thoughtcrumbs : january 2000

Lexical ambiguity

Spotted in the lab: Last week, this simply exhorted "Ruth do work." Ruth interprets the new "A" as a specifier of quantity, not quality.

Je ne veux pas travailler

There's nothing like a night of Lindy to loosen weekend-long-perl-hacking shoulder knots. Plus, it's nifty to come home and find your errant database query, left to chase its tail in your absense, finished and purring contentedly.

Perfect morning

I am stretched out on my über comfortable new couch. The couch runs parallel to the bank of windows in my living room so that sunlight is hitting the full length of my body. The window is open and a slight breeze tickles my neck. I am sipping coffee and eating airy honey bread some friends made. WYEP is playing a languorous cover of Que Será Será. Prior to the bread, I had an egg scramble with random leftover veggies, including bamboo shoots, spinach, shitakes, and snow pea sprouts. My very lengthy to-do list is somehow calming. And I'm pleased that the HTML character codes for the previous umlautted u and accented a's just rolled off my fingers; no Googling necessary.

What all the cool kids are wearing

"I am wearing a horizontally striped sweater on vertically striped pants. I suppose I look like an obese midget on stilts." From aproposthoughts.

Reading

Review of Nowhere Man over in Reading.

Stolen moment

Feeling a little stressed running between classes at CMU and Pitt today, I passed by an office on the second floor of CFA, overhearing a few seconds of a piano concerto. It sounded Shostakovichy or Rachmaninoffy. Now that's music to sprint by.

Closest thing to telepathic cookie delivery

I've been thinking lately how much I just want some local bakery to read my mind and drop by my office with a chocolate chip or oatmeal cookie on occasion. But alas, there is no telepathic cookie delivery.

However, Karen told us about the next best thing: CampusFood.com. And in particular, Hunan Kitchen takeout. Their soy protein and garlic eggplant are to die for, and twice they've prepared meals for five people in five minutes. Three times, actually, if you consider we called four minutes after placing an order tonight to add food for another person and the delivery guy was already out the door. (And so what did we do? Placed another order. I think we're now on someone's list . . . but the second course did arrive ten chopstickfulls later.)

And of course the orders include fortune cookies. No telepathy going on, but hey, there's divination. Good enough for me.

Abusing my interlibrary loan privileges

to get this book.

Collective experience

There has been this swelling din over Pittsburgh for the last hour or so—people are honking horns, cheering, and shouting en masse—the audible exuberation of Steelers fans, both rabid and nominal. (I fall into the latter category, but you can be sure I'll be watching the Superbowl in two weeks.)

Today at IKEA, they had the fleece throws separated into piles of yellow and black.

Speaking of incongruity

Tim O'Brien has a bluegrass song about a failing hard drive.

Tab, joyous tab

The latest Tiger upgrade (10.4.4) finally lets you tab between ALL form controls in Firefox. Until now, tabbing only worked between fields and text boxes. Pulldown menus, radio buttons, and checkboxes just got skipped. This was my only complaint after switching to a Mac—entering a mailing address required clicking a tiny triangle with this clumsy device known as a mouse. So many times I left my state as Alabama. But now forms work the same as they do on Windows. (Or better, if you consider Mac font rendering as a usability boon.)

(Don't tell me about the system preference for full keyboard access. It didn't work before in Firefox. Really.)

Incongruous ways to make money

From an article about Thai boxing from last week's New Yorker, in which women were banned from the ring:

In 1998, the celebrity boxer Parinya Kiatbusaba—he was one of Thailand's numerous transvestites—refused to take off his underwear for a weigh-in at Lumpini. Since Kiatbusaba made weight even in his underwear, the management eventually let him into the ring. Wearing his trademark red lipstick, Kiatbusaba easily defeated his opponent and then kissed him on the cheek. Kiatbusaba had become a boxer because it was the only way that he could earn enough money to achieve his lifelong dream: sex-reassignment surgery. After the surgery was performed, in 1999, he, too, was banned from the major stadiums.

"Do not listen to my pronouns"

Jamie Pennebaker, one of the creators of LIWC, must use a lot of inclusive we when he speaks, because I left his talk today liking him very much. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a simple dictionary of hierarchical term categories like the following:

• positive emotions (e.g. accept, awesome, cheer)
• cognitive processes (e.g. should, thought, wonder, why)
• sex (e.g. horny, love, lust)

Many social scientists (including me) use LIWC to look for patterns in web/email content. Some of Pennebaker's more interesting findings:

• Half of our speech is comprised of function words: articles, prepositions, conjunctives, auxiliary verbs, pronouns. The other half is the meaty content. However, it's the function words that indicate our social connectedness. Cognitive words, like "I think this is true" indicate an awareness of the speaker that the listener may know better, a willingness to negotiate. Not surprisingly, women use more cognitive-process words than men.
• Different areas in the brain control our use of content and function words. People with damage to Broca's area use all content words, but they speak haltingly and sound emotionally distant. People with damage to Wernicke's area use function words almost exclusively. They speak quickly, warmly, and seem to connect with you. But they say nothing.
• There are two different kinds of we. The inclusive we, in which you can identify the referrent ("we the people") and the distancing we ("Well, son, we need to take out the trash, don't we?"). Mayor Guiliani, prior to 9/11, and King Lear in the first couple of acts both use the distancing we. Both switched to warmer, more inclusive we's after experiencing tragedy.
• People taking testosterone shots were not more likely to use aggressive, angry, manic, or sports-related words. But, they did use fewer pronouns referring to other people. As the hormone effect dissipated, they would begin using pronouns again. (Pennebaker said it was as if they looked around and realized, oh, there are other people here.)
• The word I is used more often by people with depression, people in low-status positions, and people seeking power.

Pennebaker has several interesting surveys online. Don't miss the fine print.

A day in the life

Continuing with the omphalic trend here lately, here is a list of stuff I'm doing on my last day before the semester starts:

• Yoga
• Church with Jen
• Brunch at the exquisite Gypsy Cafe (where we've learned that porridge is delightful, not a punishment)
• Bog People! And the disturbing exhibit of dead birds next to cartoon icons (dead Toucan Sam, dead Road Runner, dead Pooh's friend Owl)
• The ever-glorious Giant Eagle, chock full of people in their Steelers finery
  
• Chicken Swing
• Some kind of anime with the Sunday movie bunch at Scott's. I'm hoping my anime experience will be somewhat like the porridge—surprisingly pleasant.
  

Sunny day

Plan A this morning was to go to campus and work on homework. Two blocks out the door, I scrapped Plan A, which was clearly inane; it's 65 degrees outside. I went for a run instead and surprised myself: zig-zagging through Shadyside, Mellon Park, and Point Breeze, I just kept going. And going. My plan of an easy two miles telescoped into—I think!—five. Into Squirrel Hill, then down the hill through Chatham's campus, over to Ellsworth, then along Ellsworth to Aiken, meandering through the wealthy neighborhood on Westminster, then back to my apartment.

Then, inspired by our massive lab renovation last night, I reorganized my office at home so that I look out the windows while I work. Lots of satisfyingly tedious details like wireless printing and speakers went flawlessly, and I even got my pesky wireless keyboard to work for the first time.

Going to watch the sunset in Schenley now. What a great day.

Yet another reason

Apparently most people in my lab get shocked by the door handle. Scott and I don't. Today Johnny deduced the reason: we use the titanium macs, so we're better grounded.

Innocked

Ruth, Scott, and I went to the Allegheny County Health Department this morning to get yellow fever vaccinations for our upcoming trip to Ecuador. The three of us had a generally amiable morning, giggling and telling stories on the bench outside the clinic. As one woman said, "you make getting shots look like fun."

Good matches

It's nice to know that something this important and big is being worked on by a person I trust.

When metadata goes awry

It's kind of fun being in a roomful of developers of recommender systems when a story like this comes out:

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retail chain, shut down its movie recommendation software after it was discovered that the company’s e-tail web site was suggesting movies about famous African Americans such as Martin Luther King, Tina Turner, and Jack Johnson to those looking at boxed DVDs of Planet of the Apes, a science-fiction movie about intelligent apes. (Red Herring article)

Document indexing and version control

Last night at dinner, at a tableful of information, computer, and social scientists, I lauded the merits of keyword indexing (e.g. Google Desktop Search or Mac Spotlight) over tagging (GMail) and sorting (traditional directory structures). Oh, how I praised my Mac Spotlight. And oh, how it failed me today. In the middle of my talk. I blithely hit apple-space, typed in "Minnesota presentation," select the first ppt file, and started talking. Only on Slide 3 did I realize I was showing the unfinished draft I'd sent to myself as an email attachment three days ago. Uggh.

And when I get flustered, I whip out the big words. To the people in the room: Thank you for not cringing when I said "antecedents" and later, "dyadic." I promise to make my vocabulary behave itself better next time.

Shhh

Going to Minnesota for a couple of days for a research retreat. In the meantime, there are reviews of The Blind Assassin and Shadow of the Wind over in reading.

Funky new year

I have seen The Wiz at least ten times. It had a far greater impression on me than the regular Wizard of Oz movie. As a child I would sing every lyric Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Lena Horne uttered. At one point I even had the sheet music, so I would torture my parents with piano covers of Michael's existential crow anthem ("You Can't Win").

Tonight I got to share this silly, glorious movie with a bunch of friends, projected ten feet wide on Scott's living room wall. And I discovered details in the costuming and set design that had been obscured in my previous tv-bound viewings. Miss One has numbers in her wig. The subway entrance sign says "Get down."

Pure camp value aside, the movie does verge on musical genius, and it was thoroughly satisfying to hear everyone singing along to "Ease on Down" (the yellow brick road).