Japan

For the last week, while Brandon has been busy getting his sister married off in Nashville, I have been visiting my parents in Aizuwakamatsu, Japan in Fukushima prefecture for the holidays. They will be living here for about a year because my dad is working here at the moment. It is a pretty small town, with a population of about 100,000, so there isn’t much to do except eat! I love all the food I have eaten so far. The weirdest thing I’ve eaten are these little fried dough balls with a bit of octopus tentacle hidden in the middle. They make and sell these at little stalls inside the mall, as a kind of junk food. Here are a few pictures of some of my favorite meals.

The last one is actually Vietnamese food, but the lady who owns the shop where we ate it speaks Japanese so I think it still counts. As you can probably tell, I like eating things from lots of smaller containers for some reason.

After the new year, I will be traveling across the middle of Japan (to Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kyoto) by train with my siblings.

To those nice nice nights…

On December 9th it was Emma’s birthday.  Our waiter at the diner that night shoved a handful of whipped cream in her face.

Not Now, Not Ever

I really love this collection of photos, from Gayla Trail:

 http://www.fluffco.com/not-now-not-ever

“… My photos are often described as capturing a feeling of isolation, and while that is there, I am also interested in exploring a contemplative form of solitude or most especially public solitude of the kind one would feel when walking down a street alone or that feeling you get while sitting on a street curb contemplating a crack in the sidewalk as the world passes by. Sometimes those moments are sad and express a withdrawal from the social world but they are also tender moments of aloneness that we all experience at one time or another…”

When I take photos sometimes, this is what I aim for.

Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School

There is this cool thing in Brooklyn (and around the world, now) called Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School. You basically go to a cafe, pay a modest fee, and sit down in front of a stage where a model or two comes out and poses for you. But it’s not your typical life-drawing class model doing boring poses. These models dress up in fun costumes and there is always a theme, and sometimes as the session goes on, the clothes come off. The people who attend the anti-art school may purchase food and beverages and beer and compete for prizes and free booze. It’s pretty sweet. Molly Crabapple started Dr. Sketchy’s, and she and her cohort introduce the models and provide some humorous entertainment in the breaks.

I went today for the first time. I had heard about it a year ago and wanted to go ever since. Here’s one of my sketches from today, of the model Little Brooklyn, a burlesque performance artist who regularly does shows in the East Village. I thought she looked familiar, but just now looking through the pictures on her site, I realized I had seen her perform a Halloween burlesque show a couple months after I first moved to New York City. She had an awesome spider hand puppet and she acted as though she was stuck on its web and completely terrified. She seems to like the animals though, because today she was half-dressed in a gorilla suit. Oh, and those things on her nipples are red, sequined pasties (to match her awesome red glitter lipstick) so this image is Safe For Work.

There I am in the green shirt!

I definitely want to go again. It’s a great exercise for people like me who need a little push sometimes to get creative.

What’s in a hostname?

It’s really important to name your machines so you can anthropomorphize them and talk to them.  Some names are more satisfying than others.  Sometimes you name a computer and it just feels right, and other times you hem and haw and just pick something so-so so you can move on.  I named my new MacBook Pro Kowalski and feels positively badass.  Everyday I will be working with the lead character from Vanishing Point.

Portrait of a Beardo

That’s about two weeks of growth.  It doesn’t always photograph well because I have a salt and pepper beard, so there’s plenty of blonde in there that doesn’t show up.

Mr. Mac Geek or how I learned to stop worrying and love the beard

My new employers were gracious enough to buy me a 17″ MacBook Pro to use for work and I’ve spent the last couple of days working on it and replicating all of my OS X applications and customizations over from my iMac. I have to say that I’m loving both Leopard and this machine. It’s my first Intel Mac, my iMac is a 2Ghz G5, and this thing is at least twice as fast as my G5 if not more.

Having a good laptop on which I can get real work done, with a sizable screen and comfortable keyboard, is a huge boon. I’ve never much liked working from home. It’s very motivating for me to get up and go to work, and I like being out of the house during the day. Nothing makes you feel like a shut-in quite so much as never leaving the house. I’ve always preferred to go out and get my work done in coffee shops and now I can do precisely that during the day. There’s a great place right down the street called Edgehill Studios that has an awesome coffee shop with big bright windows and modern furniture that’s not too comfortable so you can sit in it and get work done.

For Halloween this year I went out as Rick James Lipton, an amalgamation of Rick James, bitch, and former Parisian pimp James Lipton. For the role I grew a beard and I’ve kept it.

As I was sitting, working on my new MacBook Pro, wearing a corduroy sport coat, Threadless t-shirt, jeans, and bright red Reebok running shoes, and sporting a beard it occurred to me: I look like a total Mac geek. It’s unavoidable. I might as well go back to the year 1999 when I looked more than a little bit like productivity guru Merlin Mann.

Folks, don’t miss my supercool Casio calculator watch.

Admittedly, I wish I knew where that watch was. I’d probably still be wearing it.

A new beginning or why I’ve been so quiet

This past week was my first at a new job. I now work for BubbleUp. We’re a web startup focused on websites, web applications and internet marketing for the music industry. I’m very excited about it and having a blast so far. We’re a small company, headquartered in Houston, and I’m working from home and coffee shops here in Nashville. I’m 1/2 of the company’s Nashville presence right now, which we hope to expand in the future into an actual physical office and additional employees. It’s nice to be a part of a young, fast company after so many years as a cog in the academic machine. I’m working as their Systems Administrator as well as doing development work, and it is my return to some regular programming responsibilities that has me the most excited. It has been too long since that was a daily part of my job.

The first month at any new job is always very busy as you try to get up to speed on a new company, a new set of systems, and a new set of expectations. BubbleUp is a very small company and so that has been greatly magnified for me. So if my contribution here is a little bit light, it’s only because I’m working my butt off! But for a change, I’m happy to be doing that.

Visual phantoms and binocular rivalry

I’ve been published in my first scientific article. It is on studies of the interactions between how the visual system selects information to process further, and how it constructs perception like in the case of visual illusions. We used “visual phantoms” in conjunction with binocular rivalry to try and answer our questions.

Look at the two sets of gratings in the image and try to cross-fuse them. Remember those Magic Eye illusions? Do whatever it is you did with those to see the hidden pictures. If you do it correctly, there should only be one white cross in the middle, and your perception of the two gratings should change every second or two. You will also see faint impressions of the gratings continuing in the gap.

I won’t discuss the science here, but you’re free to download the paper if you’re interested, at the Journal of Vision’s website linked above.

The Spotless Mind

You’ve all seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, right? The surreal movie about erasing bad memories? I never really thought it’d be possible to ever actually do that, and I laughed off the parts of the movie where they “localized” bad memories in the brain, clicked on them, and magically erased them. Generally I dislike it whenever people use images from brain scanners in order to give credence to any scientific endeavor to do with the mind, because really, anybody can take a picture of someone’s brain. Nobody knows what is really going on, least of all cognitive neuroscientists who use giant magnets to collect their data without really understanding the physics behind it. But that’s neither here nor there.

Back to my main point of memory erasure!

I saw an interesting talk yesterday by Karim Nader, a research professor at McGill University who used to work at NYU. He and others are carrying out research that will ultimately be helpful to sufferers of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). People with PTSD are crippled by their emotional memories, and have long waited for therapies that work, namely getting rid of unwanted memories. It’s been found that if people reactivate their memories and are given a dose of Propranolol, the emotions associated with that memory are erased, or made less intense, while preserving the objective aspects of the memory. Propranolol is a beta blocker, which blocks the effects of stress hormones (reducing heart rate, perspiration, blood pressure, etc) and works within memory areas of the brain, including the amygdala, a region of the brain important for fear conditioning. So while people will still be able to recall their memories, those memories will no longer be sources of pain. It’s a win-win situation!

It’s amazing to me that this can even work. Like, how do we know people will erase the emotional part of one memory but not another? Once you separate emotion from memory, is it possible for it to come back? What is going on in the brain for this separation to occur? In any case, though there is likely a placebo effect going on for some people, for others it actually does the trick! At least to an extent that the memories are manageable through more traditional forms of therapy.

Propranolol administration is not a sure-fire method at this point, but I am sure with more research we will come to understand emotional memories better. There will also be, undoubtedly, questions of ethics. Should people without PTSD be allowed to use propranolol for things like forgetting the emotions associated with a bad breakup or the death of a family member? Would that even work or does this method only work on seriously debilitating memories that strongly affect our physiology, as in PTSD? Honestly, I haven’t done my homework, but this type of research is certainly interesting and I’ll keep my ears open for new developments.

Link to article on Forbes.com

Link to article on McGill.ca