The Kindness of Strangers

You know what’s irritating? Most of the time I spend “learning” about something new isn’t spent actually assimilating concepts; it’s spent trying to tease apart information from misinformation.

That is, most of the information out there concerning a given topic is contradictory and most of it is crap. The new health care bill? Try to find an unbiased view of its effects. Global warming? Salary comparisons by sex in the US? It’s all hopeless. I get the impression that on many of these issues, if I just knew the real facts (if such things exist — most statistics out there are already subject to huge selection biases) I could make up my mind about them. But to do that I have to wade through a huge amount of bogosity and waste tons of time trying to sort it all out.

Okay, so this isn’t a surprising observation. But it still strikes me as strange: facts lie all the time.

Anyway. Vacation was good. Had a lot of fun in San Diego with the family. Went to the Wild Animal Park, played Boggle, exercised, almost played a round of golf (rain!), had dinner with Wing and his family, which was quite entertaining. Really enjoyed hanging out with my sisters and parents. Then Umesh and I had a big New Year’s party back up here in Berkeley, which was a success.

Earlier this week I had dinner with Jen and friends in SF. Jen’s flying back to Spain soon (of course, stopping on the way to see Wing in Boston) so it was great to see her — as well as wittlebc and yayu, and a bunch of others! At some point during dinner conversation turned to the Myers-Briggs personality test. (Apparently conversation always turns to MB when Wendy’s around. :) I mentioned that I was INTJ with leanings to E. I was told that I was more of an INTP, and after hearing the descriptions of a P, I found myself swayed, even though every online test I had taken indicated J. I also mentioned how bogus these self-taken tests generally are, since you answer questions based on the type of person you think you are, rather than the type of person you actually are. I wonder if I think I am more of a J than I really am, and why (or maybe I don’t — I was pretty easily convinced that I was a P, anyway). On the other hand, there are things you know about yourself that no one else does; for instance, most people peg me as an E but I’m definitely an I.

Later that night we played Taboo and I think I annoyed a bunch of people with my strict adherence to the rules. Not sure why, but I’ve always liked playing by the rules (at least when the outcome is inconsequential and otherwise arbitrary, as in a game) — fairness is really important to me. It’s definitely another Myers-Briggs thing, no doubt… e.g. “You value justice higher than mercy” :).

Oh yeah, read a bunch of good books recently: Moneyball, Darkness at Noon, The Namesake. Also, buying lots of stuff now with my new credit card: new electric guitar, probably also a new electric shaver, digital camera, and sound card. It’s a good deal of money but I haven’t bought anything substantial in a loooong time.

Another random thought: people just aren’t built for long-term happiness, although we all seem to be searching for it in one way or another. Happiness is nearly always induced by delusions or novel stimuli. That’s pretty much how it works, and as soon as things cease to be novel or you cease deluding yourself, it’s back to the status quo. I guess two observations precipitate from this view: first, humans are probably so successful because we’re not always happy, and thus always trying to find ways to achieve happiness again (and so this “deficiency” is probably evolutionary in nature and almost certainly advantageous), and second, it’s bizarre that we all intellectually understand than long-term happiness is unattainable and yet we strive for it anyway. Maybe that’s another winning quality, survival-wise.

Blargh. Speaking of annoying things (as I did to start this entry), it’s annoying that I’m incapable of expressing my thoughts coherently with words. Why must they always emit themselves in such a staggeringly inelegant fashion?

Sometimes when I’m sitting around, an entire melody will appear in my head, so fully developed and natural that at first I’m convinced that I must have unconsciously stolen it from somewhere. I wish that kind of thing would happen with words; songs are (for practical purposes) useless for conveying ideas. Unfortunately, I’m in the business of conveying ideas.

Last time I updated for real was an unbelievably long time ago. Much to say, most of which will no doubt be skimmed since the LJ mentality is to write little and often, and long entries are easily overwhelming. See if you can stay with me on this one.

Umesh and I are waking up in about 7 hours to drive down to San Diego to meet my parents and sisters for a week of hanging out down there. Of course, I haven’t packed and my room is a mess. Yay!

Spent this entire month slaving away on two final projects, including about 100 hours in the last week. Man, that sucked. Also explains why I wrote so many emails today (first free day in a loooong time).

Love Actually: some cheesy parts — Claudia Schiffer, the lame girl that Liam Neeson’s awesome kid liked, etc… but more terrific stories lines (Keira Knightley et al., Colin Firth, Laura Linney). Definitely good.

Return of the King: Totally awesome. Minor quibbles (but if you grew up reading the books, you’re going to have minor quibbles), but overall an outstanding movie. Kickass!

Saw RotK at the Sony Metreon theaters in SF. The individual theaters are huge, and you walk in from a tunnel at the bottom. It’s like at an NFL game: you come out of the tunnel into a huge arena filled with people (except they aren’t cheering insanely for you). I mentioned to Joel at the time that everyone in the world should get that experience once: walking into a huge stadium and having everyone there just go nuts for you (perhaps even chanting your name!). Imagine what it would feel like. I think that would solve a lot of esteem problems.

American Analog Set at Bimbo’s: show was way too short.

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Brief interlude. True story.
“a) he was riding his bike to soda (he lives near the ashby bart) when, while biking across a crosswalk, a police car at the intersection happens to make a right turn on red and smashes into his bike, sending him flying and totaling his bike (value $400). the officer stops just long enough to make sure he’s okay before speeding off… so ben’s out a bike. and it was totally the police officer’s fault.

b) he’s working on the 262 project so he HAS to go to Soda somehow… so he starts driving his car there. he parks his car on cedar and euclid. he leaves soda late that night and goes back to his car, to find the two front windows smashed. what’s missing? well, he had this huge 50-lb jump-starter thing that he bought for $50 that’s worth about $15. it was stolen. bizarre.

c) so now he’s driving around without any windows. so when he parks his car anywhere and comes back, he finds random shit rearranged. like, he has a little tray for his change. he comes back once, all the change is gone except for the pennies. later he comes back again, and the pennies are gone. one time he finds his registration pulled out and left on the passenger seat.. of course it was raining that day so it got soaked.

d) the funny thing about the registration, though, is that it expired last year and he’s been too lazy to get it renewed (although he does have insurance). but since his windows are broken the car looks more suspicious to police officers, who apparently are thus more inclined to check his license plate. so he’s now gotten several tickets for having an expired registration.”

Talk about unlucky.

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Intramural soccer: our team had a good run. Made it to the quarterfinals (by beating a team 1-0 that had won its previous game 15-0 [!!!]), but I had to fly home for Thanksgiving and miss the QF game, which we lost. Doh. There’s always the spring…

Turning 24: feels old. But Umesh and Jenny threw a wonderful surprise birthday party for me. Thanks to to them, everyone who came, and everyone who thought of me! I was touched.

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Interlude two.
How many of your memories are real? Think about your earliest memories. How many are real, genuine memories, and how many have been affected by what your parents have told you, or old pictures that you’ve seen? Of course, this is a hard question to answer, because all memories seem real. But it’s pretty jarring to “remember” something only to have a fundamental property of it discounted by your parents (which would happen if your brain had partially fabricated it based on external stimuli). This has happened to most everyone I’ve asked. If it hasn’t happened to you, I’d suggest talking to your parents about what you remember (and of course be aware that if you parrot back to them something they’ve told you before [i.e. “you used to always do X when you were young” or “remember when you did Y?”], they’re going to agree with you). Eyewitnesses are terribly unreliable; memories are convincing, true or not. Brains are strange things.

(In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that many people reading this will think “oh yeah, I can remember when I was two; this is crap”, and my guess is that most of those people, while convinced they are right, are wrong.)

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I went home for a week during Thanksgiving and it was awesome. Watched a ton of movies with my family (including the subpar Mystic River. Are we the only ones who didn’t like it?). The weekend before Thanksgiving a bunch of friends came from all over (DC, NY, Boston) to stay at my house: Wing, William, Grant, Brian, James, Jeff. We played tons of Mario Kart, and some wonderfully warm-weather football (65 degrees!). Went to Damon’s and kicked some ass in trivia (top 20 in the country twice out of over 9000). Best I’ve ever done, I think. Also got to see more of my best friends from high school later in the week: Matt, Dan, Bosse, and Will. Good times.

See you next year!

“Who controls the past,” said Orwell, “controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

I’ve been woefully behind in updating this thing. Luckily I’ve gotten to the point where I really want to, which is a good thing, right? Or maybe it’s just because I have a lot of work to do for tomorrow… :)

Quick summary of recent events: Saw my cousin Sammy, who was visiting the US from India. Introduced her to crepes, which she liked :). Went to my first pro football game, Raiders vs. Chiefs on MNF. The Raiders lost in the last second as Tim Brown was tackled on the 1 yd line. Sadly, just a few minutes earlier in the same game, I lost my fantasy football game when Charlie Garner was tackled on the 1 yd line. Ah, how the sporting gods tease me so.

Jeff came to visit for a weekend, which was really fun. We spent most of the time watching sports and hanging out. Jeff seems to be doing well in med school, and I got to hear a lot of cool medical stories. We were united in our support of the Red Sox, and watched Game 7 of the series (when the Sox were up but then blew it in the catastrophic eighth inning) in a bar in the city. The meltdown was incredibly painful, and I almost puked my guts out, but since then I’ve had the good sense to detach myself from sports somewhat, and have achieved a serene Zen-like calm about the whole thing. (Still, I was grinning like a maniac when the Marlins took out the Yankees. Woohoo! :)

Umesh pointed out that I’m addicted to Internet news sites, and he’s right. I recently finished putting the final touches on NewsDog, and I check that compulsively, along with a host of others (nytimes.com, cnn.com, etc.). It’s ridiculous and it’s got to stop. If there were a news site that posted up-to-the-minute details about tectonic plate movements, I’d probably read that ten times a day, too. So as of now (in a truly spontaneous decision; I had no such intention when I started to write this paragraph), I vow to read each site only once a day. We’ll see how long that lasts.

I got the Friendster bug recently. For a while I had been a good, passive user, just responding to friend requests and the like. Then about two weeks ago I got a huge bunch of requests all at once and that started me poking around the site some more. The whole concept is kind of hokey (especially since there’s no way you’re going to say no to someone who asks you to be his or her friend) but I have to admit that it’s pretty fun to see what other people think and write about themselves. Of course, I’m leeching since I haven’t written anything in my own profile, but that’s the way it goes :). Even now, though, most of my high school and college friends aren’t on there. Perhaps that’s a good thing! I’m slowly switching back into passive mode.

Going to see “The Matrix Revolutions” on IMAX on Thursday. Never seen a real movie on IMAX before. However, this one’s been getting pretty bad reviews so my enthusiasm has been dampened somewhat. Then on Friday, American Analog Set at Bimbo’s! I’ve been wanting to see them for so long…

Simon and Garfunkel at the HP Pavilion last night, with a short guest performance by the Everly Brothers. Art looked young and sounded old (except for a stunning part in Bridge); Paul looked old and sounded young. The differences in their personalities were made obvious, too: Art wore a tie, chatted with the audience, and took bows after every song, while Paul wore a t-shirt and generally stayed in the shadows. The clearest thing about the performance was the utter genius of Paul Simon’s songs. They encompass a range of emotions and expressions — melancholy, joy, pain, love, humor and wit, loneliness, heartache — effortlessly and in a startlingly beautiful manner. His songs are so profoundly imbued with sentiment that they simply emanate it. It’s breathtaking… an astounding experience, and it honestly brought tears to my eyes.

This shouldn’t be funny, but it is.

A real update soon, I promise…

You’ve gotta read this article.

It’s awesome.

Ah, another weekend approaches, and as usual I haven’t done quite enough work that I won’t have to be slaving away all of Sunday. Also too lazy to un-double-negate that sentence. Hah.

The past couple of weeks have been quite interesting. The Radiohead show at the Shoreline was okay — they just decided to play too many bad songs, including of all things, “Kid A”, very arguably their worst song ever. Inexplicable. To me, their career is quite clearly divided between their first three albums and two EPs, and their last three albums. There isn’t a weak song in the first group; in the second, however, there’s just an album’s worth of great songs. The concert ratio was an unfortunate 5:12 or so. Sadly, Radiohead just aren’t the band they used to be for me.

Martin Sexton (at the Fillmore) was better, luckily.

Then last Friday I went to see Paul Krugman speak about Iraq and the economy at the Business School. I’ve always loved his NYTimes Op-ed articles, and it was good to see that his sense of humor carries over to real life. He didn’t say much that I didn’t already know from reading his columns, but I found fascinating the journalistic restrictions his editors have imposed on him in the past. For instance, during the 2000 Presidential election, he wasn’t allowed to use the word “lie” in reference to any of Bush’s statements, even though he was itching to.

Wednesday night, went to the opening game of the As-Red Sox playoff series (pictures). The game started off with a bang: the national anthem was augmented with fireworks. At the end, as the last fireworks went off after “… home of the brave”, two F18s flying in formation rocketed over stadium, maybe 100 feet over the top bleacher seats, in the most spectacularly timed event I have ever seen. It happened so fast that I didn’t hear anything until they were over us, and by the time I had raised my hands to my ears to stop the deafening roar, they were gone. It took me a couple of minutes to scrape my jaw off the floor.

However much you may want to malign the puppet-masters in Washington who control the military, you pretty much have to admit that the armed forces themselves are capable of some ludicrously impressive things. I also have a soft spot for the military because they pay me (for whatever reason) and also fund a ton of computer science research. Half the published papers in the field are funded by some branch of the military or other, even though much of what we do is totally irrelevant to fighting or national security. It’s always weird (but very commonplace) to see a programming languages paper “sponsored by the Navy Electronics System Command” or something.

Anyway. the game itself was terrific and gut-wrenching at the same time. The Red Sox fought valiantly but due to several bad management decisions, a few crucial failures at the plate and on the field, and some great coaching by the As, they lost in the 12th inning, despite being up 4-3 in the bottom of the ninth with two outs. There were a lot of Sox fans there, though, which made the loss slightly more palatable (misery likes company, right?). Of course, there was some animosity between the As and Sox fans (I think the As supporters were a little taken aback by how many Bostonites showed up), but the best parts of the night were when we could all agree on something: “Yankees suck! Yankees suck!” chants rang out more than once.

[Anecdote: A couple of years ago I went to a Celtics game back in Boston. It was against the Pacers, I think, and the Celts depressingly lost by about 10 points (the Celtics have depressingly lost by about 10 points every time I’ve seen them, in fact.) Anyway, as we were filing out of the Fleet Center, heads hanging, someone started up the cheer: “Yankees suck! Yankees suck!”. Never mind that this was basketball; there are some fundamental truths that are always appropriate. Within a minute, the entire building was resonating with the chant. It was awesome.]

Back to the present. Sadly, teams that lost the first game of a postseason series in extra innings have only won the series 3 of 19 times; the fact that the Sox lost again yesterday thus comes as no surprise. I’m resigned already.

I think I was on national TV. I was sitting right behind these two guys that had “Nomar/Pedro for Governor” signs. Witty, I agree. ESPN had a couple of cameras on them for a while, and my face was clearly visible behind them. walther said that he did see the “Nomar for Governor” sign on TV, so I must have had my 1.5 seconds of fame.

On a related note, jennnnnnny raised an interesting question a couple of days ago: we’ve all been traveling before, and have no doubt accidentally been extras in other people’s photographs. How many photo albums around the world does your face unknowingly grace? We figured this would be the perfect topic for an artsy movie: track the lives of the people who have inadvertently snapped pictures of you.

… I realize that this journal entry’s length is stretching the bounds of the readable, but I’ll leave you with one last nugget, this article about American misperceptions about the war in Iraq.

The more commercial television news you watch, the more wrong you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq War and its aftermath, according to a major new study released in Washington on Thursday.

And the more you watch the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, in particular, the more likely it is that your perceptions about the war are wrong, adds the report by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).
…
The average frequency of misperceptions among respondents who planned to vote for Bush was 45 percent, while among those who plan to vote for a hypothetical Democrat candidate, the frequency averaged only 17 percent.

Asked “Has the US found clear evidence Saddam Hussein was working closely with al-Qaeda”? 68 percent of Bush supporters replied affirmatively. By contrast, two of every three Democrat-backers said no.
…
For each of the three misperceptions, the study found enormous differences between the viewers of Fox, who held the most misperceptions, and NPR/PBS, who held the fewest by far.

You should really read it.

So as predicted, life is just as busy now as it was pre²lim. But I’ve been doing some fun stuff: more soccer, and hopefully ultimate this weekend; seeing the Waybacks, Super Furry Animals, and Grandaddy; making crazy corndogs to celebrate Jenny’s birthday; getting into my research project; updating bits and pieces of NewsDog and participating in some good discussions on it; using many semicolons.

One of the coolest things about Radiohead is that their B-sides are as good as their album tracks. Unfortunately I haven’t really warmed up to the new album very much yet (it’s still only “good”, not “great”) so I’m listening to old stuff in preparation for the concert. Must… stop… living… in… past.

The concert last night was at the Fillmore, so I had about an hour getting there and back in need of something with which to occupy myself. So I grabbed a book on my bookshelf that a) I hadn’t read yet and b) I could fit into my pocket during the show. That turned out to by Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, graciously gifted to me by Marianne before she left. I read most of it last night and finished it up just now. The book is exquisitely written; despite its hyperbolic excesses, it always managed to veer away from the maudlin and into the profound in a very charming way. A sample quote:

[Virginia’s niece has laid a dead thrush to rest earlier in the day.] The body of the thrush is still there (odd, how the neighborhood cats and dogs are not interested), tiny even for a bird, so utterly unalive, here in the dark, like a lost glove, this little empty handful of death. Virginia stands over it. It’s rubbish now; it has shed the beauty of the afternoon just as Virginia has shed her tea-table wonder over cups and coats; just as the day is shedding its warmth. In the morning Leonard will scoop bird and grass and roses up with a shovel, and throw them all out. She thinks of how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

(Interestingly, no doubt intentionally, the style of writing seems to be very similar to Virginia Woolf’s.) Turns out the book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999.

… That got me thinking. It seems to me that there are two basic components to fiction: the telling of the tale, and the tale itself. In The Hours, the telling is wondrous and enchanting; it’s like you’re enraptured by the virtuosity of the musician rather than the piece he’s playing. The tale, though, is predictable and, let’s face it, not nearly as moving as Cunningham might have liked.

And critics love this stuff. Critics of art in its various incarnations (literature, music, etc.) have always been obsessed with style, with virtuosity. (Argh, I was going to start babbling about this topic but I realized that I really need to get back to work. Doh.) Briefly: I think the tale is undervalued and underappreciated by critics. This is why Schoenberg is held in high esteem (neat tricks, terrible content) while Andrew Lloyd Webber is pretty universally disdained (no tricks, great songs). This is why The Hours is treasured, Faulkner is treasured, but when Stephen King is given the National Book Award, Yale scholar and all-around jackass Harold Bloom cries out to the New York Times, “[King] is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls. That [the committee] could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy.” (No doubt Bloom is very bitter that, although he’s been nominated for the Award several times, he’s never won, I don’t think.)

Stephen King, it turns out, writes incredible stories. His writing is rarely exquisite or profound by itself, but his tales are haunting and terrifically memorable.

[In fact, his fantasy series, The Dark Tower is already one of my top four best fantasy series, even though he’s only written four of the seven books. (The other three series are Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams, The Lord of the Rings, and The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander.) And he’s up against some pretty stiff competition: I’ve read hundreds of fantasy books in my day (any suggestion though, btw?).]

I wonder why critics hate a good tale. There’s as much of an art to constructing a story as there is to telling it. Hmm, my views on this subject parallel those I have for music: I think a good song must generally have good music, and lyrics are secondary; many critics feel the opposite. (Read any serious music review; lyrics are quoted and analyzed but the music itself hardly gets a mention!)

this post is cool.

The problem with Cruz Bustamante (Lt. Governor of California and candidate in the upcoming recall race) — the reason I can’t take him seriously — is that “Bustamante” just sounds too much like “Bust a Move” would in some foreign language.

No doubt that speaks more about me than it does about our buddy Cruz.

Anyway, the prelim turned out okay. Phew! If you’ve been expecting an email or phone call from me for a long time, be on the lookout :).