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Thank you, ESPN

Yvonne — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:14:41 +0000

Back in 2006 I wrote a blog post titled Shut Up, Dave O’Brien.

Thank you, ESPN, for listening.

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Tomato Nation/Donors Choose Challenge

Yvonne — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:26:59 +0000

Seriously, this contest restores my faith in humanity every year. I’m a little late in plugging it this year—it began all the way back on October 1. As of this writing, donors have already donated over $90,000 to help students in high poverty schools get badly-needed supplies and other resources. Like, y’know, DESKS.

As amazing as that is, we still have quite a ways to go before we hit the primary goal of $150,000, and we’re not even halfway to the final goal of $210,000. We have until Halloween to buy a truckload of books and other supplies for high-need children.

For details on how to participate in the challenge, visit the contest info page at Tomato Nation. If you don’t really care about getting a prize for participating, you can just head over to the Donors Choose project page and fork over some cash.

The widget below should keep updating with this year’s total.

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The View from the Other Side

Yvonne — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:13:11 +0000

For the first time in approximately 25 years, I am not a student.

I have no homework, no assigned reading, no exams. No teachers, no professors, no academic advisor. I am not enrolled in any kind of degree program.

That’s Dr. I-am-not-enrolled-in-any-kind-of-degree-program to you, by the way.

It is kind of amazing how much dead tree you can accumulate through years of schooling. In the course of cleaning out my grad office I discovered:

The coursepack for CS 525, Linear Programming. That was undergrad. I’d forgotten that I even took that class.
The binder of reference papers for one of my undergraduate theses (yes, I wrote two).
The binder of papers I had put together to read for interview weekend in Pittsburgh (I think I read two of them; still got into grad school).

The grad school adventure, she is finished. In the administrative lingo of my department, my status as a student is “terminated”. Have PhD, will travel. On with life!

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Tesseract

Yvonne — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:45:52 +0000

I am a Wrinkle in Time devotee. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read each book since childhood. On some level, I wanted to live them—instead of paying attention to my titrations in chem lab, I pondered the logistics of making stew over a Bunsen burner. And to this day I cannot read the opening scene without craving a tuna salad sandwich with pickles.

And I wanted to build a model of a tesseract.

In the books, the tesseract is described as the fifth dimension, which enables you to bend space-time and teleport.

“What is the first dimension?”

“Well—a line.”

“Okay. And the second?”

“Well, you’d square the line. A flat square would be in the second dimension.”

“And the third?”

“Well, square the second dimension. Then the square wouldn’t be flat any more. It would have a bottom, sides, and a top.”

“And the fourth?”

“Well, I guess if you wanted to put it into mathematical terms you’d square the [cube]. But you can’t take a pencil and draw it the way you can the first three. I know it’s got something to do with Einstein and time. I guess maybe you could call the fourth dimension Time.”

“That’s right,” Charles said. “Good girl. Okay then, for the fifth dimension you’d square the fourth, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, the fifth dimension’s a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around.”

I remember covering notebook pages with scribbles of cubes connected to other cubes trying, somehow, to make a sensible representation of the fourth dimension that I could square to make a tesseract. Eventually I gave up, cursing my limited human brain for only being able to deal with 3D space. Tesseracts were displaced by more pressing topics, like catching up on a decade of pop culture after my parents finally abandoned their rigid control of the TV and radio.

Last night my husband and I sat down to watch Cube over dinner. We learned quickly that this is not a film you should watch over dinner. At any rate, I wound up reading about the movie on Wikipedia and got caught in a period of fascinated clicking. Then it was as if Mrs. Whatsit herself appeared, “…by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”

That square of a cube I was trying to draw all those years ago? A tesseract!

Carl Sagan explains (see also Notes on the Fourth Dimension):

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The 40th Anniversary of a Lesson in Article Usage

Yvonne — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:55:15 +0000

I was a space nut for most of my childhood, but the famous quote always confused me:

One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

And then I learned that there was supposed to be an “a” before “man”.

I still harbor a secret love for space food, especially the freeze-dried ice cream. Yeah, you pay $4 for something that feels like styrofoam and tastes like cardboard but…it’s space food!

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And Now for Something Completely Different

Yvonne — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 07:38:47 +0000

If you’re reading from a feed, you might want to click over to the site for this one.

We’ve got a new design, a new domain, and a new way of doing things!

It’s been a long blog hiatus as I re-thought my internet presence. I have pretty much always blogged under my real name because I actually prefer having that accountability. But it’s been stifling in some ways; I always wanted just a hair more privacy on certain topics.

This new blog is the compromise I’ve devised. Most stuff will still be freely available to the public; anyone will be able to read and comment on anything. But some posts will now be members-only. Registration is free and open to anyone. If you decide to register, please re-subscribe using the feed URL you see after you log in; that one will automatically give you access to the protected posts. Even if you don’t want to register, please still re-subscribe using the new domain. Everything should be automatically forwarding from the old domain, but I can’t promise I’ll keep that domain forever. This domain is definitely here to stay—it’s my name!

The vast majority of the stuff from the old blog made it over to the new; all of the old posts will remain open to non-registered users.

This is very much an experiment for me and feedback is welcome! I’m excited to get blogging again!

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CPSIA: Senate Contacts Update

Yvonne — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 22:02:17 +0000

At the end of my post about the CPSIA, I asked you to contact your representatives if they voted for the Act and ask them to reform or repeal it before February 10.

This is especially important if one of your Senators is on the Commerce, Science, & Transportation Committee, and especially if he or she is a Democrat, as they make up the majority:

Senate Democrats (listed in alphabetical order by state, except for the chair)

[WV] Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV: (202) 224-6472
[AK] Mark Begich: 202-224-3004
[AR] Mark Pryor: (202) 224-2353
[CA] Barbara Boxer: (202) 224-3553
[FL] Bill Nelson: 202-224-5274
[HI] Daniel K. Inouye: 202-224-3934
[MA] John F. Kerry: (202) 224-2742
[MN] Amy Klobuchar: 202-224-3244
[MO] Claire McCaskill: (202) 224-6154
[ND] Bryon L. Dorgan: (202) 224-2551
[NJ] Frank R. Lautenberg: (202) 224-3224
[NM] Tom Udall: 202-224-6621
[VA] Mark Warner: 202-224-2023
[WA] Maria Cantwell: 202-224-3441

Senate Republicans

[TX] Ranking Member Kay Bailey Hutchison: 202-224-5922
[FL] Mel Martinez: (202) 224-3041
[GA] John Isakson: (202) 224-3643
[KS] Sam Brownback: (202) 224-6521
[LA] David Vitter: (202) 224-4623
[ME] Olympia J. Snowe: (202) 224-5344
[MS] Roger Wicker: 202-224-6253
[NE] Mike Johanns: 202-224-4224
[NV] John Ensign: (202) 224-6244
[SC] Jim DeMint: 202-224-6121 (was one of only 3 Senators to vote against the CPSIA)
[SD] John Thune: (202) 224-2321

Source: Zip-n-Go Blanket.

The CPSIA is a shining example of slapdash, knee-jerk legislation that was given a politically-popular title and passed without most of Congress having bothered to read it or understand what unintended consequences it might have. Call your representatives and make them understand that the CPSIA will kill the children’s market in the name of protecting it.

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The CPSIA Must Be Reformed

Yvonne — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 07:54:20 +0000

If you do not follow handcrafting news, you may not be aware of something called the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), passed last year with supermajorities in response to concerns about lead in Chinese-made toys. Forbes.com recently posted two very good articles about what the law does: prevent the manufacture and sale of tainted children’s products by making it near-impossible to legally manufacture and sell any children’s products at all.

To quote liberally from the first Forbes article:

Congress passed CPSIA in a frenzy of self-congratulation following last year’s overblown panic over Chinese toys with lead paint. Washington’s consumer and environmentalist lobbies used the occasion to tack on some other long-sought legislative goals, including a ban on phthalates used to soften plastic.

The law’s provisions were billed as stringent, something applauded by high-minded commentators as a way to force the Mattels and Fisher-Prices of the world to keep more careful watch on the supply chains of their Chinese factories.

Barbed with penalties that include felony prison time and fines of $100,000, the law goes into effect in stages; one key deadline is Feb. 10, when it becomes unlawful to ship goods for sale that have not been tested. Eventually, new kids’ goods will all have to be subjected to more stringent “third-party” testing, and it will be unlawful to give away untested inventory even for free.

The first thing to note is that we’re not just talking about toys here. With few exceptions, the law covers all products intended primarily for children under 12. That includes clothing, fabric and textile goods of all kinds: hats, shoes, diapers, hair bands, sports pennants, Scouting patches, local school-logo gear and so on.

And paper goods: books, flash cards, board games, baseball cards, kits for home schoolers, party supplies and the like. And sporting equipment, outdoor gear, bikes, backpacks and telescopes. And furnishings for kids’ rooms.

And videogame cartridges and audio books. And specialized assistive and therapeutic gear used by disabled and autistic kids.

Again with relatively few exceptions, makers of these goods can’t rely only on materials known to be unproblematic (natural dyed yarn, local wood) or that come from reputable local suppliers, or even ones that are certified organic.

Instead they must put a sample item from each lot of goods through testing after complete assembly, and the testing must be applied to each component. For a given hand-knitted sweater, for example, one might have to pay not just, say, $150 for the first test, but added-on charges for each component beyond the first: a button or snap, yarn of a second color, a care label, maybe a ribbon or stitching–with each color of stitching thread having to be tested separately.

Suddenly the bill is more like $1,000–and that’s just to test the one style and size. The same sweater in a larger size, or with a different button or clasp, would need a new round of tests–not just on the button or clasp, but on the whole garment. The maker of a kids’ telescope (with no suspected problems) was quoted a $24,000 testing estimate, on a product with only $32,000 in annual sales.

Could it get worse? Yes, it could. Contrary to some reports, thrift and secondhand stores are not exempt from the law. Although (unlike creators of new goods) they aren’t obliged to test the items they stock, they are exposed to liability and fines if any goods on their shelves (or a component button, bolt, binding, etc.) are found to test above the (very low) thresholds being phased in….

Thrift store managers, often volunteers themselves, have no way to guess whether every grommet or zipper on a kids’ jacket or ink on an old jigsaw puzzle box or some plastic component of Mom’s old roller skates would pass muster.

“The reality is that all this stuff will be dumped in the landfill,” predicted Adele Meyer, executive director of the National Association of Resale and Thrift Shops. Among the biggest losers if that happens: poorer parents who might start having to buy kids’ winter coats new at $30 rather than used at $5 or $10.

And even worse: Since the law does not exempt books, children’s’ sections at libraries and bookstores will, at minimum, face price hikes on newly acquired titles and, at worse, may have to rethink older holdings.

After all, no one has the slightest idea how many future violations lie hidden in the stacks and few want to play a guessing game about how seriously officialdom will view illegality. “Either they take all the children’s books off the shelves,” Associate Executive Director Emily Sheketoff of the American Library Association told the Boston Phoenix, “or they ban children from the library.”

Emphasis, the whole bloody lot of it, mine. It is important to note that the law is retroactive. Even items manufactured before the law was passed are subject to the new testing requirements.

If this law stays on the books, many of the small businesses who manufacture or sell items for children under 12 will go out of business on Feb. 10. The companies who survive will likely pass the costs of compliance onto the consumer.

Because that’s exactly what we need in this economy. To “fix” an isolated problem with items manufactured in one foreign country with sweeping, seat-of-the-pants regulation that will cripple an entire US industry, put more people out of work, turn millions of dollars of useful, safe products into landfill waste, and saddle households with small children with additional expenses.

There are reasonable alternatives to the existing legislation that would ensure safe children’s items without requiring thousands of dollars of redundant testing for each batch manufactured.

The people behind the CPSIA are Bobby Rush (D, 1st District, IL) and Henry Waxman (D, 30th District, CA).

Please, if you live in one of these districts, pick up the phone and tell your Congressman that the CPSIA needs to be reformed or repealed like…next week.

If you do not live in one of those districts, please check the CPSIA page on Govtrack.us to see if any of your representatives co-sponsored and/or voted for it (odds are: yes). If so, give them a call too.

More reading on the CPSIA:

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Today in Junk Science

Yvonne — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:52:33 +0000

From CNN:

Security experts say focus is shifting from analyzing the content of carry-ons to analyzing the content of passengers’ intentions and emotions.

“We are seeing a needed paradigm shift when it comes to security,” says Omer Laviv, CEO of ATHENA GS3, an Israeli-based security company.

“This ‘brain-fingerprinting,’ or technology which checks for behavioral intent, is much more developed than we think.”…

Several Israeli-based technology companies are developing detection systems that pick up signs of emotional strain, a psychological red flag that a passenger may intend to commit an act of terror. Speedier and less intrusive than metal detectors, these systems may eventually restore some efficiency to the airplane boarding process.

One firm, WeCU (pronounced “We See You”) Technologies, employs a combination of infra-red technology, remote sensors and imagers, and flashing of subliminal images, such as a photo of Osama bin Laden. Developers say the combination of these technologies can detect a person’s reaction to certain stimuli by reading body temperature, heart rate and respiration, signals a terrorist unwittingly emits before he plans to commit an attack.

With these technologies, the emphasis is on speed and seamlessness. Ehud Givon, CEO of WeCU, envisions a day when a passenger can breeze through a security checkpoint in 20 to 30 seconds.

Do these people not have a psychologist on staff? Because this is total garbage. Expensive fancy garbage, to be sure, but garbage nonetheless.

Subliminal messages do not work. If it’s not perceived, the content doesn’t get processed, there’s no response. End of story.
They’ve tried this before; they’re called polygraphs. Polygraphs do not work, except to scare someone who doesn’t know they don’t work.
There is serious base-rate neglect here (a common feature across the entire airport security rigamarole). Face it, “I am about to commit a terrorist act” causes an infinitesimal amount of “emotional strain” compared to say: fired from job, new baby, fertility problems, wedding planning, fight with spouse, clinical depression, chronic illness, 401K loses half its value one year before retirement, etc. If they’re looking for signs of “emotional strain” they’re going to wind up flagging every third person. At least.

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Praise and Positive Reinforcement

Yvonne — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 04:02:46 +0000

If you’ve ever thought the pop psychology on self-esteem had the causal arrow pointing in the wrong direction (e.g., self-esteem and success are correlated, so if I praise a kid up the wazoo, I increase his/her changes of being successful), read this and feel vindicated. Money quote:

After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction: He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: It’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”

By and large, the literature on praise shows that it can be effective—a positive, motivating force. In one study, University of Notre Dame researchers tested praise’s efficacy on a losing college hockey team. The experiment worked: The team got into the playoffs. But all praise is not equal—and, as Dweck demonstrated, the effects of praise can vary significantly depending on the praise given. To be effective, researchers have found, praise needs to be specific. (The hockey players were specifically complimented on the number of times they checked an opponent.)

This reminded me of another article I read a while back, on the power of positive reinforcement. Although this one was specifically about marriage, its lessons can be applied to parenting or almost any type of relationship.

The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don’t. After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I’d kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.

I was using what trainers call “approximations,” rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can’t expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can’t expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.

In psychology parlance, reinforcement is something that is supposed to increase the rate of a particular behavior while punishment is something that is supposed to decrease the rate of a particular behavior. Positive means the addition of a stimulus, negative means the removal of a stimulus.

Positive reinforcement:
praising your child for studying hard for a test

Negative reinforcement:
stopping an endless stream of nagging when your child finally does sit down to study

Positive punishment:
scolding your child for not studying

Negative punishment:
removing TV privileges for not studying

The take-home message from both animal and human research seems to be this: when it comes to shaping a complex behavior, positive reinforcement is definitely the way to go. But keep the praise targeted at a specific accomplishment, even if it’s a small one, or risk inflating your child’s ego without seeing any actual improvement.

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Trees are a Renewable Resource Anyways

Yvonne — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:12:12 +0000

I am part Luddite; I like to flip through pages and scribble illegibly in margins. I despise reading journal articles on the computer.

I am also really cheap. Paper and toner are expensive, yo!

And so I normally print out my articles two (or more!) pages per sheet. When it comes to saving trees vs. saving my eyes, I hug the trees.

Today I took a 40-pager to the gym to read on the treadmill. Ninety minutes, four miles, and 388 calories later, I was dizzy in the head and sore around the eyeballs. It persists even now, seven hours later.

So for anyone who might have been wondering: Trying to train your eyes on approximately 4pt font from 18 inches away in a poorly-lit room while your head bobs up and down from walking is a very, very BAD idea if you value your eyesight.

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What Would You Spend 10,000 Hours Doing?

Yvonne — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:24:08 +0000

Spread out over 10 years, that’s 2 hours and 45 minutes a day—with no exceptions.

A couple days ago I added an excerpt from Outliers: The Story of Success to my delicious.com bookmarks.

In the early 90s, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson and two colleagues set up shop at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music. With the help of the academy’s professors, they divided the school’s violinists into three groups. The first group were the stars, the students with the potential to become world-class soloists. The second were those judged to be merely “good”. The third were students who were unlikely ever to play professionally, and intended to be music teachers in the school system. All the violinists were then asked the same question. Over the course of your career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practised?

Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time – around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly the same amount – about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.

The curious thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any “naturals” – musicians who could float effortlessly to the top while practising a fraction of the time that their peers did. Nor could they find “grinds”, people who worked harder than everyone else and yet just didn’t have what it takes to break into the top ranks. Their research suggested that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. What’s more, the people at the very top don’t just work much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

This idea – that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice – surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

The caveat is that those 10,000 hours need to be “effortful practice”—as in, you need to be engaged in something challenging and actively trying to get better. Playing “Heart and Soul” for 10,000 hours isn’t going to turn you into a concert pianist.

That article got the wheels turning for me*—if I had to spend nearly three hours a day doing something for the next ten years, what would it be?

Music clearly is not it. I played the piano for 15 years and the violin for 10, logging a generously-estimated 2,000 hours on each. I’d guess I spent about 2,000 hours each in the dance studio and on the soccer field too.

If I had those 8,000 hours back, 8,000 hours of my childhood devoted to becoming the proverbial jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none, what would I do instead? Could I have been a world-class expert in something by the age I am now?

And would I want to be?

If I could make myself a world-class expert in something by the time I’m 40 (reducing my daily commitment to 2 hours, 15 minutes), what would it be? What would I be willing to give up to make it happen? And does my asking this question suggest that I need a career change?

—
*Being a psychologist, I’ve definitely heard the 10 years/10,000 hours thing before, but let’s just say that Malcolm Gladwell is much better at emotionally grabbing his audience than K. Anders Ericsson.

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I Think This Means I'm Getting Old

Yvonne — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 08:47:08 +0000

We got back from two weeks in Japan and Taiwan last weekend and the jet lag is killing me.

I used to need one, maybe two days to de-jet-lag, and that was it. I was fifteen the last time I went to Taiwan and that time the 13-hour flip was a piece of cake. I’ve done trips to Hawaii (5 hours) and Europe (7 hours) more recently and the jet lag was short-lived.

This time, it took about a whole week to make the 14-hour adjustment to Japan time (though it was a gradual and uneventful transition—going east is easier) and now, six days after our return from Taiwan, I find myself up at 2:30am blogging and nursing a mug of chamomile tea. I’d gone to bed at around 9pm because I wasn’t feeling well and apparently my body decided five hours of sleep was enough.

This is also the first time I’m experiencing full-body jet lag, and not just sleep disruption. I thought I’d maybe come down with some kind of virus, but Wiki says jet lag can cause all the following symptoms:

Loss of appetite, nausea, digestive problems
Headache, sinus irritation
Fatigue, irregular sleep patterns, insomnia
Disorientation, grogginess, irritability
Mild depression

and I’ve got everything on that list except disorientation and depression.

If you go by the one day per time zone rule of thumb, I’ve got eight more days of this to go. Joy.

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Badger Band Disbanded

Yvonne — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:02:52 +0000

The University of Wisconsin marching band has been suspended until further notice for bad behavior.

Not that I’m totally surprised it finally came to this. I had friends in the band back in oh, 2000, and it was already pretty crazy back then.

I guess I’ll have to sing at my TV even more loudly than usual when I watch tomorrow’s game against Ohio State. On Wisconsin!

Let’s hope it’s not a repeat of last week against Michigan, because dear god, I almost had an aneurysm.

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This is John Galt Speaking

Yvonne — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:33:38 +0000

It’s as good a time as any to talk Atlas Shrugged, eh?

The short of it is that I loved the book. I was completely and totally hooked at the introduction of Dagny Taggart and could barely bring myself to put it down, reading by flashlight well into the night during our extended post-hurricane power outage. That is, until “This is John Galt Speaking,” which is supposed to be the meat of the book, but I found it to be redundant and unbelievable from a plot perspective. The same people who wiped Dagny off the air seconds after she uttered “blackmail” are content to sit quietly while Galt rambles Objectivist philosophy for three hours? I didn’t really enjoy Galt’s character that much to begin with—he’s too perfect to be interesting (on the other hand, helloooooo Francisco d’Anconia!)—and could have done without 50+ pages of his speechifying, most of which had already appeared near-verbatim in other parts of the book.

Many of the broader themes of the book resonated strongly with me—personal responsibility, self-sufficiency, and competence, woohoo! I would be a very happy camper in Galt’s Gulch.

But I think the underlying political philosophy in the book looks so good because the world of Atlas Shrugged is the ideal environment for that sort of extremist laissez-faire capitalism. There is a bright line between the good and the bad; the contributor and the looter; the honest and the cheater; the genius and the dolt who thinks dividing revenue by miles of rail maintained makes any sort of logical sense. The real world is a good deal messier.

As a good, old-fashioned story of good vs. evil, it’s a great read, particularly for those with strong interests in the socio/political/psychological. I’m not sure if I’ll take away much more than that.

Discuss.

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It's Electric!

Yvonne — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 05:11:23 +0000

Judging by the time blinking on my yet-to-be-reset alarm clock, our power came back on at 7:30pm this evening, bringing our total time without power to 7 days and 16 hours.

I have lots to write about Ike and about Atlas Shrugged, which I devoured in the absence of the internet. But for now I’m just reporting in. We are totally fine. We lost of a bunch of condiments and natto from the fridge and would have welcomed the luxury of hot water (no running water for the first three days post-Ike at all; no hot water until the power came back), but we prepared adequately and thus we’ve been living more comfortably than you would on an average camping trip.

Which is obviously not the case for large swaths of the greater Houston area and up and down the Gulf coast; we’re among the lucky ones. Please donate to the relief effort if you can.

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Waiting for Ike

Yvonne — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:44:51 +0000

We’re all set here and just waiting for the storm. I’ll probably be online for a few more hours before turning off the computer and unplugging.

As I said before, we’re far enough inland that we’ll escape the storm surge (i.e., we are nowhere near the massive flooding you see on CNN right now). Hopefully the winds won’t do anything too nasty.

We’re stocked up on food and water and should be good for at least three days after the storm.

See y’all on the other side!

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Hurricane Ike Says Hi

Yvonne — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:37:18 +0000

Well, this has been an exciting first hurricane season for me.

This post is really more for people who actually know me and my husband and want to know how we’re faring.

We are west of downtown Houston and thus not in an evacuation zone (meaning we are not in danger of major flooding from the storm surge) and we are currently planning to shelter the storm in place. People are still evacuating from the coast and we don’t need to be adding to the mess. All major evacuation routes are currently jammed according to Google Traffic.

We’re stocked up on food and water. Forecasts for our area predict nasty wind and rain, but not enough to do significant structural damage. We think we’ll be fine, especially if the storm track moves east.

However, we’ve taken the precaution of eating all the ice cream left in the freezer.

I’ll try to post an update tomorrow before unplugging my computer.

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Help Me Become More Well-Read

Yvonne — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 05:29:03 +0000

I don’t make resolutions in January, but I do tend to make them for new school years. One of my resolutions for 2008-2009 is to read fiction again and to fill in some of the gaps (or rather, ginormous canyons) in my literary knowledge. And also to find new books that I really, really enjoy.

I just cracked open Atlas Shrugged, but I’m not quite sure what to read after that (other than The Fountainhead — Animal Farm? Slaughterhouse-Five? Anna Karenina?). So, dear readers, help me with my reading list!

The books don’t necessarily have to be from the Canon of Dead White Guys, but I’m definitely looking for things that are more foundational and less, y’know, Jurassic Park IV or Some Hotshot Lawyer Runs Away Yet Again (and for the love of all things holy, no romance novels). To help you, here’s some background on what I’ve liked and hated:

Loved

1984
Brave New World
Fahrenheit 451

Indifferent

The Great Gatsby
Catcher in the Rye
Sense and Sensibility

Hated

The Metamorphosis
Things Fall Apart

Attempted and Abandoned

Pride and Prejudice (on three separate occasions)
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre

This list is obviously not exhaustive (I do like novels that aren’t set in dystopias), but I’ll leave it here for now and see where the comment trail goes.

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Hey Look, Watchable Soccer Coverage!

Yvonne — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:37:35 +0000

The first Olympic soccer game I caught was Belgium’s upset of Italy on MSNBC and I pretty much lost all hope of getting decent soccer coverage. ABC, who despite employing the excreable Dave O’Brien, has at least figured out Rule #1 of Televised Soccer: No Commercial Breaks. Except at halftime.

But MSNBC saw fit to cut to commercial in the 89th minute (after going to commercial about every ten minutes during the game). Rage! Even more so considering they were showing the game on tape delay so they could have picked the game back up right where they left off, but nooooo. When we came back, we were well into stoppage time with only a minute left to play.

I was flipping through the channels after lunch when I stopped on 88 OMAND. The preview showed a soccer match. It turned out to be Nigeria v. Belgium…in Mandarin! Sweet!

The first thing I noticed was that one of the announcers was female. Are there any women calling men’s team sports on US TV? I know Elfi Schlegel, Cynthia Potter, and Brandi Chastain are doing gymnastics, diving, and women’s soccer respectively, but I think everybody else calling the events I watch has been male.

The second thing I noticed was that they were referring to players by number instead of by name (except during substitutions). I wonder if it’s due to name translation issues. If the compact “Phelps” becomes a four-syllable monstrosity in Mandarin (Fei-er-pu-si), what becomes of a name like “Okonkwo”? By the time you finished saying it, the ball would have moved on.

The game was great to watch, even though Nigeria’s total domination (including two goals scored from outside the box) took away the suspense. And there were no commercials.

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Don't Watch MSNBC Olympic Update

Yvonne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:28:10 +0000

Shut up, Tiki Barber and Jenna Wolfe.

I have cable TV for the first time in four years, just in time for me to absorb as much Olympics coverage as I can handle.

Someone should have warned me about the dreck that is MSNBC Olympic Update, particularly the massive incompetence of Tiki Barber and Jenna Wolfe.

Their banter is horribly stilted, neither can read off a teleprompter smoothly, and they can’t even pronounce the athletes’ names correctly!

Coughlin is COG-lin, not COFF-lin.
Liukin is LYOO-kin, not loo-EE-kin.

And right now Jenna Wolfe is wearing a horrible baseball cap that’s obscuring half her face. Shut up, Jenna’s hat.

And while I’m ranting on terrible Olympics coverage, will someone please gag Al Trautwig and leave him tied to the vaulting table? I have yet to meet anyone who likes his godawful overdramatic pronouncements, no matter what sport he’s been assigned to destroy the viewing experience of cover.

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Randy Pausch Passes Away

Yvonne — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:12:45 +0000

Randy Pausch of Last Lecture fame has passed away.

I am deeply saddened. The news from his personal update page (currently fried from server overload) had been getting worse in the last few months, but…man.

Rest in peace, Randy. My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family.

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Global Warming is Reversing

Yvonne — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 06:09:31 +0000

Judging by the number of pirates, that is.

…

What?

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Using 10% of Your Brain

Yvonne — Sat, 24 May 2008 16:39:37 +0000

The “you only use 10% of your brain” statistic showed up on Cracked.com’s most frequently quoted bullshit statistics list. Which is good, because the statistic is nonsense. But it’s also bad, because their explanation of why it’s nonsense is…mostly nonsense. In their explanation, they basically accept the 10% statistic is true, they just say that contrary to popular belief, you can’t actually do any better.

No no no no no.

The 10% statistic is bogus. You, in fact, use almost all of your brain almost all of the time. Depending on what you’re doing, your brain might not be working very hard, but it will be working. If I perform an fMRI on you while you lie there and do nothing, your entire brain will still light up *. If I put you through a sensory deprivation protocol for long enough, you will actually start to hallucinate, because your brain craves input and activity.

Take, for example, the simple task of sipping from a glass. Your prefrontal cortex, probably in response to a “thirsty!” signal from the hypothalamus, decides that you want some water. It (in conjunction with the parietal cortex) plans the sequence of movements needed to pick up the class and drink from it and signals your motor cortex to execute the plan.

Meanwhile, your occipital cortex processes the scene in front of you and, with the help of the temporal cortex, recognizes a particular object as the glass you want to drink from. Your parietal cortex uses the input from visual cortex to triangulate the distance to the glass and calculate the trajectory of your arm and the shape of your hand so that you can pick it up.

After you make contact with the glass, the tactile feedback goes back into your parietal cortex so that you can grip the glass firmly. And then your parietal cortex and premotor/motor cortex work to monitor the proprioceptive feedback from your arm and make needed course corrections so you bring the glass to your lips rather than dumping the contents into your eye (infants are still training this particular neural circuit, which is why they often do whack food into their eyes).

That’s most of your brain right there. So you can sip from a glass.

—
*You’re probably saying to yourself, “but I’ve seen all those brain pictures with just a few brightly-colored blobs of activity…” Well, that’s because fMRI uses something called subtractive logic.

In order to determine what parts of your brain might be really important to a task, we also scan you doing something totally mundane, like staring at a + in the middle of a screen. We then take your brain activity map from when you were doing the Really Important Task and subtract off the activity from the Totally Mundane Task to see what’s left.

As you can see, there are certain assumptions about the nature of brain activity built into the methodology, which is why neuroimaging is not quite the magic bullet it’s made out to be in the media.

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A Terrifying Realization

Yvonne — Sat, 24 May 2008 04:55:27 +0000

My kid brother (the baby of the family) graduated from college last weekend.

You know what this means?

This means that the incoming first-year grads, at least some of them, ARE THE SAME AGE AS MY KID BROTHER.

I can’t decide if this is more or less terrifying than when I occasionally freak myself out realizing that I’m nearly a decade older than incoming college freshmen. A DECADE. THE EIGHTIES DID NOT EXIST FOR THESE PEOPLE.

I’m old.

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