reminder: asa blogger extravaganza

The ASA NYC blogger get-together, a.k.a. YearlyRojas, is Saturday at 6PM, with the present plan to proceed from the Hilton Lobby. I have misgivings about this plan, as I don't quite get how people who are a little later are going to figure out where we are, but I am passive-aggressive in these misgivings, choosing just to state them publicly rather than act toward any kind of alternative. Anyway, you're invited. You? You. Fabio is offering to buy a drink to people who have pre-ordered his book. Dan is offering to buy a drink to anyone who can name a Kiss song that is not on his iPod. I am offering to thank anyone who pre-orders my drinks.

Also, Tuesday 8:30 am, at an as yet undisclosed location in the Hilton, "Blogs as a Forum for Public Sociology," including Hargittai, Healy, Uggen, Freese, and two people I don't know. Somebody should bring bagels.

don't mess with the matador!

(me, victorious at facebook rps)

(The Matador is where you wave paper at your opponent, then paper again, and then: scissors!)

I think I'm going to go down and fetch my air conditioner out of my basement. Now that Stata 10 has arrived, I can use my Stata 8 manuals with abandon to hold it in place.

Update: What's that sound? Is it the hum of my just-installed air conditioner, or the fizz of my having just opened up a tall, cold can of carbonated rps whoop-ass on Sal?


(me, once again victorious at facebook rps)

Updated again: Emily, as ever, is too wily for me. My dreams of an undefeated life end:

don't get me wrong...

I'm still really excited to be going to Northwestern and all, but I have to admit my enthusiasm was a teensy bit diminished when Eszter announced that it would NOT be okay if Sal and I moved into the condo next door, put on our matching robot pajamas, had perhaps a little too much to drink, and sledgehammered our way through her/our wall to create a Super Social Science Wired Hipster Thirtysomething Mega Compound/Mothership. I hate when friends are unreasonable.

immortality is mine!

I was having a conversation with my dissertation advisor the other day about a couple of articles he has published that have recently received attention from some major media outlets. Then, however, we turned on to the true star turn of recent years: my own appearance in an article on blogging in Footnotes, the official journal of the American Sociological Association. Small-town boy detective finally hits the big time, I know. If you mail me your issue in a self-addressed stamped envelope, I will happily autograph it for you.

The interview was my attempt to push e-mail interviews to the next logical step by actually blogging the content of the interview as I was doing it (here, here, here, here). In the end, I just sent the reporter a set of links. If you read the article, see if you think my quotes read like a person writing for his blog rather than speaking to an interviewer.

I think the reporter did a great job with the article, although perhaps I'm biased since I'm quoted at length. I would have liked to have seen more sociology bloggers interviewed, as well as URLs of the blogs of those that were. Eszter is also interviewed in the article, as is C.N. Le, who I don't know personally, and Rebecca Hensley, who I don't know at all.

(ongoing series) correlation, or causality?

January 30, 2007:

Eszter gives a talk in the renowned TechTalk series at Google.

January 31, 2007:

(via NYT)

where godiva and skippy collide

(this is literally the view from the back door of Eszter's office at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, except normally that view doesn't include me sitting in the tree.)

So, one of my pet phrases is "This is where the chocolate hits the peanut butter." I use it when I'm explaining something that requires me to first explain two seemingly unrelated things. I insert it as a preface immediately before explaining how the two things fit together, as apparently I believe this is a good moment to introduce an obscure distracting metaphor.

Anyway, it's a reference to these commercials from when I was a child where a man would be walking around with a chocolate bar and a woman would be doing the same with an open jar of peanut butter and through some collisional hijink the chocolate bar would end up inside the peanut butter, and the two would discover that in fact the combination tasted great and the voice-over for Reese's Peanut Butter cups would begin. (Being a child, the brazen sexual innuendo of this ad campaign was completely lost on me.)

I like Reese's Peanut Butter cups. They are traditionally my second favorite candy, in fact, with the first being chocolate-covered malted milk balls. So this past weekend Eszter and I were in Trader Joe's and what do I see: chocolate-covered peanut butter malted milk balls. I had never even imagined my two favorite candies could be combined before. And so I proclaimed, "This is where the chocolate hits the peanut butter!" I scarfed down something like a dozen between the checkout counter and Eszter's car alone.

The weekend was, I might add, the first time I'd ever been inside a Trader Joe's. I had heard it was a place full of strangely addictive curiosities. Even so, I had no idea.

diszpatch from palo alto

(Eszter and me smiling in the face of unique danger!)

Working with Eszter in her research cabana at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences near the Stanford campus. We're rocking out to the Tiffany cover of "I Think We're Alone Now," just after rocking out to the second-greatest-karaoke song ever, Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer."

While I've been here, I've been staying at the Stanford Guest House, which is located on the grounds of the Stanford Linear Acceleration Center, home of the world's first cyclotron and who-knows-what-physics-and-possibly-weapons-of-mass-destruction magic nowadays. When you enter, you have to show identification to a security guard, and immediately after there is a sign warning that: "Unique Hazards May Exist." I love the idea of staying at a site where they get to simultaneously warn you and let you know you are on grounds so special you could be subjected to special dangers unavailable anywhere else on the planet.

I'm taking the red eye back to Cambridge tonight, where I've got two full days of writing crunch time in front of me. I have a feeling the quality of those days will rest much on how well I sleep on the plane. Wish me slumberluck.

Update: Fabio correctly points out in the comments that SLAC is not the home of the world's first cyclotron. It is, however, home of the world's first web server, which has certainly proven a unique hazard in my own life.

squish

I've been missing Madison lately. I'm working on making a trip back there later this month. (No, no karaoke. I'm retired.) As if my nostalgia pangs weren't enough, Eszter sent me a great gift: a special squishy Magic 8 ball. Which provokes nostalgia because I have my collection of 20-odd variations on the Magic 8-ball, sitting along the top of my cupboard in my Madison office. I have never actually used them for any kind of grading decision, tempting 'tho it may have sometimes been. In any case, Madison is December is not exactly Madison at its most appealing, but it will be delightful to see people and will hopefully allow Real Progress to be made on a certain project which could definitely use some Real Progress.

If you'll be in Madison, it would be wonderful to see you. It's been too long.

it's a small world after äll (that is, if you know eszter)

(Note: Kieran beat me to posting about this.)

So, one variant on the six degrees of separation thing is that idea that everyone is six handshakes away from a President of the United States. In that respect, my own personal handshake number has been unknown, other than that I have not personally shaken hands with any president. Now, however, I am pleased to announce that it is certainly 2, as Eszter has shaken hands with Bill Clinton, and Eszter was all excited to teach me the official astrosociology-cadet secret handshake last year at the ASA meetings.

Strangely, I received word of Eszter reducing my Presidential-handshake number to 2 as I was proofing the article in which Eszter lowers my Erdös number to 4. (Your Erdös number is the number of collaborative articles it takes to get you to the mathematician Paul Erdös.)* The chain:

B Aronov, P Erdös, W Goddard, DJ Kleitman, M Klugerman, J Pach, L J Schulman. 1994. "Crossing Families" Combinatorica, 14(2), 127-34.

P Agarwal, B Aronov, J O'Rourke, C Schevon, 1997 "Star unfolding of a polytope with applications," SIAM. J. on Computing, 26(6) 1689-1713.

J Feigenbaum, E Hargittai, J O'Rourke. 1994. "Expanding the Pipeline, CRAW Database Aids Academic Recruiters" Computing Research News. September

J Freese, S Rivas, E Hargittai. 2006. "Cognitive Ability and Internet Use among Older Adults." Poetics

* Being Hungarian herself, Eszter will be scandalized when she sees I've spelled Erdös with an umlaut over the o instead of a tilde/double acute/titlo or whatever it is supposed to be, but I'm too tired for the diacritical inquiry required to figure out how to enter it in Blogger.