And This Was Odd Because It Was the Middle of the Night

You ever have that experience of waking up in the middle of the night with some brilliant idea that you write down in the dark (or in the glow of your watch or alarm clock), but then when you see it in the morning, it's illegible (e.g. is that the word "porcupine"?), nonsensical (e.g. crocodiles release the queen's ugly moat), or just dumb/ insipid? I have done this dozens of times.

Last night, between the hours of 1:15 and 2:30 a.m., I kept falling partly to sleep, then thinking some thought about my statement of purpose (that I had been working on before bed) or my research that I came into my office and wrote on a piece of paper. I filled up one side of the page and about a quarter of the other. Shockingly, when I looked over these notes this morning, they were actually good ideas. I'm not sure that it was completely unprecedented in my experience, but it was odd.

Disreputable

I sometimes talk about getting into a grad program at, or later getting a job at, a low-quality sounding fake directional state university, so I was quite impressed with how unimpressive this fake institution sounds - Southern Appalachian State Community Technical College.

A part-time instructor from said college is the purported source of a persuasive message about mandatory comprehensive exams in the "low credibility" condition of several experiments I'm reading about. The experiments were conducted at a midwestern state university, so the inclusion of both "southern" and "Appalachian" no doubt helped make this person sound stupid above and beyond what "community" and "technical" college implies because clearly, no one with intelligence would choose to work at a community college in the south or Appalachia. (And yes, I empathize with the implicit negative reaction to the idea of "Southern Appalachia" myself.)



I would also like to take this opportunity to point out this article to my reader who mocks my pronunciation of said region (and any interested others). Given my proximity to the area, and after the whole Colorado pronunciation debacle, you'd think I would have some (ahem) credibility on these things, but I guess not. Hence, I provide these other sources for your consideration.

Rabbit Round-up

Readers suffering from leporiphobia (rabbit phobia) should...well, you should know by now that Empirical Question is a rabbit-happy blog that strongly believes in the goodness of More Rabbit. If you can't handle the bunny, get out of this vegetable garden.

In the last two days, three people have sent me bunnalicious items for me to share with you:

(1) D. sends this Soviet air mail stamp featuring the Soyuz-5 spacecraft and a rabbit. She notes, "I'm not sure what role bunnies played in the Soviet space program, but it's good they were recognized." Indeed. My only guess is that the combination of a spacecraft and a hare is intended to evoke speed by air.



(2) Jen forwards this lovely little lolbun. It makes a nice (if strange) companion piece to the dormouse having his head stuck into a teapot in Alice.



(3) Robert sends this Slate "Explainer" about treatment for rabbit phobia that also includes a few more fun rabbit-fear links, including a discussion of Jimmy Carter's swamp rabbit drama. (Robert also makes a very pop culturally literate statement about a certain Buffy character's fear of rabbits that will have to wait until my mom catches up with her voracious viewing of the show. I think this idea is introduced somewhere in season 4, if wikipedia can be trusted.)

Attempting to Appreciate the Necessity

A couple years ago, I mentioned that one thing that has stuck with me very strongly is my 10th grade English teacher writing "Sally is a tireless reviser of her work."

This week, at the beginning of my meeting with my advisor, he pulled out a copy of The Language Instinct, which he's been reading recently, and read me this quote: "A banal but universally acknowledged key to good writing is to revise extensively. Good writers go through anywhere from two to twenty drafts before releasing a paper. Anyone who does not appreciate this necessity is going to be a bad writer."

Pinker also writes, "Expository writing requires language to express far more complex trains of thought than it was biologically designed to do. Inconsistencies caused by limitations of short-term memory and planning, unnoticed in conversation, are not as tolerable when preserved on a page that is to be perused more leisurely. Also, unlike a conversational partner, a reader will rarely share enough background assumptions to interpolate all the missing premises that make language comprehensive. Overcoming one's natural egocentrism and trying to anticipate the knowledge state of a generic reader at every stage of the exposition is one of the most important tasks in writing well. All this makes writing a difficult craft that must be mastered through practice, instruction, feedback, and--probably most important--intensive exposure to good examples."

I am really trying to keep this in mind this week as I work on version 5 of Experiment 1 and version 3 of Experiment 2. Fortunately, this evening as I was basically re-writing the results of Experiment 2 from scratch (and with the stats from what I think is Experiment 2 analysis version 4 or 5), I realized that I was making improvements that I want to incorporate in Experiment 1 as well, even though the Experiment 1 results section is looking pretty good at this point already. So yes, I'm seeing evidence that supports this whole revision thing in my own work right now.

I also realized that I have been thinking of myself as working on the same 15 pages for weeks now, but that actually my two experiments together are up to 29 pages...and counting. This helps satisfy the part of my mind that is occupied with the calculation of the ratio of pages written to total number of pages needed (about 60).

And I will just say that I find writing empirical papers much harder than review papers. Clearly and thoroughly presenting the results of a somewhat large number of 2 x 2 x 2 factorial design experiments and tying the results together in a way that makes sense is hard. (We are not "biologically designed" to understand the results/implications of our own three-way interactions, let alone someone else's.)

I should enjoy the fact that I am currently writing a paper that is supposed to be long because one of the hardest things of all is to be clear and thorough and insightful and concise.

Crazy, Charismatic, Vegetarian

In the past month, I've read two novels that feature extreme health food cultists: Millroy the Magician by Paul Theroux and The Road to Wellville by T. C. Boyle.

Millroy, a fairground magician who nevertheless apparently has the capacity to do Real Magic due to taking control of his bodily functions through a vegetarian eating plan based on the Bible (think: Ezekiel bread) and ritualistic elimination, takes an unhappy teenage girl into his trailer and his life. They leave the fairground behind them, with the girl posing as Millroy's "son," and venture into television (first a children's program, then Sunday preaching), where Millroy becomes a star. A diner devoted to Millroy's eating plan opens. This part of the story is actually pretty interesting, but the whole thing just becomes too much. Once I figured out the only way the story was going to resolve itself, I thought, Oh god, no, please, not that, NO. But yes. Yes, the book ended in an utterly annoying manner.

The Road to Wellville juxtaposes the monotonous existence of the pampered, half-starved, prodded, enema-ed, sexually-deprived rich patients of Dr. Kellogg's sanitarium and the machinations of desperate breakfast cereal speculators (celery-flavored cereal: mmmm) in the crucible of turn-of-the-century Battle Creek, Michigan. I found the first couple of chapters rather boring and difficult to get into (suffering from some of that "now we establish all the characters" problem often afflicting television shows), and put the book aside for a time. But when I was drawn back to it later, I found it a jolly ride.

One sort of disturbing things about these satirical novels is that their nutso health gurus appear to advocate super narrowly defined diets that are, however, more diverse and balanced than that of my two raw-foodist aunts who, last I heard, eat basically the very same thing at every meal. (OK, they do better than the poor guy at the sanitarium who was on the milk diet, then the grape diet, but those were merely short-term treatments, not intended to be diets for a lifetime.)

Gigantic Conference

This week I submitted my first year project to a poster session at the big conference in my field. Currently, there are 598 submissions, and the deadline isn't until Tuesday. Knowing how grad students deal with deadlines, I think there are a lot more of them to come. This made me feel like it must be impossible to get one's poster accepted against so many other applicants, but Robert tracked down last year's conference materials - there were over 2,000 posters at the conference last year. So...yeah, I guess this conference is even huger than I imagined.

I don't know when we find out if we're accepted or not, but if accepted, I already know that I will be happy at the time, when this represents an opportunity to present research and an accomplishment in my budding career as an academic. However, as the end of January (and hence the conference) draws near, I am going to be focusing on what an utter pain in the ass it is to put together a poster, get travel arrangements made, and miss a few days of school and thus will increasingly wish I had not been accepted after all.

Fearless

You will not want to miss this epic battle between venomous snake and badger of death. Thanks, Tam.

(I'm now really starting to hope that it wasn't a honey badger we saw in town.)