Welcome! This is my personal blog. Many of my posts are visible to the public, and everyone is welcome to read and comment. If I know you in real life, be aware that you are also welcome not to read -- please don't feel as if I've cornered you in the hallway, and you have to listen to my latest political opinion / medical problem / pie recipe until you can come up with an excuse to escape. I will never be offended if someone chooses to read selectively, or not at all.

I talk about many of the same topics I work on, and I recognize that colleagues or co-workers may also find this blog. Nothing here should be taken as an official position statement or an authoritative scholarly assertion. And like everyone else, my opinion does not necessarily reflect that of my employers.

So, apparently there's a movement to declare November 24th a body scanner protest day, on which all airport travelers are asked to refuse to go through the new full-body scanners and instead insist on a full pat-down and genital frisking, in a private room, with a witness present.

This seems misguided to me. I mean, I'm imagining that I'm an average traveler, and I get stuck behind a bunch of people deliberately gumming up the security lines. I'm late for my flight, have to sleep in the airport, get charged $50 for rebooking, and miss Thanksgiving dinner with my family. This will succeed at provoking outrage, but I don't think it will be at the scanners.

I also appear to be in a very small minority of people who think that TSA procedures are an ill-planned, manipulative sham, but who aren't particularly bothered by the idea of being seen naked. Hell, it makes more sense that being asked to take off my shoes. On the other hand, I'm not opposed to the idea of being seen naked. Being seen naked by a device that can store my image indefinitely and transmit it anywhere, and that's making money for people who spent months outright lying to the public about its ability to do those things, makes me pretty sick.

(millimeter-wave and backscatter x-ray scanners also put me in the same weird position as GM crops and social network data mining -- I end up being opposed to their use even though I think they're incredibly cool.)

In any case, getting through airport security involves doing a lot of deep breathing, and reminding myself that the screeners aren't the ones who wrote the rules; they're just ordinary folks doing a job.

As a recovered hypercarotenemic, I am saddened by the left's mockery of John Boehner's orange skin. You can't judge a book by its cover, y'all. Okay, you can judge its fondness for carrots and/or dubious self-tanning techniques, but that's it.

Also, that's a stupid expression. You can obviously judge a book by its cover. That's where the title and the name of the author are.

Maybe the expression should be "you can't judge a book by its cover art." God knows there are enough science fiction fans who can attest to that.


---

PS - I let my paid LJ account lapse. Is anyone getting obnoxious page-blocking ads when they read this post? I'll try to complete the changeover to my new, paid Dreamwidth account soon (but have it auto-syndicate my posts back here).

Reading about LED lightbulbs. I'm so excited!

I'm years late on this, I know, but I just finished playing Braid. I even got all 8 stars.

(I'm not worried about spoiling the secret that the stars exist for people who haven't played, because the stars are so unbelievably obscure that anyone who could have discovered one without being told they exist is brilliant enough that they were probably able to pull some Paul Atreides precognitive shit and deduce in advance they shouldn't read this post.)

I was terribly pleased with myself for solving the puzzle of the last (first?) star without any hints. ( I will spoiler-cut the rest, though.Collapse )

I used to be staunchly opposed to emoticons and other improprieties common to online writing (like, I used to use single line breaks between paragraphs and indent them by typing     . I had a special button on my mouse for it. But even when I was away from home, I could bang it out in about 2 seconds). I've changed my view on that in the last few years, which could be attributed to my studying emotions in grad school, or just to mellowing over the years.

I've always been enchanted by the way that our brains can turn pretty much any three dots into a representation of a face. (or a simple curve, a dot, and an arc into a happy slime!) But despite all the processing we do internally, tiny features of the input stimulus can have large effects. Just consider the subtle emotional differences between ;-] and ;-) and ;-> .

But I'm a little dissatisfied with :P. Sticking your tongue out can mean ether "ugh" or "nyah nyah!" and I feel like :P is subtly in the "ugh" camp (as are :P :b q: d:). What if I want to express playful taunting? Fortunately, I found a way!

:þ

Don't ask me why I even knew about LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN [U+00FE]. It's literally the sole, isolated piece of knowledge I had about runic script. But I really think putting the tongue in the middle of the mouth makes a big difference. More in some fonts than others.

Could anyone who knows more about the topic let me know: 1) Do the people who assign greater symbolic and magical meaning to futhark runes have any historical basis, or are they just making stuff up? and 2) Am I going to, like, curse anybody by using this emoticon? That seems a little too impolite.


PS - I know I hardly ever post on LJ anymore, and read at best sporadically. Heck, I don't even always answer my email. I feel awful about the dear friends I've been ignoring and the things I've been failing to say. I guess posting about the ridiculous stuff that takes up space in my head is better than nothing. And speaking of posting, I'll be moving to Dreamwidth soon, but I'll keep my blog mirrored here. I also paid real money for my DW account, so I'll probably have some codes to give away if anyone wants them.

Here is a picture of a jellyfish riding on the back of a crab.

And here is a picture of a crab riding on the back of a jellyfish.


ps - the answer is that there's probably at least one thing that does.

I was feeling a little bit glum about my birthday, but then euziere pointed out that 32 is 2^5!

Currently euz, glenn, and I are hanging about the apartment and talking about statistics and type 2 diabetes. Glenn explained some very valuable things about chlamydia and pelvic inflammatory disease (um, not valuable to anyone here.... just valuable in general... well, maybe valuable to glenn... intellectually speaking... since he works at the department of health. Okay.).

Later we're going to try to play that variant on Scrabble I've always wanted to try, where words are scored based on a combination of letter frequency and word frequency.

Here, have a picture of a product that has diverged substantially from its original concept.

This is a picture of the difference between a picture and a symbol.




This picture, in contrast, doesn't have any hidden meaning. But isn't "gorgonzola gems" a totally dreamy name? I mean, it makes me feel like I'm in a wonderful dream.




This is a picture of euziere. She makes me very happy.

I've been working with linear regression, both as a tool for understanding psychology and as a primary professional skill, for more than eight years now. At last, my conceptual understanding of statistics has advanced to the point where I've stopped understanding it. In a few years, I'll probably have to take some time off to think hard about what a "sample" is.

I only mean this to be mildly self-denigrating. I think it's similar to the way that anybody here could tell me what a "number" is without thinking -- unless they've studied mathematics in real depth, in which case they're going to get a glazed look in their eyes for a few minutes, and then launch into a two-hour lecture. Or maybe it's more like the way you drop acid and achieve a crystal-clear understanding of all reality, and then you look down and you're like, whoa, I've got this hand, and it's just sort of there. It's like there's a region of space with this propagating wave of handness.


Why do I make these posts? I guess because I spend a lot of time wandering around inside my head, and so for people who care about me it's kind of like telling you what's going on in my life. And in that spirit...

Special bonus entry: Boolean facepalm
( Read more...Collapse )

So... which is more dated and / or ridiculous?

a) This apartment ad, trumpeting its highly advanced "CAT5 Audio/Video/Data"?



b) The fact that I still can't read that without thinking, "How are you gentlemen!!"

I think there's a new official life milestone consisting of the first time you see an ex's wedding photos on facebook.

We could go a little further and make it an Eriksonian pass/fail life stage*, based on whether it's a happy or a sad experience. I'm in the former group, so that's good.


* It's funny to look back on an era when touchy-feely humanism didn't go hand-in-hand with reflexive rejection of rigid dichotomies.

For the folks from work -- remember the mysterious comment from today's talk about "micro-pigs?"

Here are micro-pigs: http://bit.ly/micropigpig

(Wikipedia says that they are just very small miniature pigs.)

With a mere four hours of fiddling, I've gotten my copy of SPSS 16 to run on my new Mac! I now have an additional incentive to finish relearning how to do everything using R, so I can get SPSS 16 off my new Mac as quickly as possible.

Is anyone else reading Homestuck? If so, I'd love it if you'd post here and see if we can figure out what the devil is going on. euziere and I made some diagrams and figured out ( ... click for spoilers ...Collapse ) but I'm still really confused.

euziere didn't like Homestuck that much when she first tried to read it, but she could tell how desperate I was to have someone to discuss it with, so she went back and read the whole thing anyway! How sweet is that?


PS - I realized that some people might interpret the LJ icon that I use for posts about absorption in fiction (see above) as a quill pen. It's actually meant to be a Vurt feather. I know those aren't widely recognizable, but it's a symbol that I like to use personally anyway. (this is also why I always had a silver feather over my desk in my old office at UM).

Mike was supposed to have left for Austin earlier today, but it turned out that he wasn't able to get his car repaired and smog-checked in time. Over the next 6 hours he rented a U-haul, got his car hitched to it, and went from not having packed a single box to having everything he owned secured and ready to move. And now he's on his way. The man is nothing if not adaptable (and he is adaptable).

Mike's cardboard box collection included a number of the boxes that my stuff had come here in, nearly two years ago now. They would come in the mail four or five at a time, packed so densely that they barely held together, and Mike hauled them inside and stacked them up neatly to await my arrival. Tonight I finally got to pay him back… at least, if we ignore the fact that he was carrying them upstairs and I carried them downstairs.

I've lived with Mike the entire time I've been in San Francisco. Getting started here would have been a lot harder without him. I'm grateful to him, for that and for all sorts of other things.

As many of you know, Mike is leaving California and returning to the Motherland (Austin). I've lived with him ever since I moved here, and euziere and I are both going to miss the hell out of him. No one could take his place, but we are looking for someone to take over his room. If you know anyone who is living in / moving to the Bay Area, and who would like to share a two-bedroom apartment with us, and who is awesome, please pass the word to them!

Craigslist ad with contact info

Ad reproduced below the cut.
( extraneous cut link textCollapse )

Yesterday I got home from work, and I was feeling pretty down. I flopped down in bed and euziere sat next to me. We chatted a little bit, and just sat for a little bit, and she occasionally reached down to poke at me or nibble on my arm. Then she explained object-oriented programming to me!

I mean seriously, god damn! When I started trying to tell her what I didn't understand about OOP, I had literally no hope that she'd understand, or be able to explain it to me. This has got to be one of the biggest gaps in understanding I've ever traversed in a single conversation. And it wasn't even that hard for me to understand, once we figured out what it was I needed to be told. If I hadn't started with a good understanding of organizing programs in functions, or of templates that have a certain set of parameters for you to assign values to (like a regression equation), or of systems that arise from simultaneous interactions between multiple agents (like evolutionary simulations or neural nets)... my mind would truly have been blown to bits. It was a pretty great epiphany as it was.

(in case you're interested -- which I think a few people might be, since we sometimes talk about what you have to do to teach a beginner how to think in terms of programming -- my problem was that I'd always heard people say "an object is like a thing," which I took to mean that it just sits there, and there needs to be some external program flow that operates on one of its values or calls one of its methods in order to make something happen. Apparently an object is actually an independent agent -- it's running its own code and can interact with other objects or with the outside world on its own. So "the program" is no longer a single, linear entity that acts on different things; it's a collection of different things all happening at once (well, virtually all at once, the same way you can run a multithreaded system on a single processor).

... can someone tell me if that's basically correct?

The freakin' loving kindness meditation follow-up paper. In late 2006, I asked Barb for funding to do a one-year followup on our meditation participants, to see whether they kept meditating and whether the changes in their lives were sustained. I had to do it on such a shoestring that I couldn't get anyone to write an automated email system, so the automatic daily reminders participants signed up for consisted of me remembering to hit the "send mailing" button after midnight, or waking up early in the morning cursing.

I remember getting my first glance at the data in spring 2007, on a UM lab computer where I was running that economic game study for Stephanie. It wasn't what we expected, but I thought that I understood it, and that fall I did a poster at SPSP and a talk at APS about the data. Then I realized that I didn't get it after all, and lost my enthusiasm for it. The innovative and exciting broadening test was also a complete bust.

In spring 2008, I took a trip to UNC to collaborate with Barb and get the paper started. It was a big old mess of cross-sectional and repeated measures analyses and some rather shaky causal claims. That summer, I was living with euziere after the co-op screwed up my contract for the last time, and we had a fight over this paper, based on the ethics of a priori vs. post hoc analyses and what the author's ethical obligations are. That was a good summer, though, and I have happy memories of the week I spent with her in Pennsylvania after helping her move into her new place. I also remember going to the coffee shop around the corner from her apartment and working on that paper. When I came back to visit some months later, the coffee shop was gone, and I spread out on her floor and worked on the paper instead.

In September, I was busy reworking the data, trying to make sure that I'd left no stone unturned in my previous attempt to do the analyses with every outlier, artifact, and non-responding participant removed. There was a lost weekend, where all I remember is data-grinding, short breaks to play nethack, and a brief interlude when I went for a run down to Divisadero and back, and stopped in a dingy convenience store so I could talk to euziere on the phone. Then, more data grinding until 4 or 5 in the morning. Also, my samurai learned that once a pet dragon goes feral, they stop being amused when you throw treats at them.

At that point, my new job (which I'd started in July) began picking up and I got distracted. My files show a few new revisions to the paper every month, but there were no more big dramatic pushes. We reorganized it a few times more. I invented a whole new method of correcting for multiple comparisons when you have several convergent DVs and are more interested in whether there's an overall effect than in which specific measures are affected. Somehow, nearly a year went by before the paper was fully ready to submit. It was June 2009, and I remember that I was in Boston, sitting at John and Sarah's kitchen table, when I finally clicked the button to send the manuscript off to the Journal of Positive Psychology. I don't remember how it felt.

Four months went by with no word, despite JoPP's promises of a speedy review. I forced myself to be patient. It was September, during the retirement festschrift for Susan Folkman, the Osher Center's beloved founding director, that I finally checked the online status page. It turned out that the reviews had gone out two months ago, and gotten stuck in my spam box!

The reviews were not good. The reviewers picked on every flaw in our logic and rejected all our proposed explanations. The editor suggested that we completely reenvision the paper, making it about positive psychology interventions in general rather than our specific study. Barb and I were game, and so I wrote back to the editor explaining how we'd missed the reviews and requesting an extension on the revise-and-resubmit window. Barb and I corresponded a bit, but then her husband had some medical problems, and we were put on hold for another month.

In November, Barb and I had a lengthy phone meeting. She pitched a bunch of new ideas, and I agreed to several re-analyses that might help us present the paper in a more exciting way. She also persuaded me to heed the reviewers' advice and cut some of the most interesting, complex hypotheses for the paper. I fiercely defended the part about the informant ratings of emotion, because I think the field's reliance on self-reports is such an elephant-in-the-room. Talking to Barb made me feel much more optimistic, and genuinely interested in the paper again! But then I got caught up with other things, and my enthusiasm waned. For the rest of the year the paper gnawed at me, but I just couldn't bring myself to pick it up. I wrote several apologetic letters to Barb and several more extension requests to the editor, and the gnawing continued.

At the beginning of 2010 I picked it up again, made some massive progress, and sent it off to Barb. She was busy, and I wanted to make a few more minor changes, and that held us up for another month. I finally got back to it in late February, with only a little drama. That was when I decided I was going to have to cut the informant reports after all, but swore to write them up on their own. I began what should have been the final round of revisions from a hotel room in Las Vegas.

Then came a couple of months of fixing that one last tiny little thing that I had to fix before I could send it in. There were about fifty of them. Barb recommended a small reanalysis, and it took me several days to really get it right. It was the first time I'd ever done a logistic regression, and I was delighted to finally have a use for all the work on risk ratios that we did in my epidemiology classes.

One weekend in March, euziere (who had finished her year in Pennsylvania, done a rotation in Colorado with the BLM, and finally come to San Francisco and moved in with me!) was trying to help me finish up the paper. I tried to describe one of our findings to her, and realized that it was unexpectedly fuzzy in my own head. I later realized this was because a stupid scaling error had prevented me from doing some of the direct comparisons I'd wanted to do (and I'd then forgotten that entire episode). There were a few more unpleasant discoveries about hidden nuances in the data, but ultimately I decided that they weren't show-stoppers. Finally, I got everything together and sent the paper off.

Today, in late April 2010, I got a letter from Todd Kashdan saying that the paper was accepted without further revisions. The Loving Kindness Time 3 manuscript is finished once! and! for! all!