Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Ve Ri Tas' LiveJournal:

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Saturday, April 12th, 2008
10:10 pm	thoughts on funerals I went  to the third funeral of my life today. It was for the baby of two friends. Emma was c-sectioned in her 23rd week because she and her twin sister had something called Twin-to-Twin-Transfusion Syndrome. Basically, most of mom's blood and associated resources were going to Ella who was getting too much, while Emma was getting too little and not developing. So out they came.  Emma was in the NICU for her entire life. She was also born with a ventricular septal defect - a whole in her heart. A few weeks ago, she stopped gaining weight and was still a bit under the weight they were trying to get her to before having open heart surgery to repair the defect. So she went under the knife too small. She survived the surgery, but developed sepsis. She fought off the sepsis initially, but relapsed and died a week later.   The high point of the event for me were some comments by Jordan.  This is from memory, but here is basically what he said:      Have you ever noticed yourself doing something that you just know came from someone else? We pick up mannerisms from those       around us all the time.  I think that what we are is a collection of habits, behaviors, choices and so on. When we interact with others, it      changes them and their lives.  People say that someone has "rubbed off on them".  I don't think that's just a phrase. I think it's true, that a       little part of them has attached itself to you.  Emma has rubbed off on the 1,000 people who have been following her struggle, and we all        carry a part of her with us now. I am a big fan of stuff like this that takes whacky spiritual ideas and says think about it. It really is actually true.  I'm also a fan of this particular idea. I've written a few things about it myself and made a similar point when I spoke at my mom's funeral, remarking how much better I got to know mom and how much closer to her I got after she died.  But I really like bringing the rubbing off on you phrase into it.  And I felt like he just did a great job expressing it in a way that clear and compelling and fresh, when something like this can easily veer into trite, cliche and hackneyed. I was talking with Khayah before it about how ti was kind of a weird funeral - really and I was wondering what it would be like.  I was reminded of my feeling before mom's funeral that the only memorial I'd been to before was very abnormal (it was held by an academic dept in a conference room after one of the dept staff killed himself shortly after losing his job). I remember feeling like I had no idea what went on at a funeral - just what I'd seen in movies.  Now I felt like even having been to a third, I still hadn't ever been to a "normal" funeral, but began to think maybe there isn't really such a thing. Maybe they're more like people - there is no such thing as a typical person, we're diverse and different and varied. Our lives are and our deaths are; a celebration of someone's life should naturally reflect that. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
12:04 pm	extra ticket to see The Wet Spots tonight  I have an extra ticket to see The Wet Spots at Comedy Underground tonight at 8:30. Give me a call if you're interested: 999 6866. At this late date, I just want to see the seat get filled -  it's on me. Here's how they describe themselves: The Wet Spots (Cass King and John Woods) are a musical sex comedy duo who write sophisticated lyrics paired with sweet, catchy melodies. Their musical repertoire is inspired by the risque satirical songs of Monty Python, South Park, Tenacious D and musical comedy legend Rusty Warren. They are known for their lively shows, which include sing-alongs, spankings, and bawdy sex-ed. Here's a link to one of their generally Not Safe For Work videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grGrN_nuWg8 (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
3:48 am	My funding at work is running out over the course of this month and it has kind of snuck up on me.  I know I was aware of it in like October or November, but somehow the word "May" got into my head instead of "March" and so I didn't realize it was going to be quite so soon or quite so all at once.  I've called in some IOUs and so I'm okay until about late May, by which time the radiology folks will need more work, so I'll be fine for a good long while.  That said, the definition of "okay" here is 50% time, because that's the cutoff to get health insurance. I can live acceptably on half my salary, it'll make paying off the credit cards take longer, but that can be managed. This has however lead to me looking into switching jobs.  Which I have very mixed feelings about.  I applied for a job at the Child Health Institute last weekend and I've had a few folks point out things I might do at the usual round of techie suspects around here.  There are some advantages to switching even if I stay within the university.  It's a chance to renegotiate a much better salary if nothing else. It's also occurred to me just how many times I've counselled someone about the exponential growth of savings and why if you are going to sell out it is best to do it now and then go follow your bliss later rather than the reverse. It could be time to follow my own advice. On the other hand, it is also making me realize how much I love working at CFAR.  Even the job at CHI, which would still have been an academic biostat job, still had me wondering how I'd feel about evaluating multimedia interventions to get diabetics to manage their insulin better rather than multimedia interventions about using condoms correctly.   (Of course, the funny thing is that it's not like I actually even watch these interventions.  Coding up a GEE model is pretty similar in either case)  And even less interest in comparing the effectiveness of two sets of code for inclusion in the latest version of some web app. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
6:51 pm	I did something unpleasant to my hamstring last night at soccer. I'm really mostly fine, but prudence dictated that I not go slide down mountains for the next four days.  So I'm surprised to find myself in town with no plans.  Anything fun and nonstrenuous that I should do? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, December 7th, 2007
1:26 am	scooped by Sewall Wright So it turns out that this solution to a problem that I've been working on is essentially identical to Wright's Fst. I guess if you're going to spend time replicating someone else's work, you could do worse than the guy who invented the field. It is a little embarrassing to have not done a decent enough literature search to find it though. It's an interesting mix of emotions - feeling vindicated but also negligent, smart but dumb. ( Read more... ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
1:28 am	the love - hate relationship with work Funny story from today: We had an early soccer game this evening and so a few of us went out for beers afterwards. We were discussing the work involved in managing the team and someone was talking about a webpage that the manager of his other team uses which alleviates some of the work by essentially automatically collating and tabulating players' reports on whether they will be at the upcoming game. And so we join our heroes... Mark: Yeah, I have something similar almost set up, but it's not quite working yet. Dell: I was going to say. Aren't you some kind of computer person? Mark: That's exactly the problem. [Explains his job.] After 9-10 hours at my computer writing code, the last thing I want to do when I get home is sit at my computer and write more code. Dell: I can see that. I'm certainly not going to come home and remodel the bathroom. Mark: Whereas that sounds great to me. Dell: I'm just the opposite, about all I'm good for is sitting at the computer doing nothing: check my email, watch a little porn. David: I dated this porn star for a while. And y'know, everyone always fantasizes about that, but as it turns out... Miles: What? Sorry, honey, I've been fucking all day. David: Exactly. All she was interested in was having dinner and then doing some math before we went to sleep. Amusingly enough, when we left the bar shortly afterwards, I found that I had a text message asking me a stats question. * * * No, I haven't actually dated a porn star. I just couldn't resist. However, I did recently come across a recommendation of this interview with porn star Sasha Grey. (Warning: much of the visual is her doing a semi-nude photo shoot with the interview voiceover). I've only watched part 1 so far, but it was pretty interesting. I mention it here because she makes a few comments about how being a porn star inhibits her sex life ("can't come to work with bruises"). * * * I'm also reminded of a conversation I had a few weeks ago about having hobbies which generate income - even if it is less than required to pay for itself - and the sort of weird cognitive space occupied by such an ...uh... occupation. It's not something you do for the money, you'd do it anyway, the money is simply a pleasant side effect. This leads to the question of whether you can view your job that way, too. One of the things that I realized during my stint between grad schools doing clerical temp work was that contrary to the "I'd like to be able to leave my work at the office." line, that I feel that anything I'm going to spend 40 hours a week doing should be something that I enjoy well enough that I *want* to think about it in off hours. That's not a far cry from "something I'd do even if they weren't paying me". Which eventually lead to the line: "Hey, I'm not here for the money. Being a grocery clerk is my hobby." It's interesting though. I do love my job quite a bit. And I'd like to say that I'd do it even if they weren't paying me. To a certain extent, I clearly would. I do have volunteer projects. I've been known to do nontrivial things just in yammering on my mailing lists. But it is funny how sometimes I nevertheless don't seem to get very much work done. And I haven't been for the past couple weeks, although I'm starting to pick up again. It's been easy to feel overwhelmed, especially with all the house stuff as well, and I've spent too much time in the "Oh my god, I have so much shit to do. How will I manage it?" Not by spinning wheels contemplating with terrible awe the sheer magnitude of the task list, that's for sure. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 26th, 2007
1:48 am	In the past week I: sent off 3 grant proposals and a late breaker abstract designed an analysis for the multiple cervical biopsy study that's been vexing me for ages. now i just have to implement it had a new housemate move in realized that my recent solution to "the hard problem" is less novel than I thought went to an annex play and helped with strike had a 4 stop Friday evening - toward the end, corrie was talking about liberty and says something about "i'm sure dave's been there" response: "i've been there twice today." falsified another theory about why the subaru doesnt start sometimes - or at least how to fix it (mild percussive maintenance doesn't work) went to a party where i knew only the host. met a neat person who is 1 degree away from me. got into a minor argument with a long time west seattlite about the (okay, my) "it's hard to feel too sorry for someone who has so much money they can't afford it all" view of property tax tried red wine vinegar instead of lemon juice in risi y bisi with great success - and learned that vinegar substitutes for lemon juice at about half the amount filed 3 years of taxes learned the difference between settling stones and developing them. learned about the physiology of taste and how it varies from person to person - and what a supertaster really is. AND wrote a journal entry. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 20th, 2007
12:38 pm	I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep last night - went to sleep shortly after 1:30. When I gave up on getting to sleep and got up, it was 4:00. I spent about 2 hours on the computer, mostly catching up on responding to email, before crashing. Surprisingly, I woke up about 10:30, feeling not very well rested, but not feeling like I could go back to sleep either. I got up and after a half hour of feeling groggy, recalled that Ryan - who was here chatting until 1:30 - was getting up at some insane hour to go meditate. I'd said last night - as I have every couple of weeks lately - that I want to start meditating again and probably would soon. I was never much of a morning meditator, it was really more of a midday recharge sort of thing for me. But remembering some comments Ryan made that implied it was part of his morning routine - coupled with the thought that when I do it, I find it a useful way for me to combat fatigue and drowsiness, so I decided there's no time like the present. I decided 10 minutes was a nice goal for being so out of practice (I've probably done it about 3 or 4 times in as many years), grabbed my phone and punched it into the calendar with an alarm to go off in 10 minutes and started concentrating on my breath. It started out going pretty well for a while, but then I started to have trouble concentrating, got fidgety, my hips/upper thighs got tired and achy, and I began having a lot of thoughts like "Wow is 10 minutes a long time." and "Maybe I should check that alarm." At one point I unthinkingly opened my eyes and looked down at the phone, but rather than bring up a screen and check, decided to continue and closed my eyes and went back to my breath. Eventually I began to get really unfocused and gave up. Turns out it was 25 minutes later, I'd put it into the calendar as 11:10 - 11:20, but that meant the alarm wanted to go off at 11:10, which was when I'd started. Yay team. Go me. Now after a couple hours of half useful frittering, I'm yawny again. Might be time to take a nap. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 14th, 2007
4:13 pm	my housing history I wrote this up in comment to Terri Kim saying that she'd been moving a lot. Figured I might as well record it here: You keep moving? How's this: dawn of my memory - 5/79: a house in South Bend, IN. Moved because Dad finished residency and was recruited by a clinic in Quincy, IL 5/79 - 6/86: Cheshire Ct Quincy, IL. Parents divorced in 84, mom subesequently sells house and moves to cheaper house 7/86 - 6/87: 10th&Ohio Quincy IL. House was horrid. Found a nicer house for similar rent and moved. 6/87 - 8/87: Lindell St Quincy IL. Mom is talking about moving out of town, so I arrange to get myself shipped off to boarding school on the state's dime. 8/87 - 11/87: Dorm 8A IMSA Aurora, IL. Contractor hasn't finished 2 new dorms, so I'm living in a temporary dorm: 3 adjacent classrooms- one has 20 beds, one has 20 wardrobes, one has 20 desks. There's a bathroom 50 feet down the hall, but showers are at the gym on the other side of the school. 11/87 - 5/88:Dorm 1504 Aurora, IL. Move into swanky 2 person dorm room with Steve. 6/88 - 7/88: School's out for summer (But not forever. Sorry Alice.) Back to Lindell St. Just in time to move to Bloomington, IN. 7/88 - 8/88: Morningside Dr townhome, Bloomington, IN. Mom is saving money by getting a 2BR place - she and my sister have rooms, I sleep on the livng room hide-a-bed when I'm visiting. 9/88- 6/89: Dorm 1504 Aurora, IL. With Steve again, identical but different room. School year ends, he graduates. I decide to spend most of the summer at my dad's. 6/89 - 8/89: 17th & Ohio Quincy, IL. Live with Dad, Step-mom, step-sister and step-brother. As a 17 year old who had been living semi-unsupervised for most of past 2 years, there's uh, some conflict between me and dad 9/89 - 6/90: Dorm 1505. Same cookei cutter swanky dorm room, new roommate Rich. Graduate, back to Dad's for a summer. 6/90 - 8/90: 17th& Ohio again. Next off to college. 8/90 - 6/91: Bromley Hall (privately owned dorm at UIUC). Roomed with Mez. We get an apartment starting in the fall along with Gabe and Dana, I sublet in Champaign for the summer. 6/91 - 8/91: The Hovel. Tiny 2 BR apartment with Brad (and essentially Melissa, his gf. If you asked where she lived, she said "out of my car." she sometimes stayed with her parents 20 miles away, but mostly lived with Brad/us.) 8/91 - 7/92: Daniel St apt C-U, IL. With Mez, Dana, Gabe. Apt was pricey, found a big, cheap old house for next year. 8/92 - 7/93: White st house C-U, IL. With Mez, Dana, Gabe, CJ. CJ graduated, house was sold from cool landlord to annoying landlord, upstairs bedrooms were freezing. 8/93 - 7/94: Fifth Ave apt C-U, IL With MGD. M+D graduated, G+me move to new apt with new Jim + Pacia 8/94 - 7/95: John st apt C-U. With Gabe, Jim, Pacia. I graduate and move to Pittsburgh for grad school. 8/95 - 7/96: Wilkins St apt, Pgh, PA. With Schwern. Tiny, emergency I-need-to-find-a-place-fast apt, foudn cooler house as I got to know the city a bit. 8/96 - 7/97: Point Breeze house, Pgh, PA. With Carl, Glenn, Tammy. I drop out of grad school to move to Seattle 8/97 - 10/97: Seventh Maze living room in Cap Hill. WIth Madelynn, Mez, Ethan, Sev. Mad and I took a while to find a place, and were fortunate to have generous friends willing to put us up for a longish time. 11/97 - 8/98: Russell Ave in Ballard. With Mad. She moved back to Pgh in 5/98 and paid out the rest of her lease, but I couldn't afford it myself and it was a 1 BR. 8/98 - 7/99: Franklin ave in Eastlake. With Matt and Nathan (in 11/98 or so Nathan moved out and Sarah moved in). Matt was the bldg manager, he moved out and the landlord elected to hire a married couple for it rather than me in hopes of reducing turnover. 8/99 - 4/02: Question House in Wallingford. With Eric and Heather, later adding Leah. Note this is the first time in 15 years that I live at the same place for more than 12 months. Heather and I buy a house. 5/02 - 6/04: Ivory Tower in Cap Hill. With Heather,later adding Ryan. I bought a house. FInally, I'll put down some roots. Or maybe Heather and I will break up, and I'll move elsewhere. 6/04 - present: Hellmouth in the CD/Madrona. With Jen and Scotto, til they bought a house. Now looking for a housemate (or couple). All told that's 25 moves among 23 residences with 32 other people (51 if you count the 19 in the temp dorms) in 28 years (23 in 21 if you start with leaving the Cheshire Ct house). And that doesn't count the 4-5 houses/moves before I was 5 years old because I don't have actual memories of them. But, it has actually slowed down - only 3 moves in the 5 years since I turned 30. And if you know anyone who's looking for a room in a 2BR house for ~$800 incl utilities, internet, housekeeper, put them in touch with me. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 8th, 2006
3:08 am	I haven't written about soccer in a while, in spite of it being a trigger for some surprisingly interesting thinking lately. I've had a couple conversations with Mark after games lately about taking an increasing amount of pride in being a clean player. It's a logical extension of valuing finesse. In a way, it's kind of like how I approach snowboarding: How far can I push myself and still maintain control. How close to a full sprint can I be and still not hit someone 2 steps ahead of me who unexpectedly stops or turns? Some of my favorite moments are making runs with the ball through 3 people who all pretty much just come at me and finding myself leaping one way, leaning the other way and pulling my knee into my chest, then emerging from the cloud with possession of the ball and one of my opponents getting a call even though I've managed to avoid actual physical contact. (As an aside on this, today's ref had an interesting comment about not giving a no call for advantage in this sort of situation because the player who committed the foul "wouldn't know they were out of control if [she doesn't] call it.") Anyway, the last game we had an opposing player who was just going nuts throwing elbows and the like, and after snidely dismissing a series of polite requests that he tone it down a bit, at some point this guy is coming at full sprint with a defender to his left a step behind him. Paul, who had been on the receiving end of most of the brutality, comes running back from the right and blindsides the guy at full clip. Paul is ordinarily another very calm, very well controlled player and a really nice guy. He got carded for it and half heartedly argued that "we both have a right to that ball." But it was pretty clear that what was going on was a sort of warning: If you insist on playing this sort of game, this is what it looks like when I start throwing my body around. So this episode has been an opportunity to think about the ethics of taking vengeance. And the funny thing is that some times it does seem to work or even be necessary. At the beginning of the summer, I set myself a goal to go the season without any fouls called against me. And I got one in the second game. So I revised it to more goals scored than fouls called. I didn't quite make that summer season. So far this season I'm at 2 goals and 1 penalty. It was a pretty incidental penalty - running alongside,maybe a half step behind, someone after a free ball and our feet clipped each other, she fell and I got a call. A few games back in a game where I played defense most of the game, the statistician in me showed up to point out that perhaps all I was really measuring was how much time I played forward vs fullback, as goals tend to come playing the former and fouls playing the latter. Well, maybe not, I certainly encounter my share of forwards who think they can just push me out of their way rather than having ball handling skills. But I've been playing enough of a mix that it doesn't really matter. In last weeks game, it occurred to me that it is a little odd that I formulated this goal in terms of goals and ignored assists, which historically have been both more plentiful and more of a source of pride for me. Perhaps these are related, though of course I feel that it's more of an aesthetic thing. A lot of goals are pretty boring, just be in the right place and tap it in affairs, whereas most assists involve more work and are just prettier. Mostly I was just trying to think of something simple that was still pursuable after getting a call early in the season. But maybe it isnt so bad that I picked the skill I need some work on rather than the one which fits my current skill set. I suppose there is some danger in becoming a trigger happy ballhog, but I don't see it happening and the feedback I'm getting concurs. Plus I have like 4 or 5 assists with only the two goals, so I'm not going to worry about it. The other big soccer news is that after two years of struggling in last place, tonight we clinched an entry into the season championship game. Woot! For all that people talk about winning is fun, I'm mostly just happy that the level of play has improved. It's nice having plays actually work. Hell, it's nice just being able to field a full squad and not have everyone exhausted. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
1:24 am	Today: another day of too much Go and not enough writing. After my last post, I said that I wanted to talk about tradition. Here's where that came from: The morning after Daniel's bachelor party, I was heading up to campus for a lab meeting and ran into Steve, one of my labmates, on the bus. He and Daniel are acquainted, so I played the "you'll never guess what I did last night" game and told him a bit about the previous night's festivities. Steve's comment was "So what makes that a bachelor party." He did admit however that the "bachelor parties" tended to similarly simply be all-guy festivities that preceded a wedding. Now for those of you who wisely bailed on the ramble of the previous post, here was the top secret list of activities: target shooting, dinner, bail on improv comedy show, shoot some pool instead. Now even before the event, there was some tongue-in-cheek talk about target shooting being a suitably manly sort of thing to be doing. I didn't catch how the shooting pool plan came about, but especially given that I won 4 out of the 5 games I played - I can infer this much: This is not a crowd that plays much pool. Alternately, maybe I was just the only one remaining vaguely sober. Anyway, I got the impression that the selection of both these activities had a strong element of 'we are supposed to do this' as opposed to 'this is what we want to do'. This was reinforced when I talked to someone who pretty much said 'well, how is that a bachelor party? what's the point?' I'm not saying people begrudged this, or didn't have fun. And, of course, had that really been the approach to planning it, we would have had a lot more hookers and blow or at least a stripper. But that's kind of the interesting bit - why does someone clearly willing to reject tradition, compromise to it, merely for it's own sake. A few answers come to mind: -This sort of tradition can lead you to things you wouldn't otherwise do. And there's the whole wisdom of the ages thing. -Engaging in unusual activities enhances the distinctiveness and memoribility of the event. -Others may be upset that the forms and covnentions are not followed. In fact, notice that the person I quoted above seems a bit put off by the failure of this event to be what s/he considered a proper bachelor party - even though she wasn't in any way involved. This is interesting in the way that it puts a face on cultural norms. It's not just violating the wills of abstract "thems" - there's always specific individuals that comprise the faceless mass. Oh, by the way, my answer to 'what's the point?' was basically that it gave some of the groom's closer friends a chance to spend some time with him - which was going to be difficult to do at the wedding itself. In fact, it occurs to me that there are a couple other things worth touching on here. One is that bachelor(ette) parties are about friends and peers. Whereas the wedding proper tends to be more about family. The other related point is that it gives those friends a chance to celebrate away from the family in what let's call an age appropriate way and not have to worry about what the grandparents think. This might help explain why I think we're seeing an increasing number of couples who have a joint bachelor/ette party. It's not really about purging the things you won't be able to do once you're married - it's just about a party without the parents, nieces and nephews. (Comment on this)
Monday, October 16th, 2006
12:38 am	So I looked at my journal recently and was surprised at how long it has been since I posted. I've actually been accumulating some experiences and thoughts that I've meant to get in here for a little over a week now. We'll see how I do at recollecting them. Well, actually, we won't really because we'll never know about the ones I've forgotten, will we? But first, I should note with amusement that I have a saved draft. Here's what it says: >This is going to be one of my technical statistical entries. Boy, I sure I'm glad I kept that around. Actually, I think this might have ended up becoming the power calculation entry from July 28th. *shrug* I decided a little while ago that with a backlog this large that I should attack it by interleaving it from both ends. That is, write about the most recent day/event then the oldest then the second newest and so forth. Of course, it's all a question of what you choose to optomize for. Memory is widely regarded to decay exponentially, so if pure recording of information is the goal, then simply going backwards is the best course. THe oldest stuff has already lost much of what it will, so there is little further loss from waiting. However, as new experiences accumulate, this is likely to result in never getting "caught up". The interleaving idea is meant to be a compromise between the two. Of course, in some ways a more sensible approach would be too go in order of some kind of importance. But that would require more organization than I want to put on this. Unless we take the order I think of things in as a marker for this importance. Which would be reasonable except chaining/association effects. But let's start with a big and recent one: This weekend. I went to Daniel W and Katie D's wedding at Semiahmoo Resort near Blaine, WA and had an amazing time there. Let's actually start this story on Thursday. Thursday was the bachelor party. The schedule was a procession from a target shooting range, to dinner at Serafina, an Improv Comedy Show and then to a bar for some drinks. I ended up deciding morning of to skip out on the target shooting for reasons of expense and time. I'd given a talk the day before and had spent much of Monday and Tuesday engaged in a combination of talk preparation and procrastination. I understand a certain amount of the latter is almost always involved in the former. I have listed it anyway because of the sheer quantities involved. I had a Network Modelling Group meeting Firday morning and felt like I should get some work done for it. Especially having gotten unblocked on the issue of analytic tractability for dyad-independent models. Well, as it turned out it was good that I stayed home, however, what I actually accomplished was to prepare the house for an out of town wedding guest whom I'd agreed to house. According to Dan, Michael was a fellow Yalie, a statistician and is the son of a social network researcher, and I was looking forward to meeting him. I had gotten Mark to help me move the futon from the basement up into the bedroom, but hadn't put it together, didn't have any clean sheets, and discovered that the window shades had been taken down. It seems that I may no longer have all the hardware for the futon. It shouldn't be too hard to replace, but it did rekindle the irksomeness of Heather returning it to me in bits with the hardware just kind of ranodmly laying about- bolts through holes, with the nuts just sitting next to them and so forth. Of course, it's been like two years since then and the current problem would have been greatly alleviated had I put it all together into a bag or something. But then maybe I'd just have lost it all instead of having lost some of it. Despite the setback, I managed to get the room in liveable shape, clean up the house and get the Bronze ready so that folkes could have a party there in my absence. And I still managed to not be the last person to make it to dinner. I spent most of dinner talking with Michael, Daniel and Daniel's childhood friend Jeremy, who is a C130 pilot in the air force. Most of what I remember talking about was various aspects of military life with Jeremy. He'd moved around every two years for the past 8, and I asked how culturally different he found it to be on different bases. My impression was that most military hang together and there's sort of a separate military culture. So what's it matter whether you're in TX or AR or England. He said that he lives off-base, and mostly does associated with other millies - as his wife Kelly would later refer to them. We talked about him having to take courses on leadership for an MBA program he was in, when he's just been elevated to aircraft commander, which has some interesting parallels to my own experience taking stat consulting. Only I think I liked that more. I talked with Daniel about the NRA reaction to a recent shooting in Westlake Center that I hadn't heard about previously. Apparently, some crazy guy got belligerent and attacked someone else in the mall. Turns out the guy who he assaulted had a concealed weapons permit and was packing. So he shot and killed his assailant. Now the relevant bit to our discussion was that the Seattle Times had referred to the event as "bizarre". This did not sit so well with the NRA and the hammer was brought down on the paper. I pointed out that one of the most fundamental messages of the NRA is that if more people carried guns, this sort of thing would happen less. In some sense, to the NRA this went down exactly as it should. It is an interesting thought. However, I have to wonder - if one of the main contributing factors here were that the assailant was deranged or drugged, how much of a difference would that make? It's hard to say, really. The argument against is fairly straightforward, but I think there's some argument for it having a foundational change in the way people think about physical violence in the long term, such that it is simply less likely in any situation. Oh, also heard a great story from Max about when he was in a band and played a concert where the Counting Crows opened for them about 6 months prior to being signed by the labels. Gist of it: "When you're in a band, you hear a lot of bands and they're almost all pretty mediocre and these guys went on and it was just immediately enthralling. How do you go on after that?" He said that even the friends of his band mostly just continued to be dazed or left after the Crows, and they just kind of did a perfunctory set ("we played our set list in alphabetical order") and got out. Made me think about what it must be like to give a talk at a conference right after someone who presents somehting really profound and you can tell the whole audience is still trying to process the previous talk rather than listen to you. We gave up on the comedy show and decided to instead go to dillettante's for dessert and then go play pool at the garage. I recall talking with Warren, a reporter at the Times, about the NRA stuff over dessert. I also blabbered on about my theories of sleep deprivation and aging with Warren and one of the other guys still around. If you haven't gotten this spiel, the gist of it is that the reason most people have more trouble pullng all nighters as they get older is not physiological, but the atrophy of a skill that is inovled in staying awake and in coping with lack of sleep. My alternate theory is that you don't actually get worse, you just get more aware of an impairment that was always there and less willing to tolerate it. Hmm, here's a new variant on that: as people get more structured lives, they are less able to accommodate that impairment and rescedule around it. Next up was the garage. We broke into 2 groups of 3 and played cutthroat. I won 3 of the 4 games we played, which was suprising as I'm not much of a pool player, but I guess all is relative. Steve M showed up there and I got a chance to meet him. We talked a bit about the history of flock and some of the reasons that it isn't what it used to be. No real good ideas, but it was neat to have reaffirmed from another quarter what a neat thing it was back in the heyday. It was also nice to be pointed out as one of the people on the "read anything this person writes" list of someone that I had never met. I sometimes feel like the quality of my writing has gone down. In particular, I've become sloppy about making claims. I think that one of the things that made me a good poster was that I was consistently clear about what was fact, what was inference and what was conjecture. I feel like I've gotten worse about filling in numbers that I don't really remember with something that gives the emotional impression I mean to convey. I've gotten a bit of a habit of for example, saying "over 100,000" when what I really mean is "a whole lot". WIthout stopping to consider whether the number is reasonable. I sometimes worry that I used to not do this and it contributed greatly to a reputation that led people to really respect what I had to say. Lately, I feel more like crank that no one listens to. I don't really think that's true. I guess part of it comes from Burning Man planning, which is definitely a different sort of thing. Anyway, back to sleep deprivation, I'm tired. Time to go to bed. Tomorrow more focus on important stuff. Up tomorrow: some thoughts on tradition (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 28th, 2006
6:31 pm	Kind of busy day today. I had a meeting in the morning with Todd Jusko to work on our letter to Neurotoxicology. It seems to be coming along pretty well. After that I got an email with an interesting problem from Sarah. Basic problem: we have a bunchof samples that have been tested using one assay. We want to compare the sensitivity of this assay with a different assay. Now this is a matched analysis, so infromation on the difference in sensitivities will come from the discordant results. Since we know all these people are positive and that even the new assay should get a positive result most of the time, we will maximize the number of discordant results by testing lots of old negatives and fewer old positives. BUT this means we now can't use a straightforward test. Instead we have to reweight by the inverse probability of choosing a sample. Think of it this way: out of 100 samples and 90 were positive and 10 were negative. We're going to use the new assay on 20 samples: the 10 negatives plus a random 10 positives. We find that 9 of the 10 negatives show a positive on the new assay and 2 of the 10 original positives come up negative. That means the new test is a lot better, right? We gain 7 more right answers and lose only 2. Except that we expect another 16 new negatives among the other 80 unsampled original positives. So we're actually losing 18 to gain those 7. Whoops. The neat thing here - and I suppose the above was pretty neat when I first learned it but whatever - is that when we do this reweighting we multiplyy the variance of the estimate of the number that are old + and new - by that same factor. So it turns out that preferentially sampling those negaitves isn't really giving us any more power than a simple random sample would. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's exactly the same. Yet another failed attempt at a free lunch. And now an evening of Busby Berkeley-watching, Vernor Vinge-meeting and Space Virgin-ConWorksing. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 12th, 2006
2:09 am	Oh yeah, and I'm a little irked and concerned that I'm up at 2 and not even vaguely tired. I guess I did get up at 10 til 10, so that's not so unreasonable. Though it is rapidly becoming so. Time to club myself with Ambien, I think. Ooh, and I cooked dinner for the first time in ages. A nice sockeye fillet broiled with chili and sesame oil, turmeric, ginger, a little salt and pepper. And mashed potatoes with habanero jack cheese. Tasty. I wanted to make a basil chiffonade for the fish, and a salad so that I had some green stuff. But I didn't have time before soccer. It's unspeakably good to have food in the house again. And Jen found me a microwave on freecycle. More on that later. (Comment on this)
Monday, July 10th, 2006
3:11 am	The zombie episode of Cherub is live.  I played one of the zombies.  Season 2 has gotten some great buzz, including coverage in Wired. As Scotto puts it, the premise: 7 cast members, 12 extras in full zombie make up, 7 1/2 minutes, 1 continous shot. It has a couple small problems, but considering the budget and the ambitiousness of the project, it's great.  It actually turned out to take far less time than expected.  What you see was only the 3rd take with a live camera. (Comment on this)
3:06 am	I'm in the market for a housemate, for those who did not know, and I'm trying to get a better sense of what to tell potential housemates about me and what I am like to live with. It occurred to me that it might be useful to get other people's perspective and that this might be a good forum to do that.  Plus it'd just be interesting to see.  Any input is appreciated, especially from those of you who have lived with me.  I asked Heather this the other night.  Some of the things we came up with: I'm very easy going and tolerant. I'm very adaptable and change my routine quite a bit based on my environment - ranging from things like what i eat and when i shower to adopting the hobbies of those around me. I keep odd hours, but am pretty quiet. You know how you turn around and see someone standing right next to you and you didn't realize there was anyone else in the room? I do that to people all the time without trying to sneak up on them.  I also sleep pretty soundly and generally fall back to sleep easily when woken, so I'm not generally bothered by someone staying up later or getting up earlier than me. I'm interactive.  I have housemates because I prefer to live with other people, not because I can't afford to live by myself. I also believe that regular contact makes a tremendous difference in how housemates get along and resolve conflicts.  I would hope to have at least 1 "real conversation" a week. I work from home a lot and go out more evenings than most people. Heather felt I don't intitiate a lot of activities or projects, but enthusiatically join and contribute to those started by those around me. I'm not sure how true the first part is, though I definitely am the sort of person who throws out a lot more ideas than I follow through on.  I summarized this as more of a joiner than a leader.  Another one is that I take direction better than I give it. I need very little privacy. I don't watch TV. I like movies, but don't watch many any more.  If you are someone who does, I'll probably join you and start watching more. If you're not, I probably won't. While I lived with my most recent housemates, I've started watching TV on DVD. I'm more tolerant of this than I am of watching shows at the mercy of the cable schedule. (if I missed any big ones, remind me) -- To that I'd add: I'm not very polite.  Not that I'm especially rude, but I'm not reliably a good morning, please, thank you, you're welcome, excuse me sort of person. I'm very communal. I need clear boundaries about what it is not okay for me to use/borrow.  I will ask if it's convenient or if it's something big, but if not I'll tend to assume it's okay. I'm not very attached to my stuff and pretty free with it as well.  I strongly prefer to share groceries. I'm very minimal structure. I don't want to save all my grocery receipts and add them up at the end of the month. I'd prefer to each pay attention to what you use and buy, and if it seems to be unfair, then we can try to work something out. I'm extremely intellectual with broad interests from psychology to physics to philosophy. And even things that don't start with p. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 4th, 2005
10:17 am	another striking image walking in to work Walking along Union in between 21st and 20th, I walked passed two rather bedraggled Amerinds, one carrying a sleeping bag in his left hand. Underneath an old down jacket, he wore a t-shirt whose text was partially obscured by the jacket, but said e Silent. nsume. Die. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 2nd, 2005
9:24 pm	I recently received my 5 year employment award from the University. It's actually a rather nice lapel pin/tie tack with the UW seal on it. I was trying to figure out where I should keep it and eventually decided the best place would be the small box that I keep my jewelry in. Mind you I haven't worn any of this jewelry in more than 5 years. But the box is vaguely classified as an Important Thing in my head and it is something I'm reasonably careful of when I move. Mostly it contains single earrings. Yes, I got my left ear pierced in the late 80s or early 90s back in the era where if you're a guy and your right ear is pierced then you're flagging gay. Mind you very few people who believed that understood what flagging means. I also have a few necklaces and a high school class ring that my dad bought me as a birthday present several years after I graduated from high school. I think it was for my 25th birthday, which would have made it during my last year of college, which sounds right. He told me he wanted to buy me a U of I class ring and I replied that I really had no particular identification as a U of I alum and if I were to wear a class ring I would want an IMSA one instead since I do have some identification there. He didn't apprehend the full force of that initial "if" and so he got me an IMSA ring. Well, he gave me a catalog and let me pick one out. I think I decided to go along with it partly because he wears his IU ring every day and is obviously taken with it. And I thought it seemed like something I might like experimenting with. I was pretty sure there are other better ways to spend a few hundred bucks on me, but eh, it's a gift. Just take it. Anyway, I also discovered in there a collection of particularly amusing fortune cookie fortunes that I have opened. Some of them I just plain like the saying, but I'm pretty sure that they were all selected to be great "... in bed." fortunes. Some of them have faded so badly they aren't readable anymore, so I thought to preserve them and share them I'd type them up. Or maybe I'm moved to some typing because I just watched the movie _Secretary._ Causation is so hard to determine. But here they are: There are people so addicted to exaggerating they can't tell the truth without lying. You will be sought out for your diplomatic skills. The beginning of wisdom is to desire it. One look is worth ten thousand words. Your life will soon be graced with the presence of stardom. Knowing and not doing are equal to not knowing at all. Move slowly but surely to success. Happy news is on its way to you. Pressure from a third party should not sway your decision. A member of your family will do something that will make you proud. Our first and love . . . is self love. and of course there are a few "I thought this was worth saving?!?" ones. I suppose I probably gathered many if not all of these before I was sexually active, so things like this probably made more of an impression. You will soon gain something you have always wanted. Your everlasting patience will be rewarded sooner or later. Attitudes are contagious - yours are worth catching. (This one just seems weird. Not sure why I kept it. Maybe for the weirdness.) You have yearning for perfection. Your partner will be proud of you. (my vote for the winner of the "this was definitely written by someone cognizant of the meme" award.) (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 20th, 2005
1:52 am	There oughta be a law I was in Minneapolis all last week to attend the Joint Statistical Meetings and visit John McKeown.  The last night that I was out there, John and I hung out with Zilla and Gidget and David Meyer at Dave's house.  This was the first time that I'd met David and the first time I had a non-superficial conversation with Gidget.  We took a bunch of games that we barely played at all and ended up sitting up all night talking.  We did spend a lot of time going through the questions from a game called "Loaded Questions".  This appeared to be one of those games like Scruples, where the real point is that you've bought a bunch of thought provoking questions to discuss with people and the game involves guessing how other people will answer with some sort of scoring system.  According to John the scoring system has serious problems, basically everybody gets points according to how many other players submitted the same answer.  Anyway, we just read the cards out loud and talked about the question until we had a lull and then read another question.  And a lot of the time, we'd find a question that didn't seem very suited to our group, and we'd riff changes on it into a more interesting question. For example, changing the question "What stereotypes do you think are mistaken?" to "What stereotypes do you think have substantial truth to them?"  But anyway, what I wanted to write about here was a discussion we got into from the question "What single thing do you think should made illegal?" Again, given the libertarian bent of our crowd, we didn't really come up with anything that was a serious answer for a while.  It's also interesting that we didn't have a whole lot of smart ass answers over the evening, people were interestingly finding it more amusing to try to honestly engage the questions.  Which says something for the quality of the questions. Not that they were universally good. And of course they were really intended for a slightly different purpose and I think some of the weirder ones would work better in the "guess someone else's answer" game. For example, "What geometric shape best represents you?" Anyway, in the deafening silence of what we thought should be made illegal, I had an idea that seemed likely to go interesting places. So, I qualified it as such: "I would have to think about it more to decide whether I would really want this, but what about lying.  I think it would be interesting for it to be illegal to lie not just under oath, but ever, at all."  As you might expect, someone (JRM, I think) asked me to define lying.  I went with "deliberately misrepresenting what you believe to be the truth to another person."  We talked about whether the definition should specify "in order to deceive someone" though I argued that it is redundant with the formulation as I have it above.  The other big issue was enforcement, which I brushed off as it all being about convincing 12 jurors.  If they believe the person was deliberately misrepresenting what they believe to be the truth, then the person is guilty. If the jury believes the person actually believed their statement or merely made a speech or typographical error or was communicating poorly but in good faith, then they aren't.  There are other points of law which require the jury to make judgments about intentions or other mental states of defendants. Many crimes require "mens rea" - a guilty mind - basically that the person was deliberately trying to commit the crime.  Different levels of murder charges depend on the extent to which actions were premeditated. Defamation and other crimes may require malice - an intention to cause harm.  I was thinking this evening about this and wondered whether I think it should be a valid defense to claim that you accurately represented your beliefs at the time even if it can be proven that you had previously had access to information such that you should have known better. For example, I missed my original flight out to MN, and I was feeling like a bit of an irresponsible fuck-up for doing so.  To make myself feel better about it, I reminded myself that this was only the second time I've ever missed a flight in my life and the first time I was only like 16 years old.  I later realized that  this isn't true, when I went to the Stata users group meeting in winter of 2002, I missed my flight back by 15 minutes or some agonizingly low timeframe. So anyway, let's suppose that I had told someone that I'd only missed a plane once before. Let's say the person next to me in line turned out to need to hire a statistics consultant or was a cute chick I was hitting it off with, so I have some particular motivation to present myself as actually a responsible person. Now suppose they later discover that I had in fact missed at least two flights and decide to press charges for lying to them. Should my defense "I'm sorry, your honor, at the moment I forgot about that episode. I tried to remember previous missed flights, remembered only 1 and reported that I had only missed one." acquit me or should the prosecution be able to say "We agree that the defendant made a memory error that in some sense resulted in a temporarily mistaken belief, however the fact that he later recalled the other episode indicates that in some other sense, his mind retained the information about 2 episodes, which is tantamount to saying that he believed there were 2.  It is Mr. Lockhart's responsibility to remember correctly and if there is any uncertainty about the veracity of his recollection, his claim should reflect that." This is an interesting point. Now there's a difference that depends on a subtle distinction in what I actually said. I'm ok if I said "I can only recall one time I did this before." but not if I said "I have only done this once before."  It would be a pain in the ass to live somewhere where you had to cover your ass and qualify your statements like that all the time. Though I sometimes think it would be good for people to realize how much uncertainty (and variance) there is around so many of their beliefs, and I can also argue that it would make the stronger claim mean something more.  It would raise awareness and use of declaratory force.  I guess in some sense this is the effect of the law against lying, it adds declaratory force to all statements. Everything you say has an implicit "I swear that..." or "I promise that..." in front of it.  Which is an interesting argument against it - it in some sense destroys the value of these phrases. Without the law, you can always explicate that you are willing to not merely make the statement, but swear to it. With the law, it is not possible to make an uncertain claim. Well, unless you allow people to get off for ending every utterance with "...or I could be wrong." How often do you need to say that? Every sentence, paragraph, proposition, conversation, acquaintance? Can I just tell everyone I meet once - just so you know anything I ever tell you could turn out to be a lie?  This is trying to game the system, I say, leave it up to the jury to decide what is enough. Except that this paragraph leads me to something else yet.  Which is that any such law should not make all statements be under oath but merely make it possible to certify a statement as something that you are willing to back up on pain of prosecution.  But at this point you quickly just end up with contract law and notary publics. The impulse that there should be a law against lying comes from believing that we should make it so that the default is that a statement is true.  But it isn't really about truth, it's about certainty. And I'd prefer there that the default be that a statement is uncertain, or of some moderate level of certainty.  And that it is the more (or less) certain statements that should be marked. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 10th, 2005
9:56 am	a couple of dreams I didn't sleep very well last night, waking up 4 or 5 times that I can remember during a 6 hour sleep. I do remember bits of a couple of the dreams I was having, though. In the most drawn out one, I was walking through a mall with my sister. Julie was talking about how amazing it had been that she had woken up from her coma and how bravely she'd faced rehabilitation and how ironic that she should live through that and then get hit by a car and die only a year later. We were also trying to figure out how to get the body from wherever she had died, which was somewhere she had moved off to after recovering and like a thousand miles away from wherever we were and wanted her to be buried. (I have a vague recollection that one of these was Minnesota; at least one, if not both, was some random location that none of the 3 of us has ever lived.) The tone of the conversation was very off-hand and chatty, in spite of the content. Anyway, at some point while Julie is talking about all this, my memory says wait a minute, mom died after a week in a coma and she didn't wake up from it. And then I woke up. I didn't feel any particular emotion on waking. If anything, I feel like I quickly oriented and became frustrated at waking in the middle of the night after getting to bed late and having an early morning and long day ahead of me. I got back to sleep quickly and had a brief dream snippet later where I was visiting San Francisco with a girlfriend and we walked across the bridge and stopped for a bit so I could look out into the ocean and close my eyes and remember mom for a bit. I think this one was a bit more imagining while drifting to sleep than a true dream. It's funny that I felt no particular emotion on waking for either of these on waking. But trying to cement them in my mind while walking to the bus and now writing them up have both had me choking up a bit. (Comment on this)