played well - got the disc a few times in the zone, almost got a D by running past her girl at one point, made a nice bid on an errant throw and generally didn't let her girl get open or turn over the disc. Not bad at all for a first time out! I'm still worried that she has fun and that we do a good job of explaining offenses / defenses and the like; these hat leagues can be pretty chaotic and not fun if you can't tell what's going on. But Beck's doing an excellent job, and we have a ton of nice teammates who are all making an effort to help her out. Good deal.
We played pretty fantastic as a team for the first time out - tons of hard running on defense, and we were (for the most part) patient on offense and didn't make the ridiculous turns one normally associates with the first time a team gets together. There were a couple of overly ambitious throws in the mix, but they were few and far between. Learned a about some of our players - Rich is an older guy who I already knew (just didn't know his full name) who is very solid; Viral is a super-steal late in the draft: can play mid, handler, and had a big sky for a score; llyson is a wicked athletic player who is picking up the game; Kelly is a very enthusiastic player who made a sick catch and played great D all night. Two folks were missing - Salina and Greg - but all of our unknowns have thus far turned out great (AND our injury risks, Nat and Miller, looked A-OK).
I had a couple of bad plays in the game - one on a huck to one of their tall dudes; I read it way too late and just couldn't get around him to make a play on it. The other was EPICALLY BAD - I cut deep for Craig, he didn't throw it, so I started to head back in, but then Craig put up a big backhand - my guy was in perfect position to D it, so I gave up almost right away, but then my defender didn't move - seemed he didn't see the disc go up at all. So I coasted back, the disc floated in and as I reached to grab it, it nailed me right in the tip of my probably broken finger. Ouch, and I bobbled it, then tried to grab it with my off hand, missed it, then tried to grab it again and ended up swatting it out the back of the endzone. Just a terrible, terrible drop - there was a confluence of give-me-an-excuse factors - bad lighting, weird throw, thought my defender was just going to catch it, these odd broken-ish fingers in both of my hands - but it really was just a horrendous, embarrassing drop, something that I don't do very often on hard-to-catch discs, let alone floaty hucks. On the plus side, the thunderstorm of heckles included things like "He's human!," so I must be doing some other things right.
Yeah, accentuate the positive: I killed their Z, and threw a ton of scores - hammer to G, flick huck to G, scoober to Viral, flick to Paul, hammer to Rich, hammer to Jack, hammer to Miller, hammer to jeremy, and a s-i-i-i-ck inside out, perfect float in front of him forehand huck to Tom. Dropped that one goal, but caught another off a Ded throw by Genevieve, and I Ded a huck somewhere in there, too. Sorry to report all of this, but in light of that terrible play, I have to remind myself that I did anchor our team's offense a little bit. I'm not worthless... on another perhaps interesting side out, I did not even come close to laying out in this game, largely because 1, our team didn't put up any bad throws to me, and 2, I defended my guys well enough that throws did not go to them. So yay for that.
Great game ZORRO. Lotsa speed on this team - we don't have any shutdown stand-out stalwarts like Justin (even though Jack is a total stud and SUCH a great guy to have on our team), but everyone on the field at any time is solid and dependable. Our 5th-8th picks on the guys side - Paul, Craig, Jeremy, Viral - are all STEALS, and it's just silly that people let us get away with that. Of course, this is after one game, so I suppose we'll see. Stay tuned.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Follow-up on the Quartet for the End of Time
For more info on this photo click here.
A local reader gave the Clarion Content's editorial staff some brilliant further insight into the performance we saw at Duke University the other night, "Akoka" and Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time." We noted in our review and reaction that the musical performance was accompanied by fascinating and evocative lighting changes that are rare for a classical music concert.
Our friend Lindsay P. says this was quite appropriate because composer Olivier Messiaen experienced synesthesia. Synthesia is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Perceiving music as color is one manifestation of such a phenomenon. To quote her at length,
"Another figure central to the early documentation of clinical synesthesia employed in the compositional process is Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992). A French composer, [and] organist... Reportedly, Messiaen experienced chordial color associations with written musical notation as well as auditory stimuli, and although his color-photisms seemed to manifest as inward, mental projections (rather than the external visuals described by many synesthetes), he was fully aware of the function of these mental colors as integral to his relationship with music. A number of his own writings as well as interviews describe the means by which chordial color affected his experience with music: “…when I hear a score or read it, hearing it in my mind, I see also in my mind’s eye corresponding colors which turn, mix and blend with each other just like the sounds which turn, mix and intermingle, and at the same time as them…” In a set of interviews published in 1967, Claude Samuel asked Olivier Messiaen if, as a result of this ‘synopsia’, he tries to translate colors into his music. Messiaen responds, “Actually I try to translate colors into music: for me certain complexes of sound and certain sonorities are linked to complexes of color, and I use them in full knowledge of this.” When asked if Messiaen has ever composed a work inspired by the contemplation of a painting, Messiaen answers, “No, never” and explains that when composing, rather than imitating a painting he essentially becomes the painter: “I use [musical sonorities] as colors, juxtaposing them and putting them in relief against each other, as a painter underlines one color with its complementary.”
How's about that for background? It fits perfectly with the execution of the show we watched at Duke's Page Auditorium. The colors were part of the becoming of the music, a fusion that heightened the mood, the tension, the despair. Studies report that there are parallels between the way synesthetes and non-synesthetes perceive color.
Thanks for the knowledge Lindsay!
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Facebook owns you forever
The Clarion Content has long been suspicious of Facebook and other social networking services. Obviously, they have a profit motive to track information about their users. Facebook's Beacon was the most blatant attempt to cash on this data we have seen to date. They caught hell about it and revised their policy slightly, but continued to collect data in the same manner. They seem more impervious to criticism about their methods than most other social networks. A reported 175 million users will make a company cocky.
This month they revised their Terms of Service User Agreement to give themselves the right to data about their users and their content in perpetuity. According to the New York Times, Facebook changed its service agreement thusly, "it deleted a provision that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. Further, it added new language that said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses after an account was terminated." They quoted the blog The Consumerist describing the new terms as meaning, "anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later."
Wow. Sounds a little invasive and Orwellian. Facebooks's CEO has indicated the language will not be changed.
From the Facebook Terms of Service User Agreement, which hopefully you read in full before signing up...
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Long Overdue Reviews, Part I
Wow, have I ever fallen off my review train. Here are books (some of them school-related, sorry) and films from the past several months...
BOOKS
Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution: Taking Development Seriously by your friend and mine, JSRobert: NR
This is Jason's first book and an effort at pointing out the limitations of strict DNA->RNA->Proteins thinking. It's concise and very clear, and if you want an inkling of some of the stuff that philosophers of biology do, this is a great place to see it in action.
Drop City by T.C. Boyle: 60
A novel on commune living during the era when the hippy aesthetic was beginning to fade - covers a commune group as they have to pull up roots and move to Alaska where they find convening with nature none too, er, convenient. Good stuff, but there were some fairly one-dimensional / stereotypical characters and some rather stereotypical treatment of "the life."
Leviathan & The Air Pump by Shapin and Schaffer: NR
Another book for school, it's an undeniable classic and an example of a scholarly approach to answering questions of social construction in science. It covers the sort of methodological conflict between Hobbes and Boyle and reveals just how much of a political struggle th eintial conceptions of scientific knowledge were. Recommended, though there are some insanely detailed passages on the construction of Boyle's air pumps that probably don't require close reading.
The Social Construction of What by Ian Hacking: NR
Probably my favorite book from the fall semester; it's a great account of what social construction means and gives a slew of examples of the varieties of claims that certain social practices are "socially constructed." It's a great take, especially if you find the post-structuralist theories of social construction to be nonsensical - Hacking really hones in on what is meant by such phrases and when it is useful to consider social construction and when it is just flaptrap.
Sociobiology by E.O. Wilson: NR
Coffee table book from the mid 1970s about biological study of animal (including, controversially, man) behavior. This got the whole ball rolling, and while I agree that Wilson just flat out didn't claim a lot of the things he was accused of claiming, it seems ridiculous that one, he couldn't anticipate the critique, and 2, that he makes some of the sweeping statements he does in the absence of obvious evidence. This book is undoubtedly the grandfather of experiences like the one i had in class last Wednesday, so BLECH, but the work on animal behavior is top notch. Just don't mess with my Camus next time, eh?
Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate by Ullica Segerstrale: NR
And this book chronicles, quite excellently, the debate surrounding Sociobiology. I used this as a starting point for my paper and highly enjoyed it; revealed how much of the conflict is rooted in alternate approaches to scientific inquiry rather than social beliefs.
Politics in the Laboratory: The Constitution of Human Genomics by Ira Carmen: NR
Horrifically dry book with some dubious ethical stances with regards to the purposes of understanding the human genome. Its thesis was also seriously buried, and as much as I like my obscurantist fiction, I'm not such a fan in Poli Sci books. Not recommended.
New York Trilogy by Paul Auster: 90
Post-modern detective noir, and superbly executed (for whatever that means. Sometimes I get the feeling I am coming up with long paragraph translations of the sentence "I liked it."). I remember feeling like I was reading pulp stories that just spun outside of themselves constantly -Auster the text just nails the detective genre and intertwines three fleeting-locus-of-self stories excellently. I wish I had reviewed it in full at the time, but this was terrifyingly enjoyable; highly recommended.
Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences by Bowker and Starr: NR
Reasonably interesting book on the social aspects of taxonomy in various disciplines, focusing largely on the international designations of disease. I remember finding it UTTERLY WACK that they used Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain as a reference for the experience of tuberculosis. You know, it being fiction and all. I also remember a rather dense and the word of the day is obscurantist final chapter. Ah, well.
Why Men Won't Ask for Directions: The Seduction of Sociobiology by Richard Francis: NR
A book-length critique of EP that Jason, Maggie and I are reviewing. Skewers some of EPs more ridiculous claims and points out a slew of animal behaviors where EP-like thinking would lead you astray. So, um, don't bring it up in mixed, jackass company.
All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850-1950 by Robert Kohler: NR
I had to give a talk on this, and so ended up reading it twice. Amazingly, I did not smash my head in with a miniature diorama twice, ugh. A whole lot of anecdotal accounts and quasi-historical explanations for trends. As I recall, it didn't really discuss all creatures, naturalists, collectors or biodiversity, and it stopped in 1930. Not recommended.
The Meaning of Fossils by Rudwick: NR
Historical account of paleontology which was more interesting than you might think.
Biology Under the Influence by Levins and Lewontin: NR
Another book that Jason and I are reviewing; it's a couple of notorious Marxists who carry a strong torch of social equality in the approach to science and think that biology should be treated as a dialectical enterprise. Enjoyable, but it's a collection of previous essays that was not heavily edited and as a consequence repeats some ideas. Still, some valid points are made in between the rhetorical chants.
The Challenger Launch Decision by Diane Vaughan: NR
A vastly more detailed than your average ABC News Special take on the procedures that led up to the Challenger disaster. I presented on this as well. Some of the presentation aspects were cool, and it is definitely more interesting to note the level of detail that the American public is routinely not exposed to. I am not sure if I buy some of her arguments, but it's a fairly landmark text that put the author in a position of great influence - she ended up sitting on the committee that investigated the next shuttle disaster. Interesting read, if you can stomach 400 pages of analysis of a tragedy.
Alright, that's it for this sitting. A few more books and some movies in the near future. Until then...
BOOKS
Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution: Taking Development Seriously by your friend and mine, JSRobert: NR
This is Jason's first book and an effort at pointing out the limitations of strict DNA->RNA->Proteins thinking. It's concise and very clear, and if you want an inkling of some of the stuff that philosophers of biology do, this is a great place to see it in action.
Drop City by T.C. Boyle: 60
A novel on commune living during the era when the hippy aesthetic was beginning to fade - covers a commune group as they have to pull up roots and move to Alaska where they find convening with nature none too, er, convenient. Good stuff, but there were some fairly one-dimensional / stereotypical characters and some rather stereotypical treatment of "the life."
Leviathan & The Air Pump by Shapin and Schaffer: NR
Another book for school, it's an undeniable classic and an example of a scholarly approach to answering questions of social construction in science. It covers the sort of methodological conflict between Hobbes and Boyle and reveals just how much of a political struggle th eintial conceptions of scientific knowledge were. Recommended, though there are some insanely detailed passages on the construction of Boyle's air pumps that probably don't require close reading.
The Social Construction of What by Ian Hacking: NR
Probably my favorite book from the fall semester; it's a great account of what social construction means and gives a slew of examples of the varieties of claims that certain social practices are "socially constructed." It's a great take, especially if you find the post-structuralist theories of social construction to be nonsensical - Hacking really hones in on what is meant by such phrases and when it is useful to consider social construction and when it is just flaptrap.
Sociobiology by E.O. Wilson: NR
Coffee table book from the mid 1970s about biological study of animal (including, controversially, man) behavior. This got the whole ball rolling, and while I agree that Wilson just flat out didn't claim a lot of the things he was accused of claiming, it seems ridiculous that one, he couldn't anticipate the critique, and 2, that he makes some of the sweeping statements he does in the absence of obvious evidence. This book is undoubtedly the grandfather of experiences like the one i had in class last Wednesday, so BLECH, but the work on animal behavior is top notch. Just don't mess with my Camus next time, eh?
Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate by Ullica Segerstrale: NR
And this book chronicles, quite excellently, the debate surrounding Sociobiology. I used this as a starting point for my paper and highly enjoyed it; revealed how much of the conflict is rooted in alternate approaches to scientific inquiry rather than social beliefs.
Politics in the Laboratory: The Constitution of Human Genomics by Ira Carmen: NR
Horrifically dry book with some dubious ethical stances with regards to the purposes of understanding the human genome. Its thesis was also seriously buried, and as much as I like my obscurantist fiction, I'm not such a fan in Poli Sci books. Not recommended.
New York Trilogy by Paul Auster: 90
Post-modern detective noir, and superbly executed (for whatever that means. Sometimes I get the feeling I am coming up with long paragraph translations of the sentence "I liked it."). I remember feeling like I was reading pulp stories that just spun outside of themselves constantly -
Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences by Bowker and Starr: NR
Reasonably interesting book on the social aspects of taxonomy in various disciplines, focusing largely on the international designations of disease. I remember finding it UTTERLY WACK that they used Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain as a reference for the experience of tuberculosis. You know, it being fiction and all. I also remember a rather dense and the word of the day is obscurantist final chapter. Ah, well.
Why Men Won't Ask for Directions: The Seduction of Sociobiology by Richard Francis: NR
A book-length critique of EP that Jason, Maggie and I are reviewing. Skewers some of EPs more ridiculous claims and points out a slew of animal behaviors where EP-like thinking would lead you astray. So, um, don't bring it up in mixed, jackass company.
All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850-1950 by Robert Kohler: NR
I had to give a talk on this, and so ended up reading it twice. Amazingly, I did not smash my head in with a miniature diorama twice, ugh. A whole lot of anecdotal accounts and quasi-historical explanations for trends. As I recall, it didn't really discuss all creatures, naturalists, collectors or biodiversity, and it stopped in 1930. Not recommended.
The Meaning of Fossils by Rudwick: NR
Historical account of paleontology which was more interesting than you might think.
Biology Under the Influence by Levins and Lewontin: NR
Another book that Jason and I are reviewing; it's a couple of notorious Marxists who carry a strong torch of social equality in the approach to science and think that biology should be treated as a dialectical enterprise. Enjoyable, but it's a collection of previous essays that was not heavily edited and as a consequence repeats some ideas. Still, some valid points are made in between the rhetorical chants.
The Challenger Launch Decision by Diane Vaughan: NR
A vastly more detailed than your average ABC News Special take on the procedures that led up to the Challenger disaster. I presented on this as well. Some of the presentation aspects were cool, and it is definitely more interesting to note the level of detail that the American public is routinely not exposed to. I am not sure if I buy some of her arguments, but it's a fairly landmark text that put the author in a position of great influence - she ended up sitting on the committee that investigated the next shuttle disaster. Interesting read, if you can stomach 400 pages of analysis of a tragedy.
Alright, that's it for this sitting. A few more books and some movies in the near future. Until then...
Cold, Dead Hands, or A POST OF THE MUNDANE
For the second time in a week, I can't stop thinking about something. Last week it was that painful class (thanks for the messages of support); it kept me up late and my hard drive of a brain just spun and spun as I tried to figure out what had gone wrong and what else I could've done to prevent such a nasty experience. This time, I've lost my knitted fuzzy orange fingerless gloves that Beck made for me, and I CAN'T STOP RETRACING MY STEPS. ARGH!!!
Beck assures me that it's okay and she can knit me a new pair, but I really, really liked those gloves as they remind me of her and cold Grafton days and guitar and typing and hot coffee (hot for me anyways) and they are awesome bright orange to the point that some of my co-students (?) suggested that perhaps they had been stolen and used as highway flares. HA HA. I've been taking special care to always leave them in the same place - in my fleece pockets - and it just drives me nuts that they've vanished.
The clues - I definitely moved them from my brown fleece jacket to my orange one on Friday as I figured I would need them to drive home after the softball game. (Huh? you ask. I wear the green fleece to sporting events as it is older). I had both gloves in my right jacket pocket, and I guess they could have BOTH fallen out in the dugout? So maybe they're in Scottsdale or with a softball teammate, but I've e-mailed the team to no avail.
I went to Mama Java's the other day and definitely thought about taking them with me, but I don't think I ever actually picked them up and put them in my green hoodie pocket. I checked said pocket and called Mama Java's, again no dice.
Sunday, I wore my fleece to both Ultimate pickup and our stupid E-league softball game (stupid only in that it was gratuitously low level softball and if I lost my gloves for it, I'll be upset). We started on one field at frisbee and moved to another, plus we had Beck's and my stuff and we switched over to softball. So they could be somewhere at Rhodes, again if they BOTH fell out, which seems unlikely. I posted to the VOTS board to no response. Beck and I then went to the softball game, where I ran back to the car to get her wallet; I guess they could have fallen out sometime in there. So maybe they're on a street near Kiwanis park, or maybe they fell out in the dugout - again, e-mailed the softball team with no luck.
I dropped Beck off at home and went to the grocery store, where I don't think i put them on... I checked the grocery store lost and found today, NADA.
So I'm still holding out for discovering them somewhere around my now torn apart abode, but sadly I think they've probably just vanished into the ether. I am digging through my dresser, my Ultimate bag, my orange fleece for the fifteenth time, thinking that my sad gloves have now blown apart somewhere in Phoenix and are resting alone, covered with 'Zonan dust. Dammit.
Beck assures me that it's okay and she can knit me a new pair, but I really, really liked those gloves as they remind me of her and cold Grafton days and guitar and typing and hot coffee (hot for me anyways) and they are awesome bright orange to the point that some of my co-students (?) suggested that perhaps they had been stolen and used as highway flares. HA HA. I've been taking special care to always leave them in the same place - in my fleece pockets - and it just drives me nuts that they've vanished.
The clues - I definitely moved them from my brown fleece jacket to my orange one on Friday as I figured I would need them to drive home after the softball game. (Huh? you ask. I wear the green fleece to sporting events as it is older). I had both gloves in my right jacket pocket, and I guess they could have BOTH fallen out in the dugout? So maybe they're in Scottsdale or with a softball teammate, but I've e-mailed the team to no avail.
I went to Mama Java's the other day and definitely thought about taking them with me, but I don't think I ever actually picked them up and put them in my green hoodie pocket. I checked said pocket and called Mama Java's, again no dice.
Sunday, I wore my fleece to both Ultimate pickup and our stupid E-league softball game (stupid only in that it was gratuitously low level softball and if I lost my gloves for it, I'll be upset). We started on one field at frisbee and moved to another, plus we had Beck's and my stuff and we switched over to softball. So they could be somewhere at Rhodes, again if they BOTH fell out, which seems unlikely. I posted to the VOTS board to no response. Beck and I then went to the softball game, where I ran back to the car to get her wallet; I guess they could have fallen out sometime in there. So maybe they're on a street near Kiwanis park, or maybe they fell out in the dugout - again, e-mailed the softball team with no luck.
I dropped Beck off at home and went to the grocery store, where I don't think i put them on... I checked the grocery store lost and found today, NADA.
So I'm still holding out for discovering them somewhere around my now torn apart abode, but sadly I think they've probably just vanished into the ether. I am digging through my dresser, my Ultimate bag, my orange fleece for the fifteenth time, thinking that my sad gloves have now blown apart somewhere in Phoenix and are resting alone, covered with 'Zonan dust. Dammit.
The Times
They Are a-Changin':
New Simpsons intro for HDTV. I've been noticing that shows are filming in HD and not caring how awkward the shots look for those of us with the ol' 4:3 - cut off foreheads, uncomfortable zooms, half bodies, the whole deal. While the super sharp clarity of the new medium is dazzling, it's really the wider shot that's starkly altering the form. I suppose we'll have to cave and go for the new deal sometime in the next year or so, if for no other reason so that we can see both participants in TV conversations. Ugh...
New Simpsons intro for HDTV. I've been noticing that shows are filming in HD and not caring how awkward the shots look for those of us with the ol' 4:3 - cut off foreheads, uncomfortable zooms, half bodies, the whole deal. While the super sharp clarity of the new medium is dazzling, it's really the wider shot that's starkly altering the form. I suppose we'll have to cave and go for the new deal sometime in the next year or so, if for no other reason so that we can see both participants in TV conversations. Ugh...
Sunday, February 15, 2009
A put on?
Was Joaquin Phoenix being facetious about his budding rap career the other night on David Letterman? Andy Kaufman was a wrestler, anybody? Phoenix, who has a troubled family history, sounded sincere. He was wearing both sunglasses and a thick beard which made his expression very difficult to determine. Letterman, as always, played the willing foil to his guests mania.
Phoenix's appearance was re-cut together by Letterman and World Wide Pants to make it look especially loopy. (It ends with we owe an apology to Farrah Fawcett, what a reference.)
Check it out here.
Read People Magazines take here.
Commentary de Beck...
"You know, Charisma Carpenter is 45 years old, so she's probably all wrinkly underneath that make-up."
"Um, she's 38, according to IMDB."
"Whatever, she's way too be old to be in high school."
Duly noted.
We have a big Sunday - Beck's headed off to brunch with some Cooking Light-heads (apparently it's no boys allowed - actually, I think this is the female equivalent of G.R.O.S.S.), then it's pickup frisbee followed by CSPO team E-league softball for the two of us. Our efforts at being more active and social in 2009 are holding steady. Wish us luck!
Saturday, February 14, 2009
II, 2-4
The last three weeks of school - aside from the aforementioned stupidity of that one Evo Psych episode of my Cultural Psychology class - have gone quite well. I'll try to be better about keeping up with the updates, but here's a little class by class take:
Hist and Phil of Sci Seminar - good stuff. We covered Brad's article on stake-dependent belief systems (within rational choice theory). This is, loosely, the question of whether our degrees of belief change as the stakes of holding a belief change. It turns out to be exceedingly hard to tease out, as a degree of belief and a willingness to act on said belief are nearly indistinguishable. Talked quite a bit about Dutch Books; cool stuff. We also read the intro chapter to Michael Ruse's Evolution: The First Four Billion Years, a widely distributed sort of desk reference for biology teachers. Most of our discussion focused on the difficulties of compiling and targeting such works. And last week we talked about two papers, one by Jane and one by Matt, on biology as an engineering tool and the recent "monstering" history of the so-called invasive plant species tamarask.
Phil of Science - also quite the excellent course. We continued to talk about explanation, focusing on Hempel's model that I mentioned here earlier, and Salmon's effort at statistical explanation. We next covered Kitcher(sp?)'s attempt to formulate a way to choose between explanatory systems (it was essentially an attempt to limit it to the explanatory system with the fewest premises and most consistent argument forms while maintaining a stringent requirement for the types of allowable arguments. Covered some of Carnap's explanation of the symmetry of explanation and prediction, and more recently read about Popper's purported solution to the problem of induction and Nancy Cartwright's (not the voice of Bart) differentiation of theoretical explanation and causal explanation. Whew. Heady stuff, and we're blowing through it really fast, but it's been great so far. Andrew and Rick are doing a great job.
Cultural Pscyh - I've already given this course more bytes than its worth, but other than the travesty of the last class, we've read about how to define culture, how excessively studying college sophomores may have biased psych findings for the last umpteen years, different parameters by which to characterize a given culture, how disease prevalence and personality types may be correlated, and how job parameters can affect cognition. I enjoy this class on an anthropological basis and on the basis of repeatedly trying to figure out how otherwise intelligent people could justify obvious categorical conflations and general ill-assumptions, but I 1, had a terrible time in the most recent class, 2, find the seminar to be like trying to sit in on a clique (the professor has a harem of underlings who all bat eyelashes at his every word), and 3, find the rest of the people in the class to be either afraid of speaking or ill-equipped to do the reading and have original comments to make. Wow, I am captain positive attitude - really, I just get sick of the lack of rigor and lack of introspection that I mentioned earlier - it's like it hasn't even occurred to people that chronic conditions are not necessarily just the addition of acute ones. Bah - I hope this picks up, or gives me more insight than that psychology lacks the rigor of other sciences / philosophy, because I kinda already knew that - I suppose it is interesting to see what counts as empirical evidence and how theoretical connections are made in various disciplines, so I will try to improve my attitude for the coming weeks.
Miscellaneous - Helped Jason finish a grant a couple of weeks ago that hopefully will get some much-needed cash. The omnipresent topic at ASU these days is the budget cuts that are happening across the state - public education is taking a giant hit, and some the impacts have included collapsed departments, eliminated programs of study and mandatory furloughs for all university employees. For a professor, a furlough is tantamount to a pay cut, since it's not like they can say, "Oh, it's Tuesday? I suppose I will not write, do research or prepare lectures as today is a furlough day." So there's a lot of negative energy about.
Darwinfest has been raging lately - sorta a half celebration of his birthday / publication of Origins, half anti-creationist/ID campaign. Lotsa stuff going on campus - lectures, films, a Darwin look-alike contest, adopting beagles, you name it. Michael Ruse gave an entertaining lecture on the history of Darwin about a week ago, and Randy Olson came to campus and screened his films Flight of the Dodos (about evolution) and Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy. SO fun times, and things have been busy.
I had two entertaining interactions with the aforementioned professors. Michael Ruse attended a Bioethics club meeting and shilled for his new book on the interface of science and religion. He is, um, an interesting guy - I don't think it's unfair to characterize him as an egotistical dude who could give a crap what you think of him (who also slips in a too frequent to be accidental stream of sexism taboot). So the meeting was charged, to say the least, but mainly I just couldn't believe what the other club people were saying. Scratch that, in order to not believe it I would have had to understood it - I have never heard more rambling, bizarre comments in my life. I at one point turned to Johnny and asked him if I had had a stroke, because it certainly seemed like my Werneicke's area was shot. Just babbled nonsense, weird assertions, incoherent, poorly thought out arguments and sentences - a total nightmare. Add on top of this the wackiness of Ruse, and you've got twilight-zoney times. A sample quote, and I'm pretty sure this is verbatim:
"That really reminds me of when the lioness doesn't eat the antelope because she's already ate - and that kinda leads directly to Newton's theory of gravity."
Eh? Exactly. Maybe I was tired and / or someone had put LSD in my coffee, but that was easily the weirdest two hours I've spent at ASU - between Ruse's crotchety old man sexist antics and the babble coming from the undergrads, I had a borderline spiritual experience.
The Olson experience was much more exciting - we talked a bit about my paper on science communication and the power of mainstream pop media to frame how people think of science. I shared my thoughts on people building science-knowledge basis on shows like ER and Eli Stone, and he agreed that I was onto something with the weird media regard for realism. Cool guy, and nice of him to take a few minutes to talk to me - I don't know if I entirely agree with his grass roots "we need to sexify science" line that he delivered at his lecture, but I was glad to get to chat with him a bit. (For the record, his movies were lauded by media like Variety and lambasted by Nature and Science - he, too, seems to be sacrificing some rigor to sell his product).
That's probably enough for one post - I haven't been doing near as much of my own research as I would like, so I need to jump on that horse sooner rather than later. In the meantime, hope everyone is having a good time and that the recession dies before I have to go job-hunting, because man are there some miserable-seeming profs about these days.
Hist and Phil of Sci Seminar - good stuff. We covered Brad's article on stake-dependent belief systems (within rational choice theory). This is, loosely, the question of whether our degrees of belief change as the stakes of holding a belief change. It turns out to be exceedingly hard to tease out, as a degree of belief and a willingness to act on said belief are nearly indistinguishable. Talked quite a bit about Dutch Books; cool stuff. We also read the intro chapter to Michael Ruse's Evolution: The First Four Billion Years, a widely distributed sort of desk reference for biology teachers. Most of our discussion focused on the difficulties of compiling and targeting such works. And last week we talked about two papers, one by Jane and one by Matt, on biology as an engineering tool and the recent "monstering" history of the so-called invasive plant species tamarask.
Phil of Science - also quite the excellent course. We continued to talk about explanation, focusing on Hempel's model that I mentioned here earlier, and Salmon's effort at statistical explanation. We next covered Kitcher(sp?)'s attempt to formulate a way to choose between explanatory systems (it was essentially an attempt to limit it to the explanatory system with the fewest premises and most consistent argument forms while maintaining a stringent requirement for the types of allowable arguments. Covered some of Carnap's explanation of the symmetry of explanation and prediction, and more recently read about Popper's purported solution to the problem of induction and Nancy Cartwright's (not the voice of Bart) differentiation of theoretical explanation and causal explanation. Whew. Heady stuff, and we're blowing through it really fast, but it's been great so far. Andrew and Rick are doing a great job.
Cultural Pscyh - I've already given this course more bytes than its worth, but other than the travesty of the last class, we've read about how to define culture, how excessively studying college sophomores may have biased psych findings for the last umpteen years, different parameters by which to characterize a given culture, how disease prevalence and personality types may be correlated, and how job parameters can affect cognition. I enjoy this class on an anthropological basis and on the basis of repeatedly trying to figure out how otherwise intelligent people could justify obvious categorical conflations and general ill-assumptions, but I 1, had a terrible time in the most recent class, 2, find the seminar to be like trying to sit in on a clique (the professor has a harem of underlings who all bat eyelashes at his every word), and 3, find the rest of the people in the class to be either afraid of speaking or ill-equipped to do the reading and have original comments to make. Wow, I am captain positive attitude - really, I just get sick of the lack of rigor and lack of introspection that I mentioned earlier - it's like it hasn't even occurred to people that chronic conditions are not necessarily just the addition of acute ones. Bah - I hope this picks up, or gives me more insight than that psychology lacks the rigor of other sciences / philosophy, because I kinda already knew that - I suppose it is interesting to see what counts as empirical evidence and how theoretical connections are made in various disciplines, so I will try to improve my attitude for the coming weeks.
Miscellaneous - Helped Jason finish a grant a couple of weeks ago that hopefully will get some much-needed cash. The omnipresent topic at ASU these days is the budget cuts that are happening across the state - public education is taking a giant hit, and some the impacts have included collapsed departments, eliminated programs of study and mandatory furloughs for all university employees. For a professor, a furlough is tantamount to a pay cut, since it's not like they can say, "Oh, it's Tuesday? I suppose I will not write, do research or prepare lectures as today is a furlough day." So there's a lot of negative energy about.
Darwinfest has been raging lately - sorta a half celebration of his birthday / publication of Origins, half anti-creationist/ID campaign. Lotsa stuff going on campus - lectures, films, a Darwin look-alike contest, adopting beagles, you name it. Michael Ruse gave an entertaining lecture on the history of Darwin about a week ago, and Randy Olson came to campus and screened his films Flight of the Dodos (about evolution) and Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy. SO fun times, and things have been busy.
I had two entertaining interactions with the aforementioned professors. Michael Ruse attended a Bioethics club meeting and shilled for his new book on the interface of science and religion. He is, um, an interesting guy - I don't think it's unfair to characterize him as an egotistical dude who could give a crap what you think of him (who also slips in a too frequent to be accidental stream of sexism taboot). So the meeting was charged, to say the least, but mainly I just couldn't believe what the other club people were saying. Scratch that, in order to not believe it I would have had to understood it - I have never heard more rambling, bizarre comments in my life. I at one point turned to Johnny and asked him if I had had a stroke, because it certainly seemed like my Werneicke's area was shot. Just babbled nonsense, weird assertions, incoherent, poorly thought out arguments and sentences - a total nightmare. Add on top of this the wackiness of Ruse, and you've got twilight-zoney times. A sample quote, and I'm pretty sure this is verbatim:
"That really reminds me of when the lioness doesn't eat the antelope because she's already ate - and that kinda leads directly to Newton's theory of gravity."
Eh? Exactly. Maybe I was tired and / or someone had put LSD in my coffee, but that was easily the weirdest two hours I've spent at ASU - between Ruse's crotchety old man sexist antics and the babble coming from the undergrads, I had a borderline spiritual experience.
The Olson experience was much more exciting - we talked a bit about my paper on science communication and the power of mainstream pop media to frame how people think of science. I shared my thoughts on people building science-knowledge basis on shows like ER and Eli Stone, and he agreed that I was onto something with the weird media regard for realism. Cool guy, and nice of him to take a few minutes to talk to me - I don't know if I entirely agree with his grass roots "we need to sexify science" line that he delivered at his lecture, but I was glad to get to chat with him a bit. (For the record, his movies were lauded by media like Variety and lambasted by Nature and Science - he, too, seems to be sacrificing some rigor to sell his product).
That's probably enough for one post - I haven't been doing near as much of my own research as I would like, so I need to jump on that horse sooner rather than later. In the meantime, hope everyone is having a good time and that the recession dies before I have to go job-hunting, because man are there some miserable-seeming profs about these days.
Five by Five! Again!
Very happy to see another Joss Whedon show on the air, and even happier to have it star not one but two of my favorite Buffyverse feministas, Faith aka Eliza Dushku AND Fred aka Amy Acker:
(And trust me, if you're thinking this is just an excuse to post pics of Buffy babes on the blog, know that these are two of the more modest entries in Internet-wide image searches for Eliza Dushku and Amy Acker. Plus, if the point were just to post pics of Buffy babes, then I'd HAVE to post Cordelia somewhere, too, right?)
The show seems pretty solid - my first impression was just gratitude at the actual effort put forth in the show to create character arcs off the bat and generate an interesting universe within which to operate. If you haven't heard or seen, the general premise is that there is a weird corporation (that looks suspiciously as though it purchased the building vacated by Wolfram & Hart) that has a slew of attractive though vaguely zombie-ish people walking around in yoga clothes. They are agents who have next to no personality, allowing them to be "programmed" with various personality traits in order to achieve missions - some of the missions are your run of the mill "rescue the kidnapped child" type thing, while others seem to be "give a guy a nice weekend." When the missions are completed, the agents go to get a "treatment" that zaps their memory clean. So clearly, there's a lot of moral ambiguity - how did this corporation get these
To don the philosopher hat for a while, interesting that a Joss Whedon show - normally such a locus of talks of souls and love and good and evil and the like - is operating on a materialist model of mind where personality, ability, memories, etc. are all reprogrammable by computer circuitry. Seemingly reducing the human condition to neural circuitry and electric potentials? Maybe? Unless, natch, that machine has some mystic soul component - or, better, if the fact that it is failing is a pointer toward the immaterial. We shall see.
I have read some criticism here and there that the premise - women who can be used for dates, whose memories can be conveniently erased so the next day they remember nothing - has a sort of nasty roofies-referencing undertone to it. Whedon has such a history of pro-feminist motifs that this seems to be a little bit of a paranoid charge, but the idea, once planted, is pretty sketchy seeming. Still, the initial mission in the pilot - where Echo certainly seemed to be serving as a tailor-made escort - gave the entire episode a weird vibe.
And beyond that, the pilot - which was reportedly reshot to provide more exposition - handed the goings on to the viewer on a platter in a much more overt manner than the typical Whedon vehicle. Lots of scenes where characters stopped and explained in speech exactly what they do and exactly the moral dilemmas involved - it wasn't quite an expository voice over, but it did have a little bit of LCD. AH, well - the second episode is supposed to be the original pilot and much better than the first. We'll see next week.
So I'm down with the show - it's got that energetic vibe and big setup that's given Joss his cult-god status - but I understand some of the complaints thus far. Interesting if they'll be able to flesh out the "erased memories" ideas without resorting to sci-fi silliness. And interesting to see if there will be anything approaching the interlocking chacter arcs of the other Mutant Enemy efforts, since so far Echo seems even more of an overwhelming center to the show than Buffy of Angel ever were. Give it time, I suppose.
Was there anything else I was supposed to include?
The Olé Defense
(Another warning - this is a LONG account of a terrible class I had the other day in the psychology department. Read at your peril).
I had one of the worst academic experiences of my short existence on Wednesday and have hesitated to write about it because I was so exceedingly angry. The basic background is this: we were reading a "classic text" by Tooby/Cosmides that essentially outlines the principles of Evolutionary Psychology. EP, briefly, is an attempt at understanding modern psychology in the light of evolutionary theory, notably presuming that the vast majority of our evolution took place while we were hunter gatherers and that a lot of our seemingly maladaptive behaviors are due to the residual effect sof this change in environs. The week before I had commented to the professor, "I am really interested to read this text, because most of what I have read has been critical of EP." Which is true; strict biologists are generally not fans of EP on methodological philosophical grounds; jason in particular has repeatedly written begging EPists to do more than pay lip service to developmental biology. The prof responded thusly:
"What do you mean? What criticisms could there be?"
I should have known that I was in trouble there, but I pressed on, "Well, it's not a categorical criticism; it's more of a concern that starting with ideas about psychological functionalism without knowledge of the underlying evolutionary / developmental biology can lead you to posit hypotheses that contradict known biological mechanisms." In other words, if you follow the MO of EP - that extant psychological mechanisms evolved under selective pressure in the Pleistocene Epoch (1.8 million years BO to 10,000 years BP) - you may propose evolutionary tracts or facts that just couldn't be true given what we already know about the underlying biology. So it's not so much an accusation of "your discipline is ludicrous;" it's a criticism that "your discipline, while probably generally correct in theory, would be well-served by paying close attention to the biological mechanisms we already know about." And that's it.
Of course, the prof took this as an attack and an accusation that "EP is wrong." And the week before, he already rather aggressively asked me to "bring in examples where what we've said is wrong." I tried to reiterate that this was not the point, but I went unheard.
So here's the thing - there are examples. EPists, which is a broad group of people who try to incorporate evolutionary theory into the development of human psychology / culture, have said some wildly stupid things. My favorite is the "upsuck hypothesis," that female orgasms evolved as a way for women to control which sperm enter their cervix to fertilize their eggs (Um, the idea that female orgasms, whose neural and anatomical causes bear a STRIKING resemblance to males', evolved independent of the male anatomy is highly unlikely). Or they comment on animal behavior - another great example is that female hyenas have come to develop male-looking external genitalia because it helps them to win conflicts with the males. Or that men are better than women at spatial reasoning because when we were hunter-gatherers this was a sexually-selected trait (which would, natch, require some rathe rimpressive "spatial reasoning genes" on the Y chromosome). Or that being gay is a sort of "alternative reproductive strategy;" that by being gay and more effeminate, gay men could help rear their relatives offspring and perpetuate their behavior via kin selection. Or, even better, that rape can be theoretically conceived of as an alternative reproductive strategy. All of these hopefully sound dubious on the surface, but trust that there are serious biological reasons - location of genes on chromosomes, developmental similarities between women and men, actual survival costs of certain anatomical features, etc. - why you would not even bother to entertain these claims as explanatory mechanisms.
But again, that wasn't my point. Here are some major ASSUMPTIONS, not FINDINGS, of EP that biologists tend to criticize:
1. EP is concerned with "ultimate," not "proximate" causes. You can understand human evolution at the top level without regard to underlying mechanisms.
2. All important human evolution took place during the aforementioned Pleistocene Epoch, and understanding the current human condition involves conceiving of us as animals with hunter-gatherer instincts in a non hunter-gatherer world.
3. No relevant evolution has taken place in the past 10,000 years.
4. Our modern psychological features are ADAPTATIONS that were functionally evolved to solve ADAPTIVE PROBLEMS.
5. Oh, yeah, FUNCTIONALISM, the AI idea that top level function is important and could be equivalent regardless of instantiated architecture, is absolutely true.
6. We can generally assume that complex traits had to have been formed by selective pressure, so most complex behaviors we see currently are the result of evolutionary design.
7. Oh, wait, spandrels, aka evolutionary "side effects." Yes, those exist, but they will be relatively few compared to the complex adaptations.
8. Oh, and these functional problem solutions are mental modules. Specific modules have been designed to solve specific problems. There are thousands of them, because it is inherently better for a function to solve a particular problem instead of having a general solution mechanism.
9. These modules, being evolved entities, are encoded for by genes.
10. These genes are polyphenotypic (that may not be the exact term), meaning that a single gene can respond to the environment in the appropriate adaptive way.
11. While we clearly can't figure out exactly what happened in the Pleistocene Epoch, we can get at it by looking at 1, the modules that have evolved, 2, looking at modern hunter gather societies, or 3, looking at other primate species.
Okay, so that's a huge list, and the interest of not letting this post wax on forever, please trust that these are legitimate, fundamental theoretical differences that biologists and EPists have, and that there are just some plain philosophical differences of method here that don't jive. Among other things, biologists tend to get miffed when people posit things like "mental modules" but are the unable to point in the direction of the underlying neural architecture. It's as though EPists want it both ways - they want to utilize a plainly physicalist mechanism (natural selection on genes) for authority, but they don't want to point out the actual physical thing that is emerging from the physical process of evolution. Whether I agree with them or not, I feel you would have to acknowledge that they are making certain theoretical assumptions - that mutation of genes can occur and result in neural modulation that for some reason we have not been able to detect - that obviously conflict with biological standards of knowledge.
Anyhoo, to cut to the chase of the story, when i got to class on Wednesday, the prof had invited another EPist to sit in on class. No one other than the two profs and I had read the Tooby / Cosmides paper, and so we were the only three speaking for the first two hours of class. And the professor asked me to present some of the biological critiques. And after each one he blurted, "But that's wrong," and then gave a canned response as to why a particular critique was "wrong." This quickly degraded into the professor just shouting "Well, give me an example where an EP theory was actually biologically wrong!" Shouting is not an exaggeration. It had quickly devolved into a "let's get defensive about EP" quasi-debate, and I was going out of my way NOT to attack EP but just to list the theoretical differences that EP and developmental biological theories of evolution have.
Enter the Olé defense: Every example I gave, the visiting professor qualified as "that's not us." Apparently one of the above examples of biologically implausible EP theories is just "not really EP." And so the professors were collectively answering, 'That's not us; what's a criticism that the REAL EPists need to respond to?"
And so, I started pointing out the evo devo biologist problems with the Tooby Cosmides paper. Guess what the responses were?
"We don't say that."
This eventually got the absurdity of my having to turn my laptop monitor around to show them the exact line of the Tooby/Cosmides paper did indeed "say that." After which we got the line of the century:
"Well, they may have written that, but they don't really think that."
Oh, okay. So after this repeated dodging, and repeatedly, I don't know, yelling and trying to make me feel stupid for even daring to question them on the basis of what had been written in their foundational paper (they did eventually admit that the bit about all relevant evolution taking place in the Pleistocene Epoch being unfounded), the discussion turned to the ideas of evidence and mental modules. Again, they asked me for criticisms, and I tried to explain that generally speaking, biologists don't like reference to physical mechanisms that cannot be located. That furthermore, it certainly seems with what is known about neural plasticity and other organization aspects of the brain, that the postulated mental modules don't really jive with what we already know.
"Well," they slyly replied, "what about visual mechanisms? They're not organized in an encapsulated fashion - we can point to criss-crossing neurons from the optic nerve back to the occipital lobes, and they don't stay encapsulated. They're a functional mechanism that is not encapsulated in the brain."
"Right," i slyly replied, "but we have found them. We can see them. There's a visual mechanism, and we can point to the neurons. It's there in a way that a "spousal jealousy module" plainly is not."
After which we get line number two of the century:
"Absense of evidence is not evidence against."
Well, guess what smart guys? Absence of evidence is also not evidence for. And this was all I was trying to point out in the beginning, that there are fundamental methodological approaches that differ between these two areas of study. Admittedly, I have more sympathy for the biological model, but I had no interest in a who's-right-who's-wrong game. Apparently, they did, and in front of the silent crowd of ten worthless students who neither did the reading nor stepped in with any evidence of higher cortical function during this entire "class discussion," I got tag teamed by two pathetic PhDs who were so defensive about their discipline as to feel the need to try to bitch out a visiting grad student in their seminar class. Real welcoming attitude, fellas.
It degenerated from there - the class prof threw forward, "Well, Einstein didn't have evidence for light bent by gravity when he posited its existence." Leaving aside this quasi-appeal to authority, let's just think about the silliness of trying to justify an evidenceless theory by stating that another theory posited before evidence had turned out to be right: GUESS WHAT? LOTS OF THEM WERE WRONG. I pointed this out, but they just said "we do have empirical evidence that agrees with out findings." Finally fed up and tired of being grilled to give examples of times "they" had been wrong when the "they" turned out to be ever-shifting people who don't even write what they think, I asked, "Okay, what's an example of a useful EP theory with empirical evidence?"
"Male aggression," they replied.
That's just great. We need EP to tell us that males are more aggressive than females. I was unaware of that. I asked them what specific adaptive problem this solved, and beyond offering nothing, they said "It fits in well with cross species functional analysis." Meaning, I suppose, that since male birds are the offspring's caretakers, you would expect them to be less aggressive. Fine, great; call me bodhissatva because I am enlightened.
I can't even begin to explain how terrible this all made me feel - I had tried to just put forth a set of critiques in order to start a discussion about methodological assumptions, and these jerks turned it into an adversarial, hostile debate. I felt terrible - the whole time I was consciously trying to rein it in, because yes, I know I can get argumentative, but I was specifically trying not to. They were out to try to make me feel stupid, and Oléd every comment I made. WORSE, it just seems so powerfully indicative that even in a relatively benign environment, a stupid grad seminar, professors are incapable of listening to a critique - from a freaking grad student, no less - without lapsing into an immature defensive posture. What is the point of even trying to undertake philosophy of science type endeavors if the "scientists" are going to behave as though you're burning their church every time you question a methodological assumption?
So, I left that class just feeling utterly pointless about everything - aggravated because I had been berated, because I felt that I couldn't have been articulating my points well if they were so deaf to them, and because of that nice crystalline feeling that people are just too effing worthless, defensive and self-concerned to permit honest philosophical discussion. It was a terrible feeling; I really couldn't sleep that night (some eight hours later) because my blood was still pumping hard, my mind spinning on edge trying to figure out how they couldn't have understood what i had been saying.
It's difficult, because I came to realize I had a sort of dichotomy of choices - either I had just failed and hadn't stated anything clearly, or they were just dumb and refusing to listen. I thoroughly recognize that the latter is a really easy way to justify yourself in just about any dispute, so I was trying and trying to give them every benefit of the doubt and think of how I could have made it clearer that I wasn't interested in arguing. But I couldn't - I had plainly stated exactly what I was looking to do at the beginning of class, and they just chose to take it as an attack. I can't let myself feel bad about this any more.
There's a coda, though. The prof is interested in doing a study about religious dietary laws and how to explain them as an effect of ecological evolutionary pressures. His method - he's going to prime subjects with images of disease, and then get their thoughts as to the rationality of dietary laws. SO yes, we're going to learn something profoundly significant about the formulation of 5000 year old dietary laws by gathering data about attitudes in the present... okay, fine. But how do you even pretend to justify this idea, that acute diease-diet associations in the present have anything to do with the formulation of chronically applied dietary laws in the distant past?
I would find it difficult to justify that, but that's not even the point. They don't even try; they just carry it as an underlying assumption sans reflection. So the end of this is not that the EP angle, at least as espoused by these two professors, is just dumb, it's that it's unreflective - and if you're so concerned about entrenching yourself in a set of disciplinary assumptions that you're unwilling to even reflect on their justification, well, then you are not worth my concern. That may mean that my discipline all the while is pointless, seeing as we're preaching to an unreflective deaf crowd who will just spit back canned nothingness at us. But at least we reflect on what we do.
I had one of the worst academic experiences of my short existence on Wednesday and have hesitated to write about it because I was so exceedingly angry. The basic background is this: we were reading a "classic text" by Tooby/Cosmides that essentially outlines the principles of Evolutionary Psychology. EP, briefly, is an attempt at understanding modern psychology in the light of evolutionary theory, notably presuming that the vast majority of our evolution took place while we were hunter gatherers and that a lot of our seemingly maladaptive behaviors are due to the residual effect sof this change in environs. The week before I had commented to the professor, "I am really interested to read this text, because most of what I have read has been critical of EP." Which is true; strict biologists are generally not fans of EP on methodological philosophical grounds; jason in particular has repeatedly written begging EPists to do more than pay lip service to developmental biology. The prof responded thusly:
"What do you mean? What criticisms could there be?"
I should have known that I was in trouble there, but I pressed on, "Well, it's not a categorical criticism; it's more of a concern that starting with ideas about psychological functionalism without knowledge of the underlying evolutionary / developmental biology can lead you to posit hypotheses that contradict known biological mechanisms." In other words, if you follow the MO of EP - that extant psychological mechanisms evolved under selective pressure in the Pleistocene Epoch (1.8 million years BO to 10,000 years BP) - you may propose evolutionary tracts or facts that just couldn't be true given what we already know about the underlying biology. So it's not so much an accusation of "your discipline is ludicrous;" it's a criticism that "your discipline, while probably generally correct in theory, would be well-served by paying close attention to the biological mechanisms we already know about." And that's it.
Of course, the prof took this as an attack and an accusation that "EP is wrong." And the week before, he already rather aggressively asked me to "bring in examples where what we've said is wrong." I tried to reiterate that this was not the point, but I went unheard.
So here's the thing - there are examples. EPists, which is a broad group of people who try to incorporate evolutionary theory into the development of human psychology / culture, have said some wildly stupid things. My favorite is the "upsuck hypothesis," that female orgasms evolved as a way for women to control which sperm enter their cervix to fertilize their eggs (Um, the idea that female orgasms, whose neural and anatomical causes bear a STRIKING resemblance to males', evolved independent of the male anatomy is highly unlikely). Or they comment on animal behavior - another great example is that female hyenas have come to develop male-looking external genitalia because it helps them to win conflicts with the males. Or that men are better than women at spatial reasoning because when we were hunter-gatherers this was a sexually-selected trait (which would, natch, require some rathe rimpressive "spatial reasoning genes" on the Y chromosome). Or that being gay is a sort of "alternative reproductive strategy;" that by being gay and more effeminate, gay men could help rear their relatives offspring and perpetuate their behavior via kin selection. Or, even better, that rape can be theoretically conceived of as an alternative reproductive strategy. All of these hopefully sound dubious on the surface, but trust that there are serious biological reasons - location of genes on chromosomes, developmental similarities between women and men, actual survival costs of certain anatomical features, etc. - why you would not even bother to entertain these claims as explanatory mechanisms.
But again, that wasn't my point. Here are some major ASSUMPTIONS, not FINDINGS, of EP that biologists tend to criticize:
1. EP is concerned with "ultimate," not "proximate" causes. You can understand human evolution at the top level without regard to underlying mechanisms.
2. All important human evolution took place during the aforementioned Pleistocene Epoch, and understanding the current human condition involves conceiving of us as animals with hunter-gatherer instincts in a non hunter-gatherer world.
3. No relevant evolution has taken place in the past 10,000 years.
4. Our modern psychological features are ADAPTATIONS that were functionally evolved to solve ADAPTIVE PROBLEMS.
5. Oh, yeah, FUNCTIONALISM, the AI idea that top level function is important and could be equivalent regardless of instantiated architecture, is absolutely true.
6. We can generally assume that complex traits had to have been formed by selective pressure, so most complex behaviors we see currently are the result of evolutionary design.
7. Oh, wait, spandrels, aka evolutionary "side effects." Yes, those exist, but they will be relatively few compared to the complex adaptations.
8. Oh, and these functional problem solutions are mental modules. Specific modules have been designed to solve specific problems. There are thousands of them, because it is inherently better for a function to solve a particular problem instead of having a general solution mechanism.
9. These modules, being evolved entities, are encoded for by genes.
10. These genes are polyphenotypic (that may not be the exact term), meaning that a single gene can respond to the environment in the appropriate adaptive way.
11. While we clearly can't figure out exactly what happened in the Pleistocene Epoch, we can get at it by looking at 1, the modules that have evolved, 2, looking at modern hunter gather societies, or 3, looking at other primate species.
Okay, so that's a huge list, and the interest of not letting this post wax on forever, please trust that these are legitimate, fundamental theoretical differences that biologists and EPists have, and that there are just some plain philosophical differences of method here that don't jive. Among other things, biologists tend to get miffed when people posit things like "mental modules" but are the unable to point in the direction of the underlying neural architecture. It's as though EPists want it both ways - they want to utilize a plainly physicalist mechanism (natural selection on genes) for authority, but they don't want to point out the actual physical thing that is emerging from the physical process of evolution. Whether I agree with them or not, I feel you would have to acknowledge that they are making certain theoretical assumptions - that mutation of genes can occur and result in neural modulation that for some reason we have not been able to detect - that obviously conflict with biological standards of knowledge.
Anyhoo, to cut to the chase of the story, when i got to class on Wednesday, the prof had invited another EPist to sit in on class. No one other than the two profs and I had read the Tooby / Cosmides paper, and so we were the only three speaking for the first two hours of class. And the professor asked me to present some of the biological critiques. And after each one he blurted, "But that's wrong," and then gave a canned response as to why a particular critique was "wrong." This quickly degraded into the professor just shouting "Well, give me an example where an EP theory was actually biologically wrong!" Shouting is not an exaggeration. It had quickly devolved into a "let's get defensive about EP" quasi-debate, and I was going out of my way NOT to attack EP but just to list the theoretical differences that EP and developmental biological theories of evolution have.
Enter the Olé defense: Every example I gave, the visiting professor qualified as "that's not us." Apparently one of the above examples of biologically implausible EP theories is just "not really EP." And so the professors were collectively answering, 'That's not us; what's a criticism that the REAL EPists need to respond to?"
And so, I started pointing out the evo devo biologist problems with the Tooby Cosmides paper. Guess what the responses were?
"We don't say that."
This eventually got the absurdity of my having to turn my laptop monitor around to show them the exact line of the Tooby/Cosmides paper did indeed "say that." After which we got the line of the century:
"Well, they may have written that, but they don't really think that."
Oh, okay. So after this repeated dodging, and repeatedly, I don't know, yelling and trying to make me feel stupid for even daring to question them on the basis of what had been written in their foundational paper (they did eventually admit that the bit about all relevant evolution taking place in the Pleistocene Epoch being unfounded), the discussion turned to the ideas of evidence and mental modules. Again, they asked me for criticisms, and I tried to explain that generally speaking, biologists don't like reference to physical mechanisms that cannot be located. That furthermore, it certainly seems with what is known about neural plasticity and other organization aspects of the brain, that the postulated mental modules don't really jive with what we already know.
"Well," they slyly replied, "what about visual mechanisms? They're not organized in an encapsulated fashion - we can point to criss-crossing neurons from the optic nerve back to the occipital lobes, and they don't stay encapsulated. They're a functional mechanism that is not encapsulated in the brain."
"Right," i slyly replied, "but we have found them. We can see them. There's a visual mechanism, and we can point to the neurons. It's there in a way that a "spousal jealousy module" plainly is not."
After which we get line number two of the century:
"Absense of evidence is not evidence against."
Well, guess what smart guys? Absence of evidence is also not evidence for. And this was all I was trying to point out in the beginning, that there are fundamental methodological approaches that differ between these two areas of study. Admittedly, I have more sympathy for the biological model, but I had no interest in a who's-right-who's-wrong game. Apparently, they did, and in front of the silent crowd of ten worthless students who neither did the reading nor stepped in with any evidence of higher cortical function during this entire "class discussion," I got tag teamed by two pathetic PhDs who were so defensive about their discipline as to feel the need to try to bitch out a visiting grad student in their seminar class. Real welcoming attitude, fellas.
It degenerated from there - the class prof threw forward, "Well, Einstein didn't have evidence for light bent by gravity when he posited its existence." Leaving aside this quasi-appeal to authority, let's just think about the silliness of trying to justify an evidenceless theory by stating that another theory posited before evidence had turned out to be right: GUESS WHAT? LOTS OF THEM WERE WRONG. I pointed this out, but they just said "we do have empirical evidence that agrees with out findings." Finally fed up and tired of being grilled to give examples of times "they" had been wrong when the "they" turned out to be ever-shifting people who don't even write what they think, I asked, "Okay, what's an example of a useful EP theory with empirical evidence?"
"Male aggression," they replied.
That's just great. We need EP to tell us that males are more aggressive than females. I was unaware of that. I asked them what specific adaptive problem this solved, and beyond offering nothing, they said "It fits in well with cross species functional analysis." Meaning, I suppose, that since male birds are the offspring's caretakers, you would expect them to be less aggressive. Fine, great; call me bodhissatva because I am enlightened.
I can't even begin to explain how terrible this all made me feel - I had tried to just put forth a set of critiques in order to start a discussion about methodological assumptions, and these jerks turned it into an adversarial, hostile debate. I felt terrible - the whole time I was consciously trying to rein it in, because yes, I know I can get argumentative, but I was specifically trying not to. They were out to try to make me feel stupid, and Oléd every comment I made. WORSE, it just seems so powerfully indicative that even in a relatively benign environment, a stupid grad seminar, professors are incapable of listening to a critique - from a freaking grad student, no less - without lapsing into an immature defensive posture. What is the point of even trying to undertake philosophy of science type endeavors if the "scientists" are going to behave as though you're burning their church every time you question a methodological assumption?
So, I left that class just feeling utterly pointless about everything - aggravated because I had been berated, because I felt that I couldn't have been articulating my points well if they were so deaf to them, and because of that nice crystalline feeling that people are just too effing worthless, defensive and self-concerned to permit honest philosophical discussion. It was a terrible feeling; I really couldn't sleep that night (some eight hours later) because my blood was still pumping hard, my mind spinning on edge trying to figure out how they couldn't have understood what i had been saying.
It's difficult, because I came to realize I had a sort of dichotomy of choices - either I had just failed and hadn't stated anything clearly, or they were just dumb and refusing to listen. I thoroughly recognize that the latter is a really easy way to justify yourself in just about any dispute, so I was trying and trying to give them every benefit of the doubt and think of how I could have made it clearer that I wasn't interested in arguing. But I couldn't - I had plainly stated exactly what I was looking to do at the beginning of class, and they just chose to take it as an attack. I can't let myself feel bad about this any more.
There's a coda, though. The prof is interested in doing a study about religious dietary laws and how to explain them as an effect of ecological evolutionary pressures. His method - he's going to prime subjects with images of disease, and then get their thoughts as to the rationality of dietary laws. SO yes, we're going to learn something profoundly significant about the formulation of 5000 year old dietary laws by gathering data about attitudes in the present... okay, fine. But how do you even pretend to justify this idea, that acute diease-diet associations in the present have anything to do with the formulation of chronically applied dietary laws in the distant past?
I would find it difficult to justify that, but that's not even the point. They don't even try; they just carry it as an underlying assumption sans reflection. So the end of this is not that the EP angle, at least as espoused by these two professors, is just dumb, it's that it's unreflective - and if you're so concerned about entrenching yourself in a set of disciplinary assumptions that you're unwilling to even reflect on their justification, well, then you are not worth my concern. That may mean that my discipline all the while is pointless, seeing as we're preaching to an unreflective deaf crowd who will just spit back canned nothingness at us. But at least we reflect on what we do.
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