Two Dishes But To One Table

OSU vs MSU Saturday at 4.

If Ohio State loses this Saturday (ABC-TV, 4 pm EST) I will feel personally responsible.
As an OSU alumnus I dutifully gathered a talisman last month in anticipation of next month’s University of Michigan game (also known simply as "The Game") and tucked it away in a jar.  But look what happened to my little buckeyes (click for larger). 

I'm afraid to even open the jar, fearing the smell.  If this were a dream it would be rich in interpretable culpability but here it is just bad luck. 
This is not the ideal time for a bad omen: Saturday afternoon (tomorrow as I write) is a crucial game: Michigan State and Ohio State are tied for first in the, albeit in the admittedly weak this year, Big 10.  Both Michigan State and Ohio State are (6-1). 
A tiny consolation, viz the still-distant University of Michigan game is that their ability to perform even the most basic tasks on the field is currently doubtful. 

From Russia With Love

I checked my anti-virus log on McAfee to see if anyone has been pinging my PC.  (It took four clicks from the Anti-Virus home screen: Reports and logs/Recent Events/Inbound Events/Trace This Address.) McAfee seems to show that on October 5 somebody tried to make "an unsolicited connection to Port 68" on my computer.  The source IP looked strange.  Here is the map that McAfee proposed for the source of the event.

IMHO The interface on McAfee anti-virus is much less useful than the one on Norton.  Unfortunately McAfee just auto-renewed itself for a third year...gotta make a note on my to-do list for September 2009.

3rd Presidential Debate

It was surprising to me how the debates went. 
I am a diehard liberal (Kucinich or Sharrod Brown would be my ideal candidates).  I came close to voting for Joe Biden in the Democratic primary but he was out of the race by the time we voted in NY and I wanted to weigh in on Obama-Clinton the side of the equally smart but less neoliberal, way less pro-war  Obama. 

And yet I would score the first two prez debates with McCain the winner.  Only last night's debate, do I feel, belonged to Obama.  The difference was dramatic.  McCain's cognition and emotions are now clearly a notch below the requirements of the job description.  His mental freshness date seems to have expired in 2000.  And McCain should really be held accountable for his impulsive choice of Palin to be second in command.  I think even if I were a McCain supporter, that mystifying choice alone would have been a deal breaker.

Speaking of Palin, the most interesting idea I have seen is that the SNL parody actually helped her.  I think many people thought that the script of that skit was an invented parody of Palin rather than, largely, her own words.  Moreover, the SNL parody set the bar so low that, most people's second exposure to her, via the VP debate, may have come across to many inquiring voters as an improvement over the Tina Fey portrayal, when all she was really proving was that she was less laughable than the opening skit for Saturday Night Live, hardly a qualification for VPoTUS.

We linear humans are plodding at best in Cancer analysis

How can you think like a tumor cell?  How can you untangle the chemical dance of cancer?  Those are my thoughts while studying for my Cancer (BIOL 472) mid-term at Hunter College.

Scientists are at a disadvantage when trying to eavesdrop on the transformations of a normal cell changing into a tumor cell.  We humans are overwhelmingly reliant on vision for input and linear events for analysis.

That kind of thinking sets you up for solving Newtonian mechanics, i.e. controlling the trajectory of an Apollo mission to space or at least the distance that a kicked football will travel but in the symphony that is cell chemistry, we really need a brain suited for wholistic, simultaneous events, based not on the visual image of something but more on the smell of something. 

Non-visual humans are out there, subverting paradigms in their fields.  I know we read about a blind biologist that achieved breakthroughs in shell analysis because he would feel the bivalves instead of just looking at them.  That gave him a headstart on figuring out some of the aspects of their symmetry.  For chemistry we need not a feeler but a smeller.  Oh to be a dog.  Man’s best friend, if he could evolve a better cerebral cortex.  The insights of a dog-scientist into the biochemical signaling pathways of a neoplastic cell would be deep.

But since we aren’t dogs, the complex chatter of cell signaling has to be teased apart and interpreted by what are less straight science and something bordering on graphic design and the visual representation of data seen in the work of artists like Edward Tufte.   Check out the artfulness of the data in some papers we studied this semester:

 

 

Personal Time Zone: How Do You Relate to 'Time'?

I found a sort of Myers-Briggs test that analyzes your perceptions of time.  It is an instrument that finds what time zone your psyche is dominated by: Past, Present, Future.  The theory is robust and has seven categories in all.  You may know the author, Philip Zimbardo, as the past president of the American Psychology Association and narrator of the PBS series Discovering Psychology.

Zimbardo  has done demographics studies that use this categorization tool to evaluate different populations.  For example, while nothing is absolute, being raised in poverty is correlated with producing a person who is fatalisitic and present-oriented toward hedonism.  Further, Zimbardo says the test scores are predictors of future personal success, citing a correlation between people who are future focused and how far they go in life. 

One part of his research may already be familiar to you: the marshmallow experiment, where 4 year olds are left alone in a room and told that if they stay out of the treats bowl, they'll get more treats after the researcher returns.  Zimbardo gives dramatic longitudinal data for the kids from that study.

You can take the test for free.

I always hope that these tests will give a clear score, not some middling result, and so I was satisfied that at least two of my scores were in the outer fifth of the data collected so far by the site.  Here are my results:

 

The red dots on the graph are Zimbardo's recommended levels.  The middle stripe, marked 50%, is the list of average scores (i.e. the average for all people who have taken the test is a score of 3.0 3.7, 2.4, 3.4, 3.5, 3.3 in the six categories).

If you take the test, let me know how it comes out!

(I discovered the Time Paradox Test while listening to the largely excellent podcasts which archive current presenters from meetings of the New York Academy of Science.)

UPDATE: I added my scores to the graph with an E mark.

Arnold is PUMPed

Naming things on a computer is often but not always boring.  If you look, all sorts of cultural debris lurks amidst computer code. 

One example:  in tribute to MPFS, the stuff that peppers your inbox is called Spam and one of the most popular computer languages right now is called Python. 

Another example: machines are shipped with a default password.  This is often "password" or even simply a blank. But it could be something more personal  The Intershop 4HTTP used to show up at your office loaded with the default password $wartzepumpe.  This was presumably in the 1980s or earlier.

(Hackers, ever hopeful of finding a machine password that was never reset posted a collection of passwords here.  A primer on password cracking is at Wikipedia. )

To the Phillipians

Photo by Timothy A Clary (AFP), words by Paul (62 A.D.).

Obama Buttons

There are buttons for a dollar each here.