Vowell's contagion
Insomnia, that is! I tried sleeping an hour ago--no luck. Until tonight, I'd been reading Sarah Vowell's "Take the Cannoli" before bed. I finished this morning, reading (among other feel-good yarns) an essay on the author's chronic wakefulness. She lists each treatment and the particulars of its failure in turn. No news there: done that. I've tried chamomile, exercise, eating, not-working-in-bed, and (thanks, E.) toe-wiggling (twelve times, up and down). Heaven help me.
So I've been programming instead. It turns out grep (in perl) does what I hoped and more. All the tweaking I'd done on them before (maybe they'll work if I escape everything!) was for nothing--it could only hurt. The real problem was in my misunderstanding of null strings in regular expressions, that is, m// That's out of the picture for now. Perl's nice because incomplete knowledge (as mine clearly is) can often be sidestepped by the flexibility of the language.
Stepping back some:
I'm all caught up in enterprises of great pitch and moment :) This may just be self-justification talking (see, by the way, my use of self-justification theory a la Festinger and especally Aron & Mills, 1959, in explaining religious belief), but I've decided B.'s lab is the best imaginable setting I could work in. Complex methods poorly understood outside the small group directly involved--of which I consider myself a fringe member--are fun and satisfying to learn. I get a smattering of theory, a morass of data, and unique tools for data collection and analysis--it's a psychology multivitamin. I expect I'll enjoy myself most, and get the most done, working on projects for B.'s cognitive neuroscience lab next semester. I detect a Turkheimer-style over-eagerness to apply exciting biological measures to everything imaginable (psychophysics plus any psychological question equals instant academic career), but there seems to be real value here. Meanwhile, a presentation with B.L.'s lab next week has reminded me to keep thinking about evolutionary psychology and romantic relationships. A new (or forgotten and reinvented) idea came to mind before, while I was trying to sleep: looking for more modulators of female face preferences, but this time in places where existing theories apply. I mean, V.S. Johnston's results on BEM-masculinity and magnitude & direction of menstrual-phase preference shift are interesting (tremendously, I think), but the authors had to fast-talk the discussion. I think I might be able to do more with Penton-Voak's results on (objectively and subjectively assessed) attractiveness and face preferences--there, there's theory, and it doesn't feel forced.
And--and! I continue slogging through perl. Progress is happening. I may actually get a cgi script running from my cpanel account tomorrow, and I may soon be able to automate the creation (besides the display) of gather-compatible psych surveys. Better to say streamlining, though--automation has taken on connotations of sleaze lately. Which reminds me of "Streamline", which reminds me of loud, pseudo-angry music, which reminds me of Audioslave.
Which reminds me that I'm excited and can't keep hold of my thoughts. It's maybe a few hours until dawn. I'm considering (obviously addled by sleep deprivation) staying up all night--at least I'll have no trouble sleeping early tomorrow. But every time I swerve off my eight-hours-a-night path, I think of REM sleep and memory consolidation--how the second might be impaired in the absence of the first. I like to think that doing psychology calms my neuroses--I wondered, a few weeks ago (and not for the first time, then), whether knowledge of psychological processes confers some kind of immunity to them. Not so, I think. Or maybe knowledge of the behavior of naive folks twists my own behavior. Self-monitoring effects, maybe. I don't know. Jargon helps, anyway--always does.
On Friday, I discovered my very first four-way interaction. Yesterday, Saturday, I acquired (by entirely legal means, for once) a charming vest and half a Navy overcoat. Half because I shared the purchase with one oscilloscopin' A.Y. We made corn muffins, and I felt kitchen-bossy. This brings to mind the fiddler on the roof: see Tevye on the likely condition of his wife if the former were rich. That is to say: Screaming at the servants, day and night.
Thinking of musicals means thinking of Man of la Mancha, which means thinking of Lost in la Mancha, which I hereby recommend to anyone who holds that Americans lack a sense of tragedy.
Tonight we saw Bottle Rocket, Wes Anderson's first, which I liked (if for nothing else) because I saw so much of Rushmore in it. So I wonder what people who've known us both see of me in my sister.
I'll do my best to make my perl code less obfuscated than my livejournal entries! Ha!
Now it's close to five a.m. I'll try for shuteye again, if only for the sake of appearances.
So I've been programming instead. It turns out grep (in perl) does what I hoped and more. All the tweaking I'd done on them before (maybe they'll work if I escape everything!) was for nothing--it could only hurt. The real problem was in my misunderstanding of null strings in regular expressions, that is, m// That's out of the picture for now. Perl's nice because incomplete knowledge (as mine clearly is) can often be sidestepped by the flexibility of the language.
Stepping back some:
I'm all caught up in enterprises of great pitch and moment :) This may just be self-justification talking (see, by the way, my use of self-justification theory a la Festinger and especally Aron & Mills, 1959, in explaining religious belief), but I've decided B.'s lab is the best imaginable setting I could work in. Complex methods poorly understood outside the small group directly involved--of which I consider myself a fringe member--are fun and satisfying to learn. I get a smattering of theory, a morass of data, and unique tools for data collection and analysis--it's a psychology multivitamin. I expect I'll enjoy myself most, and get the most done, working on projects for B.'s cognitive neuroscience lab next semester. I detect a Turkheimer-style over-eagerness to apply exciting biological measures to everything imaginable (psychophysics plus any psychological question equals instant academic career), but there seems to be real value here. Meanwhile, a presentation with B.L.'s lab next week has reminded me to keep thinking about evolutionary psychology and romantic relationships. A new (or forgotten and reinvented) idea came to mind before, while I was trying to sleep: looking for more modulators of female face preferences, but this time in places where existing theories apply. I mean, V.S. Johnston's results on BEM-masculinity and magnitude & direction of menstrual-phase preference shift are interesting (tremendously, I think), but the authors had to fast-talk the discussion. I think I might be able to do more with Penton-Voak's results on (objectively and subjectively assessed) attractiveness and face preferences--there, there's theory, and it doesn't feel forced.
And--and! I continue slogging through perl. Progress is happening. I may actually get a cgi script running from my cpanel account tomorrow, and I may soon be able to automate the creation (besides the display) of gather-compatible psych surveys. Better to say streamlining, though--automation has taken on connotations of sleaze lately. Which reminds me of "Streamline", which reminds me of loud, pseudo-angry music, which reminds me of Audioslave.
Which reminds me that I'm excited and can't keep hold of my thoughts. It's maybe a few hours until dawn. I'm considering (obviously addled by sleep deprivation) staying up all night--at least I'll have no trouble sleeping early tomorrow. But every time I swerve off my eight-hours-a-night path, I think of REM sleep and memory consolidation--how the second might be impaired in the absence of the first. I like to think that doing psychology calms my neuroses--I wondered, a few weeks ago (and not for the first time, then), whether knowledge of psychological processes confers some kind of immunity to them. Not so, I think. Or maybe knowledge of the behavior of naive folks twists my own behavior. Self-monitoring effects, maybe. I don't know. Jargon helps, anyway--always does.
On Friday, I discovered my very first four-way interaction. Yesterday, Saturday, I acquired (by entirely legal means, for once) a charming vest and half a Navy overcoat. Half because I shared the purchase with one oscilloscopin' A.Y. We made corn muffins, and I felt kitchen-bossy. This brings to mind the fiddler on the roof: see Tevye on the likely condition of his wife if the former were rich. That is to say: Screaming at the servants, day and night.
Thinking of musicals means thinking of Man of la Mancha, which means thinking of Lost in la Mancha, which I hereby recommend to anyone who holds that Americans lack a sense of tragedy.
Tonight we saw Bottle Rocket, Wes Anderson's first, which I liked (if for nothing else) because I saw so much of Rushmore in it. So I wonder what people who've known us both see of me in my sister.
I'll do my best to make my perl code less obfuscated than my livejournal entries! Ha!
Now it's close to five a.m. I'll try for shuteye again, if only for the sake of appearances.