Author: Aaron Weber

Kissinger Was a Swinger

Swingers, a 1996 movie in which foolish young men try to pick up annoyed young women, is often credited, along with that Gap ad, for bringing swing dancing and jump blues into the mainstream.

It’s also been a strange influence on my life recently, since I find myself… well… in my midtwenties and foolish and hanging out in bars trying to pick up rather annoyed young women. Am I in some sort of a Quarterlife Crisis? Probably not. Just young and foolish and wondering, given a phone number or email address, exactly how long I should wait to call? The goal, of course, being to indicate interest, but not so much interest as to be off-putting.

My friend Dana insists that you should call at most two days later, because otherwise they’ll think you’re not interested and go on about their merry way. But Swingers suggests that the answer is at least four days, and ideally six, if you’re really cool. You have to imply that you’re very busy. After all, if you’re not busy, you’re free, which is to say there’s no cost, which means you’re worthless, because only busy people who are avidly pursued by others have intrinsic worth. Or something.

Liberals are like Red Sox fans

Truthout has a great article about how being a liberal these days is like being a Sox fan: the grinding sense of… well… doom.
It’s all there, in the way the players aren’t quite up to par, in the way the TV pundits smirk. In the way the US votes against human rights treaties. and the fact that everybody knows Bush lied in order to go to war and the secret reports on The Great Tragedy.

“Everybody knows that the ship is sinking, everybody knows that the captain lied… Everybody knows that the game is rotten, old black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton for your ribbons and bows, and everybody knows. Everybody knows, that’s how it goes…. “

Good technology day

All my docs were printing out wrong: the content would be too high on the page, cutting off the running header and sometimes the first line or so of text. I learned how to hack around the DSSSL stylesheets to adjust the top margin, but that only changed the space between the running headers and the body text. Turns out it was a bug in the dvi to PostScript conversion. So, instead of letting docbook2ps handle the docbook->DVI->ps conversion, I run it manually and use the -t “letter” option, and it works right. Sweet.

She Blinded me with Science

Today I went to work early so I could finish things up by five, so I could get out to Charlestown by six for the exciting evening I had planned: participating in an EEG/MEG scanning study. Yes, the whole mad scientist electrode cap and all.

It actually was like some sort of erotic sci-fi nightmare: after hours on a weekend at a huge medical research lab, uncomfortable equipment, two incredibly beautiful female scientists, one American and one Russian. Sadly, we all conducted ourselves very professionally.

For the experiment, I was supposed to look at words that flashed on a screen in pairs, and tell if they sounded the same by pushing two buttons. The idea was to understand brain wave activity in children and adults with and without learning disabilities. I was supposed to be in the non-disabled group, but for the first group of questions, I had the buttons backwards, and so I got nearly every one wrong. It reminded me of the time I was in the fifth grade, and I messed up on one of those test forms where you have to fill in all those little bubbles. I filled in the wrong section or was off by one row, and was crushed to find that I had scored in the fourth percentile.

By the end of it, my back and neck hurt and my hair was full of gritty electrode goop, and I was hungry because I’d skipped dinner. Still, I was kinda reluctant to leave. Maybe it’s the weather, but my experimentors had this completely mesmerizing combination of brains, beauty, and complicated electronic equipment that requires the application of conductive gel.

Clever Title

Been very busy preparing slides for Zee Germans. But here is some arbitrary linkage to tide you over:
The Guardian, ever the right-thinking editorialist, has two articles on the decline and fall of the West: Scientific Illiteracy is widespread, and of course superstition and mumbo-jumbo are encroaching. The next thing you know, we’ll have faith-healer MDs.

Fortunately, we can laugh: at other people’s fashion and of course at their drunken shenanigans.

Two other neat things: Guardian Media is just media news. And a study on depression and biology which I haven’t read all the way through but which looks interesting.