June 2011
1 post
the blind men and the elephant
In behavioral neuroscience, there seems to be an emphasis on simple behavior paradigms. Behavior is complex and messy, so it needs to be tidied up. The more prestigious journals favor simple, highly controlled and easily interpretable behavior paradigms typically linked to a clean, molecular manipulation yielding a tractable, digestible tidbit of data… nothing sprawling, confusing or...
May 2011
1 post
Equating Facts with Opinion
Political discourse seems increasingly dominated by a strategy of inducing confusion and then capitalizing on this confusion to spread distorted, misleading and even outright deceitful soundbytes to sway voters. The American public is, for the most part, treated like idiot children. What passes for political discussion in our nation, on one hand, obscures complexity with simple-minded soundbytes...
March 2011
1 post
The Amish approach to Farmville
I recently decided to start playing Farmville to see what it was that engaged millions of people and generated millions of dollars for Zynga. I determined in advance I would not pull out the credit card, under any circumstance. I figured I would be able to play for awhile and then would hit a preprogrammed wall where I would have to fork over some cash to keep having fun.
Nope. It turns out that...
April 2010
4 posts
Friend wrote this. . . what's your interpretation?
After a while we went to the diner at Market and Church. Jason and I took a table next to a table of girls with strong jaws talking in deep voices. Under the light I saw their makeup shine, their hair stiff. They were hunched over burritos in conversation. Jason gave them a second glance as he sat down. One turned to Jason and said, “Say, darling. Do eat something. You look rather...
like a drug. . .
Omfg. Beautiful day in Chicago. First warm day capable of inducing a sheen of perspiration. I can’t stay indoors. Shuffling down Chicago Avenue, earbuds in, gawking at everything, everything seems beautiful and I just smile dumbly at everyone. I feel like I’m 16 in the Arizona summer sun. I want to drink and fuck and dance and run or just do nothing and soak up the world. This is our reward for...
March 2010
13 posts
a different film experience. . .
So recently I saw this film, Universalove, at CIMMfest. Here’s the promo:
In Marseille, Julie’s heart beats wildly when thinking of Rashid. In Tokyo, Satoshi dreams about his adored one who works in a soup restaurant but who doesn’t even know who he is. In Rio de Janeiro, Maria falls for a Telenovela star. In Belgrade, a couple fight for their very existence. In Brooklyn, the...
Fleshpot on 42nd Street: Sex and the movies
I went to see Fleshpot on 42nd St. (Milligan, 1973) the other night, a sexually explicit film about a prostitute in New York in the 70s. Turns out, there are no known surviving copies of the original hard-core version of this film. Instead, I viewed Girls on 42nd St., where explicit sex is crudely sliced out.
The sex scenes may have redeemed this movie. Without them, it is ‘interesting’ at...
ZombieHarmony - One of the Best Free Dating Sites... →
guerillastarfish:
And this is what I did when I skipped class today.
Laptop magic: closing the lid
Like many people in 2010, my days are processed in trillions of nanosecond operations as I deftly swipe the touch pad calling up and dismissing different windows onto my existence.
The sleek, brushed aluminum casing contains the complete workings of a life concentrated in a way never before possible. My entire scientific career—data, papers, grants, experiments, library, correspondence—sits...
from Kavalier and Clay. . .
“When I’m sober,” he said, “I’m probably going to want to kill myself.”
“Status quo for me,” Deasey said. The bartender smacked down another glass of rye in front of him.
The trouble with reality television
“Reality television” seems like an oxymoron (emphasis on moron). But if you think about it carefully, reality may not be all that different from television after all, except perhaps in the quality of production.
So to get this, you have to think about it seriously. Imagine you have been given a unlimited budget by some network to produce a ‘real’ reality television show. How would you go about...
Herzog takes a dim view of the jungle →
Just finished watching ‘Burden of Dreams.’ My favorite part was this monologue, which is, to say the least, way over the top with such lines as ‘the birds here are in misery, I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain.’ Clearly Herzog was having a very bad day.
February 2010
12 posts
Love this detail. . .
from Kavalier & Clay:
As they turned the landing to the top floor, a strand of her hair caught in the corner of his mouth, and for an instant he crunched it between his teeth.
internet literacy. . .
Greg Rutter’s definitive list of the 99 things you should have already experienced on the internet unless you’re a loser or old or something.
Sent by a friend. Though maybe it should be renamed ‘Greg Rutter’s index of how much f*ing time you have on your hands,’ the list is a winner and just goes to show we don’t need television for quality entertainment. I’m slowly...
strange moments in history
Watched Adam Curtis documentaries tonight. Two memorable tidbits:
1. when the Soviets wanted to build their grand, industrial city of the future they modeled it on an American city: Gary, Indiana. Wouldn’t have been my first choice, but hindsight is 20/20.
2. The economic scientists in Britian during the 1960s constructed a water-based machine to model the economy. Water (blood colored)...
Why Geeks Make Good Lovers →
mobscenity:
One of the Universal Truths that lie just beyond the fabric of modern society is the axiom that geeks, along with nerds and other peoples who overinvest in intelligence but boast underdeveloped social skills, make the best lovers. Once people realize this, the sexual revolution that will sweep through western culture will make the seventies look like the fifties, and I’m not talking...
Encounters at the End of the World (2007): not...
Described by a friend as the anti-March of the Penguins, Encounters at the End of the World (2007) is remarkable and provocative. Herzog travels to the Antarctic to interview the people who choose to work and live on this inhospitable continent isolated from the rest of civilization. He declares from the outset that this is not going to be a film about penguins. And if they do come up, he...
The Jesus Lens: Marjoe (1972) and The Eyes of...
Marjoe (1972) chronicles the last preaching days of a child prodigy minister, Marjoe, before his evangelical demise brought about by a documentary that exposes him as a religious fraud. This documentary. He not only cooperated; he initiated the film with the intention of ending his career as a religious con artist. “Touched by God” one night at age 4, so the story goes, he woke up with the...
January 2010
13 posts
Salesmen (1968, Maysles): the other 1960s.
The regurgitated 1960s is a staple of our cultural diet. Woodstock. Altamont. Civil Rights Marches, Little Rock. Haight-Ashbury. Kent State. The Weather Underground. Motown. The Black Panthers. Timothy Leary, Electric Kool-Aid Acid test. The Chicago 1968 Democratic Convention, Allen Ginsberg. Vietnam, Cold-War. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young. JFK. MLK. LBJ. Free...
Fact and fiction: 'A Single Man' and 'Chris and...
Setting aside feel-good movies and inspirational works, in general we frown upon movies and stories where everything works out and all ends happily. It’s not that we enjoy suffering, but happy endings are fairy tales—what do they tell us about our lives? It’s easy, after all, for an author to write a happy ending. Realizing one in real life, that’s a different matter. A different, much more...
“Life happens in the footnotes.”
some gems in here →
Lawyer: “Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?” Witness: “No.” Lawyer: “Did you check for blood pressure?” Witness: “No.” Lawyer: “Did you check for breathing?” Witness: “No.” Lawyer: “So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?” Witness:...
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple...
Okay, so a bunch of people drank cyanide flavored Kool-Aid and died. Tragic. Crazy. Until I saw this documentary I just assumed they were a bunch of religious flakes waiting to be ferried off to another world and, well, there’s no accounting for those people.
Not so, it turns out. The church was founded on a platform of integration in Indianapolis, where that wasn’t too popular, necessitating a...
honorable mentions for 2009 music list
I’d be remiss if I didn’t include:
1. Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest (great concert with cool mason jar lighting)
2. The Cave Singers, Invitation Songs
3. (continuing the category of late better than never), My Morning Jacket, Z and It Still Moves.
4. Broken Social Scene, You Forgot it in People (Love ‘Anthems for a 17 year old girl’)
5. Talk Talk, Spirit of Eden...
10 albums I listened to obsessively in 2009
1. Dirty Projectors Bitte Orca. Has my vote for best album of 2009. Favorite songs, Useful Chamber, Stillness is the move, Two Doves. Favorite line, “I am caught up in a storm I don’t need no shelter from.” I wouldn’t know where to begin. Genius.
2. Neutral Milk Hotel In the Aeroplane over the Sea. Better late than never. This has become one of my all time favorite...
December 2009
1 post
sound of one hand clapping, or something
I can’t really say at the moment whether my life sucks or it’s great. By one account, it sucks. I’m adrift. I have no idea where my career is going. I could yet be a success … or a complete loser. The crystal ball is all smudged and hard to see into. “He’s really going places,” is not something I hear; rather, “so what exactly is your plan?” Honestly, not really sure. Science is a hard...
November 2009
4 posts
1 tag
ban pharmaceutical advertising
Browsing through Spin magazine (I dunno), I come across an full page ad with pill bottles labeled with various anti-depressants and the suggestion that if these aren’t cutting it, perhaps the addition of Abilify might be a good idea. Abilify is an anti-psychotic (or neuroleptic), though I suppose if they are marketing it now as SSRI’s “little helper,” they might not want...
2 tags
