despite this short segue into badgers nostalgia, my first and eternal loyalty will always be to the iowa hawkeyes

A University of Wisconsin football player was taken third overall in the NFL draft today. While many of the top picks actually went to New York to attend the draft in person, the Wisconsin player did not, opting instead to go fishing. An aunt of his, however, drove all the way from Germantown, Wisconsin--which, come to think of it, is the most Wisconsin-y town name in the entire state--did:



I forgot to mention this, but when I was in New York City the last time, I joined a former Madison colleague (now at NYU) and went to this bar that apparently pulls out all the stops whenever the Wisconsin Badgers are on television*, including putting a big inflatable Bucky Badger out front:



I had heard you can find everything in Manhattan, but I wasn't expecting a bar devoted to University of Wisconsin sports. I don't know how many Big 10 schools are represented by comparable venues in NYC.

* Yes, this was the only full evening I had in New York on the trip, and I spent it watching University of Wisconsin basketball on television.

there is no i in wii

Okay, I just set up my Wii and played a game of tennis. This thing is hilarious. I have got to get a second controller and invite you over.

My elbow is a little sore, though, and I just played one game (which is literally one tennis game--not like a set or a match).

Note: Apart from half a semester of graduate school lost to Tomb Raider II, and another half of a semester lost to Ultima VI as an undergraduate, and being astonishingly good at Gorf on my Commodore 64 in seventh grade, I am not a video game player.

Update: Given that my Standard Shorter Loop running takes me within six blocks of the Cambridgeside Galleria, I took a little detour and bought a second controller. So now we can play doubles tennis. They didn't have an extra Nunchuck controller in stock, though, so we still can't box. Anyway, stop by. Let me know if you need any frequent flyer miles.

the technology giveth, the technology taketh away

The other night I marveled at the miracles of this world as I rode in a subway car that contained ads for both laser hair removal and laser hair restoration.

Unrelated: I made some small changes to my Blogger template. But I can't figure out how to modify the "Labels" part of the post to make it small like the byline. Does anyone know how to do this without having to upgrade one's template to the new Blogger layouts?

a couple days ago i posted a good opening paragraph from an article; today, a good opening sentence

"In comparison with research on other psychological problems, research on the nature of procrastination began relatively late, in the 1980s." -- "Procrastination in Academic Settings: General Introduction", Henri C. Schouwenburg, 2004

how to promote your book of short stories online

At least here is one interesting idea, by Miranda July.

mobius trip

I've posted before about my tendency go through brief but intense phases where I listen to the same song over and over and over again. I'm currently doing this with Amy Winehouse's "Rehab." I think I find there to be something recursively pleasing about addictively listening to a song about addiction.

BTW, as a shout of to fans of replicators everywhere, it's National DNA Day today. (And, for our antipodal friends, it's also ANZAC day.) Cambridge is having this science festival for which they advertised a special 2-mile genome walk, but as far as I can tell it's just these red and blue gene-ly banners with chromosome numbers hanging from lightposts at intervals between Kendall and Harvard square.

the only way we can turn this company around is to make a product sufficiently addictive as to undermine career aspirations and family life

From CNN.com story on the Wii:

Nintendo's turnaround began five years ago, when the company's top strategists, including CEO Satoru Iwata and legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, zeroed in on two troubling trends: As young consumers started careers and families, they gradually cut back on game time. And as consoles became more powerful, making games for them got more expensive.

wiinner!

Other than some additions to my Magic 8-ball collection, I've never been able to buy anything on eBay because of my fear of the winner's curse--the idea that the person who "wins" an auction is the person who most ridiculously overvalues the thing being auctioned off. But, I cast all that aside and bought the very first Wii I bid on, with the very first bid I made. I am not going to share the price, so I can remain ignorant as to the degree to which I overpaid. I didn't seem inconsistent with my brief inspection of prevailing rates, and was definitely efficient.

one way of getting me to read the rest of an article is to have the first paragraph be a capsule summary of a large swath of my life

"In this lecture I shall focus on situations involving repeated decisions with time-inconsistent behavior. Although each choice may be close to maximizing and therefore result in only small losses, the cumulative effect of a series of repeated errors may be quite large. Thus, in my examples, decision makers are quite close to the intelligent, well-informed individuals usually assumed in economic analysis, but cumulatively they make seriously wrong decisions that do not occure in standard textbook economics." -- George A. Akerlof, "Procrastination and Obedience," American Economic Review, 1991.

coincidence, or causality?

From CNN.com:

ASHBURN, Georgia (CNN) -- Students of Turner County High School started what they hope will become a new tradition: Black and white students attended the prom together for the first time on Saturday.

In previous years, parents had organized private, segregated dances for students of the school in rural Ashburn, Georgia, 160 miles south of Atlanta.

[...]Mindy Bryan, attended a segregated prom in 2001.

"There was not anybody that I can remember that was black," she said. "The white people have theirs, and the black people have theirs. It's nothing racial at all."

I hope one of the songs is Prince singing about how "Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1969."

postscript

"That post where somebody said, 'What else are you doing besides not listening to me?'--that was me, right?"
"What? No? I don't remember you ever saying this to me."
"I say this to you all the time."
"You've never--"
"All the time."
"Well, apparently you've been right each time that I wasn't listening to you."

semicircumgooglequest denied!

People are passing around news of this feature on Google Maps where you can get driving directions from the US to Europe, so long as you are willing to swim across the Atlantic Ocean (see Chris). I tried to see if I could get it to stretch halfway across the globe (12,450 miles). Given actual work to do, I had to abandon the expedition only 120 miles from my goal. So close!

by comparison, last year 700 americans were killed by poisonous gases

Via Kristina via Eszter. I wanted to look at the comparable graphs for economics and anthropology, but couldn't figure out how to get the NSF web software to produce it.

Update: Tom B sent me a link to the numbers for economics. (Thanks also to Nan and Kim for sending these numbers to me as well.)

among the more seemingly futile questions

"So, what else are you doing besides not listening to me?"

six floors under

Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin is divided into three areas: archeology, biological anthropology, and cultural anthropology. The image on their homepage is divided into three parts, with pictures standing in for each of the three areas. Am I the only one who thinks it is strange that, for archeology, the selected picture is a grave with "ARCHEOLOGIST" written on it? I don't know anything about archeology at UW, and I don't know if that choice of image is intended to convey anything or not.

what predicts how much coverage a tragedy gets?

So, the New York Times is currently running stories on its front page about 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech being murdered and 160 citizens of Iraq being murdered. Enormous tragedies, all, obviously. Yet, the VT shootings will presumably get at least 10x--and perhaps more like 100x--the total column inches of coverage in the NYT than these Iraq bombings will get (indeed, a telling part of the coverage of Iraq bombings is how commonly and easily they are lumped together).

I'm not making any judgment on the wrongness or rightness of this as a journalistic practice, but: I've always thought it would be interesting to do a study of the relationship between the number of deaths in a tragic event and the number of column inches a story gets, and then what are the other factors that lead events to get more or less coverage.

Even just for the deaths of individual soldiers, I think it would be an interesting graph to see how (I presume) coverage of individual soldier deaths has declined as the war has gone on, despite the rate of soldier deaths being, if anything, remarkable for their relative consistency over time.

I'm presuming there is research on this and it's more that I'm not aware of it. If anyone is and has pointers to finding it, let me know.

left behind

I just took a break here in the office by reading the whole of Anthropology: 101 True Love Stories by Dan Rhodes. The stories are all around 100-150 words, and while some of them turn a too much on a cutely warped last sentence, the book on the whole is a fun bag of prose popcorn that is well worth the forty-five minutes it takes to devour it. Anyway, as I don't have any great ideas for posts and the continued rain in Cambridge brings out a melancholic turn, I'll instead here promote the book by reproducing three of the stories about being dumped:

Xanthe left me. I found out her new address and returned the kettle she had left behind. The next day I took her a book she had lent me. I found a box of hairgrips, and delivered one each day. If she wasn't home I would post it with a long letter explaining how I had found it on the floor. When I had returned them all, I took her, on the tip of my finger, a tiny ball of dust. "I remember seeing it fall from your dress one afternoon," I said, "The pretty one, with the flowers on it."

After Firefly left me I presented her with a video recording I had made of myself, so if she ever felt down she could be reminded that there was somebody out there who loved her more than anything in the world. I met her in the street, and asked her if she ever watched it. She said she did, and that it always cheered her up. She told me she particularly liked the part where I kissed and caressed the tiny black skirt she had left behind, and cried like a new-born baby. She said that always made her smile.

Treasure left me. "I'm so sorry," she said. "I understand how awful you must feel." Choking, I told her she couldn't begin to understand. She insisted that she could. "You know you'll never find anyone as pretty as me," she explained, "or as nice, and your every moment will be clouded by nagging recollections of times we spent together; times when you wrongly believed we had some kind of future. Believe me, I understand." she said, gently." A part of you has died, the part capable of loving and trusting, and you know you'll never get it back. Stuff like that."

BTW, for the trip to Madison, I was going to bring my jacket, but then because the forecast called for several inches of snow I decided to bring my big winter coat instead. While the snowstorm did strand me in Detroit for several hours, I never wore the coat during my visit. Several times I wished I had my jacket, but chose being cold to cavorting around in the cumbersome coat. Last night, as my flight from Detroit to Boston was taking off, I realized I had left my coat in the in the overhead bin of the plane going from Madison to Detroit. Story of my life.

wiijected

The big plan hatched on Wednesday night was to have a Nintendo Wii boxing tournament while I was back in Madison. We sent out invitations Thursday for a Sunday party--to a mixed group of people ranging from a couple who have been here thirty years to someone who's only been here three weeks--and we received 20 RSVP yeses. Only on Saturday, though, did I get around to the matter of actually trying to purchase the Wii. I had just been presumed that, where there's a will, there's a Wii, especially around here, since you can't spell "Wisconsin" without "Wii." Instead, a massive wiisearch campaign resulted in our learning there is not a single Wii for sale within 100 mile circle around Madison. Efforts to rent or borrow a Wii also proved fruitless, or at least not until after we sent out the announcement to postpone the party.

We're hoping to reschedule for Memorial Day weekend, when I'll be in Madison for the Mad City (Half) Marathon and the spring 2007 edition of the World's Largest Brat Fest.

The spring 2004 WLBF, btw, was what broke me of five years of pescatarianism (a pescatarian is someone who would be a vegetarian except they eat seafood). Many lapsed vegetarians/pescatarians have some story about being tempted by being in a group of people at a party or a picnic or someone occasion where it would be really awkward to turn down meat. Me, it was that I had to drive by the WLBF on my way to and fro work, and the afternoon of its last day I just pulled into the parking lot and had two bratwurst with mustard all by myself. Even aside from various concerns about the content of bratwurst, it's a weird food to have crush one's pescatarian will, because vegetarian faux bratwurst is a very close substitute for the real thing. (Indeed, according to the WLBF website, this year for the first time they will be serving vegetarian brats for the first time. If only they had done this three years earlier, who knows how many animals lives would have been spared the unhappy fate of being shoved down my postpescatarian gullet.)

oh no! don ho!

A palindrome comes to pass.

fun back in middle america

I hang out with Sal for less than a couple hours on Wednesday night, and that was all it took for me to be committed to a festive idea for this weekend that promises to involve me spending several hundred dollars and perhaps a mild amount of dignity. Stay tuned.

Before getting together with Sal, I got together with another friend who, in place of whatever highbrow leisure pursuit, really wanted to play whack-a-mole. My replying that I didn't know where one could play whack-a-mole in Madison was met immediately with "Chuck E. Cheese." I had never been in a Chuck E. Cheese before--indeed, I was pretty ignorant about the entire "Chuck E. Cheese" concept--but sure enough, they have whack-a-mole:



And, better still, skee-ball:



And, better still, pop-a-shot:



And we were there late enough on a school night that there were few actual kids there. Those that were seemed only interested in the video games. Alas: no wonder you never see Americans taking home the gold medal in skee-ball anymore.

(Thursday night I drove from Madison to Evanston, where I'll be spending the day Friday and then returning to Madison on Friday night.)

super kiwi cloak!

Someone has created an improved version of the "Kiwi Cloak" Firefox script that Lucy and I "made" (by doing some simple modifications to someone else's script). The script is an anticrastination tool that works by shutting you out of websites you specify (e.g., GMail) except for a window you specify (e.g., the first ten minutes of the hour). As the person describes the update:

I've updated the script so that it now functions across hours (ie, you can make the window go from :55 to :05). It will also no longer have problems with midnight (for all you night owls). Finally, I cleaned up the "minutes left" errors.

You can find the updated script (as "Super Kiwi Cloak") at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8448.

dispatch from the detroit airport

Because of the snow lamented in the last post, the Detroit-to-Madison leg of my flight was cancelled and I have been stranded in the Detroit airport for the past 5 1/2 hours. The flight on which I was rebooked looks like it might actually leave approximately on time, and people have been crowded right around the gate for at least the last half hour. I would think would be for some demented person to shout "There's a gremlin on the wing! They're going to cancel this flight, too!" in order for them to riot.

I can't believe I booked a spring trip to Madison and they went ahead and held a snowstorm anyway.

wwol: week six update

I would seem to be operating under some unusual definition of the word "week," as I have skipped around my weigh-in date for my diet from Friday to Sunday to Tuesday. All I can say is, traveling makes the details of tracking-based dieting difficult, although I have stayed reasonably consistent with the system. I'm out of Cambridge the next six days, and have little pretense of renewed diligence until I return. At least I'm down another fraction of a pound, continuing my streak of posting losses each week.

Being on this diet has definitely been good for me, and I strongly suspect I wouldn't be sticking with it even as modestly well as I am if I didn't know I was accountable to posting about my progress on this blog. So, I owe you one.

Also: Decorum prevents me from using language vivid enough to express how I feel about this:



This whole winter thing has got to end.

shout-out to the birthday girl!

(my mother and me, on a road trip in the early days of this weblog)

My mother turns 71 today. When my mother was my age, her sixth child was already over a year old and showing signs of being alternately the shyest and the most talkative member of the family.

On a related front, I learned last week that the father of a chair of a sociology department on the East Coast worked at the same meatpacking plant that my father did, and has a nephew that lives in my hometown. I'm used to sociology being a small world and rural Iowa being a small world, but not those two small world colliding.

views of sociology from beyond this world

So, the recent Pacific Sociological Association meetings hosted a panel entitled "Pirate Professors, Deviant Departments, and Disappeared Programs." Via Jeff, here are the titles listed in the program for four of the five papers:

"Views of Education from Beyond this World" - Emails and Conversations with my Dearly Departed Mentor 'Boz'

Educating Astrosociologists: The Need to Bring Outer Space Into Social Science Classrooms

The Denial of Educational & Employment Opportunity Due to the Discovery of Evidence Contradictory to the Axiomatic Assumption of Harmlessness of High Demand Religious Movements: A Case Study of the Normative Negation of Conflict of Interest from Australia.

[!!] The Fascist Trend in American Academe: "Disappearing" Sociology at Niagara University, New York

Jeff apparently found these titles not exactly inspiring. Imagine that! Comments on his post include Jeff reposting a couple of e-mails received from participants on the panel, one of whom thought it appropriate to cc: various faculty in Jeff's department and close with:

Well, in a few years, when this angst-driven 30-something comes to us for some sort of connection, we'll be sure to remember. In addition, the realities of the sociological job market ought to throw him off that high horse he is riding when he isn't riding a barstool in Berkeley coffeeshops. Right now, I'd just love to get put on his thesis committee to help straighten him out.

I think the foregoing probably speaks for itself with no need for additional commentary from me. So instead I'll just pine for the idea of changing International Talk Like A Pirate Day to International Talk Like A Pirate Professor Day. "Today I will lecture ye on astrosociology! Argh! How do I advance me Powerpoint slides with just a hook for me hand!"

just now

"Hey, getting together tomorrow sounds great, but let me find my phone to see when I'm free."
"Jeremy--"
"Ugh. I can't find it. I thought I plugged it into--"
"Jeremy, you are talking to me on your phone."
"Oh. Yeah. That's pretty much me in a nutshell, right there."

dear, you know you're still number one, but girls, they want to have fun

A dollar well spent is to go over to iTunes and buy Greg Laswell's cover of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun".* Laswell offers what I have been arguing for years via karaoke is the correct interpretation of the song: to be sung by a male, not a female, and to be sung sadly/ruefully/bitterly, not exuberantly. It's unclear from the recording, however, if he also steals my tactic of choosing an audience member at random to be the target of this rue.

Two other songs I downloaded from the same list: "Infinity" by Merrick, and an acoustic rendition of "Overkill" by Colin Hay. The latter is interesting for being recorded over twenty years after than the hit version by the same artist and being, perhaps inarguably, better. All these songs are of the mellow and easy-to-work-by variety.

* Via a list on the private blog of a certain friend; my ability to link to friend's blogs has been hindered in recent months by the rise of the private blog.

a dream deferred is not a dream denied

Okay, so maybe the sociology world isn't ready for the idea of a group twittercast of ASA. It's only April, though. If Twitter continues to grow at its current rate, then by the ASA meetings in August, the world will actually be needing to grow babies in vats and signing them up for Twitter as soon as they ripen just to keep the trend going.

This has been one of my notoriously unfocused Saturdays. I'm in the middle of reading five separate books right now. The best may be Allen Brandt's The Cigarette Century, which is a great (but long) history of the cigarette industry. The book, perhaps oddly, reminds me about what I found so interesting about pharma that made me go on a ten-book-bender about the pharmaceutical industry last year. With cigarettes, you just get these corporations that engage in all sorts of ugliness in the service of getting the public to buy a product that is horribly bad for them. With pharma, you get these corporations that engage in all sorts of ugliness in the service of getting the public to buy products that are often good, sometimes bad, and regularly hard to tell exactly which.

i have a dream

In that dream, I manage to convince at least 20 people who will be attending the American Sociological Association meetings in New York this summer to engage in a simultaneous pseudonymous group twittercast of the events.

You, if you are going to the meetings, can help my dream come true.

No, I haven't figured out the details. But I see the potential for an interesting piece of socioconceptual art.

Plus, the whole theme of the conference is "Is Another World Possible?" I think this theme is better than most of the other ASA meeting themes since I've been in this business. But, still, there is something naive about it that smacks of The Baby Boomers Who Run Sociology reminiscing self-indulgently about the days when they would sit around their dorm rooms in various degrees of drug- or rally-for-the-revolution-induced haziness asking each other this question. The real question is not whether another world is possible, because a very different world from what we have now is inevitable and is, in fact, well on its way. The real questions are instead what ways the world will be more benign and more pernicious than the world we have now, and whether anything can be done to nudge the future more toward the former than the latter. Anyway, the transformations of connectedness manifested in innovations like blogs and like twitter seem one vital part of the Another World that is on its way, and I continue to be amazed at how little appreciation sociologists in their forties and above seem to have of this.

travel tips

Arrived this evening back in Cambridge. So I have this problem where I will often space out at luggage claim and end up missing my bag as it goes by. Today I learned that no matter how determined I am to keep my attention focused on the JetBlue conveyor belt, it still doesn't really do any good if my flight was on United.

dispatch from salt lake city

(photo of the Cheney protest at BYU -- note the sign that says "Enter to learn, go forth to TORTURE")

So, thanks to Brayden's invitation to give a talk at BYU, I can now cross Utah off my list of states from which I've blogged.* I'm staying overnight tonight at the airport Hilton in Salt Lake City, and the temptation to go rent a car and drive to the Wyoming border is almost overwhelming.

Turns out my talk was the same day as apparently the biggest protest in recent years at BYU, against the forthcoming appearance of Dick Cheney as BYU's commencement speaker. About a half hour before my talk, Brayden and I went downstairs to check out the protest. I left my bag inside the open conference room where the talk would be. Brayden hesitated for a moment before leaving my bag there, but then decided it was okay. Me, I thought, "Come on, what's there to worry about? This may be Crazy Civil Disobedience Day, relatively speaking, but this is still BYU."

Anyway, I got back to the conference room and discovered my laptop was gone. So then I was simultaneously panicked about my impending presentation and thinking that this would make a pretty good cocktail party anecdote. As it happened, I was just confused and had left my laptop in Brayden's office, even though I had no reason to have hauled my bag down to the conference room in the first place except it contained my computer.

The talk went okay, especially considering how little sleep I've gotten the last few days. Perhaps I could have used some caffeine beforehand. The person who gave me a ride from the airport graciously asked if I had any caffeine needs to be taken care of before entering BYU's campus (which is a caffeine free zone), but I passed with the idea that if BYU was nice enough to bring me in to speak, I could caffeine-fast for the day. That lasted all the way until the off-campus lunch.

* Updated list:

Alabama	Alaska	Arizona	Arkansas	California	Colorado
Connecticut	Delaware	Florida	Georgia	Hawaii	Idaho
Illinois	Indiana	Iowa	Kansas	Kentucky	Louisiana
Maine	Maryland	Massachusetts	Michigan	Minnesota	Mississippi
Missouri	Montana	Nebraska	Nevada	New Hampshire	New Jersey
New Mexico	New York	North Carolina	North Dakota	Ohio	Oklahoma
Oregon	Pennsylvania	Rhode Island	South Carolina	South Dakota	Tennessee
Texas	Utah	Vermont	Virginia	Washington	Washington, D.C.
West Virginia	Wisconsin	Wyoming

dispatch from lax

(giant robot store in LA)


(condominium complex called "The Jeremy" in LA)

Sitting in the LAX McDonald's eating a fruit and yogurt parfait. I had a great visit to LA, which did include a trip to the Giant Robot Store (photographic proof to follow). Two very brief observations of a more sensational nature about my LA experience:

1. Walking around in all the early April sunshine made me feel like I was being continually irrigated by this light mist of joy. It was all I could do to keep from skipping as I walked between buildings.

2. I had occasion while I was here to acquaint myself first-hand with the condo market in LA. I was reminded of this time I saw someone eating at a sushi restaurant for the first time who mistook wasabi for guacamole. At least judging from the look on their face, that of someone whose sinuses had just been completely and searingly cleared, perhaps permanently, makes me think the sensation was something like what I felt upon seeing the prices. It's one thing to hear a housing market is "very expensive," another to see it firsthand.

Incidentally, I also took a taxi from a taxi stand at one point on my trip. I walked to the first cab to get in, and was told that the last cab in line was actually the first. The way I was told was as if this was something they thought I ought to know, so I'm not sure if this is the common way for taxi stands to work in LA. If so, maybe it's a south of the equator thing--I didn't check whether the water spun the wrong way down my shower drain.

Update, next day: I do, truth be told, know both that LA is not actually south of the equator and that water does not spin the other way down the drain south of the equator.

can someone remind me what the first n in cnn stands for again?

This CNN.com story provides a stunning contradiction to the multitudes out there who believed American culture and mass media were completely indifferent to whether teenage girls are thin or fat.

BTW: Writing this during an hour of downtime in my trip to Los Angeles. I'm enjoying my trip. Last night on my way to dinner I passed these two stores, The Giant Robot Store and Giant Robot 2, that I am hoping to find a way of making an actual visit to. I don't think I could fit a giant robot in my luggage, but perhaps they ship.

dispatch from los angeles

So, my flight from LA was scheduled for 7:30 this morning. I arranged for the cab to pick me up at six, and had things packed so that I could set my alarm for 5:30am and still be ready to go in time. Of course, it took me being awake packing and whatever until 2:30am so that I could have the luxury of sleeping in until 5:30am.

Instead, at 4:30am, my phone rang. I presumed somebody I loved was dead. This didn't mean I was able to rouse myself fast enough to actually answer the phone, but I did immediately check my voicemail. The message was an automated voice from Orbitz, which I had used to buy my ticket. I heard the words "flight status" and was less annoyed, as I could understand the utility of getting a notification of a flight delay even if it did come at 4:30am. However: Orbitz was calling to tell me my flight was on time.

I presume I checked some option or something about giving my updates by my cel phone, although I don't remember this and certainly didn't know the result would be my getting phone calls at 4:30am.

P.S. I'm too tired to write a separate post about this, but: For followers of my diet, we are through week five. My weigh-in was down three pounds, meaning I'm down 12 pounds overall. I will not, however, be tracking during this week's (Sunday through Thursday) travels, but I will endeavor to remain faithful to the basic plan. I'm not sure how I will count this in terms of my general ten-week committment; it will probably depend on how well I do.

even though i saw this in a harvard parking lot, i suspect the driver might be from m.i.t.