Book Review: Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain by Kirsten Menger-Anderson

Sometimes, I read novels. Other times I read short stories. This time, I read a short story-format novel.

Well, Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain is a collection of short stories, but it centers on two themes: the family of Dr. van Schuler and his descendants who inhabited New York from 1664 to 2006; and brains. All of the short stories are about a person in a generation, and every generation seemed to have a doctor in them. And almost all of the doctors dealt with brains.

The first short story dealt with a Dutch doctor, Olaf van Schuler, who immigrated to North America because his curiosity with respect to human brains were making Europeans worried, to the point that he was chased away from his town. People thought he was insane, dangerous, and not a welcome part of society. So he immigrated, had a son, and the medicine practice went on and on. A few centuries later, he has a descendant who is a practicing phrenologist. Another later descendant specialized in lobotomies. And finally, in the last short story, one aging doctor is suffering from Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is a brain degeneration disease.

I first liked the notion and design of the novel. However, I found myself flipping back to the genealogical chart and seeing how the characters relate to each other. I later realized that the design of the plot is flawed: the reader has to make enormous bridging inferences between stories, because all the short stories provide is a short glimpse, a small slice of the happenings in a given point in time. And somehow, I did not like that, perhaps due to the same reason why I hate sci-fi, and that is, I need to do enormous mental acrobatics with respect to imagining things.

Anyway, the book is still a good piece of entertainment, but I do not see it as profound reading.

See my other book reviews here.



(Queen Zenobia, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Musical Ends Among Cayenne Pepper

This past weekend was rather busy, given the fact that it is the final weekend of the semester. Let me start Friday.

Last Friday was the last day in which I had a class. I attended the seminar and then it was over. Of course, I still have the paper requirement for that class unfinished, and so I will be working on that after I write this entry. However, there were several social events that day, such as a Colloquium Awareness Bash in the afternoon, where the department had a modest finger food event, very Mediterranean, and fun as well. A few students also organized a pink shirt day, so I wore a pink shirt, and we attracted quite a little attention from other people who noticed it.

Then, of course, the graduate students also held a end-of-semester pizza party, so that we can spend the rest of our club budget on something that everyone can participate in. That also marked the end of my duties as an officer in the graduate student club. I suppose I won't be planning to do this again next year, given the fact that I may or may not be here for the whole year.

Saturday was a day in which I just went to my office and worked my ass off for the whole day. I had to start my final exam for my Psycholinguistics class. The task was to describe the design characteristics of the human language processing system, citing evidence from word recognition, sentence processing, and language production. I basically constructed a design that has five components, and the whole system is interactive and connectionist, instead of being a modular system. I suppose I am convinced that the architecture of the human language processing system should be this way. If you guys want the paper, then let me know.

On that evening, I went to the Music Department to attend a piano recital. I suppose the musical festivities of the Music Department provide the appropriate break moments of my work, and the music was good indeed. The performer was a graduate student of music performance, and he performed a concert that had Bach, Beethoven, Cage, and Chopin in the program. I suppose I liked the concert, except for the Beethoven piece. He played the Tempest Sonata, and I felt like I wanted more forte and piano contrasts in the piece. However, his rendition of the Bach Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue was amazing. It was overall an amazing performance.

Sunday was similar to Saturday, in which I was still working on my psycholinguistics essay. It had to be within 12 pages, and I was two-thirds done. In the evening, my friend and I went out to eat, and then we watched a movie on DVD. The movie that we watched was The White Countess. We didn't like it too much, because there seemed to be no plot. Anyway, that was that.

Monday was a very busy day. I actually accomplished plenty of things yesterday. First, I met with a fellow student, and we discussed an experiment that we are planning to do. This is actually an experiment that involves replicating some other people's result, because we think that there is a confounding factor in their experiment, and so we want to tease it apart. If this actually goes through, then we can present the results in a conference next year. If that happens, then my track record of presenting in at least one conference a year would be good. I will be designing stimuli and then meet with him next week again.

Next up, I also was emailing a professor back and forth regarding some statistical consultation. He had a bunch of data, and he needed to do some stats tests on it, so he was consulting me along with other people. It was fun, and then it was resolved.

What else is there? Oh, I also went to the International Students Office, and extended my stay. That means I will be legal again for the next year, at least. I also filled some forms for my bank certifying that I am not a citizen, because it seems that they need it for some tax purposes.

I also finished my psycholinguistics essay and turned it in. It turned out to be 12 pages long, plus references. Right within the page limit. And since I was so busy yesterday that at around 4 PM, it seemed that my blood circulation had cayenne pepper in it, that I was so jittery and perhaps, too much adrenaline flowing in my system, my friend and I decided to take a walk in a nearby state park, where we strolled along the beach of the river.

Finally, we got back to campus again, and attended the last performance of the university's symphony orchestra. It also is the last performance of the conductor, because he is moving out of town to the West Coast. I will miss him, I actually like the way he developed the symphony orchestra, and they showed a great improvement than how they were before the conductor came in.

So yeah, that was last weekend. I still have some things to do before this semester finally ends, such as finish the first draft of my dissertation proposal, and finish writing another paper for publication. So there. I need to get back to work.



(Mountain Scene, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Hot

For the first time this year, I have opened my windows in my house due to the fact that it is hot. Well, it is around 25 degrees Celsius, so it is not sweating hot, but still, it is hot.

I suppose this is just in alignment to my theory that even though I come from the tropics, I do not prefer hot weather. Everyone else here thinks that this is good weather, and to a degree I agree. As long as there is wind blowing, thereby resulting in a lovely breeze, then it would be great. But if the sun shines and it makes you sweat, then I hate it.

The thing is, if it is the winter, then all one needs to do is add more clothes, but if it is the summer, one cannot remove clothes. Well, another confounding factor is the fact that the better body you have, the easier the clothes can be removed. So I suppose I need to work on that too.

Speaking of which, I am slowly trying to get back to eating meatless. I was able to do that for two straight years from 2004-2006, but I stopped upon encountering Czech cuisine. So I better think of Borneo every time I need to make a food choice.

Ah, this weather makes me want to have air conditioning. The body scents are about to appear, although not as bad as in Europe. But in the meantime, I need to finish certain academic obligations I have. I still have a final essay I need to write, which is due May 1. I also have a dissertation proposal draft which I want to finish by May 4, and I have to write a paper for publication which is due on May 15.

Oh, I also got approved by the ethics committee to run the first batch of experiments for my dissertation. That would be sweet. Now I can get my hands dirty again.



(Venetian Scene, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

On Tiptoe

Last Wednesday, my friend and I went to see a ballet performance in the university theatre. The Russian National Ballet Theatre was in town, performing a one-night only show of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. Granted, I never had a ballet experience before, and so my only encounter with ballet is through the music, since I played certain pieces before, like Swan Lake, among others.

Therefore, I did not know what to expect.

Anyway, we were a little bit disappointed with the fact that the music was taped. There was no real orchestra in the theatre, but that was ok, if there were real music, then the ticket would have been more expensive. Good thing I am still a student, I can buy a ticket for just ten bucks.

Anyway, aside from that, I suppose one should simply get used to the fact that the story is supposed to be read first, from the program notes, since, after all, this is a group of people using their bodies to tell a story, but still, there is a limitation as to what the human body can convey. One still has to read the program notes so as to know what exactly is happening at a certain scene.

The weird skirts of the fairies, the ladies, and the princess was also disturbing. I wonder why the ballet skirts are rather stiff, with the edges pointing out, instead of simply flowing down. Why do they need to look like upside-down umbrellas? I really don't know what that was about.

Anyway, I have to say that the people were good at dancing. The feet were wonderful, and they did things that I never imagined possible. However, I suppose I cannot say that I enjoyed it very much. If I want to attach a value judgment to the performance, perhaps, on the enjoyment scale, on a scale of one to ten with ten being "I really enjoyed it very much", I would give it a 7.5. And as a point of comparison, I would give the theatre performance of The Mystery of Edwin Drood a 9.8. Perhaps I simply do not have appreciation for the aforementioned art form.



(Interior Garden, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Insane Inventions

The life of a graduate student can be boring at times, since most of the time, we either sit in front of a computer and write, or work in a lab running experiments. Some graduate students choose to head to the field, most of the time, in a remote area, and conduct a long-term study. At least, that is how research is done in my field.

So sometimes, in order to amuse themselves, graduate students think of things that usually do not exist in the current world. With this, I present to you my insane inventions.

Do you have headaches? Sometimes, the headaches would be so bad that you wish you had your head chopped off. So, perhaps the idea of a drive-through guillotine would not be so bad. You know, if you find yourself driving on the road one day, and then you have this one really really bad headache, so you see this drive-through guillotine shop. Just like a McDonald's, you simply pull up the curb, drive through, undergo the guillotine, and there! Your headache is gone!

Another invention perhaps is the body transplant procedure. You know, sometimes, when we have a failing heart, we can undergo a heart transplant, a kidney transplant for a failing kidney, a liver transplant for a failing liver. However, sometimes, the whole package just fails. So what if we can undergo a body transplant? Everything about you that is not attached to the body can be transferred to a new body. The way you talk, the way you move your face, your mannerisms, your personality and memories, they can all be transferred to a new body. That would be great! Not only would it be great if people want to try living as a different sex, but it also has great health benefits as well. If one is dangerously obese, that the fat cells are so all over the place and threatening one's health, then one can simply have a body transplant and get a new body, disposing the old one!

The final invention for today doesn't really have much use, but it is one that is inspired by a sign I saw in the T-shirt shop on campus today. Say a lady was looking for ladies pants. So she asks the store clerk where the ladies pants are, and then she was directed to the toy section. The lady went there, but obviously, there wasn't anything clothing related. However, the clerk pointed her to the shelves, where indeed, there was a series of black little boxes there, labeled "Ladies Pants". Apparently, this little black box has a lid, like a Jack-in-the-Box, and when the lady opened it, she heard something, along the lines of "hhhahh, hhahh, hhahh, hhahh, hhahh..."



(Convoluted Man, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Book Review: Death with Interruptions by José Saramago

Wow. That's what I can say upon finishing this book. This is a book about death, both as a phenomenon, and as a personification.

I have read one of his other novels, entitled The Cave about more than a year ago, and I liked it. Saramago writes in a very interesting style, where his prose was rather in the stream-of-consciousness style, and the dialogue is interspersed with the prose. Paragraphs usually take more than one page long, and non-human entities like dogs even get a chance to think.

So yes, in this book, those qualities still hold true. A dog and a scythe both had the ability to think in this novel. But before I explain that, let me recount the synopsis first.

The book is roughly divided into three parts: the first part tells the story of when death decides to rest, at the strike of midnight, in New Year's Day, in a certain country. So, for the next seven months, nobody dies in this unnamed country. Of course, this had its own interesting ramifications: the funeral parlors went bankrupt, to the point that the government order everyone in the country to subject their pets to the same funeral treatment that they used to give to humans, just so that the funeral parlors and the gravediggers have jobs. The church also had problems, because they think that their doctrine is now nullified, since without death, there would be no resurrection, and without resurrection, there would be no church. Apparently, one could still die if one gets out of the country's border, so people who wanted to die like the extreme aged people cross the border, and the minute they do so, they expire. Eventually, the three bordering countries were on the brink of declaring a war due to the border violations, which led to the development of the maphia, an underground organization that people can pay big money so that their very aged grandparents can be transported to the border and let die.

The second part was when death decides to stop her social experiment. Apparently, she wanted to see what it would be like to give the people what they really want. She argued that people always wanted to live forever, that people had high hopes of living forever, joining religions preaching eternal life, and that people always wanted to deny the fact that human life will someday expire. So she gave them a taste of what that would be, which, as we have seen in the first part, rather comical but disastrous. So she sent a letter to the media, saying that the social experiment is over, and at the strike of midnight, all of the people who were scheduled to die within the past seven months would expire. Thus, at the strike of midnight, 62,580 people died. Death also explained that she would be kind this time, that she would give one week's notice to everyone who was scheduled to die. Thus, if one wanted to make good with their long-lost cousins, or mend an argument, they have one week to do so, so that they can write their will, and die peacefully. Death argued that letting a person die without prior notice was rather cruel and harsh. She warned the people of their deaths by sending them a note written on violet paper. Of course, the government started investigating whether there was a certain prankster who was writing all these notes, but to no avail.

Finally, the third part consists of death and her infatuation with a rather invincible cellist. The city's orchestra's principal cellist was scheduled to die, but somehow, the letter that death sends him always comes back unsent, returned to the sender. Death tries so many times to send it again and again, and every time, it gets returned. Death becomes infatuated with this cellist, to the point that she takes on the form of a human, and interacts with the cellist, in the end falling in love with him. In the end, they spend the night together, and the novel ends with a sentence stating that the next day, nobody died.

This book has been one of the greatest books I have read recently. It takes the topic of death, and using a what-if scenario, tries to describe what would happen to the human race if death is not around. Death owns a scythe, of which she carries a conversation with, even saying that they had happy times together in the past, when that was the preferred method of killing, but now, the preferred method would be those middle-class diseases, such as heart attacks and strokes. The cellist also has a dog, which also gives his thoughts to the reader. At times, the book is comical. One such incident is when death wonders the efficiency of her method of sending a letter. She notes the existence of faster and more reliable methods such as email, since everyone has email nowadays, but she still prefers the traditional method of snail mail.

In the end, I appreciate this book since it gives an allegorical take on one of humankind's obsessions, that is, avoiding death. Death is always going to here, and is something that cannot be avoided. Many people want to shake off death altogether, but humans were never too good in accepting it as a fact of one's existence. Perhaps, that is the better hypothesis to take, that death is just another facet of human existence, and taking it out of the equation makes things rather disastrous an more complicated.

See my other book reviews here.



(Flying Horses, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Modern Music

This last weekend, I went to two concerts that are offered free by the university's Department of Music. And I should say that those concerts were very eye-opening.

The concert that I attended last Friday evening was the UB Contemporary Ensemble. It featured chamber works by composers that are not only actually still living, but are in fact attending the concert in the concert hall. The first half of the concert featured works by students in the composition program, and they were rather interesting. One piece featured toy instruments, one piece featured shredding paper and a knife being sharpened. It was quite interesting indeed.

The second half of the concert featured selections from Benjamin Britten's chamber opera The Turn of the Screw. My friend who plays the harp was part of this piece. It also featured four singers: three sopranos and one tenor. It was an opera with a bizarre theme, featuring ghosts and governesses, but the music was grand.

The second concert that we attended was last Saturday, and this was, like the first one, free as well. This was the concert of the UB Percussion Ensemble. It featured four long pieces, and all of them were contemporary compositions as well. The first one was a piece by John Cage, which featured a radio. The second one was a modern percussion piece that featured a soprano singing a Japanese poem. The third one was a piece composed by a composition major, and the piece involves the musicians setting up the instruments. However, the best piece of the night was the fourth one, which was a composition written for the soprano of that piece, which was a music student here in the university. The composer was from a different state, but he was in the attendance. The soprano was very versatile, and the piece was quite difficult I suppose. But it was a piece that made me sit on the edge of my seat for the whole time it was being performed.

I like the music department here. I suppose their strengths lie in composition and theory, so I am fortunate to be able to attend these premieres of modern music. It totally is a different experience.



(Washing Feet, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Why Armchair Linguistics is Not For Me

Here's a funny article from Speculative Grammarian, a satirical take on the academic field of linguistics. Original site is found here. I suppose this illustrates my preference over experimental methods of inquiry instead of simply sitting down and theorizing on linguistic phenomena.

Reanalysis of Spanish by Naïve Linguists
Chesterton Wilburfors Gilchrist, Jr.
Chairman, Department of Lexicology and Glottometrics
Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton

While sitting in the Linguistics Lounge the other day, I overheard some first-year grad students discussing the day’s Spanish class. My eavesdropping turned out to be much more interesting than I had anticipated.

I must interject here that several faculty members and grad students had fought against the idea of first-years fulfilling their foreign language reading requirement with Spanish. Objections ranged from the dearth of academic linguistics material published in Spanish to the commonly accepted ease of learning the language. Frankly, I believe it came down to snobbery on the part of those who ‘read’ French and German, and I over-ruled them all. Such are the perquisites of Chairmanship.

So it was with much interest that I listened in to the conversation. The first set of data under consideration is presented here:

hasta luego ‘see you later’
hasta pronto ‘see you soon’
hasta jueves ‘see you Thursday’
hasta mañana ‘see you tomorrow’

Given the known meanings of luego (‘later’), pronto (‘soon’), jueves (‘Thursday’) and mañana (‘tomorrow’), our intrepid heroes determined that hasta must mean ‘see you’.

Then one of their number added this bit of data:

hasta la vista ‘see you’

I thought this would lead them to reconsider their earlier conclusion. Not so. Hypotheses they considered included non-identical reduplication, a grammaticalized verbal tick, and analyzing la vista as “a recursively epenthetic allophone of an inductive null-morpheme” (though I think that last may have come from a particularly sarcastic second-year with a BA in Math who walked through the lounge about then).

In any event, my heart sank.

Eventually, their conversation moved away from hasta et al., and turned to salutations. One of them misspoke and said “habla” for “hola”. They laughed for a moment, but suddenly stopped short. There was a flurry of scribbling and murmuring, and I lost the thread of the conversation.

When their heads came up, I heard one say, “See, hola has the phonetic shape of a verb. It must be a verb.” A pause. “But what does it mean?”

Another had a sudden, devastating inspiration: “Habla means ‘you speak’, so hola must mean ... what? ... ‘you are greeted’?”

A third objected—but not at all as I had hoped—“But that’s the formal ‘you’. Shouldn’t we use the informal with each other? What would that be? Holas?”

The first replied, “Only for one person.. holan for multiple people.”

The second asked, “What would holamos mean? ‘We are greeted’?”

At this point I threw up in my mouth a little bit. But before they could tragically analyze the abomination that is neological holamos, they realized that they were late for their classes. They parted ways, each smiling and saying “¡Hasta!” to the others as they left.

The next morning I entered the Linguistics Lounge by the side door, finding two of the three already drinking coffee and reviewing their Spanish homework together. The third entered, somewhat ashen-faced, and sat down. “¡Holas!” the other two offered. When there was no response, they stared in silence. I stayed to watch and listen.

Finally their comrade spoke. “I talked to my roommate—from Mexico—last night about our analysis of hola and hasta. I think we got it pretty wrong.”

Objections were quick and fierce: “Nonsense!”; “No, it was a good analysis.”

They spoke amongst themselves quietly and finally seemed to arrive at a consensus: the native speaker, while invaluably informative, is linguistically naïve and not to be taken as the final authority on anything.

This struck a nerve with me! Up to this point I must say that I was considering whether it would be appropriate to consider removing these proto-linguists from our prestigious program—and, I admit ashamedly, I was even considering some creative means of drumming them out should standard administrative manœuvres fail.

But this instinctive flouting of the authority of the native speaker broke the dam and rewrote the rules of the game. Linguistics, as either art or science, is very much a skill—a skill that can be trained and honed and sharpened much like any other, so there was always a faint hope for their analytic skills—that is what graduate school is all about, is it not?

But certain aspects of the practice of linguistics as a theoretical science, as a practical academic subject, as a political minefield, are only ever truly mastered by those with certain inborn abilities.

The abhorrent analysis and theoretical violence these all-too-young babes-in-the-woods had done to the mellifluous Spanish language had saddened me, almost angered me. But this final strike at native speaker competency was something different all together, something that could not be denied.

Clearly they are to Linguistics born, and will not bend to the whiny “needs” and “wants” of native speaker naïveté. I have personally taken them under my wing, and will see that they achieve all that they so obviously are meant to in the field of theoretical linguistics.

¡Viva la Revolución!



(Pierced Jesus, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Restoration

It is almost the end of the semester. April is pretty much just a week left, and soon enough, I will have to turn my calendar to a new page.

I suppose this is a season in which beginnings and ends happen. I was walking on campus this afternoon, and I saw the gardeners planting grass seeds, since the lawns were pretty much destroyed during the winter season. In a few weeks, the lawn would be sparkling green again.

The conductor of the UB Symphony Orchestra is leaving for the West Coast. Too bad, because I liked the style and the contributions that he brought to the Music Department. I was very much impressed at the improvement of the group when he was here for two years. This coming fall, he will be moving to California to fill a position in another symphony orchestra. I wonder who will be here to conduct the university's orchestra next year.

Speaking of next year, I myself do not know if I will be here next year. The department has said that they would be notifying people of the decisions by Monday, so I have about two days to wait, before I know whether I would be here or not next year. Hopefully, the outcome would be good.

Stress is quite high for me nowadays. Perhaps it's because of the uncertainty of the future, and the fact that my personality just wants things to be planned and certain makes it even worse. The Filipinos have an expression along the lines of Bahala na... which translates to Whatever will be, will be... reflecting the usually fatalistic nature of the Filipino folk. I do not believe in fatalism, however, and I tend to believe that I make my own future. If there isn't anything at the moment in my future, I will put something in there so that there is something in my future.

I suppose I never thought of the question of what's next. When I was a little kid growing up, there was always a next step. When you're done with first grade, there is second grade, when you are done with elementary school, there is high school. After high school, there was college, and after college, there was graduate school. I suppose the progression just went through naturally. Even in graduate school, after my first year, there was second year, third year, and fourth year. Now, after this semester, I am done with my coursework, and all that remains is a dissertation. Within the dissertation process, there is the idea. Then, there is the proposal. Then there is the actual research. Then there is the defense. Right now, I am in the proposal stage.

Now the thing that sometimes is mind-boggling is the fact that after graduate school, there are plenty of possible worlds. Unlike when I was in high school, even though there are plenty of possible worlds, there is one possible world that was probabilistically higher than the other choices, and that was college. After graduate school, there isn't a single possible world that is probabilistically higher than the rest. Of course, there may be logical next steps, logical possible worlds after graduate school, and yes, I would want those logical possible worlds to happen, but one is less constrained to follow the logical next step. Given my personality, perhaps, there is more of a chance that I will take that logical next step, although who knows, I might just go traipsing around the world as a travel writer after I get my degree.

But no. I didn't work hard for at least four years of my life for nothing. I love the lab environment. I love the mental taxation that I get when I think of clever experimental paradigms. I love the feeling that I get whenever I see the data lining up in accordance to my predictions. So perhaps I will do whatever I can do achieve this end-state.

I suppose this rambling is simply the result of the fact that I cannot take it in my own hands what my future is going to be. Would I find myself still here a couple of months from now? Or would I find myself packing my bags and flying halfway around the world again? I don't know that yet, and I am not taking the optimistic mentality. In that way, if I do find myself staying here for another year to finish my degree, I will be happy. If I set my expectations really low, even the slightest inkling towards a desired end-state will be cause for rejoicing.



(Marble Madonna, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Book Review: My Life in Heavy Metal by Steve Almond

There is a line between literature and pornography. A book can be a fine piece of literature while still involving sexual scenes. However, if there is too much sex, then slowly, but surely, the book turns from literature into pornography.

This book is a collection of short stories about man-woman relationships. Granted, some of the stories were amusing, poignant, and funny at times. There are stories about couples belonging to different political parties, couples transcending language and citizenship, among others. Relationships can be colorful, and yes, chances are there is sex involved, but if every story has sex, let alone, vivid sex, then I don't like it.

Why? It's because the feeling that the reader gets when reading the stories is along the lines of "What kind of sex is involved in the next story?" Instead of looking forward to the next story because one enjoyed the previous one, the reader instead disdains reading the next one, because the reader's head is dizzy with the sexual encounter in the previous story.

When I started the book, I first liked the first story. Then I read the second and third stories, and then I saw a pattern. Man meets woman, their relationship develops, and there is a vivid description of sex. I felt that the vivid descriptions of female multiple orgasms were over-shadowing the plot as a whole. After reading a very descriptive paragraph of gushing bodily fluids, I forget what the story is about. I know that this book is about man-woman relationships, but I really think that the sex in this book was too pervasive.

Like I said earlier, if there is a line between literature and pornography, this obviously belongs to the latter.

See my other book reviews here.



(Marble Man, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Talking Vaginas and Banging Pots and Pans

So the university is staging a production of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. Bad timing. I wanted to go, but then the semester is almost ending, and so there are plenty of things to do, and this is just a distraction.

There are also two performances in the Music Department that I want to see: one on Friday, and one on Saturday. On Friday, there will be the recital of the UB Contemporary Ensemble, where a friend of mine is playing. She will be playing the harp. I don't know the program yet. On Saturday, there will be the recital of the UB Percussion Ensemble. Both of these programs are free to students.

The Vagina Monologues costs 8.00 USD. I don't know whether the actors are good or not, but I had wanted to see this production ever since I was in undergrad. In fact, I have the book. And no, I do not want to see it because of talking vaginas. If I wanted my brain to send a command for a redirection of blood flow, there's pornography for that purpose. I wanted to see this because I am curious as to how a series of monologues would be performed. And back in my undergrad days, this has been performed every February, even translated to Tagalog as Usaping Puke.

Anyway, I suppose I have mentioned above the constraints that are associated with the competing events for this weekend. Two events are free, and one is not, although the event that has an admission price is an event that I wanted to see ever since I have heard of it. One of the free events has my friend performing. Let me compute the constraints and see what I would do.

(computing)

Hmm, after some consideration, I think, I would attend the UB Contemporary Ensemble, and if I have some free time left, I will attend the UB Percussion Ensemble as well. I will let the battalion of talking vaginas talk without me for this year. I am sure they will stage a production of it sometime in the future, and I will just catch it by then. I'd rather enjoy the performance of my friend, and sit down and have some pots and pans banged on the stage. After all, it's a nice diversion from what I usually do every day.



(Among the Pillars, from my National Gallery of Art Series)

Pad Thai

Whenever my friends and I go to the Thai restaurant that is near campus, I usually order the Pad Thai. I suppose I am addicted to this, and it just is a mix-match of various different condiments, and the flavor is rich and binding to all the ingredients. I tried doing this dish once at home, but I failed.

Anyway, I suppose this blog post will be like that, a Pad Thai of sorts, with various different topics.

The first topic would be a recollection of my day yesterday. Yesterday was a very hectic day for me. I had something scheduled from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM straight. It was a ten-hour non-stop day. If that were a flight, it would have been a flight from Vancouver to London.

I had a class at 9:00 AM, which lasted for three hours. We discussed language acquisition, and the innateness problem. After that, I had a meeting with a professor from a department that is not my own, but from the Psychology department. I do work in her lab, and there is a large chance, actually, 99% chance that she would be part of my dissertation committee. I met with her because I had to have her review my IRB protocol before I can actually submit it to the reviewers, since the experiments will be conducted in her lab.

After that, we are already at 1:00 PM. Good thing my previous meeting ended a little early, I had about 12 minutes to eat lunch. Then, I had a meeting with a professor in my department, since I am his research assistant, and we were brain-storming ideas for a problem that we have, and so we were bouncing ideas off each other on how to investigate the problem and test it. That meeting lasted about 45 minutes.

Then, I went to the other building, where the Psychology lab is located. I work there for three hours every Tuesday, and so I was running participants with the experiments that they have signed up in. That was very busy. While they were in the testing booths, I was also digitizing the results of the previous participants, typing their data into the computer.

After the three hours, I went back to my office, and waited for two participants for the experiment that I have designed for my research assistantship. I had a 5:00 PM, which did not show up, and a 6:00 PM, which showed up.

I realized that my schedule needs me to be able to switch gears really quickly, since I have multiple different projects occupying my brain in a single day. I am juggling multiple different experimental paradigms, and running other experiments at the same time. In a way, it gets my adrenaline pumping, and I am enjoying the high.

I have to revise the IRB protocol for an experiment that I am planning to run this summer. There are a few legal and technical misgivings that I have to correct.

This is the last blog entry which feature the Embassy Row Series. There will be a new series for the next post, so watch out for that. The series will still feature pictures from my trip to Washington DC, back in December 2007. I am so back-logged with respect to that.



(Tower of the Islamic Center, from my Embassy Row Series)

Book Review: Pompeii by Robert Harris

I am glad that I picked up this book. Not that this is one of the best books that I have read, but it was interesting nonetheless.

This novel is about an aquatic engineer, Marcus Attilius, who was in charge of maintaining the aqueduct that ran through the Roman province of Campania. This is the province where the cities of Neapolis, Herculaneum, and Pompeii are located. The novel takes place in four days, culminating in the eruption of the famous volcano, Vesuvius.

Attilius first notices the appearance of sulfur in the water, and little did he know that the reason was in the volcano, who until now they thought it was just a mountain. People actually believed that there were giants in the mountain, and the little earthquakes that they have been experiencing were just being attributed to the mysterious giants.

Anyway, the book covers events occurring within four days, and it deals with more things, not just about the events that were physically connected to the eruption. The author had a good job of describing the social dynamics of the people, giving the reader an image of Roman corruption. The engineer unearths the evidence that proves his predecessor a corrupt man, and he eventually realizes that people are misappropriating funds for their own benefit.

The only thing I wish was different was the ending, however. Once the volcano erupted, the story just became too fast, and it seemed that I wanted more of an epilogue than what was provided. However, maybe it was just the fact that the author had faith in his readers, that the readers would have the right deduction of the ending. In that case, I like that.

So if one likes a good historical novel once in a while, this would be a great read.

See my other book reviews here.



(Pillars of the Islamic Center, from my Embassy Row Series)

Rewind, Erase, and Play Again

This past weekend, a friend of mine and I watched a movie entitled The Butterfly Effect. We happened to pick this as our movie of the week, and it was rather philosophical and metaphysical as well.

The movie centers on the assumption that what if the flap of a butterfly's wings cause a tornado on the other side of the planet, also known as the butterfly effect. This was actually an original idea of Edward Lorenz, an American scientist who pioneered chaos theory.

Hmm, it seems that I have been blogging about this topic for multiple times now. I blogged about the butterfly effect and the Gaussian distribution here, here, and here.

I actually like this movie. It centers around a college student who experienced blackouts when he was a kid, and suddenly realizes that one can time travel back in time by reading his journals. He also realizes that he can change certain things in the past, and that in turn results in certain changes, with new memories being added.

In the end, the morale of the movie is that one really cannot change the factors that affected one's childhood. No matter what one does to ratify one's past, there are consequences that cannot be avoided.

It is a very interesting Gedanke experiment, however.



(The Islamic Center, from my Embassy Row Series)

Birth Causes Death

So how do people process causation? How do people determine that a certain event is a cause of another event?

The relation of causation is one such thing that I am studying, and I am especially interested in the inferences that people make whenever they encounter a certain discourse where there are multiple possible causes. How do people process events in the world, and how does the language modulate this process?

Some other people already studied how different events are related to each other. Some have posited a probabilistic account of causation. This basically means that things that usually co-occur together cause one another. So a stabbing event usually co-occurs with a bleeding event, and so we can somehow construct a probabilistic account of the stabbing event being a cause for the bleeding event. However, this is not always true. Thunder co-occurs with power outages quite often, however, thunder isn't a cause of power outages.

Other people have posited a counterfactual analysis of causation. There is the counterfactual test, where, for example, given a stabbing event and a bleeding event, if John was not stabbed by Bill, Bill would not have bled. This scenario passes the counterfactual test, so it suggests that the stabbing event is the cause for the bleeding event. However, there are certain scenarios where the counterfactual test passes and yet it is absurd to think of the scenario as a causative scenario. We can say that if birth did not occur, death would not occur. Does that mean that birth causes death?

These accounts are the two most popular accounts within the dependency models of causation. There are other models of causation, resorting to physicalist models, where they reduce causation into transfers of energy, force, or some other related factor. Whether these are the better theory for causation is still up for debate.



(Embassy of Belize, from my Embassy Row Series)

Endurance Test

If there were a button or a magic wand that I can use to make things disappear or make things speed up, I would possibly do that. But then, that is not reality, the reality is that those things do not exist.

This time of the year is rather stressful. There are plenty of things that have to be considered, and I suppose the trick is considering them in a fashionable and orderly manner.

I suppose the first thing to be considered is my finances for next year. I need another year to do research for the dissertation. I am done with my coursework, so that is already taken care of, and I am graduating this June with a master's degree, earned on the way of earning a doctorate. Thus, the upcoming year will be focused to the dissertation research and it alone. With regard to that, I need to secure funding for one academic year. I have already applied to some funding sources within the university, in case the department does not give me funding. The department has been sort of hinting that I would get at least a semester's worth of funding, but I hope that they give me more than that. Looking at the track record of people who came before me, maybe that is a possibility, but I am not putting all of my hopes in there, so I am covering my ass as much as possible by applying to other sources.

Another thing to consider is the dissertation proposal. I am supposed to give a first draft by the first week of May, since it will count as satisfying a course requirement for a class I am taking. Hopefully, I can find time to research what I am doing for it and draft it on paper. As a preview, my dissertation will involve the psycholinguistic aspects of inference generation regarding causality. Let's leave it at that for the moment.

Those perhaps are the two big things that are mulling inside my head at the moment. There are other things as well, for example, the fact that there are people scheduled to meet with me every day, in order to do the experiment that I have designed but is done not for my research but for the professor who I am a research assistant to. I schedule about twenty people per week, since after all, I am paid to do twenty hours of research per week. I could schedule more, but then that would amount to neglecting my own research, and I have my own deadlines to keep.

I also need to find a new roommate. My current roommate is moving out at the end of May, so I need a new roommate at the beginning of June. My current roommate thinks that the rent is expensive for him, so I don't blame him for that. I guess it is a good thing, however, since he isn't the best roommate I had. Come to think of it, of the three roommates that I have had, the best one so far was the first one, when I was still living on-campus, but I remember that I complained about him too much as well when I was still living with him. I guess I just have high standards and people do not measure up to it that much. I tried to mention the things that I do not like to my roommates, such as leaving the toilet unflushed, leaving crumbs on the sink, among other things, but then, I am not their parent, and after a few times mentioning these, they should have known that these are not so good habits to keep. They're also adults, so I suppose it is simply true that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks.

I also need to deal with my visa situation pretty soon. My current student visa will expire in June. I am still a student, so that doesn't mean that I will be staying here illegally once June passes. However, that means that if I need to get out of the country, I have to get a valid visa in order to get back in again, thus, if I have an expired visa, then I would be trapped here. I don't like that situation, so I need to somehow go back to Manila sometime and renew it. I will do that once I know of my financial situation for next year. If I only get one semester, I might as well wait it out and stay here until the end of that semester, then go back to Manila and see what I can do from there. If on the other hand I get a full year of funding for next year, then I will definitely try to find a way to go back to Manila and renew my visa during this summer so I can get in and out of the country legally and without being hampered. But as of now, I still do not know what will happen next year so that is still unanswered.

I hate this situation in which things are left unanswered. Things are hanging, and so they can be frustrating sometimes. I also hate the fact that I have to live on a year-by-year basis. But then, what can I do, this is just a means to an end. I am starting to hate school, and I am slowly accumulating the itch to graduate. Hopefully, that is sooner than later.



(Embassy of Lesotho, from my Embassy Row Series)

Unraveling a Mystery

This past weekend, I watched a musical that was produced by the university's very own Department of Theatre and Dance. It was a very interactive and perhaps, the best performance I have seen so far. It was a production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Rupert Holmes, based on the unfinished novel by Charles Dickens.

Let me tell the plot first. The plot involves Edwin Drood, who is engaged to Rosa Bud. Drood disappears from the scene halfway, and several characters are suspects. The obvious suspect is John Jasper, Drood's uncle, who happens to be in love with Rosa, his music pupil. Another suspect is Reverend Chrisparkle, who is in love with Rosa's mother and wanted to somehow continue the unrequited love with the daughter. A third suspect is Neville Landless, who is an immigrant from Ceylon, and seems to have taken a fancy on Rosa. Helena Landless, the brother of Neville, is also a suspect for some reason. Finally, Princess Puffer, if I am not mistaken, is also a suspect, since it was later revealed that she had some connections with Rosa Bud's past.

The nice thing about this musical is that this is an interactive one. The audience has a hand in deciding the ending. It is also metatheatrical: it is a musical within a musical. It is a mystery but it is also a comedy. The musical starts with the characters approaching the audience, explaining the voting process to the audience. They act as actors of the Music Hall Royale, of which later they play the story in Edwin Drood. The audience then votes who they think is the killer, and they also vote on who they think is the mysterious character Datchery. They also vote on a couple that would sing together for a happy ending.

I have to say that I am impressed with the performance. The fact that the audience has to decide the ending implies that the actors rehearsed multiple lines for the conclusion, depending on what the outcome would be. I am impressed at that. I also like the fact that the actors never broke character, especially when they were talking to the audience. The first song actually incorporates some members of the audience, asking for volunteers to do certain things.

In short, this was a nice little break from the busy wave of things. I suppose it lightens up the last three weeks of the semester in a good way.



(Embassy of Japan, from my Embassy Row Series)

Book Review: The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

This is one of the novels that I have enjoyed reading recently. I suppose I somehow stopped on the habit of reading novels a few weeks ago since finishing Andrei Makine's Human Love. Perhaps I was just too busy that I couldn't find time to read and escape to another parallel world temporarily.

However, that changed recently, when I started running experiments, and since running this particular batch of experiments involved the participants using my own laptop, I couldn't do anything that involves my computer. So I changed my schedule to fit that. I would do the things that needed my computer when I am not running participants, and I would read articles and books whenever a participant is busy evaluating sentences in my computer.

So most of the time, I have articles that I am reading, which, armed with a highlighter, I read and store them for future reference. However, sometimes, the articles are finished, and yet there are still participants running the experiment. In those times, I pick up a book and read.

So one day, I was near the shelf where the library puts the new arrivals. I saw this book by Steven Galloway, and since it was new, and the topics I found on the title page was intriguing (it was supposed to be Sarajevo and snipers), and because the hardbound cover was rather nice in color (yes, I pick books with weird standards), I decided to check it out.

Apparently, the author hails from Canada, and this is his third book. This book strips the siege of Sarajevo to the micro level, which focuses on the lives of three different characters around the city revolving around a main theme, which is the cellist of Sarajevo. I loved the way the book told the story from the perspective of these three different and unconnected characters, instead of focusing on the bigger picture. I have the news reports to tell me that.

So what binds these three characters is the cellist of Sarajevo, who is based on the real-life character of Vedran Smailovic, the cellist of the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra. When one day, he witnesses the death of twenty-two people lined up to buy bread due to shelling, he decides to play Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor for twenty-two days.

The three characters in the book intersect with this premise quite nicely. Arrow is a female sniper, and she gets the assignment to protect the cellist so that he can complete the twenty-two performances of the adagio. Kenan is a man attempting to cross an intersection that is being targeted by snipers. Finally, Dragan is a middle-aged man who traverses the city in order to get water for his family and neighbor. All three characters encounter the cellist, either because they are protecting him, or because they heard him play.

I absolutely recommend this book to others, especially if one wants not mere entertainment, but a more substantial experience in reading a novel. There is no happy or unhappy ending to this book: this is just a snapshot of the lives of the three characters, sometime in 1992, documenting approximately a month's worth of activities. This novel is worth reading it because it extends beyond its pages, it lets the reader extrapolate beyond those twenty-two days and ponder on the plight of the three characters who endured the siege of this once lovely city in the Western Balkans.

See my other book reviews here.



(Embajada de Venezuela, from my Embassy Row Series)