Hiatus or No, Have to Share This

Today in class, we were discussing the evolution of sexual reproduction vis a vis asexual reproduction. The general question is why is it beneficial to combine dissimilar genotypes rather than to maintain a singular genotype? To make a rather complicated topic bulled-pointed:

• All told, sexual reproduction is weird. Given the "choice" of passing on 100% (asexual) of one's genome to the next generation or 50% (sexual), you would think that 100% (asexual) would be a more effective technique. Consequently, there must be some kind of advantage to sexual reproduction; otherwise, it's extraordinarily odd that it's so commonplace.
• One major speculation is that sexual reproduction (along with the recombination often involved in meiotic events) sort of shuffles the genome and results in a level of variation that is beneficial enough to compensate and then some for the 100 v. 50% transmission. I.e., it's a lot easier to get novel combinations when the various mutations occurring randomly in the population are routinely combined in parallel fashion, rather than waiting for a single line of asexually reproduced genomes to accumulate those same mutations serially. These variations would theoretically be key to evolutionary flexibility to changing environments.
• However, sometimes particular allelic combinations are, to whatever extent, idealized , so it would be beneficial if they were kept together. So there exists a second tension - while sexual reproduction is best at creating these sorts of beneficial allelic combinations (consisting of multiple novel mutations at multiple loci), asexual reproduction is best at maintaining a particular combination. Sexual reproduction effectively shuffles and loses those "perfect" combinations.
• This model / theory is called the "Sisyphean Model," as just like good ol' Sisyphus, sexual reproduction will push the alleles up the proverbial hill of higher fitness, only to lose that powerful combination via another sexual reproduction. And the boulder rolls back down, and sexual reproduction must begin again.

I don't really care if that makes all that much sense; the major point is that we spent four hours talking about sexual reproduction v. asexual reproduction, sans "sexual reproduction" jokes, and the whole shebang ended by discussing a metaphor based on the myth of Sisyphus. When the professor asked if anyone in the room knew why it was called "Sisyphean," I was one of two people who could give an account of the actual myth of Sisyphus. (You will recall my Camus fanboydom). I didn't know this at the time and thought I was just the only person willing to talk. So I described the myth. We're rolling along, and the major point is that this is something of a tricky situation, that clearly something MUST be going on to explain why sexual reproduction is so common, but this Sisyphean Model seems to at least partially counteract that effect. Class winds down, the professor asks if there are any questions, and after a couple seconds of silence and blank faces, I simply ask:

"So, what you're saying is that we're supposed to imagine sexual reproduction happy?*"

* - Just so we're all on the same page here, Camus rather famously ends his metaphor of Sisyphus as stand-in for the human condition by declaring that we must imagine him happy as he pushes the rock pointlessly up the hill. Defiance of his fate is his only means to maintain anything resembling individual freedom, etc. This is, imho, a fairly major 20th century philosophical quote, and someone in the room *should* have been familiar with it.

The professor - who, mind you, just described how these kinds of literary metaphors sometimes shape scientific thinking - just stared at me blankly. Mark, a classmate from my program (and the only other guy in the room, it turns out, who could have explained the myth), almost fell off his chair laughing. Everyone else: crickets.

And you know what? Screw you, roomful of academic biologists. That was GOLD JERRY GOLD, and I don't even care if you didn't get it. On three hours of sleep, I delivered a second level, perfectly-timed literary joke, and it's not my fault y'all's all ign'ant.

That is all.

In Light of Evolution, or Pinkə at Sacklə

So big disclaimer - I have to be relatively careful here, unlike my normal shoot-from-the-hip express thyself with impunity style, because I'm guessing that if Christastrophe can track me down using google analytics, these high power science types can probably do the same and squash me like the academic piss-ant that I am. So take the following commentary as you will.

This past weekend I traveled* to the OC to attend the Sackler Colloquium sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences entitled "In the Light of Evolution IV: The Human Condition."** It's a rather prestigious conference with a number of big deal speakers and a bit of an odd format. There's only one lecture hall, all of the speakers talk in it in succession, and you spend a serious amount of time listening to said talks: eighteen 50 minute talks over two days, with some coffee breaks and lunches and dinners sprinkled inbetween. The topics are all over the map, though at least in principle centered around evolution and the human condition. Long days and a ton of interesting information, though there are some interesting dynamics going on that I'll try to capture here.

* - You will recall that I had a flight delayed by three plus hours and was inserted into a dream world of gorillas, Suns girls and Grant Hill. I wasn't lying:

See? I *told* you the cheer outfits were absurd. Though, as Beck will tell you, nowhere near as absurd as the one we witnessed on lovely 24th street in Phoenix lately. Sheesh. That one is definitely NOT making an appearance in the Ballad.

** - "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" is a rather famous and oft-referenced quote / series of essays by Theodosius Dobzhansky, a sort of grandfather of evolutionary biology and the "modern synthesis" aka neo-Darwinism (or whatever the least offensive term is these days). He's known as "Doby" to his close friends and/or the kind of people who casually drop such tidbits in their lectures. I, ftr, do not know him as "Doby." Having read a whole lot of biology over the last few years, though, I'm going to have to agree. :) I mean, seriously, your genome is something like 30% mobile elements, pointless little sequences that do nothing much more than wreck other genes. Something like 1.2 million of them have been copied and copied and copied over the millenia. And your genome is also largely composed of remnant pseudogenes, no longer functioning sequences with all components of genes that are rendered inactive by accumulated mutations / errors / etc. So, um, show me a car that has a ton of the same random part strewn about it occasionally causing other parts to break, show me a bunch of other parts that would have worked in older models but no longer do, explain to me why an engineer would do that, and then we can start talking about intelligent design. Sound good?

The most obvious thing is that it's a non-specialty conference - you've got paleontologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, biochemists, primatologists, evolutionary psychologists, geneticists, and the list goes on and on, all as speakers, let alone the variety of people in the audience (see, um, biology-based ethicists aka Nyet Jones). So you've got power player speakers, all of whom come from decidedly different backgrounds, some disciplines which have beefs with one another - most notably evo bio and evo psych, but also social scientists and "hard" scientists generally. But you've also got decorated experts in all of the fields sprinkled throughout the audience. The overall effect? First, there was an extreme air of deference. I'd venture that 95% of the questions that were actually asked* were of the softball variety. No serious challenges to claims, concepts, underlying methodology, none of the stuff I hear on a daily basis at talks at school. This was cool, on the one hand, because the oneupsmanship that goes on elsewhere can get a little tired. But on the other, it seemed that a lot of ideas went down completely unchecked - I would have enjoyed some interdepartmental wrestling, though I can understand why they perhaps did not want to foster that. I also saw a whole lotta hat-tipping and cultish lust for all things science. I get that it's a science conference and I shouldn't really be surprised, but I could have a used a bit more articulation with humanistic notions of "The Human Condition" subtitle.

* - This was a problem - speakers were given 50 minutes, and while the conference as a whole was run exactly and admirably on time, most of the speakers ran over by a minute or so and permitted little to no time for questions. I don't know if this was by design (i.e. people didn't want to have to answer a lot of q's in that environment; that seems unlikely, though, as these were all dynamic speakers at ease in front of the crowd and see the above notes on deference) or if people were just taking the long talk format to riff as much as they wanted. It definitely did not foster a whole lot of give and take - I asked no questions, but I probably would have chimed in on two of the talks in particular had there been more opportunity. Anyways, weird format, not to mention a little long-winded at times, and I would have preferred maybe 35 minute talks with fifteen minutes for Q & A or extended jamming or something. As it was, you had to try to grab people in coffee breaks or at dinner, and especially with some of the big-time guys (e.g., Ayala), it's hard to break into a crowd of ten people to have a real conversation over a ten minute coffee break.

The second effect, though, was a bit more disappointing. For the most part, the talks stuck to pretty surface level, survey course style accounts of research. I think people knew they were delivering talks to a broad audience - which they were - but as a consequence, some of the stuff presented amounted to summaries of a disciplinary approach or a life's body of work, and if you were familiar with the speaker's work already, it came off as a whole lot of stuff you already knew. Which, if you've flown far, spent several days alone in a hotel room etc. to hear, can be a bit irksome. Not that this held back the conference - I heard a lot of really cool stuff and learned a lot from the people I didn't know - but the people I specifically went to hear largely failed to deliver something that I hadn't already gleaned from reading their publications. Ah, well.

So, aside from my usual negative Nelly intro - long talks, surface talks, too much nicety to really hear what's going with scientific takes on the human condition, too much sitting in a single room* - the conference was quite nice. I had to cab it to and from the hotel, but otherwise, all transportation was taken care of - buses to and from the hotel (which was the shwanky Newport Beach Marriott) to the very posh Beckman center. We were served two excellent breakfasts and dinners and a wine-drenched banquet dinner as well as lots of gourmet coffee and snacks throughout both days. No complaints at all about the amenities; they were quite ridiculously good.

* - Holy footnotes Batman - but it's worth noting that I had Vietnam-style flashbacks to med school this past weekend, what with the single lecture hall, the power points, the fifty minute lectures, the occasional nodding off at a too-monotone discussion ...

There was time to chat over meals with various people, though as noted, with all the people there who already knew one another, it was sometimes a little tough to grab a table with a person you might want to talk to. I definitely would like to go to the next conference with someone I know - I was all by my lonesome, and while I'm okay at striking up conversations with strangers, it's a lot easier to join conversations in progress. The best chats I had were with groups of other students / professors at meals who all knew one another - I tracked down some of the interesting philosophy people in attendance, and it helped a ton to have them already engaged in various conversations and just slide in with a comment rather than doing the usual game of I'm so-and-so and what do you study? So that was cool - I met some UC Irvine people doing various things with monkeys and morality, people I might be interested in thinking back and forth with over the coming years. But man, in the other conversations - there were a whole lot of highly specialized scientists there, and let's just say that there isn't a whole hell of a lot for a guppy biogeographer and an ethicist to talk about. At one point I listened to a twenty-plus minute speech on a student's beetle dispersion statistical analysis, and while it was highly impassioned and clearly the awesomest thing in the world to that guy, I felt very out of place. Like a guppy out of appropriate biogeographical evolutionary niche, if you will. Still, I said "ethics" and generally got enthusiastic responses - seems a conference on the human condition grabbed people who were at least seemingly interested in how biology and evolution can speak to ethics. On occasion, of course, I said ethicist and either got sort of "Oh, a philosopher" type reactions or people who felt ready to comment on the entirety of my discipline based on a book they had read one time. I always find that wacky - like I would challenge a genomics expert on his area of study because I took a genetics course once? Seriously, somebody was trying to tell me, "well, morality is all based on fulfilling hardwired desires, so that's really already figured out." Oh, okay. Thanks. I'll go tell the postmodernists. Vague insults aside (one prof tried to ask me what my experimental design was going to be, and I'm still not sure if he badly understood me explanation of my interests or if he was being a colossal empiricist dick), people were generally welcoming and friendly. A good time, despite my inherent distaste for those type of "let's network" environs.

The last thing to add before jotting down a bullet summary of the talks is to note that I do not like traveling by myself. Most people probably don't, but there's something quite lonely about the empty dark hotel room, no matter how Marriottish it is. There was a mall nearby, so I walked around there quite a bit (in the pouring rain - 50 degrees and wet all weekend, thanks a lot southern cali!) during the little down time that I had (Thursday night and after 4 on Saturday), but otherwise it was a lot of hotel room hanging out, reading and watching TV / DVDs. (I did catch the ESPN 30 for 30 on "The U," which was quite awesome. I now realize why I spike on the Ultimate field - I'm a 'Cane at heart!). Anyhoo, I was very glad to be back with the Beck and the dogs come Sunday. We (minus the S/W) grabbed some dinner and football with D/C and had a great time - good to be home.

Okay, point by point, lecture by lecture - I can't believe you're still reading!

• E.O. Wilson - who is as rock star evo biologist as they get - gave a talk called The Four Great Books of Darwin. I've heard so much of this stuff in my HPS course lately that I wasn't thrilled at the topic, but he did an admirable job. He did give a little dig - told this joke about how mathematicians achieve their peak in their teens, physicists in the 20s, chemists in their 30s, biologists in their 40s-50s and philosophers never. Well, Mr. Wilson, I believe after all these years, you're still all wet. So there. Phbbbt. :)
• All of you high power scientist career breakers, that previous comment was a light-hearted joke. Please don't end me.
• Bernard Wood, paleontologist, gave a great talk on the evolution of hominids. The primary point was that it is very difficult to take a fossil specimen and place it in the evolutionary tree appropriately - it's hard to be sure if any given species is in direct human lineage or is an offshoot of one of the branches.
• Kristen Hawkes, anthropologist, talked about human longevity and the evolution of post-menopausal life. It's 1, not a recent development, and 2, something we don't share at all with the apes.
• Juan Luis Arsuaga spoke on human ape-relatedness and effective uniformity in the fossil record
• Douglas Wallace gave an interesting talk about energy as the fundamental concept of human life, talking extensively on the evolution of mitochondria and how, among other things. lack of mitochondrial ox-phos uncoupling for thermal purposes accounts partially for why Kenyans are so good at marathons. Lively speaker.
• Anna DiRienzo spoke on genetic variation and its service to evolution in the presence of local environmental factors.
• Sarah Tishkoff gave a very cool talk on tracking human genomic lineage in Africa.
• Mark Baxter spoke on the above-mentioned mobile elements and their historical dynamics in the human genome.
• Carlos Bustamante gave a statistically technical talk on personalized medicine and the human genome - lots of cool stuff on being able to track human migration over the millenia via genomes.
• Morris Goodman, another rock star, gave a general talk on evolutionary evidence in human lineage
• John Avise gave the banquet lecture entitled Non-intelligent Design: Inside the Human Genome. 'Twas a general refutation of the notion of the design (also referenced above) in the human genome given all the mayhem and utter failure that is evident within it. His argument was well-supported, but I wonder about his audience - who's going to be swayed by this who isn't already swayed by, say, back pain? He also closed with a rather wacky notion (shared by Ayala, I gather) that evolutionary theory is actually a gift to religion, as now reli doesn't have to account for many forms of human misery as it falls under the domain of science. "They" can focus on meaning and spirituality and morality/ethics and all that stuff. I have alluded before to the chapter 7 phenomenon - where the science writer delivers a perfectly cogent argument and that tacks on some bizarre, ungrounded humanities oriented commentary at the end. This was it par excellence - it implies that you could completely undermine the metaphysics of a religion and leave it largely intact for those "types of things science can't do." Which is, in a word, dubious - you're basically asking for a tacit admission of a God of the gaps who can only cover non-empirical ground. I think that's a bit dismissive of the role of religious narratives in the belief structure - anyways, not to go all hypercritical on this, but I just thought that was a weird tag on to an otherwise finely put point, that the genome is riddled with evolutionary evidence that makes no sense if viewed from an intelligent design perspective.
• Saturday morning opened with a fantastic talk from Nina Jablonski called The Skin That Makes Us Human, an account of melanin evolution in different climates. This was probably up there for the best talks of the weekend (for me) - just really drove home the point that skin tone is a magnificently malleable trait, and the interplay between UV protection and Vitamin D synthesis dictates not just skin color but hair color, distribution, etc. The *malleable* point was huge - there have been numerous independent evolutionary events that have changed population's skin colors, which indicates that relative to a lot of traits, skin color, aka one of the primary determinants of race, is actually one of the more fleeting characteristics of peoples when considered on evolutionary time scales. If one were to start with an ethical premise that treatment of others not be arbitrary - and then note based on scientific evidence that one of the main things we use to differentiate peoples is that highly "temporary" trait - I think one has something resembling an logico-empirical stance that racism is idiotic. I'll need to come up with a more eloquent way of phrasing that at some point, but it was quite a lovely point in a conference that occasionally wandered off the "Human Condition" topic.
• Ajit Varki gave a very detailed, fascinating talk on unique patterns of sialic acid biology (i.e. cell surface sugars / potential antigens) and the evo histories of certain ones that appear in humans but not other species (and their impact on disease). Science-detail heavy, but quite sharp stuff.
• Peter Richerson gave a largely apologetic talk on how culture evolution studies are some 75 years behind bio ones. He alleged that variable climate seemed to spark human cultural development. Dubious? Maybe. This was essentially a claim that cultures follow Darwinian rules, which always treads a bit in meme territory for me - is it the cultures undergoing evolution, or the people who practice them? Unclear.
• Francisco Ayala, another fretboard burner rockstar biologist, gave the weirdest talk of the weekend (again, for me). It was called The Difference of Being Human, but focused entirely on the biology of ethics. The claim was that ethics can be split into two concepts - the capacity / proclivity to judge right and wrong, and the actual instantiation of what determines to be right and wrong. Ayala claimed the former is biologically / evolutionarily determined (the capacity for abstract thought, anticipation of action outcomes, the ability to contemplate and choose possible alternatives) and the latter, the particularities of what is right and wrong, is largely culturally determined. It's a distinction between capacity and code. (Ayala further claimed that he could make a similarly structured argument for many human cultural practices - aesthetics, religion, etc.). To be honest, the first part was unremarkable - it was supported by top notch biology, to be sure, but it was just a typical "humans are unique animals" type argument that alleged that this was key to our moral foundations. He also alleged that our bipedal gait permits tool development which drives brain development which drives more tool development, etc., which results in our big, abstract thought conceiving brains. The second part was simply bizarre - after a brief run through the history of ethics, he alleged that our ethical beliefs are largely cultural, and that the successful ones are determined by natural selection. This was essentially an argument that moral peoples will be more evolutionarily successful than non-moral ones (or maybe cooperative groups will outdo non cooperative ones) without a specification of what being moral means. The obvious question here is how this articulates with an endorsement of moral relativism, since it seems to boil down to a rule that survival will trump other concerns. I wanted to ask this, but didn't get a chance as some other grad student made an ill-advised challenge to Ayala's criteria for moral capacity (the student made a fair point, but got shot down in front of everyone for being unable to properly articulate it). Anyways, I'd be interested in reading Ayala's books - he is a former Dominican priest, so one imagines he has some moral philosophy / theological chops, even if it didn't come across in this lecture too much. In short, I found this very superficial and reeking of chapter 7-ness, though I am also confident that Ayala has probably outlined the idea better in other venues.
• Leda Cosmides gave an utterly boring talk called Whence Intelligence that didn't seem to have much to do with intelligence but rather a "mental module" of cheater detection. I should qualify that - it was boring because it was a *survey* on cheater detection, the literature of which I am already profoundly familiar and find problematic for a whole truckload of reasons. So perhaps for people unfamiliar with her work it was interesting; I can't speak to that, because all I heard were arguments and evidence that have been in play for some fifteen years. She was one of the people I was most excited to see because I am fairly familiar with the back and forth that she and anti-evo psychologists have undergone, so I wanted to hear something of a response to the challenges or a take on how this affects our conception of the human condition. I got neither, so her talk was something of a letdown.
• Terrence Deacon gave an overly long talk called Whence Language, and I will pay you handsomely if you can explain how this said much about human language. It was a lot of stuff on birdsong, to be sure, but again missed the larger point of things for me.
• And finally, Steve Pinker closed with a talk on the Evolution of the Mind. Pinker was the show closer, the guy I had come to see, and he gave a somewhat demure performance and more or less rehashed some of the things from his popular works on language and the blank slate of the mind. He was stunningly non-assertive - of all the people there, he seemed the most keenly aware of the differing theories from his own present in the room that afternoon. I doubt he was nervous, but he was a lot less lively than in, say, his Colbert Report appearances. The talk included thoughts on the intelligence measure G and our lack of ability to pinpoint its genetic underpinnings and our pervasive use of metaphor in language which he points at as evidence of a generalized preference for abstraction. He specifically made a point that though a large percentage of our mental association is sensory driven a la Proust, there is a certain percentage that comes about via this metaphoric, structural brain associations. He also argued that while skin colorations and other specific biological traits are important for explaining our multiple niche compatibilities, our mind is largely the thing that permits our varied dominance of earth's nooks and crannies. He made a slew of other Pinker-typical, interesting points, too. It was odd that he read his lecture from notes and again, gave a very soft-spoken presentation of ideas. He was also the only person who got challenged (really) in the Q&A afterwards - people griped with the specifics of his notions of intelligence inheritance. All in all good stuff, but again, the survey nature of the talk was disappointing - I'm glad I got the chance to hear such a pop scientist celebrity talk, but I was genuinely surprised by the low key feel of it.

Phew. So that's it. Definitely a good experience, but also definitely one that good use some tweaking. I was probably most fascinated by the meta-anthropology at play - scientists talking to scientists, wheeling and dealing, trying not to stick foot in mouth and some wielding their cachet like 50 Cent at da club. Fascinating. Hopefully next time I will be a bit more of a participant observer and not just an observer - I feel like a did a good job socializing and as mentioned met a few people who might be interesting to work with, but I can definitely work on shmoozing profs and figuring out a way to convince them that an ethicist / non-strict scientist is worth their time. Things to work on. Until next time, that's the lyrical tale of the past weekend with Nyet and the OC. Looking forward to more interesting conferences to come.

I'm Told the Eventual Downfall...

Caught this on NPR recently, and I must say that Neko Case is one charming lady (with a beautiful voice, taboot!). If you're unfamiliar with her solo work or The New Pornographers, well 1, you suck, and 2, get thee to a Waterloo Records.

Good news from the Ultimate front: we worked on zone D Tuesday (primarily the trap), and despite handling all practice AND handling a lot on the trapped side AND breaking the zone with breakmarks, scoobers and hammers, I had a whopping zero turnovers. WAHOO! That's even morer like it. Small victories, even if the D was griping that my upside down throws would not have worked in windier conditions. Fie on that sound, I say.

Went on a run this morning - ankles are still bugging me, so I stopped at the 2.5 mile mark when I had originally intended to go 3 to 3.3. Baby steps, though - this would be the rare instance of me exercising prudence w/r/t my running program. Beck is so proud. I took it a little slower than the other day because I was running early in the morning (I am a stiff-jointed old man), but I still managed a 19:15 or so pace, which is roughly 7:48 miles. Close enough for funk.

Finished the last bit of Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings and conquered quite a few articles yesterday. REPfLB, for a Phil of Sci book, was surprisingly accessible, which either means that I didn't get it or that I'm getting familiar enough with the terms / concepts / authors that I'm not getting as bogged down as I have been. Progress, or something easily mistaken for it. I refuse to believe that it had anything to do with the clarity of the writing, as there was an entire section on level organization and three dimensional system complexity graphs that... well, just trust that you understand exactly as much as I do about it from that one sentence description. Or not so much fail to understand as fail to see the point of. I think there's a middle ground that people are aiming for - don't want to be analytic, codified-in-logic-equation philosophy types, don't want to be Continental obscurantists - that they are not quite getting, and as a consequence you get dumbed down unanalytic generalized accounts that don't say much. That's not a knock on Wimsack, nor does it characterize the book fairly; I'm just noticing that the failures of both ends of the phil-writing spectrum are hard to eliminate when trying to write in some middle-grounded, useful and accessible way. We'll all press on, okay, alright already we'll all press on.

Busy day ahead - meeting w/ Jason, more reading, frisbee tonight (women's league is back on, though without team captain Joanne, who indeed suffered a torn ACL - poor lady), packing and then a seriously early departure for Rachacha and another iPReunion, the first I've managed to attend in a few years. Looking forward to it. And now, to work...

(Oh, and this has been on my radar for quite a while now... but I am starting to catch an idea that maybe I should do it, if just to break the string of philo books. It'll be a "read from the nightstand only type of thing. I'm three or four weeks behind, but I can catch that pretty quickly, I suspect. I'll keep you updated).

Should We Talk About the Government?

Hi Hi ... Hi Hi.

Just took the dogs for a walk at 6 in the morning... and it's only 91 degrees. I couldn't bring myself to go to pickup yesterday, my elbow was still sore (feels better today, thanksforasking) and the computothermometer read 117 (!!) at 5:00. I seriously doubt we would have had more than 6 people there anyways, and to drive 20+ miles to play box and die of heat exhaustion is just... well, let's just say you're welcome mother earth.

The plan for today, written here to hold me to it - do some serious damage on Wimsatt's Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality. It's general claim is that reductionism introduces biases into our thinking and that we need to reconceive our understanding of the world as being a heuristic enterprise, not one that pins down TRUTH; i.e., every method of learning about the world is going to have built in strengths and weaknesses, biases and focuses that give you a limited glimpse. Interesting and promising so far; hopefully by the end of the day I'll have conquered it.

Beck and I finished season 2 of Burn Notice last night, a glitzy, Miami-boobed-up spy version of MacGyver, which sits entirely in the "entertaining" portion of the entertainment spectrum. There are funny, cool characters, a reasonable over-arching plot, and plenty of action and bad-assness, but we'd be the first to admit that it's a ridiculous, dumb show. Ah, well; we finished Season 4.0 of Battlestar Galactica and are just waiting for the final season 4.5 to come out; in the meantime, I think we are entitled to our goofy pleasures. Plus, the characters, while somewhat static and one dimensional, are FUNNY, and you can't pass up listening to Ash* crack wise on a nightly basis. We missed finishing season 2 in time to catch the first ep of season 3 on Hulu, so we may be forced to buy an ep or two if we're too impatient to wait for the DVDs...

* - Shop Smart - S-Mart.

Got froyo (I am so hip, yo) with D & C and D's parents on Friday - good times, but by far the craziest news of the night was that D's parents unexpectedly put an offer on a house right around the corner from all of us. Dan's ability to not crack Everybody Loves Raymond jokes in this circumstance impressed. I don't think they'll be coming down for a few years, but when the reality show starts filming in 2012, remember that the seeds were laid here.

Alright, work-time. Here goes. YEAH!

Hello.

THAT was the best two month nap I've ever had.

Well, what happened was a confluence of a number of things. One, I got mired in writing two term papers, both of which I waited a little too long into the semester to start writing (though I had done a fair amount of reading for both along the way). That'll be a good mistake to not replicate. Still, the relevant-to-you consequence was that I spent several days in a row hammering away at papers, both of which i was not thrilled with and so required a lot of nitpicky editing and brain-wracking editing. Basically the sort of stuff that would have made for the worst blog-reading you've ever encountered, things like, "Today, I fixed minutiae X about topic that you do not care about Y; it took me Z hours and this is all i've been thinking about for days and I have become a unidimensional log bump." See, you didn't need that. If you're really interested, one paper was on scientific realism and the need for a working understanding of scientific model justification amongst policy-makers; the other was on the possibility of cross-cultural translation in cultural psychology and a recommendation for statistics-based methods of validating comparisons of intercultural test results. Sexy, sexy, i know.

Two, my hard drive crashed. Well, first my computer turned into a discombobulated pile of mechanical do-nothing, which turned out to be due to the hard drive slowly corrupting and the CPU having trouble accessing the appropriate files for start up, running programs, etc. I spent a couple of days practicing all kinds of ninja-witch magic on my computer getting it back up to form, and it ran well for abut a day before whatever corruption that was going on in the hard drive finished itself and it (the computer's soul) emitted its death croak. Because I am so SMRT, though, I had backed everything important up (well, most everything*), and manged to rebuild my computer on the backup hard drive I installed a while back. Reincarnation, yes. The end of this was that after finishing my papers and having absolutely nothing exciting to write about, I had spend several days frustratingly banging away at my computer. I had become unidimensional in another dimension (what?), and not only that, it was a dimension that made me want to avoid the computer at all costs. So I didn't blog through that ordeal either.

* - I'm still missing some of the miscellaneous software that I can't find discs and/or registration codes for - things like a photoshop clone, my music recording software, etc. Non-essentials, and I'll eventually get it together and put them back on the machine. No worries. The big things - photos, music files - are all good to go and thoroughly backed up. Take that, fallible human artifacts.

Three, I made an executive decision, partially in an effort to save money and partially just because I wasn't using it, to cancel my GoDaddy account and thereby rid the world of nyetjones.org. That website is all backed up, too, so I'll start the slow and insanely boring project of transferring all of those blog entries and any other redeeming content over here sometime soon. I don't know if anybody even noticed this - certainly no one has contacted me about it - which just speaks to the pointlessness of maintaining such an unviewed website. This, in addition to my blogging apathy, only furthered the elimination of my active online presence, and at some point in here I began to seriously question the audacity of updating the unseen millions (okay, unseen twelves) w/r/t my daily activities. This is what is known in the biz as a lack of motivation.

Four, perhaps obviously, the vast majority of my blogging of late had been all about Ultimate, and there were no league games to recap. I could have told you all kinds of exciting things about pickup, but that would have been even dumber than the VOTS writeups. I also could have told you about some exciting softball times (2nd place finish in spring league; lotsa stupidity in the il Vileno realm)... actually, that Il Vileno stuff probably contributed to my apathy quite a bit. Lotsa effort, totally unappreciated. Eff that; no more discussion necessary.

Five, after finishing those two papers, my job has effectively turned into full-time reading. I'm getting a lot done and forming a strong base on which to build whatever thesis plan I'm going to design this year, but again, the daily accounts of "today I read pages 231-398, yay" did not seem especially enticing. I've also been running into repeated super-stupid arguments or, more exactly, clear exhibits of the world of academia being entirely self-concerned/located and not really interested in any application to the real world outside of itself, which is somewhat disheartening. This is a little bit of a difficult feeling to convey, especially since it's not like it's something I wasn't aware of; the concept of ivory tower is hardly a hidden one. But seeing its mechanisms up close, repeatedly, just got old, and I didn't want to blog about a broken-record wah wah of my feelings of how insular the academic world is and how difficult any authentic interaction with the world from within it is likely to be. I chose to silence my inner Eeyore.

Effectively, I've been feeling like quite a boring human being of late and did not want to blog about it terribly much. But I've decided over the past couple days that July 1st was a good enough time to snap out of the fnuk and realize that there have been quite a few things going on of late that I could have thrown on here. In no particular order:

1. Julliette got married! Huzzah! We went to New Orleans. I will post about this.
2. Andy got married. Huzzah deux!!! We went to Long island. I will post about this.
3. I say Mike whilst in Nueva York! And new SLF Jen! I will post about this.
4. Beck's been playign real life women's frisbee! On a team I am coaching! I will post about this.
5. I made the local club team Sprawl! I am an O-line player! I will post about this.
6. Phish has been back on tour! This is unspeakably great! I will post about this.
7. I organized a Saturday morning competitive Ultimate game for money. This is all kinds of awesome. I... have pretty much relayed everything you need to know about that.

Alright. That's a good framework to start, and between those beauts and the backlog of old posts that I'll throw up soon (throw up, HA - no really, you can go down memory lane a read a whole lot of Ali-Ben content!), you should have some entertainment coming up. Soon. I promise. No, really.

Oh, and I have about 2000 saved links to share, none of which will be current any more.

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.

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?

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.

The Categorical Unsight of Unicorns

u·ni·corn (yoo-ni-korn) - an imaginary creature represented as a white horse with a long horn growing from its forehead.

So if you saw something real, a white horse with a spiral horn protruding out of its forehead with a virgin comely lass on its back and rainbows and magic and the whole deal, it still wouldn't actually be a unicorn because they are by-definition imaginary. Existing unicorns are not unicorns.

Beck seems to think that this sort of thing, or more exactly finding this sort of thing funny, makes me a dork.

I press on.

fiveferfive / the week that was (II, 1)

Nothing diagram-worthy (diaphragm-worthy? HEYO!) from last night's softball game, but I did make all my plays in the OF and go five for five with 2 straight-up legit inside-the-park (sigh) HRs. The second one came late in a 7-7 game with 2 outs and nobody on, and we ended up winning that game 9-7, so groovy groovy jazzy funky on that. I took the week off from Ultimate in an effort to recover from the nasty job the Lei Out sand did on my adductors, and it seems to have served me well - no discomfort last night, so I'll be getting back on the field tomorrow for some pickup (and to get ready for next weekend's New Year's Fest). Hot times ahead! In the more immediate future, it's 1, lotsa Phil reading today; 2, Chinese New Year party with some of Beck's Cooking Light friends; and 3, birthday dinner with Danimal and Xtina. AND we have a veterinarian dinner tomorrow night! Butterflies be we.

The first official week back at school went well - I'm taking four classes, auditing one, doing some research / helping out with a class with Jason, and I suppose I should get on some of my own research interests. The four classes:

History and Philosophy of Scinece Weekly Lab Seminar (aka Weekly Departmental Discussion of Our Work Session)
Philosophy of Science Graduate Seminar
Cultural Psychology
Advanced Bioethics (Feminist Perspectives)
Neuroimmunophilosophy (Auditing)

The last class is a one-monther toward the end of the term, so nothing particular on that yet. We had our first HPS Seminar on Tuesday - last semester our class was combined with the Human & Social Dimensions of Science & Technology (HSDST, or HSD) lab of similar purpose, and the experiment crashed and burned. So we've divorced the two and put things back in an HPS-only seminar, which is FANTASTIC - Drs. Laubichler and Armendt are running it, and we had a great session on foundational problems of HPS and "Specific Theory," the question of how do you reconcile the particularity of case studies with notions of universality / the general. Cool stuff, and it seems as though having a smaller group to work with is going to help mightily.

Phil of Science (also Tuesday) was great Drs. Hamilton (my prof from last semester's semi-disastrous HSD class) and Creath, both of whom are actual in-the-flesh philosophers, run this course and do so in a fast-paced, know-yer-stuff atmosphere. We discussed a classic paper on scientific explanation which brought up, among other things, what the hey are you doing when you "explain" something. I tried to share this with Beck, but she responded with "isn't it obvious" and "this is just a semantic argument," both of which are fair assessments. If you permit yourself to play the philosophy game, though - admittedly semantic, but we are concerned with meaning, after all - it does get very hard to understand what explanation and hey, understanding are really getting at. This paper made the grand distinction between "Scientific explanation" and "mere description," and oddly, mere description seems to be a lot of what science does. This may be worthy of its own post entirely (post-worthy? Huh?), but think about Newtonian physics - when you have a body at location l₀ time t₀ with x mass, y velocity, z acceleration, etc., and then you have the same body at location l₁ at time t₁, you can "explain" how it got there by referring to Newton's laws. But what do those laws do, other than enable you to describe a bunch of intermediate positions between the two - how are these laws anything more than a method for compiling laundry lists of locations? Where is the understanding, really? The gist of the paper was that leaving that question aside, explanations tend to look like (conditions, laws) -> (outcomes), and there are some problems with that model. Sorry to wax on about this, but here's a funny example:

Condition: Joe is a man taking birth control pills
Law: Men who take birth control pills don't get pregnant
Outcome: Joe does not get pregnant

Does that strike you as an accurate explanation? Because it fits the requirements of the general scientific explanatory model (at least as proffered by this paper).

Anyways, that was Tuesday; Wednesday, I read a ton, worked on some stuff for Jason and eventually went to my Cultural Psychology course. The professor was wildly disorganized, and kept putting in under the guise of "I want to make sure you guys get out of this what you want," but really it just seems like he came in with a list of one hundred articles he thought were applicable to the topic and didn't do much work to structure the course. We'll see, but this could end up being a hodgepodge experience. The prof is also a HUGE evolutionary psychology fan, and Jason and I spent part of last semester reviewing a book that skewers the discipline*. So this should be fun.

* (Real quick - evo psych uses "natural selection" as a mechanism to explain certain psychological trends; classic example would be "men are unfaithful because it is to their reproductive advantage to sleep around." Overt Problem - Evo Psych stops at this level of analysis without offering an explanation of the underlying genetics or any mechanisms which would result in the observed outcomes. So you've got a lot of theoretical explanations of contemporary phenomena that don't ground themselves in evolutionary history or detail, which (obviously?) pisses biologists off; worse, evo psych often posit theories that fly in the face of known genetic mechanisms and therefore couldn't possibly be accurate. Evo Psych also aggravate general decent people on the street by hypothesizing things like "rape gives you a selective advantage," which would be interesting if demonstrable, but since its based on such armchair-guessing just strikes a lot of people as distasteful and controversial-to-sell-books. So, this semester could be fun; I'll tread lightly).

Neuroimmunophilosophy on Thursday was a bit of a bust; he was covering "basic immunology" which 1, I've already had several times over, and 2, is sort of categorically incomprehensible. Immunology is vastly complex, so to try to cover the entire shebang in an hour amounts to a long list of cell types and functions, all of which are vague and questionably useful as working definitions. Worse: they were presented in powerpoint with goofy animations and sounds and NO HISTOLOGY, so we saw nothing resembling "real" cells - not that histology cells are actually "real" - just a slew of jagged edged cartoon bubbles. Frustrating, but I can understand why the prof wanted to give everyone a grounding before diving into articles full of "cytokines" and "CD4+" cells and the like. Hopefully this will get better as we get into the philo; it is a combo grad / undergrad class, so I'm not going to hold my breath.

The main note from Friday was that I met with Andrew to discuss my HSD paper from last term and its implications for future research directions. Great meeting; he liked my paper, had several suggestions both for how to improve it and "next steps" for research. Word on the street is that he normally skewers papers, so pin a gold star on me. I am sure that ego-boost carried over into my HR walloping ways...

"Missing" a Hinge: Doors DeLuxe

Beck had the day off, and I still feel cold crappy, so we both stayed home this dreary Tuesday. After I edited a student article and read five more neuroscience articles and Beck facebooked quite a bit this AM, we trekked over to Luxe, a hipster indie coffee shop not too far from our house.

Luxe has that nice, abandoned warehouse aesthetic combined with enough Mac computers, black turtlenecks and unnatural hair dye colors to give it that so-hip-it-hurts vibe. The parking lot houses high mpg vehicles with Obama bumper stickers. A guy in the corner wears a shirt proclaiming "Enjoying My Coffee," smacking of concert-going being-that-guy. (Did his wire-rimmed glasses twinkle a little more than usual as he pulled that shirt off the floor? Don't know). Cool kids behind the counter deal lattes below sharpe-ed glass door menus; a stray marker remark asks if we are "real." Local art adorns the walls. There are tables and lounging chairs and couches. People in rugged sweaters greet one another as regulars. Beck asks if they have real jobs. All of this is meant to signify that Luxe is a cool, liberal-minded kid typical kind of a place. An archetype. Perfect setting to sip 500 calories of coffee goodness and read up on chimpanzee / human comparative neuroscience.

Except that this FRIGGIN HIPSTER COFFEEHOUSE found it necessary to blare an Everything But the Girl mix instead of perhaps more appropriate, certainly more desired light guitar strumming Baezian offerings. This would have been annoying enough, except that said mix featured at least four different versions of "Missing," that big club hit that you've undoubtledly heard before with the chorus "I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain." And it was on repeat.

Okay, i get it, you hipster ironists, it's pouring today in the desert. Your musical selection is quite jokily apt.

But they didn't want to just tell the joke once, they wanted everyone who entered in an hour-long period to hear the joke. Hence the repeat. They stopped eventually, but not before this tune had bored into my consciousness. Dammit.

Problem: not so much the tune that was reverberating between my ears. But something that I'm sure has been pointed out before: deserts don't miss rain. Deserts fare remarkably well without it (with the possible exception of those rare natural Arizona phenomena known as "golf courses," which are truly an ecological miracle). They are in fact kinda defined by their non-missing of rain. "I miss you... not at all because I by my very nature don't really need you all that regularly." Or even if you want to get all technical, the deserts here do get hit pretty reliably with a big dose of rain every monsoon season and again in the winter. So even if we grant that yeah, they miss their rain lover a bit, they still know it's coming back before too long. "I miss you... like other predictable cyclical events, for example, Arbor Day."

This is all trite of course, but my weird observation here is that Luxe managed to get not a song stuck in my head, but an irritation at a dumb metaphor. One that may not bother you all that much, but go listen to the song eight times in a row in marginally different forms at loud volume, and let's see how you feel about casually dropped incoherent metaphors that rose to #2 on the charts.

The other source of repeated entertainment at Luxe was the entranceway. I recently read this article by Bruno Latour about mechanical agency; one of my two or three favorite pieces from the entire semester. Highly recommended if you get a moment. A big part of it is dedicated to the human labor that gets replaced by placing a pneumatic hinge and an automatic latch on a door. (Latour refers to doorways as "wall holes" in the article, something that cracks me up for no obvious reason). Luxe's door decidedly lacked anything pneumatic about its hinge - Luxe being a decrepit converted warehouse and all - and the latch was hardly functioning at all. It was 45 degrees and raining outside, so this was somewhat noticeable for those of us sitting near the entrance. And when I say noticeable, I mean, "chilled our souls."

What was fascinating was the incompetence with which Luxe customers attempted to solve the door problem. I'd say it was about a 1 for 50 success rate while we were there (excluding the Beck, who thanks perhaps to being biased by my observation and generally being a considerate human who cares for the comfort of others, closed the door with aplomb). Some assumed pneumaticness and just let go of the door after they traversed the wall hole; one lady waltzed through the door, refusing to deign to touch it; others gave it a perfunctory shove as they went on their way. But the vast majority did a four step dance: 1, walk through assuming the pneumatic; 2, shuffle step in surprise as the door did not close; 3, push it closed, but not all the way, leaving it unlatched and one foot agape; 4, shrug and leave. You know, denying the door its "doorness." An utter failure to secure the wall hole or keep out the wind and rain. Wasting electricity isnide of Luxe and making all of our carbon footprints that much EEEer. Seeing this exact same pattern of failure and apathy quickly made me question the resolve of our hipster slick community. I mean, if they can't even shut a friggin' door, how can we expect them to sort their recyclables? And these are the conscientious folks? I miss that door's functioning hinge like the desert misses the time before human reign!

Now, this may seem like the mindless minutiae of a cold Tuesday morning. And it is. But had you even thought about door hinges and their implications for the future of mankind before now? Or the evils of stupid club hit metaphors, and the think-they're-clever barristas who blare them? On repeat? This is annoying, important stuff, people!

All of that said, the coffee was mad yummy, and yeah I am like totally going back tomorrow, mainly to be seen. And I'll be the guy wearing the t-shirt that says "t-shirt."
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Now playing: Beck - Missing... a hipster lack of consideration for people sitting next to the door.

Didn't Even Have to Use My AK (Week 15, too)

Greetings from the depths of academia.

It's very hard to write on ye olde Ballade when there's a constant pressure to be writing elsewhere. So if I go under for a week here or there, trust that that's why.

The writing project of late that has eaten my time like an event horizon has been a paper for the HSD core seminar. I'm writing on rhetoric in public science communication during the Sociobiology controversy of the mid-seventies. The reason today was a good day¹ is that after dragging my feet/knuckles for a solid couple of weeks - I was reading and doing a ton of background work in that time, but still, I just couldn't get myself to start writing - I finished the first draft of the paper. Huzzah!

Considering this is pretty much all I've been doing (aside from a slew of other research projects and the usual class reading and such) for the past LONG WHILE, it feels pretty good to have it done. It's not in shareable form yet; I need to do some editing and rewriting and the like, but I'll post it when I get it to the readable stage. 28 double spaced pages of some pretty annoying quotey detailed analysis, so i suppose we all have that to look forward to.

Speaking of 28... sigh:


(Photo nabbed from Boing Boing; Yoko sent it specially to them to commemorate his passing. Other than typing DAMMIT four thousand times, I have little to add here. I was two at the time).

So the week 14 account is somewhat boring, mainly because of the previously mentioned paper-write-a-thon. We suffered through our last shared lab on Monday - actually scratch that, the lab itself was pretty cool; Dr. Hall talked about some of his work on Evolutionary Development (aka Evo Devo). But we suffered the death rattle of the lab in that form; seems the desire to divorce HPS/BPL from HSD has become overwhelming, so next semester we are back on our own. This has all kinds of icky politics behind it so I will forego that here; suffice it that sunnier days are ahead (theoretically) from both camps' perspectives.

Also sat through my last law class, so that requirement is dead and gone.

Tuesday - Thursday was sorta a mess because Beck was sick and coughing all night. So I did research for my paper from home and did my reading for Friday. Friday's class was another eagerly received death knell of a class; we were treated to a trio of presentations on the Philosophy of Technology, the height of which were the claim that computer software is immaterial and that the tale of Icarus is an anti-technology fable. People couldn't get out of there fast enough; this class was also drenched in political ill and represents a divorcing of departments for next semester. So yay for that. We did cap Friday with a party at Jane and Richard's house - the whole department etended showed up, and a good ol' time was had by all.

When I look at this semester's classes... YECK. Not a great first semester class-wise, though things should turn better this spring. And I suppose the fact that I didn't go running crazy from the premises in response to the circumstances is a solid sign that I like what I'm doing despite the objective badness of the classes I found myself in this semester. So, that's... good?

(Musical insert: Axl just asked me, over a sonicscape of thunderstorm and raindrops, "What's so civil about war anyways?" What indeed, W. Axl.)

Anyways, back to the good day - tossed the frisbee with Johnny, melissa, Mark, matt and Genevieve and then got a burrito at lunch today. That was fun in a stupid tossing on the quad kinda way, followed by the usual awesome lunch hijinks. At some point today / yesterday we also watched this video, which is funny as hell but decidedly unsafe for work. Get that song running through your head for a (short but) good time.

And yeah, I stomped that paper! Seriously, after not getting anywhere near as much done this weekend as I wanted, I ran through and got a ton of pages written by hunkering down in the lab the past two days. Go team Nyet. Er, me.

So anyways, that's the tale of week 14 and part of week 15. The plan is to finish editing / rewriting on both papers tomorrow and get those suckas turned in so I can get on to the next thing. Fun times.

Hopefully this means I'll get some more updates in soon. Still gotta do GPGDS and the Rochester Turkey week. And discussing Men's League and the uberfun Royal WEfnuk dinner (as well as the DOPE t-shirts that Alexxx has designed) would be a good idea, too. Until then...

Would you PLEASE give it on up to Homeslessville?

¹ Knowest ye thy Ice Cube?

Weeks 12 & 13 Recap

Quickly, the last two weeks at ASU:

Monday (Nov. 10): Endured perhaps the most boring lecture on sustainability of my life for monday seminar. No offense to the speaker or the field, but man oh man, he was describing "ethnographic" work he did by observing sustainability engineers from various fields and settings, and it was just horrendous - at one point he showed a video clip of a conference where people had split into groups and were all talking simultaneously. It was just as stupid as being at one of those conferences where they split you up and make you write on a giant pad in big fat marker, only less exciting because it was a freaking video of that mundane activity, and you couldn't understand anything anyone was saying. His comment afterwards was, "as you can see, it's hard to figure out what's going on." Pretty much wanted to smack my head with a book right there.

Law class - ugh, this guy came to give a guest lecture. The lecture was on performance enhancement in sports, and his basic take is that performance enhancing drugs are in no way different from anything else, and there actually is no ethical argument against them. I presume he thinks it will all just work itself out. He supports his argument with a spurious collapsing of various sports medicine, technologies and practices, honestly equating things like anabolic steroids, aluminum bats, overtraining and carbo-loading at various points. He was dismissive of questions and generally unpleasant; apparently he kept this up at a meeting with undergrads in the Bioethics Club meeting later in the week. Just a pompous guy, not a very fun exercise at all.

Tuesday - spent the majority reading evolutionary psych papers for a project I'm working on with Jason.

Wed - Finished reading those papers, only to have Jason cut our meeting short and then redirect it to a completely different topic. Too busy that guy is. We also talked about institution creation in law class, which was interesting only in its discussion of icann, the internet "governing" body, which is apparently just some dudes in California who more or less rule the world. CRAZY.

Thurs - started some more serious work on my seminar paper (it's on science communication and assumptions regarding the "scientific laity" in the Sociobiology controversy, wahoo) and did my reading for seminar. Reading was all about systems of organization during the progression of the Industrial Revolution and into the early 20th century (Fordism, Taylorism, etc.). Interesting stuff, and it set up

Friday - Holy Awkward Batman. Andrew was back for seminar and Clark was absent, which represented a distinct shift in professorial attitude. Melissa gave a presentation on the aforementioned systems organizations, and it was admittedly pretty muddled. Difficult to figure out her structure, what she was driving at, and there was no real narrative going on, just a slew of disparate notions. Andrew, tired of muddy presentations for the semester, all but heckled her during her presentation and then took the opportunity to give a short professional development talk about how one should give a conference talk. His points were all excellent and well-intentioned, but man did Melissa take the brunt of a response that was really to a semester's worth of bad talks. Melissa took it well but understandably got a bit defensive; then the class got defensive ("We didn't know what kind of talk we were supposed to be giving, it's not fair!"), and all the while Andrew was trying to point out that he wasn't concerned about this class, just everyone's ability to show up at a conference and pull off a good presentation. The subtleties here went unnoticed, and a lot of bad blood seeped out. Pretty ugly, actually. Melissa needed a beer at lunch to decompress.

Andrew is a really interesting guy. Funny, engaging, smart, passionate, but also carries a weird sense of "does not care" that reminds me of certain suitemates from my past. He can alternatingly come off as borderline asperger's and the life of the party. And he's also a sort of mover and shaker, but definitely of the rough joke-telling kind. So he can come off as blunt and a jackass. Example: he routinely responds to an unclear question in class by saying "In English, that would sound like this." He then "translates" the question into something more concise than whatever random spewing you just did. Okay, fine, it's a stock joke, and he goes to it frequently; it's pretty rude but it's all in good fun. The problem is, when he tells it by reflex after a German girl who barely speaks English struggles to ask a question in class, WOW. Awkward. (Incidentally, she played it off, saying "Oh, it's a joke, HA HA" in a sternly German way. Brilliant).

Anyhoo, Andrew's a good guy if a bit rough sometimes. We share an impatience for incompetence. He's also highly supportive of his students is his own way. Good times.

Monday (Nov. 17) - Heard from Donna Dean, a cool scientist with lots of high end NIH experience with all kinds of ideas on policy and the like. She just happened to be in town for the day, and it was probably the best class of the semester. Education by serendipity. Hey Ya. Hey Ya. Law class was law restrictions on science research, which essentially turned into industry practices and unwillingness of scientists to share data. More of the same. I got my paper back that day, and Dr. Marchant seemed to like it with only a couple of paragraphs that need reworking (and some miscellaneous typos and the like). Good stuff.

Jason had shoulder surgery in here, so he's been out all week.

Tuesday - Gathered everything and started buckling down for the sociobiology paper. Also did some of the reading for our seminar class which got moved to Monday. Long day of intense reading.

Wednesday - Read for seminar, worked a bit on my paper, and then decided it would be a great day to check out Andrew's lecture on The Selfish Gene. It was in his Science and Society class, TA'ed by the ever-awesome Jenny, and I was more interested in seeing how to teach a book like that in a large lecture format than anything else. Things gleaned: 1, an Andrew large lecture class is kinda like a standup set. He's hella funny, even if his class doesn't always get the jokes. 2, he went soooooo slooooooow. Which is good thing to do to make sure you keep everyone in a room of that size with you - but man is it painful if you've read and understood the book. I don't remember my Rice lectures being like this; then again, we didn't really have too many classes with 140 people in them. So a good and worthwhile experience; I'm definitely planning on attending again on Monday.

Law class was actually a reasonably interesting guest lecture on digital discovery. Law in the digital age is NUTS is the general message I'm getting - you can essentially get sanctioned for not backing up your e-mail in certain scenarios. Yikes.

Seminar was decent - we read Noble and Latour, and Johnny gave a fly-by talk on Noble (the military has shaped our production economy) and Katherine BS'ed her way through a talk on black-boxing science. The class was theoretically on standardization, so we waxed a bit in that vein. Then we covered our paper topics (mine seemed at least mildly interesting to all involved, though I got the ever-annoying "why does this matter?" question that I need to articulate better). And then Clark and Andrew teamed to give us a talk on how to write a prospectus or a grant proposal. Useful stuff, if a little weird to be coming three weeks before our papers are due.

Grabbed dinner with Johnny, Katherine, Andrew and his fianceé Shannon (who is super nice). Great time at Casey Moore's, and Andrew picked up the tab. What a guy!

I wussed out Thursday and worked from home. The reason we had class on Wednesday instead of Friday is that most everyone has checked out for the holidays already. Weird. I got a fair amount of work done and then headed over to the frisbee event. Bringing us to:

This second - I'm gonna head into the school to go to the library real quick, but other wise there's no real reason to work at ASU when I can do the same stuff in the company of my dogs. So I'll run down there quick, do some work, then head back here to do some work, then head over to softball for a light, light, good-lord-don't-hurt-yourself doubleheader with No Drama. And then on to the the tourney tomorrow... and a follow up Guitar Hero-fest over at D&C's. Fun times ahead!