This Week
Many interesting things happened this week!
--------------
I spent much of Monday and Tuesday writing a midterm paper for my sociolinguistics class. It amounted to nine pages analyzing why this interview (specifically, the minute of the interview following 1:38 mark) between Stephen Colbert and Georgia Representative Westmoreland is funny.
It may surprise you, but after analyzing it carefully and writing nine pages about it, this interview is no longer funny to me.
Now, when watching this interview, I'm like Neo in the Matrix, in those scenes where he sees everything as just strings of green symbols on a black background. Only in my case, the green symbols are norms of discourse.
I know kung fu.
--------------
I had an telephone interview with Google because I'm applying for an associate product manager position there. I discovered that while I have strong opinions about how one could organize information better on the internet with a machine-readible representation of an argument, I have absolutely no idea how I would go about designing a mall.
I don't really go to the mall much. The one answer I had to the interviewer's question was "Well, that thing they do with the escalators is pretty annoying." You know, that thing? Where they make you walk around to the other end of the frickin' mall to go up the next flight of escalator stairs so you have to walk past the shop windows? Like I'm really going to be attracted to something I see on a mannequin while fuming to myself at the attempts of mall designers to force stuff into my mind....
The second phone interview that was scheduled for that day was cancelled. I found out later that it was because the poor guy had an emergency appendectomy. I'm been struggling to get a rescheduled second interview ever since, but they haven't really jumped on it, which is giving me the suspicion that I unwittingly bombed the first interview.
I hate malls.
---------------
Wednesday the guest lecture for my cog sci seminar was this guy Bill Warren. Psychology has all these crazy traditions within it--psychodynamics and behaviorism being the most Olde Skoole (Katie can correct me if I'm wrong here), with cognitivism cropping up later (my education has been mostly in this belt), and with newfangled twists like Lakoff's embodied cognition and others coming out of criticisms of the cognitivist approach. Warren works within a really obscure tradition: ecological psychology (or Gibsonian psychology, after J.J. Gibson), which sounds like tree-hugging hippie psychology, but in fact is more about doing away with the kinds of mental representations of the world thought to be essential to most thought and action by cognitivists. Here's a bit snatched from Warren's website:
Bill Warren takes an ecological approach to problems of perception and action, which asks: how much of the organization in behavior can be explained "for free" on the basis of informational and physical constraints in natural environments?
Or, put more succinctly by Gibson, "It's not what is inside the head that is important, it's what the head is inside of."
I'm afraid I may have derailed Warren's presentation (which was more about a particular case in which sensed environmental information more or less automatically affects human navigation without any apparent modeling of that environment) trying to get to the bottom of this theory and where it actually differs from the cognitivist account, since it was presented by Warren and a better and brighter alternative to the Bayes-rule-thumping cognitivism I've soaked up in the past year. I haven't quite resolved the conflict yet in my head, but I'm fairly certain the ecological approach can't be used to get rid of representations all together--I mean, we do seem to have concepts and perceptual representations, even if they aren't always used in particular tasks.
I mention this largely because Warren and Gibson are both direct realists. If i_am_lane or any of the other philosophy crowd make it down this far into this entry, he may be interested to know that that there's a empirically motivated debate about the nature of perception that parallels the philosophical one, and may help inform it. (I think the ecological guys are losing pretty badly though...)
---------------
Yesterday we had our fifth-ish weekly Friday night potluck. You are all invited, by the way, even if I've forgotten to send you the invitational email.
I haven't mentioned these much yet, but they are pretty much a focal point for my social life this semester.
Howard Prospect was out with his parents, but Melanie and I made some kickass vegetable tempura. If you've never deep fried something in your kitchen before, I would highly recommend the experience. The batter gets everywhere and it's a total mess, but it was a lot of fun. It's the sort of cooking where the procedure itself adds a lot to the experience beyond the final product (which was, by all accounts, delicious.)
We didn't have a deep-frier, so we used a sauce-pan with a thick layer of boiling oil at the bottom.
On the second batch, we didn't calibrate the temperature of the oil properly. For some reason the batter was becoming cooked almost instantly. Suddenly, a glob of oil launched itself out of the pot past my brow. I think it may have barely scorched some of my hair in passing.
We finally turned the temperature down when Hodgson, who was in charge of removing crispy, golden hunks of vegetable, egg, and flour at the time, pointed out to me that the plastic spoon he had been using had started to melt and become deformed.
Live and learn.
Anyway, I'd recommend it.
------------------
Laura, who graduated a couple years ago and who I met in the Madhouse my first year there and who is now in med school in Ohio graced our potluck with her presence as part of her weekend New England tour. Despite my preoccupation with the tempura, she was insistent that we talk and catch up, which was something I really appreciated. I've done the same sort of thing: wafted randomly into some party where I knew I could track down one person who I cared about and wanted to renew contact with, then work awkwardly to get their attention and try to get something substantive out of them past the initial small talk. This happened with a lot of people at Craig's memorial service a couple weekends ago, for example, with varied success. Except she wasn't awkward about it at all, just persistent.
We finally got to talking and managed to hit the heavy stuff--our personal hopes and expectations, our respective love lives, etc., all of which reminded me of how impressively in control of herself she is and about her resiliently upbeat attitude. I really appreciated and was moved by the effort she took to maintain our line of communication. I'm kind of bumass about that--now I'm remembering all the people who I haven't spoken to in a couple years or longer who I ought to send greetings out to.
Speaking of which, I need to remember to call Steve Morrell this afternoon.
--------------
I spent much of Monday and Tuesday writing a midterm paper for my sociolinguistics class. It amounted to nine pages analyzing why this interview (specifically, the minute of the interview following 1:38 mark) between Stephen Colbert and Georgia Representative Westmoreland is funny.
It may surprise you, but after analyzing it carefully and writing nine pages about it, this interview is no longer funny to me.
Now, when watching this interview, I'm like Neo in the Matrix, in those scenes where he sees everything as just strings of green symbols on a black background. Only in my case, the green symbols are norms of discourse.
I know kung fu.
--------------
I had an telephone interview with Google because I'm applying for an associate product manager position there. I discovered that while I have strong opinions about how one could organize information better on the internet with a machine-readible representation of an argument, I have absolutely no idea how I would go about designing a mall.
I don't really go to the mall much. The one answer I had to the interviewer's question was "Well, that thing they do with the escalators is pretty annoying." You know, that thing? Where they make you walk around to the other end of the frickin' mall to go up the next flight of escalator stairs so you have to walk past the shop windows? Like I'm really going to be attracted to something I see on a mannequin while fuming to myself at the attempts of mall designers to force stuff into my mind....
The second phone interview that was scheduled for that day was cancelled. I found out later that it was because the poor guy had an emergency appendectomy. I'm been struggling to get a rescheduled second interview ever since, but they haven't really jumped on it, which is giving me the suspicion that I unwittingly bombed the first interview.
I hate malls.
---------------
Wednesday the guest lecture for my cog sci seminar was this guy Bill Warren. Psychology has all these crazy traditions within it--psychodynamics and behaviorism being the most Olde Skoole (Katie can correct me if I'm wrong here), with cognitivism cropping up later (my education has been mostly in this belt), and with newfangled twists like Lakoff's embodied cognition and others coming out of criticisms of the cognitivist approach. Warren works within a really obscure tradition: ecological psychology (or Gibsonian psychology, after J.J. Gibson), which sounds like tree-hugging hippie psychology, but in fact is more about doing away with the kinds of mental representations of the world thought to be essential to most thought and action by cognitivists. Here's a bit snatched from Warren's website:
Bill Warren takes an ecological approach to problems of perception and action, which asks: how much of the organization in behavior can be explained "for free" on the basis of informational and physical constraints in natural environments?
Or, put more succinctly by Gibson, "It's not what is inside the head that is important, it's what the head is inside of."
I'm afraid I may have derailed Warren's presentation (which was more about a particular case in which sensed environmental information more or less automatically affects human navigation without any apparent modeling of that environment) trying to get to the bottom of this theory and where it actually differs from the cognitivist account, since it was presented by Warren and a better and brighter alternative to the Bayes-rule-thumping cognitivism I've soaked up in the past year. I haven't quite resolved the conflict yet in my head, but I'm fairly certain the ecological approach can't be used to get rid of representations all together--I mean, we do seem to have concepts and perceptual representations, even if they aren't always used in particular tasks.
I mention this largely because Warren and Gibson are both direct realists. If i_am_lane or any of the other philosophy crowd make it down this far into this entry, he may be interested to know that that there's a empirically motivated debate about the nature of perception that parallels the philosophical one, and may help inform it. (I think the ecological guys are losing pretty badly though...)
---------------
Yesterday we had our fifth-ish weekly Friday night potluck. You are all invited, by the way, even if I've forgotten to send you the invitational email.
I haven't mentioned these much yet, but they are pretty much a focal point for my social life this semester.
Howard Prospect was out with his parents, but Melanie and I made some kickass vegetable tempura. If you've never deep fried something in your kitchen before, I would highly recommend the experience. The batter gets everywhere and it's a total mess, but it was a lot of fun. It's the sort of cooking where the procedure itself adds a lot to the experience beyond the final product (which was, by all accounts, delicious.)
We didn't have a deep-frier, so we used a sauce-pan with a thick layer of boiling oil at the bottom.
On the second batch, we didn't calibrate the temperature of the oil properly. For some reason the batter was becoming cooked almost instantly. Suddenly, a glob of oil launched itself out of the pot past my brow. I think it may have barely scorched some of my hair in passing.
We finally turned the temperature down when Hodgson, who was in charge of removing crispy, golden hunks of vegetable, egg, and flour at the time, pointed out to me that the plastic spoon he had been using had started to melt and become deformed.
Live and learn.
Anyway, I'd recommend it.
------------------
Laura, who graduated a couple years ago and who I met in the Madhouse my first year there and who is now in med school in Ohio graced our potluck with her presence as part of her weekend New England tour. Despite my preoccupation with the tempura, she was insistent that we talk and catch up, which was something I really appreciated. I've done the same sort of thing: wafted randomly into some party where I knew I could track down one person who I cared about and wanted to renew contact with, then work awkwardly to get their attention and try to get something substantive out of them past the initial small talk. This happened with a lot of people at Craig's memorial service a couple weekends ago, for example, with varied success. Except she wasn't awkward about it at all, just persistent.
We finally got to talking and managed to hit the heavy stuff--our personal hopes and expectations, our respective love lives, etc., all of which reminded me of how impressively in control of herself she is and about her resiliently upbeat attitude. I really appreciated and was moved by the effort she took to maintain our line of communication. I'm kind of bumass about that--now I'm remembering all the people who I haven't spoken to in a couple years or longer who I ought to send greetings out to.
Speaking of which, I need to remember to call Steve Morrell this afternoon.