Unimaginable Luxury

I'm over a month into my summer of complete freedom, and things couldn't be better. I'm jogging my 1.5 miles five days a week, sleeping 8 - 9 hours per night, reading a good novel, hanging out with friends every day, eating good food, drinking good coffee, seeing good shows, and generally living a life of, well, unimaginable luxury. It could only be better if The Daily Show and Colbert weren't in reruns now. And it would be better if the nightmares would stop. Seriously. Somehow when I'm completely relaxed during the days, my subconscious decides I'm not getting my RDA of stress, so it starts having stress dreams. I got a break for a few days when I went to the Adirondacks (so much fun), and for one day at home I was fine, but now the bad dreams have returned. It sucks not to look forward to sleep...usually it's so lovely.

But anyway, while I'm awake, I'm happy. This sort of worries me. By and large, the great people of the world can't help but do stuff. Great artists always do their art. Great activists are always looking for ways to help. People who achieve things do so, in part, because they can't stand sitting around and doing nothing. I love sitting around and doing nothing...or at least I love not working. I am doing a fair amount, I'm just not working on making anything happen. I've given up on all of my projects for the summer, deciding I'd rather just have a good time. I don't plan to travel, because I don't like the hassle of traveling. And this worry that I have isn't some deep, motivating force; it's just a general acknowledgment of an unproductive temperament. I'd like to achieve great things in life, but with two major personality traits working against me—satisfaction without accomplishment and reluctance to commit to one discipline at the expense of all others—that's going to be somewhat difficult.

Oh, I did win a trivia challenge this vacation. You can read all about my glorious achievement here. To read about the challenge, take a look at Day 1, and to navigate to all the puzzles, use Day 5. That was pretty exciting.

Sadly, part one of this summer is about to come to an end. I move out of my apartment on Monday, back for a month in Westchester with my family. I think it'll be nice to hang out in the burbs for a while, and it will make the transition back to school more natural, but I'm also going to really, really miss living in the city and in this apartment. My roommates are awesome, and the freedom of New York living is unparalleled. I can hop on the subway and be anywhere in Manhattan in a half hour. It's awesome. I do like Westchester, and I love spending time with my family, and I'll be coming back into the city frequently, but it sure won't be the same. I'll be doing lots of errands and driving around and probably spending much more time in the house than I currently do in my apartment. So here I am, down to my last three days as a true New Yorker. It's the end of an era, folks.

First Time Around!

Living in a post-work world has been lovely thus far. I wake up late and well-rested, I've been exercising, reading The Audacity of Hope, seeing shows, and slowly (and unsurely) working on a musical of my own. I get randomly anxious, of course, but I tend to do that when I'm not working. I also get not-so-randomly anxious...I should probably pick a day to move out and contact some movers, eh? Pshaw. Pura vida. Om.

Today, I achieved my first goal of the summer: Jogging all the way around the reservoir in Central Park without stopping. This is part of my getting into shape plan, which now involves continuing to jog around the reservoir once a day without stopping. Hopefully I'll gradually get faster.

My initial goal was to start with one lap and work my way up to two. I guess I underestimate how unfit I really am/was...or maybe I just underestimated how long 1.5 miles is because all of my in-shape friends say obnoxious things like "Oh, I just did a nice easy three mile run today," or "Yeah, that was a good seven mile run," or "I'm working on getting my 6.5 minute mile down to 6 minutes." (I'm looking at you, Greg.) In any case, when you haven't run since you were nine, 1.5 miles is hard.

So my first day I had hoped to run a full lap but wound up running half. And I was in a lot of pain. The second day was worse. Much worse. I didn't even make it a quarter of the way around. The third day, sore of leg, blistered of foot, and broken of spirit, I speed walked. I took the fourth day off. Yet somehow, with some stretching, serious pacing, more selectivity of my music, and the misery of those first three days behind me, I started improving this week. Monday was the first day I did better than day one, making it over a mile before walking. On Tuesday I made it almost all the way around. And today, for the first time, I made it all the way around the track! Yay! 1.5 miles of pure jogging, baby!

Now, when I say I paced myself this week, I mean I really slowed the fuck down. I've been operating under the jogging philosophy that my legs should always hurt more than my lungs. It hasn't entirely worked out that way, but it certainly helps me at the beginning when I just want to run and know that if I do, I'll never make it around.

All right, time to switch the laundry. More updates TK.

Then We Came to the End

I'm reading that book right now, and not only is it a great read, but it's also very appropriate for this week, when both my tenure at work and the Democratic primary come to their respective ends.

I'm psyched to ride the Obama tide. I was an ambivalent but unwavering Hillary supporter throughout the primary, and I still think she would make an excellent president. I really can't get too worried about verbal gaffes or the sins of her supporters; I like her health care plan, I like her doggedness, and I like her solidity. But I think she now needs to concede—I always said she would never concede on the night of a primary win, so I'm not surprised she didn't concede tonight—so we can start the fight for Obama. And, actually, I think she needs to concede so the Republicans can start their fight against Obama. If they have aces up their sleeves that they're just waiting to rip out, it's far better they do it June than in September. And the sooner we can see him juxtaposed with McCain, the better. He will come across so well: He's quicker (I don't mean smarter, per se, but that too), he's more poised, and he's more passionate. He just needs really good foreign policy people whispering in his ear so he makes zero gaffes. I think Barack Obama will make a wonderful, thoughtful, and inspiring president, and I'm thrilled to have him as our nominee.

I wasn't too upset about work winding down. I've been excited for the summer and all the possibility and freedom it holds, and I've been looking forward to living outside the 9 to 5 (or 10 to 7, as the case may be). But just last Friday I started to feel the impending nostalgia. I work in a great area with great people researching and writing about great ideas. There have been better times and worse times at work, but in the end, I've been working in a job most people can only dream about. Not only do I get to write, but I get to write about science. Not only do I get to research, but I get to talk to great scientists about their work. Not only do I report, but I get to think deeply about scientific ideas. Not only do I get to think about articles, but I get to think creatively, across as many media as can fit on a screen (and that's many). And I get to do it all with an uncommonly intelligent and young group of people. That's pretty special. Oh, and I get to proofread. Which I enjoy more than is probably healthy.

There was a time, after I had been writing news stories for a while, when I was wondering whether I was really getting a lot out of my job. A couple of years later, I know I've learned an incredible amount. My writing is better than ever (and if you were looking for "but also"s to follow all of those "not only"s...I hate you). I have become more comfortable on the phone and with my ability to talk with people of all ages and levels of prestige. I have learned what it means to work in an office and what it means to work on a team...and how many things 'working on a team' can mean. I have slowly started to figure out what makes a good boss and what makes a good subordinate, although those are always a little slippery. While I never quite got the hang of thinking as a journalist—that's one of the reasons I'm not staying—I did get the hang of thinking about issues from the perspective of our publication, which is a worthwhile perspective to have. And I learned a lot about science. That's important stuff.

I certainly can't sum up 32 months in a single blog post, but I'll just say, I've been grateful for them. Even in the most miserable times, I was learning, and even in the best times, I was finding out what was wanting in me and in my work.

Oy, I've fallen into lots of soulful repetitions in this post. I think it's because I'm listening to Obama's victory speech as I write. Back to the Baracketry...

Changing Taxonomies

I am amused—as it is so easy to be—by the number of basic facts I learned in elementary, nay, pre-school that have changed since I entered higher education (middle school).

Most obviously, the planet Pluto is dead. Long live dwarf planet Pluto! I guess there was always the possibility we'd discover another planet, and our solar system wouldn't stay at 9 forever. Yeah, that would have been cool to discover another planet. Maybe two other planets. We discovered there were probably about 200. So the IAU voted, and decided that it wasn't enough for a planet to orbit the sun and be sufficiently massive that it is nearly round, but it also has to clear its own orbit. Eight planets stayed in. Pluto was out. We never really learned that astronomers didn't have a good definition of a planet. Who knew this was even a possibility? That would have been an awesome lesson in ambiguity and human imperfection. Or it would have been an awesome excuse for some wise guy four-year-old not to memorize his planets. Maybe it's a good thing we just learned them.

We all learned how to eat according to the food pyramid. It looked like this. Apparently, to live healthfully, you should carbo-load like there's a worldwide grain shortage (er...) and run like hell from fats and oils. Today we know the true evil of the carbohydrate and the vast healing power of the omega-3. Or something. The food pyramid now looks like this. Apparently the pyramid was either too good a shape to lose or too good a url to change. It doesn't really matter that the pyramid no longer has a base and really looks more like a 2-D prism than a proper pyramid. The important thing is it's a pyramid. I just tried to play with the MyPyramid menu planner, but apparently a coke with a steak for dinner already puts me over my recommended "extras" maximum. We need to set realistic goals, people. I'm not becoming a raw foodie anytime soon. Anyway, the food pyramid is gone, the food prism has arrived, and Michael Pollan's approach of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." is probably the wisest option yet.*

The good Lord made four apocalyptic horsemen, four Gospels, and four sons with varying question-asking abilities. He also made four tastes: Sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. Or so we were told. Long before my birth, those c-razy Asians knew the power of MSG to make food taste delicious. But only recently did Western taste taxonomists catch on and dub "umami" a fifth fundamental taste. I guess I understand why we were confused...it's a little hard to distinguish "savory" from "salty;" but the distinction is there, and the four elements of taste aren't the complete set of orthogonal bases I was raised to believe they were.

So, now that I've finished mocking my elementary education and our general confidence with current knowledge, here's what I think the punchline is to all this: These were all good mistakes. Well, maybe the food pyramid was never based on anything especially solid, but certainly we had decent cause to believe that we had 9 planets and the tongue tastes four flavors. We didn't wildly misinterpret our evidence. We didn't miss an obvious interpretation of data because we were sticking to dogma. We just needed to wait until the right evidence became available for us to change our taxonomies. And it's also important to note that these are taxonomies, not theories. These aren't rules of science with great explanatory power from which we could make lots of predictions. It can be upsetting when we get those wrong. These are just discrete categories. If new evidence shows up, it's very easy to add and amend. And so we have done just that. I guess this just shows us that the things that lend themselves to elementary school memorization—which happen to be the things that stick in our heads for our entire lives—aren't usually the things that have the most meaning or pack the most punch. But hey, at least those multiplication tables will never go out of style.

*_{Yes, I realize that steak is not a plant and coke is not food. Shut up.}

Forgive Me, Father...

...for I have sinned. I wonder if Catholics actually feel absolved of their sins when they confess. As an atheist Jew, I've never had the privilege, so my sins just sit with me. Unless I apologize for them. Which I'm usually too chicken-shit to do. So I thought I'd put them on the blog as my own form of confession. I spend a lot of time thinking about the bad things I've done to people—they literally keep me up at night, sometimes—so I might as well get them out in the open. Without some sort of openness, I feel like a phony. I'm no less reprehensible for confessing them on my blog, but at least I'm not faking moral perfection, or even consistent pretty-good-ness.

This isn't about vices, although there are plenty of those. I don't really worry about my porn- or bad-TV-watching. That doesn't hurt anyone. And it's not even about my absurd sins of omission (I may have the single worst community service and charitable giving record of anyone I've ever met). This is about me actively doing things that hurt people. So, here it is, a working list of my sins. I'll update as things come to mind:

1. Probably the worst thing I've done: As you may know, in college, I photographed for a "beautiful people" issue of the campus tabloid. My senior year, I photographed a professor for the issue. After college, I created a personal website and put lots of the photographs of attractive guys up, along with the names of the guys and little blurbs about them. The one I put up about this professor was horrible. I called him unbelievably arrogant (he was glad to take the photographs, which was great, because that makes for much better pictures) and mentioned his facial hair and swaggery style in really obnoxious ways. I meant for the blurb to be light-hearted, but one critical perusal would have made it pretty obvious how hurtful the blurb could be. Critically, the professor's full name was in the blurb as well as in the title of the page. I periodically googled names on my website just to be sure they didn't turn up, and the names never did. Apparently google didn't search the title field. What I didn't realize was that google most certainly did search the blurb field, and not only was it picking up the professor's name, but it was returning my page on the first page of google hits for the professor.

I didn't know about any of this until a source who wished to remain nameless emailed me saying that the page was turning up on searches for this professor and not only had it hurt him personally, but it may have been hurting him professionally, too. It was also brought to my attention that the professor had been having an otherwise very tough year (illness, etc.) and this was just adding to his troubles. The source also emphasized that keeping the page up was fully within my rights...yeah, great. Needless to say, I took it down immediately. I still can't believe that I was so thoughtless and careless and in such a way that hurt someone so badly...that I said something rude, hurtful, and uncalled for in a forum that everyone could read and people would actually be led to. And I never apologized. And I don't think I'm going to...I'm just terrified. I am, in the truest sense, sorry, but that doesn't change anything. I hurt someone, and the best I can hope for is that the damage is done and won't continue.

2. In English class, in high school, I called a close friend's comment "stupid." I even led up to it with "I've wanted to have an occasion to say this for a long time," or something like that. I was jealous of his incredible breadth of knowledge, his intellectual confidence, and his insight, and that jealousy came out in this horrible way. He had the good form to tell me after class that he thought my "behavior today was disgusting." He was right. It was.

3. I had a rough time, socially, in elementary school. So I probably should have known better than to pick on this guy in middle school. For some reason, I thought our mockery of him was in good fun. He never seemed to take it too badly, and people do sometimes pick on their friends in light-hearted ways without problems. But he didn't take it that way. I didn't realize that until I asked him to sign my yearbook at the end of the year, and he said, "What should I say, 'thanks for making my life miserable?'" I was pretty stunned.

4. In a dining hall in college, there were these two grad students sitting around laughing. I imitated their laughter to my friends. They heard. They stared at me in disbelief.

There are more, I know. I'll add them as I think of them.

Dublin Trip(lin)

I have returned from Dublin! I thought it would be faster to record a video than to actually write about the trip (I may have been wrong), so here's the video. Sorry for the weird high-pitched buzzing. I'd get rid of it...if I cared! Oh! Snap! Right:



(I hope that worked...if not, I'll fix when I return)

Gerry: Spring Her

Perhaps I'm missing some context. Perhaps I'm completely tone deaf. Perhaps I'm a horrible human being. But I don't see what the whole kerfuffle is about Geraldine Ferraro's remarks on Obama's popularity. As far as I can tell, she asserted that people wouldn't be as excited about Obama's candidacy if he weren't black, and this has contributed significantly to his success thus far. She also said that being a woman has more mixed repercussions, with some excitement generated but also a strong negative response, particularly from the media.

On the second point, about women candidates, I think I'd go so far as to say I agree. See my (likely incoherent) post below about types and why it's really hard for a woman to come off well as a leader. Ferraro's bitterness is unbecoming, to be sure, but I think her point is at least reasonable and at most right on.

Then to the race comment. I'll say first, I don't agree that people's excitement about his race is what's pushed him to this level of success. His charisma, his words, his voice, his speaking style, his optimism, and, of course, his message of hope, unity, and change would have been more than enough to get him this sort of following no matter what his race. Of course, you can't entirely separate things like his speaking style from his race, but I don't think that's what Ferraro was talking about.

OK, that said, why is it so horrible for her to suggest that? And worse, why is it so horrible that Clinton has to not only disagree but also "reject and denounce" both the comments and Ferraro herself? I understand it's dirty for a politician to give tacit consent to hideous speech on their behalf. But this doesn't strike me as outside the realm of normal messy politics. Neither did the Samantha Powers "monstrous" remark. Did that really merit a resignation?

Maybe there's reason to believe Ferraro truly sees this as some kind of affirmative action...at least partially because she's said the same thing about her own nomination for vice president. But the (obvious) difference between those situations is one dude (and his advisers) chose her as his running mate. A fair portion of the country is getting psyched about Obama. It's pretty hard to do affirmative action by a non-communicating, many-million-person committee. They like him; they really like him! Why do people think her comments were intended to be any more than "people are psyched about electing a black candidate, and that's an essential factor in his success." And if that's all there is, why is that so heinous a point to raise?

P.S. I reserve full right to delete or edit this post if I realize I sound like a moron later. :-P

Race & Sex. Yaaaaay!

In a discussion this inflated, my two cents are worth, well, about five Indonesian Rupiahs. (Oh, snap.) But I've been thinking a bit about this whole question of whether race or sex puts a presidential candidate at a greater disadvantage. A lot of the science seems to suggest that things are harder on the woman. Racial prejudice seems to be easier to overcome with specifics about a person, but prejudice against a gender is there to stay.

My thought...and perhaps it's a totally obvious one...is that we see people in types. And we have a whole bunch of these types, but ultimately it's a finite number. So if you try to think of an "old, black man," you might have five types that come into your head...and there are probably traits besides being old, black men they all have in common. And I think people have to play into these types in some way, otherwise we just don't quite get them. Even as a black man, Obama can play into the Edward R. Murrow-style gravitas. And there's just no type like that for women. If there are wise, gravitas-type women, they're generally low energy. And low-energy won't win you a nomination.

OK, things have gotten too interesting around the apartment for me to continue this post...another time, maybe.

When I'm Drunk, I'm Beautiful...

Hello, blog-reading friends! I am a bit smash-ed right now, which, as you know, is somewhat unusual for me. I'm not averse to a glass of fine wine/beer/liquor here and there, but I am usually averse to five glasses of fine wine/beer/liquor here or there. All of this apparently changes when I go to a phenomenal dinner with V at a fine restaurant where he's buds with the sommelier. Some advice: Try to go to a fine restaurant where you or your date is buds with the sommelier. There will be perks (which are substantially better than blood). Chris (said sommelier) gave us not only some complimentary wine, but also two additional scotches to go with the Macallan 25 we splurged on. One of the two was a Macallan 50. Oh my God. I don't even know how to describe it. Suffice it to say I feel superior to you all, now that I've had the Macallan 50. I'm like the 14 year old boy who's the first in his class to have sex. Or something. While my taste buds are elated, but metaphors apparently suffer after a gin and tonic, a glass of champagne, half a bottle of chateau-du-pape, a taste of 10 year scotch, a serving of 25 year scotch, and half a serving of 50 year scotch. Maybe I exaggerate. But barely.

The food was great, too. I had a "PB & J" (their creative foie gras-based appetizer) and bacon-wrapped duck. V had a goat cheese salad and the short ribs with truffle mousse. All dishes were phenomenal. And Chris arranged for a complimentary lollipop tree with dessert, which was amazing. In short, even if you have to pay full price for everything. I recommend davidburke & donatella. The portions are far more generous than you'll get at any other super-upscale restaurant, and the food is redonkulous.

So V and I got wasted. We were about even until Grand Central. He had missed his train by five minutes, so we stopped at the bar. Realizing that 130 pounds of Jew can only take so much, I ordered a coke. He got another cocktail, which tipped him from loose-lipped to incoherent. Which was fun, but it also marked a pretty clear end to the festivities. The loose-lipped stage was great, though. I'm sure tomorrow morning I'll regret many things I didn't get out of him. But the things I did get out of him were pretty good...mwhahahahaha.

Oh! And I should mention what we were celebrating, considering it's been my most important life development in a while: I got into YUUS this past week! Woo! I'm not positive I'm going to go there...I'm still looking pretty seriously at one other UUS (mentioned in an earlier post), but I think it's the most likely place, and I'm very, very excited to be offered a spot. When I visited Brad there at the beginning of the year, one thing he said to me was, "this is the most intellectually secure group of people I've ever met." That's a pretty compelling reason to choose a school. So I'm a little bit thrilled.

In other life news, Jess and I went to a Rufus concert at Radio City on Valentine's Day. The concert was just great; I've been listening to 14th Street constantly ever since. Rufus is pretty sweet live...all of his crazy Rufisms come across even better than they do on the albums. And his outfits are (there's no better word) fabulous. All right, I should probably get to bed early so I'm ready to read for Seed tomorrow morning. Good night, my friends!

You Are Old

I've had that familiar itch lately. That feeling of, "My God, how long has it been? A month? A year? Longer? Too long." So tonight I did it.

I found some interesting data, and I graphed it.



This is a breakdown, in five year increments, of the age of the world's population. It's from the International Data Base. Sorry about that little yellow box in the upper left-hand corner...screen captures aren't what they used to be.

If you are 28, I have some exciting news for you: You're older than over half of the world! I know, you can't deduce this exactly from the chart, but it's in the database (or data base, as the case may be). To all my friends turning 25 now, you are older than merely 44.8% of the world. In a little over a week, however, my grandmother will turn 80 and be officially older than 98.5% of the world's population. Yowza. And those small children aren't so small...compared to the world! Five-year-olds are older than about a tenth of the world.

I think this stuff is fascinating. BTW, world life expectancy is 66.2 years...but that's including infant mortality. Oh, and it's the world. It's a pretty diverse place. If you live in the good ol' US of A you can (at birth) expect to live 78.1 years. If you're a newborn in Liberia...you don't want to know.

Good and Bad Cryptic News

So, I got the inevitable bad news last week: My cryptic was rejected by the Times. Their criticisms were very fair, and I appreciated their (briefly stated) insights. It was still sad. They published a cryptic on Sunday, though, and it was a very neat one: Show about meat (6) = REVEAL; Musical instrument tossed into breach (9) = VIOLATION; Starts to cry after performing extremely risky stunt (5) = CAPER. Tidy clues like that. I was very happy that I still loved doing the cryptic, even after mine was rejected. I've had negative experiences with things I love after which I can't really look at the thing for a while. It's always bugged me, and I like to think I'm getting over that.

In other good news, I got into another vibrant center of UU studies, and they're giving me mad incentives. Incentives are tempting, so I will be considering this particular UU institute more closely. Yay, them.

And I've discovered a new pet peeve: Jargon. (OK, it's actually an old pet peeve that's resurfaced.) I understand things need names, and shorthand can be very convenient...so, yes, there is a time and place for jargon. But I feel like people and ideas are often unfairly excluded by jargon. People will, say, have an idea about what it means to act ethically, and someone will respond, "Oh, that's utilitarianism." And that way whatever subtle differences existed between the person's original idea and utilitarianism proper get eliminated. It's kind of like how victims of a crime will describe the perpetrator to a sketch artist, and from then on in, their image of the perp is the one drawn, not the one they saw. Everyone's ideas kind of get sifted into preexisting categories. Maybe this is fair...maybe the currently existing categories are the optimal versions of these theories...the ones that have withstood the test of time. But I have a hard time believing they're truly an orthogonal basis of philosophy. I think it might be better to let people's ideas flourish for a while without categorizing them. Maybe it could actually lead somewhere.

As for excluding people...well, I just see so many blog comments telling people the name of the fallacy they're committing, or the theory they're ignoring, or the concept they've overlooked. And by handing them the jargon (affirming the consequent! logical positivism! the patriarchy!) they're putting them out of the conversation. Usually these concepts are simple enough that they could take the time to explain and thus continue to engage the person. But they don't. They just tell them to "look it up." In this way jargon prevents learning, and it pisses me off.

So, here's my quick thought for the day: Jargon is a necessary and convenient evil for people who spend large amounts of time dealing with a topic, but in general, the use of jargon shows a lack of understanding and does not in any way indicate that the speaker belongs to the group that should be using it. If you can explain an idea simply, always do it. Ultimately the name of the idea isn't as important as the idea itself.

And now I am tired. Good night.

Unrequited Love (the blog post!)

But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.
—Abraham Cowley

All right, I admit it: I took that from the Wikipedia entry, /Unrequited_love. So sue me.

Unrequited love is, like, one of the big emotions, right? Shakespeare! Dante! Hugo! Et cetera! They all took on unrequited love, holding it up as one of the most all-consuming, powerful feelings a person can have. Woe unto the man or woman struck with this affliction, for it can inspire you to great achievement, but all the while it tears out your heart. This is the reaction we have to unrequited love.

...OR IS IT?

What was the last reaction you had to someone who loved in vain? Was it, "Oh God, I'm so, so sorry for your suffering."? Was it, "Take this burning passion and sublimate it! Let it drive you."? Or was it, "Yeah, that sucks. But at least you know: He's married/gay/straight/not into you. Now get over him."? I'm betting on that one.

To everyone's credit, that is the healthiest response, getting over him. But I wonder why we believe this to be so overwhelmingly possible today, to the point where it's considered a sign of immaturity not to get over your crush? When did we delegitimize unrequited love? I don't think the feeling has gotten any less potent in the last 500 years (although I'd imagine the selective pressure for genes that help you get over crushes would be strong).

Kudos, then, to Barry McCrea. When I read this essay he wrote for Sex Week at Yale, I found it enormously refreshing. I haven't looked at it since it was published a year or two ago, but it's stuck with me throughout. (Looking at it again, now, I realize exactly how much it's stuck with me...and I again doubt Ms. Viswanathan's guilt. Anyway.) He acknowledges how bad it can be—see the friend who lost her job—without dismissing or demeaning it. I especially like his point that unrequited love takes you outside yourself...even though I'm not sure I agree with it. Yes, there is an external object, but your internal interpretation of this person is really the fixation, no?

In any case, I'd like to put in my vote for "unrequited love is serious shit." Sure, call it a silly crush. Dismiss it. Laugh about it. That's all necessary to save face. But if it persists and grows, know you're far from the first to have felt this way. Is it unhealthy? Hells, yeah. But your fellow invalids have a long history of producing great poetry and art. You're in good company, you pathetic puppy dog.

Ought we give Iowa a try? Really?

7:59 PM (EST): The corn people are preparing to caucus (yes, that was the secret code), so I suppose I should register my predictions now. I predict Hillary will win handily. Not overwhelmingly, but handily. I base this on one fact alone: John Kerry won Iowa handily last time. To the best of my recollection (and my recollection may suck), Kerry was as much of an initial front-runner, as centrist, in as close a race in the polls, and substantially duller...in terms of charisma, not intelligence. So I'm going to bet that Iowans are perhaps only slightly hungrier for change—whatever that means—and Hills will win by about a 3 point margin. Could definitely be wrong...we'll know in a matter of hours.

9:48 PM (EST): It appears that Obama has won by that handy margin I predicted for Clinton. That does make me happy, even if he's not my first choice candidate, because it means the youth turned out. I like when the youth turn out because, well, young people are progressive. Young people aren't scared of Teh Gays, we want to help the poor, and we're violently pacifistic. If Obama's candidacy gets more young people involved in politics, that's great. ...but I'd still like to see Hillary win.

MMVIII

At long last, it is 2008. A year of elections. A year of Olympics. A year of the prime factors 2 x 2 x 2 x 251.

Vacation, which I was glad to have, was excellent. I read a truly great novel, watched the first season of a hideously addictive TV series, and caught up with lots of old friends (no link provided). I attended one very good play, two very good movies, and three of the best coffee shops in the world. Not that I'm biased, or anything. So that was vacation. Low-key and friend-filled. Just as I like it.

Other than that, UU stuff is going delightfully. I wouldn't want to gasconade on the blog, lest UU committees read this and have their perception of me go catawampus. (V and I worked on an exceptionally difficult Saturday crossword over break.) But I've heard good news from two excellent places: the "New York City of UU" and a place that would have me study UU in New York City. Woot woot.

Speaking of cities that count, Natalia has flown off to Londres! I'm pretty excited to go visit her there in a couple of months.

There was plenty more I wanted to say, I think, but it will have to wait for my post-caucus update. For now I leave you with this blog post, which sucked up too much of my late afternoon, and the following quote on the "Greatest Generation:"

“What makes them so great? Because they were poor and hated Nazis? Who doesn’t fucking hate Nazis?”

Who says Broadway is dead?

Pre-Bed Thought 2

The New York Times has this great article on experimental philosophy this week. It's good to hear this is going on: I always thought that ethics, especially, could benefit from some good experiment. If you think ethics is more descriptive than proscriptive, as they say, it makes sense to test your ideas when you can. And it might even make sense just to throw people into a bunch of situations and see what comes out.

But here's my take on the actual study cited. And I quote.

Suppose the chairman of a company has to decide whether to adopt a new program. It would increase profits and help the environment too. “I don’t care at all about helping the environment,” the chairman says. “I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” Would you say that the chairman intended to help the environment?

O.K., same circumstance. Except this time the program would harm the environment. The chairman, who still couldn’t care less about the environment, authorizes the program in order to get those profits. As expected, the bottom line goes up, the environment goes down. Would you say the chairman harmed the environment intentionally?

I don’t know where you ended up, but in one survey, only 23 percent of people said that the chairman in the first situation had intentionally helped the environment. When they had to think about the second situation, though, fully 82 percent thought that the chairman had intentionally harmed the environment.

Then there's another similar study:

Edouard Machery, a philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh by way of the Sorbonne, told subjects about a man named Joe who visits the local smoothie shop and asks for the largest drink available. Joe is informed that the megasmoothies come in a special commemorative cup. He doesn’t care one way or the other about the cup. He just wants the megasmoothie. Did he get the commemorative cup intentionally? Most people said no. What if, instead, he’s informed that the megasmoothie has gone up in price and that he’ll have to pay an extra dollar for it? Joe doesn’t care about the extra dollar; he just wants the megasmoothie. Did he pay the extra dollar intentionally? Most people said yes. Machery concluded that foreseen side effects of our actions are taken to be intended when we conceive them as costs incurred for a benefit. In the case of the blameworthy company chairman, then, more pollution was taken to be a harm incurred to gain more profit.

I think, and perhaps I think this too frequently, that this is a language issue more than a substance issue. I think we actually use the word "intend" differently in positive and negative situations. When we talk about intending good things to happen, we are asking whether we purposefully brought something about. This is our usual definition of "intend." But I think when we ask "Did he intentionally harm the environment?" or "Did he intentionally pay the extra dollar?" we're asking whether or not he was hoodwinked and/or ignorant, whether he did something with or without knowing the all the negatives.

I think this distinction might also come in not just in the situations but also in the difference between the phrasing "Did he intend to...?" and "Did he intentionally...?" I think "intentionally" points to knowledge of the consequences of your actions more than it points to purpose. Whereas "intend" points to purpose. You shoot an intruder in the chest. Did you intend to kill him? Maybe not. Did you intentionally kill him? For some reason, it feels slightly more ambiguous, slightly more likely.

So yeah, first reaction: In the positive situations, as presented here, we need them to be purposeful actions to define them as "intended," and in the negatives the person need only have full awareness of the consequences and be in control of their actions to qualify as "intentional."

Pre-Bed Thought

I read something today that raised the question, "Why did we evolve consciousness?" It is, of course, a fun question: Couldn't we do exactly the same stuff if we weren't there witnessing it? I haven't given the question appropriate consideration, but here are my first thoughts:

We could have evolved consciousness because it's the most efficient way to make us unpredictable. Unpredictability has clear benefits for survival...it's harder for animals to hunt you or for other people to trick you if they don't know you'll react the same way to nearly identical stimuli. And although I'm more or less a determinist, certainly the factors that sway decisions can be extremely subtle and nigh impossible to control for. It's really hard to create a random number generator, so perhaps consciousness is the closest we can get with reasonable efficiency. Also (and similarly), consciousness may us to adapt to new situations. We can extrapolate not only rules but probabilities from our past experiences and apply them to the present. Maybe consciousness is a good tool in extrapolation and probability gaging.

Then again, maybe not. I'm just throwing the possibility out there...

Falling in Love with Love

A recent conversation prompted me to wonder: When did we start to hate love? I mean, we all want love for ourselves, but at what point did an affectionate, happy couple stop evoking "aw"s and start evoking "ugh"s? And when did the announcement of an engagement stop being cause for joy and start being cause for whispers about how long it will last. I mean, I suppose it started when we saw which people were getting engaged right out of college and noticed that a fair percentage of them were passionate but fickle people who shouldn't be putting a down payment on an apartment, much less getting hitched. Not all of them...but a fair percentage. I remember, when I was young, I used to watch romantic comedies where the woman eventually had to choose between love and career. And I always thought, "Just go for love; that's what will make you happy!" And in the end, she always did. Now I'd think, "If you have a great career opportunity, for god's sake, take it!" If the guy's good for you, he'll urge you to make the same choice.

Maybe young people have always been cynical about love. Really, it's usually little kids and old people who smile at happy couples. Maybe they have a better perspective on life and know what's really important. Or maybe it's just that most little kids I see have married parents and most old people I see found a life partner. So not only do they not have anything to be jealous of, they may have forgotten how frequently love spectacularly flops. Or not-so-spectacularly flops.

Something about Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach rings pretty true. Twenty-somethings, to say nothing of teenagers, can be insecure and fucked up. Sure, there are some great couples out there. I'm proud to say I know a few. I'm less thrilled to say they're disproportionately religious Christians. Doesn't bode well for me and most of my friends.

But enough with the moping: All but one of the UU apps are in, and that's exciting. I had lunch with Brad and his UU school buddy Nick today. Nick was talking about a case going on somewhere he works (worked? I don't remember). Even though it was in an area of UU I'm not too into, it was pretty spectacular. The evolution of the UU has left some crazy-ass loopholes, and people in the know are far better at exploiting them than your average feller. So average fellers get screwed. With so much emphasis on companies and people who are tacitly evil, it's sometimes easy to forget how many companies and people are explicitly evil. During those times, I like to think of my old landlord. Ah, me.

Back to work post-vacation tomorrow. It was nice to spend time at Slave again.

I Like Mic

Status Que?

When Greg leaves comments on my last post cryptically hinting that I should perhaps update my blog, I figure it's time. The bad part about going two months without updating is that I have two months worth of updating. So you're getting a cumulative update rather than an event-by-event update.

So, the months. I finally finished my cryptic crossword and sent it in to he who wears short Shortz last week. It's not without its flaws, but I think there are some fun and creative clues in there. I'm battling serious odds—he may not even take unassigned cryptics—but until I hear back, I can live safely in that quantum superposition of "accepted" and "not accepted." And if the function collapses to "not accepted," you, my dear reader, can look forward to trying the puzzle...on this very blog! Unless I decide to submit it elsewhere. Gee, I hope I get some personal comments from the man himself. That would be an honor, indeed.

Our apartment has settled, and it is good. Chayes has beautified her room—it's great to be spending some quality time with her—Betsey has moved into Megan's old room and is fitting in beautifully, and Greg's the same sunny delight as ever. Greg and I saw a super-exclusive run-through of Cry Baby last weekend (yay, thanks, Mark!) This particular performance was not "up for review," so I will only review it with the most inscrutable puzzle I can think of: _T W_S _W_S_M_. G_ S__ _T WH_N _T'S _N T_WN.

Work's been crazy as ever. There's been lots of talk about the, er, inappropriate comments made by a certain, unnamed James Watson. If you haven't already read the massive press coverage, you can get the latest at the links I put in the first half of the sentence. The whole to-do prompted me not only to fashion a harness for my jaw to wear whenever reading Watson's comments on black people, women, fat people, gay people or, oh yeah, Rosalind Franklin, but also to do some reading on race and IQ.

It's apparently well-established [most of the following assertions come from that linked report] that the average IQ of black people in America is 15 points lower than the average IQ of white people in America. There are two major questions that come out of this: What are the reasons for this difference? and What the heck does IQ mean anyway? Neither one of these has yet been answered especially thoroughly. While IQ is highly heritable, this doesn't mean that the IQ variations between races is largely genetic. There are plenty of other factors, many unknown, that go into intelligence, and it seems likely that these largely account for differences that we see. Yes, racists, it's conceivable they don't. Someone, sometime will do solid research and we'll have a better idea. The other question, about what IQ actually measures, is just as hazy. It's definitely a solid predictor of academic achievement. In this sense, the test isn't biased toward white people...it's an equal predictor for black people and white people. As the APA report points out, the test is biased against black people in the plain sense that they, on average, do worse. You might say, well, that's not really bias if it still predicts the same stuff, but hey, IQ tests are designed so both sexes necessarily have the same average. It's explicitly not biased toward men or women; I don't know if it's an equal predictor for both sexes, though. This paragraph's getting long, so let me sum up my point: IQ tests are a good but imperfect predictor of academic achievement. There's no great reason to think they measure some ineffable quality of "intelligence." That concept isn't well-defined, anyway. There would probably be some correlation between IQ score and anything measuring some kind of intelligence—probably a fairly strong correlation—but who knows how strong or how consistent between tests? I don't. What I'm saying is we don't know all that much about this topic. And I think people without an agenda should research it, mostly because I'm a curious person and it's an interesting topic. So there.

Oh, and the UU apps are coming along swimmingly. Hopefully those will be out the door in the next couple of weeks. I'm actually feeling very good about this decision. I'm reading One U, a book about UU school, and it's scaring me, but it's also getting me very psyched for the kind of thinking I'd be doing.

All right, friends. I have an episode of Dirty Sexy Money to watch. Emily points out the show's egregiously absent commas. Normally, I would be unforgiving, but somehow Donald Sutherland and Peter Krause have won me over.

Midnight Madness X

What more could I want from life than 18 hours of sleepless, delirious puzzle solving? Well, 18 hours of well-rested, clear-headed puzzle-solving would be nice. But that's not what I got from Midnight Madness X, an alternately frustrating and exhilarating puzzle hunt that started Saturday at 8 pm and ended Sunday, just before 2 pm. Greg had participated the past two years (he's also done a few Microsoft hunts) and brought me onto Team Plaid, otherwise comprised of people who work with him at the hedge fund. I will now tell you the exhaustive and exhausting tale of Team Plaid's glorious victory (over teams who finished in eighth place or later), complete with pictures, provided by flickr users who actually took them.

After a sushi dinner with Jess and her friend Jack, Greg and I headed over to the (misleadingly) convenient starting point, Riverside Park, just west of 103rd St. I gradually met Greg's coworkers (and the one other female who came along) and we got a map of the Columbia campus (our area!) and our first two clues. One was a clear box that revealed a poem (I didn't work on this one), and the other was this (courtesy Brian of Team Red):



One guy quickly realized the abbreviations referred to places on the Columbia campus, and Greg quickly realized it was a tangram (you have to cut it up and rearrange the pieces). It took him about 10 minutes to convince everyone of this, and they never actually believed my solution of the tangram (it wasn't perfect), but we were both right. When we got to the (very general) location, there was a hangman puzzle on a whiteboard. It very clearly was going to spell out "TIME MACHINE" when it was solved, and there were some econ equations scribbled next to it. We spent a few hours trying to solve this puzzle. One problem: IT WASN'T THE REAL PUZZLE. I kept on saying to Greg, "wouldn't it be funny if this weren't the real puzzle," and he did not approve of my sense of humor. Without finding the real puzzle, we couldn't solve the other puzzle, because they relied on each other. Eventually we found out we were working on the wrong thing and found the other half of the puzzle. We solved it too late...by the time we got the next puzzle—a hilarious craigslist ad for a BBW (big-breasted woman, apparently) looking for a VGL (very good looking, that one I knew) man—we were off to Union Square, where we were all supposed to be at midnight.

We got there around 1 (we hadn't originally bought the Union Sq thing as not-a-trap) and waited for the rest of the game to start. Teams that had done better in the first half got a head start. We got two digital pictures: one of a street, one of a storefront. So part of our team went to the storefront (14th and C) and the other part went to the street (9th, just E of Bway). And we looked for the clues. And looked. And looked. And Game Control was MIA. So we looked some more. Shortly before FOUR FUCKING AM we managed to reach game control, who told us that there were no clues there and the direction of the photographs mattered. So with that we got that we had to head to the intersection of the two sightlines: 9th and C. While hunting for the clue there, I ran into a drunk coworker, which was fun. I also realized it was kind of strange that I was out at 4 am and neither drunk nor somebody else, which together would have made the situation make sense. Anyway...

That almost ended the excruciatingly frustrating portion of MMX. There was just one more. The packet at 9th and C sent us to the lower east side and contained three clues. The easiest of the evening (there was a dude in a Subaru), a tough but ultimately satisfying one (explanation TK), and this (thanks Strle):



Greg and I easily translated the wingdings by pattern. Greg then suggested that it was probably an intersection, so the middle word should be "AND." (Go, Greg.) I plugged that in and found that the Ds fell in the first word in such a way that ELDRIDGE fit perfectly. That put an R at the end of the 6-letter last word. I looked on the map they gave us. BROOME was the only 6-letter street crossing Eldridge. Alas! We had solved it incorrectly! Well, either that or their map just wasn't detailed enough to include Hester. UGH. Turns out the numbers indicate the letter in the name of the font (Times, Courier, Wingdings or Helvetica) to use there. Grr. In any case, had Hester been on that map, we would have gotten that one an hour earlier than we did.

In any case, we wound up working on "statements" (via Brian, again):



Our team figured out that it had something to do with states. Game Control eventually clued to us that an official state abbreviation is hidden in each line. We went through them, and I realized (Go, me) that the states were all kind of contiguous, and we should try tracing a line through the states in each stanza. When we did this, we came up with ESSEX + BROOME.

There we found a line of animals...each animal present twice. Here, Greg again solved the puzzle but with an execution that they didn't want (he took the difference in the animals' positions, not the number of animals between them, heaven forbid, and found that number letter in the animals' names), so the answer didn't work. Oh, the pain!

As we were working on that, around 6am, we ate breakfast, and about half of our team left. Greg was fading fast. We soon got my favorite puzzle of the day (Strle, again):



You're probably thinking what we were thinking: "What in God's name do we do with this?" Greg was apparently thinking, "Why am I sitting on concrete in a desolated area of Chinatown when I could be sleeping?" because he departed. I was left with three guys (a fourth would rejoin us). We perhaps too quickly got a hint on the clue: The spiral is the key to solving the strip. See if you have any inspiration...

We sat down at base camp and stared. And then I started folding the strip. I folded on every line indicated in the spiral. And when I was done with the segment between the outermost two black circles there was a "K" in my hands. Turns out the inside was the beginning, but we got it, and the bikers biked off to 103 Norfolk.

Much of the rest of the game was blurry for me, less because of exhaustion than because things got very fast very quickly, and the three guys on bikes got places much more quickly than myself and Jaime, the other pedestrian on the team. Other highlights included a fake crossword that gave us GPS coordinates, a video of a woman dancing in 22 dance segments that gave an intersection when we took the first letters of all the dances (Josh and I—mostly Joshmdash;managed to get enough of the dances that we could figure it out), and an awesome puzzle using the dongles that kept track of how many hints we had where the dongles responded to the angle they were placed at. Awesome.

At long last, when my legs were completely shot and I could feel the blisters forming, we got a direction to the amphitheater in East River Park. When Jaime and I arrived, our biking crew—Peter, Andrei and Josh—had come in 7th, seconds behind 5th and 6th, but an hour and a half behind the winners, who may have somehow gotten there without figuring out all of the clues. Everyone there felt good about finishing, and people from different teams were warmly congratulating each other (a girl I'd been scribbling down dance moves with clapped for me as I walked up the path).

Peter suggested going out for a drink, but it was 2 o'clock, and I was ready to treat myself to a cab and take a shower. Which I did. Thank God.

Sadly, this was the last Midnight Madness. Despite the early frustrations, I would love to do it again. It was a marathon, but the few times I figured things out were incredibly gratifying, and I got to know the LES pretty well, which was cool. And puzzle people rule. But I knew that already.

UPDATE: Kevin of Team Cerulean posted a picture of Team Plaid on flickr! You can see a little bit of me behind Greg: