More Vogelpark Photos

Robert sent a link to this gallery of photos from the bird park we visited several weeks ago. Critically, it contains images of the "robotic" toucan that I mentioned earlier as seeming to attack my camera when I attempted to photograph him. Luckily, this photographer got several shots, including this image of the toucan sticking his beak out of the cage. This is a lot more menacing-seeming when it's coming at you at speed, but perhaps you can get a sense of the bird's fake, plasticy appearance from this picture.

Party Like It's 1993

The party last Friday was BYOB, so I put together this 6-pack to represent the kinds of beer I drank when I was an undergrad. (No, I did not drink nor plan to drink 6 beers at the party; I figured other people would help, and they did.)


I had forgotten how good the raspberry lambic is. Though it's described as "delicate," I thought it was quite rich.

Uh Oh, Neuro

Today's class was a bit more like that dream in which you show up for your Advanced Polish Poetry class and realize that you don't understand a word of Polish than I would have preferred.

Is Math a Young Person's Game?

In a review of Proof, Lee quotes an old mathematician as saying that creativity ends at 23 (presumably taking with it the capacity to do brilliant mathematical work) and wonders whether this means he is over-the-hill.

I've heard this a lot, also - the idea that math is a young man's (ahem!) game, that if you haven't made your contribution by age 30 you never will, etc. What's not clear to me about this common assertion is whether the actual imagined culprit is chronological age per se or years spent working in the discipline. Since it seems likely that the majority of mathematicians complete grad school while they are still young, in general, being young in years also means being early in one's career, and being old in years means being farther along in one's career. (I guess a mathy person might call this a multicollinearity problem.)

I'm not even remotely convinced that either version of this belief is true, but if it's less an issue of having an old vs. young brain (e.g., information processing speed, working memory capacity) and more about being new to the field, energized, and in life circumstances that promote doing a lot of math (e.g., being "married" to math rather than having an actual spouse, kids, and so on) vs. established, complacent, tenured, and caught up with other distractors, then "older" math grad students like Lee and Tam are not over-the-hill, mathematically.

I have to admit, as a social psychologist (in training), I enjoy / am infuriated by the stereotypes associated with mathematicians, both from those outside of and within the discipline.

Anyway, ultimately, this is an empirical question, and one that mathematicians (even mathematicians in plays) are sadly not well-placed to answer.

Takin Care of Business: Day 1

Today was my first day back on school. Although classes don't begin until Wed., I had all kinds of errands to run and the first TA meeting for the stats class I TA for, so I spent my first full day back on campus.

This year, I am the only TA who has taught the course before; the other TAs include 3 first year students and a second year student who had a different assignment last year. But the professor (who is also my advisor) is the same, and it looks like the labs/homeworks are mostly the same, as last semester, which is great on both counts; I think the TAship is likely to be less work than it was last year, and I'll probably do a better job with the material.

I had several especially nice things happen today:

1) My advisor has read the first 10 pages or so of my major area paper (MAP) and came to my office to give me a thumbs up. He's going to make suggestions for deletion of some material that I can keep in reserve to add back when I write my thesis.

2) I went to the library for some more books, some to do research for my current project and others to read up on the state of research as I start working on my statement(s) of purpose for PhD applications, and I found a book that just came out earlier this year and that I drooled over when I saw it listed in a catalog I get due to belonging to a psychology association. Now it's mine...or at least, for now it's mine.

Today, I stayed at school after my meeting and read the five chapters of another book that interested me and that had implications for both my current project and the SOPs. Even though I was at school for a good while, the time went really quickly. I'm getting good at reading material in my field, and it feels a lot less taxing than it used to. (Whether this represents skill building or an increase in self-regulatory ability I will leave to the musings of the reader.)

3) I am getting a new printer set up in my office. I haven't had one in my office before, so this will be great.

4) Best of all, they distributed the department grad handbook for the year and I discovered what course I am taking next semester. In last year's book, it listed a 3 hour "elective" and 6 hours of thesis research. In this year's book, it lists 6 hours of thesis research, full stop. So the spring semester is All Thesis, All the Time. I like it.

Braaaaains, Continued

My biological psychology prof just emailed us the syllabus for this semester. If I am reading this correctly, we will be dissecting a sheep brain. God, I can hardly wait.

I am 100% serious.

2 Days, 2 Shirts

After sending in my draft major area paper, I decided that if I wanted to wear my My Masters Psychology t-shirt I got on the first day last year while I was still in the program, I should work on it now. So I did a dead-easy resizing of the shirt. (Which looks weird with the brown skirt I'm wearing, but whatever.) Because I may be in my last summer in the south for a while, I did attach sleeves rather than leave it in my more typical, lazy sleeveless style.


Yesterday, I looked at my supplies and decided to do something with a free, cheap-ass (as in, that sort of sheer knit) white t-shirt my mom got from the library. I put it in a heap with two long red sleeves left over from one of the source shirts for the Mondrian shirt, a too-short dark green long-sleeved shirt, and two pairs of black knit short sports shorts I never wear these days (one of which was a bit more faded than the other).

I decided I wanted to make a somewhat athletic-looking shirt. The association in my mind is with soccer, though I don't know that my image (let alone final product) matches any actual soccer shirts. I thought that style would make a nice contrast with the writing on the free shirt.

So I cut out and sewed together a huge number of pieces until I had two pieces of fabric from which I could cut out the front and back. It took me a god-awful long time to get to this point, and the fabric was heavy from all the stitching. I sewed it up, added sleeves, and voila: We have the Team Brains T.

I was too impatient to wait for Robert to take a photo, so the writing is reversed, Through the Looking-Glass style.


Right way round, it says:



I didn't have enough red for the front and back, so I used white on the back.


I think it came out pretty similar to how I'd envisioned it. Consistent with the sports vibe, I gave it a roomier fit than I normally do.

I almost ran out of black thread last night; I went to Hancock Fabrics this afternoon to buy some more so I could do the bottom double hem. While I was there, I found thread to match a light purple shirt I got at the Outer Banks and some supplies for doing applique. I've been feeling a strong need this week for t-shirts featuring appliqued owls, other birds, rabbits, and Pac-man (not on the same shirt).