The Frisbee Week I: Clinics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week 1.8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Um...

Oh...

Uh, not have way, I guess."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Now playing: Pavement - Elevate Me Later

Cat power

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

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

Book Review : Un Homme et Une Femme

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pithy F*rging Sayings (8th ed.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to other Clarion sayings posts.

Its Own Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Week In

But first, a rewind to orientation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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