it's...

It is now Dillo Day. If you are reading this please stop whatever you are doing, start drinking immediately and go find friends (or make new ones, you'll be surprised by how friendly people are around Northwestern today).

here's 10 songs just for you, picked randomly by my Salinger:

Led Zeppelin, Dazed & Confused (BBC Sessions)
Eels, Jeannie's Diary
Dizzy Gillespie, I Should Care
Joy Division, Exercise One
the Doves, There Goes the Fear
Dianogah, Lone Tree Point
Andrew Bird, Why?
Blur, Country House
Bob Dylan, Pledging My Time
the Stevies, Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue (Ramones cover)
Beck, Loser

(and happy birthday to my new roommate Sam -- what a day to turn 21!)

Cyberonics makes a device that can be implanted in your chest like a pacemaker, but with wires that connect to a nerve on your neck... this apparently is being considered by the FDA to treat severe depression. Only problem, in the only existing trial run only 17 of 111 people who had the device turned on felt better, and 11 of 110 who did not have their little happy-maker turned on also felt better... um, this is not a 3-sigma result worth unleasing on severely a depressed public whom you would think would get to the point that they'd try this. Well, it can't hurt you, right? Actually, several people found that if you turn up the juice on this thing you start to feel suicidal. And you thought tinkering with your ipod was dangerous... And wouldn't you know it, shortly after the FDA subcommittee recommended FDA approval of their VNS therapy, they announce planned stock options!

This from a recent NYT article which had this helpful graphic:

Today my friends Mia and Rachel reached the culmination of their four year foray building robots. And they did pretty well too, scoring third place, sexiest robot (for the second year running!) and one of those GIANT checks (like 5 feet long -- taller than Mia, though just barely) worth a cool $1,000. They had cute shirts too... quite impressive.


Bit of backstory: If you were around me last May you might have gotten to hear me bitch and moan a bit about robot building. Northwestern holds an annual Design Competition and we physics majors like to field a team to either foil the engineering students, or inject a bit of humor into the proceedings. It usually ends up with us not sleeping for several consecutive days before competition and just barely getting our robot to run on time (though our designs have always been among the best in the competition).

Last year Mia, Rachel, Laura and myself were the Physics DC team, going under the proud name of "Hermitian Operators" (mis-pronounced "Her-mi-tan" throughout the entire competition much to the chagrin of anyone in the know). Our proud little robot, Hermione, did much better in the competition in previous years, but due to some battery problems primarily, we weren't much of a threat in the competition. We did manage to bag sexiest robot. But at the end we all were pretty much the living dead.

So Laura and I had our chuckles at how unabashedly insane Rachel and Mia were being when they decided to enter the contest this year (they'd done it for their first three years, might as well get closure with a fourth year). They did an unbelievable job managing to do the work of four this year and clearly build a much better bot for the competition (or were Laura and I really that useless last year?). And all of this after writing senior theses to get them honors in ISP and Physics in the weeks before. Naturally, a much modified Hermione was still sexy enough to bag sexiest robot for the second year running. Those girls just know how to build sexy robots; what more can be said?

Sadly, I missed most of the competition (sleeping in, of course: likely my greatest failing in life, it always does me in). However, a DV camera was on hand to record most of it, and there's talk of putting together a video to the theme song as Mia did last year when Laura ended up in the hospital shortly after the competition. I'll post a link to it when it goes up.

so tonight i'm trying to get to sleep but found myself digging through my itunes collection looking for songs that fell into the above stated catergory. here's what i came up with that got me to sleep... (don't ask me why some of these worked, they just do)

Air, Ce Matin-La
Sufjan Stevens, Sleeping Bear, Sault Saint Marie
The Magnetic Fields, Nothing Matters When We're Dancing
The Smiths, Ask
New Order, Temptation
Looper, Impossible Things #2
Stars, The Aspidistra Files
The Brunettes, Leonard Says
Rilo Kiley, Portions for Foxes
The Who, Baba O'Riley
Wilco, I'm Always In Love

oh and there is a spice girls' lyric in one of these songs... can you find it? ...will anyone even try?
(well, that whole restored faith in life didn't last long did it?)

I was browsing the morning news when I came across this gem of a quote from an article about LucasArts moving to their new studio in Presidio:

"Lucas has already hired a handful of writers and directors to work on two new 'Star Wars' television projects. . . We do have to exist after George. He's not going to live forever. The man's in his early 60s."

Just to clarify, it's not the fact that they're finding new ways to commercialize the star wars universe that excites me, it's how potentially bad these new attempts could be. And what better way to spend one's retirement than going about gathering up all the copies of a Star Wars Holiday Special and destroying them? ...*sigh* these mornings are slow and fraught with work to avoid.

So I went through the "date equation" (see the last post) and the magic number that came out: 7. Granted, this figure is poorly representative for Evanston, and for Chicago it goes up to 260. these numbers just don't agree with me, so let's come up with a date equation for northwestern...

Here's our basic data: Undergrad population is 8000 (which we'll assume to be evenly proportioned) and the graduate population is suppose to be 6000 (see NU's demographics). Let's assume, to make the math simple, a third of grad students are legally off limits, and 2000 are first years, and 2000 are "older".

We'll used the "NU Date Equation":
N = F_gender x F_single x F_babe x F_pc x F_cool x F_school x N_class

F_gender (this one's pretty well defined):
 0.5 if you are unisexual
 1.0 if you are bisexual

F_single (this one will probably depend on what age range you're after)
  0.25 if you insist on no previous significant relationship
  0.6 if you'll consider those presently single
  1.0 if you play like that

F_babe (or, substitute F_hunk, using the appropriate change of variables; i.e. physical attractiveness)
  0.10 if you consider only the knockouts in the top 10%
  0.30 if you're reasonably picky
  1.00 if you're desperate

F_pc (political/social/religious compatibility; this one is pretty ill-defined)
  0.001 if you belong to a far right or far left militia group
  0.10 if you're very libral or very conservative
  0.50 if you're moderate
  1.0 if you're not interested in conversation or verbal interaction

F_cool (fraction of people who are cool to hang out with, similar interests, etc.; this one's really uncertain; take a wild guess)
  0.01 if you're a couch potato
  0.10 if you're picky about your friends
  0.50 if you're really hip and travel in all crowds

F_school (this is for you picky people who only date SESP geeks, or some similar such ridiculous stereotype. Just sum for all you'd be willing to date, or 1 if you could care less)
  0.40 for WCAS
  0.20 for Grad Students
  0.14 for MEAS
  0.10 for School of Communications
  0.08 for Medilldos
  0.05 for School of Music
  0.03 for SESP

N_class (this accounts for your age preferences; sum the number you'd consider, disregarding sexual preference and going only by age)
  2000 seniors
  2000 juniors
  2000 sophmores
  2000 freshman
  2000 first year grad students
  2000 "older" grad students
(at most 12,000)

For example, a single male, physics major, with liberal views, etc. (like myself) would find this equation yields 32 date-ables.

hey, things are looking up!

So people were talking about "lithopanspermia" at this thursday's theory group meeting (that would be litho-, as in rocks, panspermia, as in the seeding of life through interstellar space... yeah, was not my choice) Anyways, there was pretty much a reparametrization of the drake equation described in this paper, which reminded me of something entertaining I'd come across once before... The Date Equation.

This is pretty much the pinacle of astrobiology geekness. A good read whether you put any credence in the Drake Equation or not, I mean, I love the Drake equation to death but it seems more like poetry to me than science. You can parametrize pretty much anything, but what if several of your parameters are, well, completely unfounded speculation? or zero? well, as far as life elsewhere in the universe, Drake gets credit for making as good a start as any. I think people just cite it too much as evidence (one way or the other).

It looks like it shall rain tonight, so if no one shows up for public observing I shall dutifully calculate my own "Date Equation" and post it here for your enjoyment.

The following thirteen (in honour of it being so) songs were brought to you by Salinger, which seems to be on an indie rock bent of late (i however am decidedly on a Four Tet kick, which is... um, totally awesome, for lack of an actual description):

1. Of Montreal, Disconnect The Dots
   
2. Beck, Little One
   
3. All-Time Quarterback, Untitled
   
4. the Appleseed Cast, A Place In Line
   
5. Fatboy Slim, Acid 8000
   
6. Teenage Fanclub, Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From
   
7. Brian Wilson, Song For Children
   
8. The Olivia Tremor Control, Holiday Surprise 1,2,3
   
9. Architecture in Helsinki, Rendezvous Potreso Hill
   
10. Talking Heads, The Girls Want To Be With The Girls
    
11. U2, Twilight
    
12. Ben Folds, Hiro's Song
    
13. the Cure, The 13th [Swing Radio Mix]
    

... ok, so maybe i chose the last one.

but fun!

Last night was a nice break from study/work/life. I hung out primarily with Lyssa, Cam and Tim and the original idea was to go sit in 3-green in CRC and talk, just because we could, and couldn't think of anything better. So off to white hen to get things to mix with alcohol, and then we decided we would walk back to Tim or mine's apartment to get alcohol, after having called tim to order him to bring us alcohol to crc. Yes, it was rather imperative alcohol be consumed. On our way to my place we called Tim to see if he was actually done with his dvd and going to bring us alcohol, and he was doing just that... walking down simpson with a handle of stolovy vodka and his dvd player. at 1am. with his dvd player tucked under his arm, and the frost visible on the 40 of vodka.(Tim is a silly lad!)

So we met up with Tim at Hamlin and Maple, got back to my place, watched the trailer for his film (which turned out really well... the trailer, can't speak for the film), and mixed our mixers (which included vitamin water and vodka, vanilla coke and malibu, and snapple lemonade and vodka, and a double gin and tonic in a mineral water bottle) and headed out to the nice grassy field behind the evanston civic center to consume our beverages. Much drinking and talking and laying in the grass looking up at the stars followed. Then we started throwing things at each other (ok, maybe i started throwing things at cameron to see if she was asleep first). Then Tim suggested we play tag, so we did. Realize at this point all of us must have been somewhat intoxicated since we were playing tag in the parking lot behind the evanston civic center.

As we were heading back Cameron decided it would be fun to roll down the hill. This was so much fun that we had to do it several times (and I tried rolling up the hill, with somewhat less success). This led Tim to bet me a dollar I could not roll across Ridge Ave. I now am the proud owner of Tim's dollar. Safely on the other side of Ridge (and only steps from our respective apartments, we proceeded to fake fight each other on someone else's apartment building lawn. Such memorable one punch defeats of me by tim, followed immediately by tim by me. Tim and Lyssa faught, and well, that was so damn entertaining that Cameron and I had to follow up with a fight, in which I defeated cameron by tripping her, and trying to dip her in my arms. The man walking to his car at 3am was definitely pretending not to notice us so we decided maybe we'd go play tetris. that was fun, but finally lyssa passed out in the papasan, tim crawled home, and cam passed out on the aerobed.

this was just the kind of night i needed. now back to studying for qualifiers.

here's a question for Lyssa, Cam and Tim: if I had been run over while rolling across ridge ave, would you have told the police that I was stupid enough to do so on a bet?

so as some of you may or may not know, i have a penchant for constructing phrases in which a word gets repeated twice and yet the whole phrase still is grammatically correct. for example: "Will Will will his G5 to me should he die?" So i was absolutely delighted when I came across this article about "Theory theory".

to my understanding, they are saying there are cells in the brain which respond empathetically to others actions. for example, were i to win the lottery, and you to observe me collecting my giant check some cells in your brian brain (we won't go into theories about everyone's inner brian) would be triggered, allowing you to recognize what it would feel like were you to get a giant check. Theory theory also in know to some as the "Vulcan Approach". I want to collaborate with these theorists on naming my next paper...

ten more.

The Moldy Peaches, NYC's Like A Graveyard
   remember when you first discovered moldy peaches? maybe it was hearing the lifted easy-rider riff on jorge regula, or their cover of little bunny foo foo. either way, it was a crazy-fun time.
The Jesus & Mary Chain, Girlfriend
Wilco, War On War
The Fall, Dktr. Faustus
   It takes the Fall less than three minutes to write a five minute song. That's the only way I can think of to explain how they've been able to put out 85 albums since Live at the Witch Trials in 1979.
Ben Folds Five, Eddie Walker
   what is this song about anyways? got time to kill, listen to this song and discuss... i love it regardless
The Strokes, The Modern Age
   such good memories of driving around San Francisco listening to the Stokes and visiting Ameoba.
My Bloody Valentine, When You Sleep
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong, Don't Be That Way
Architecture in Helsinki, Fingers Crossed
   indie Aussie bands are the next big thing, if you haven't realized it yet. great song, beautifully understated vocals.
Cafe Tacuba, El Aparato
   oh how i love these guys. probably my favorite band that i "discovered" on my own. another four star track.