Archive for June, 2009

my neighbor across the street just broke up w/ his live-in girlfriend, which means she took her stuff, which includes a tv, which means he has all these video games that can’t be played. long story short, i now play guitar hero III every day.

in my rediscovery of guitar hero, i am revising what i’ve always said about the game and its relation to past experience with a musical instrument. i still believe musicians have a slight advantage, but not for the reason i first thought.

i assumed musical training instilled a better sense of rhythm, making the dots easier to follow. but i’m pretty terrible at the rhythmic sections, and the loud clicking of the paddle actually overpowers the rhythm of the music. even if i were fantastically rhythmically inclined, i still listen to the guitar clicks (which are a fraction of a second ahead of the beat), not the music.

where i totally rock are the sections that depend heavily on pinkie use and left-hand shifting. i’d guess guitar players are naturally good at this, as are people who can play stringed instruments (holla, cello). i don’t know enough about woodwind and brass, but i imagine there’s some benefit (especially w/ constant pinkie use, but perhaps not with the shifting). the same goes w/ piano.

obviously slavish dedication to the game and hundreds of hours of practice will overcome any pinkie disadvantage one might have, but i’m sure my 7ish years of intense cello-play has enabled me to find great success in impressing boys with my virtual shredding skills.

if i were on that episode of gossip girl where serena and vanessa play guitar hero at some lame party, i’d f’ em both up.

meaning all the 15yo’s are at the beach, doing their teenager thing.
meaning i’m feeling old and kinda fat.
meaning my summer got a little less peaceful.

a post from an old friend (professor who i had but never talked to, but whatever).

Stealing the Iranian Election

Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen

1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.

2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers. [Ahmadinejad is widely thought only to have won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-reform groups were discouraged and stayed home rather than voting.)

3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran’s western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which he did not.

4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as Karoubi.

5. Ahmadinejad’s numbers were fairly standard across Iran’s provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.

6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.

i suggest juan cole for all your middle east related readings. does that make me an alleged arab apologist, too?

“kimo” came up to me while i was walking and, among other random convo, asked if i wanted surfing lessons. here’s his card:

notice the excellent cutting job at the top, and also that his office is the “3rd palm tree north of pier.”

Why Eczema Often Leads To Asthma

Now scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have uncovered what might be the key to atopic march. They’ve shown that a substance secreted by damaged skin circulates through the body and triggers asthmatic symptoms in allergen-exposed laboratory mice.
…
Kopan’s findings suggest the problem starts with damaged or defective skin. The researchers found that cells in damaged skin can secrete TSLP (thymic stromal lymphopoietin), a compound capable of eliciting a powerful immune response. And because the skin is so effective in secreting TSLP into the blood system, the substance travels throughout the body. When it reaches the lungs, it triggers the hypersensitivity characteristic of asthma.

there has always been a known link b/w eczema and asthma, but not until this study is there a better understanding of that link. i have pretty severe eczema, so i’m pretty sure i’m doomed to form asthma. sonofa.

i am also allergic to the sun, which makes living in southern california not as awesome as you would all think. the internet tells me i have polymorphous light eruption:

PMLE is characterized by recurrent, abnormal, delayed reactions to sunlight, ranging from erythematous papules, papulovesicles, and plaques to erythema multiforme–like lesions on sunlight-exposed surfaces [that are not normally exposed to the sun].

sound nasty even if you don’t know what any of those words are? it is gross, and often radiates heat. (do not click this if you are squirmish. p.s. those are not my legs.)

apparently one treatment for severe PMLE is the use of thalidomide. you now the stuff in the 60s that caused thousands of babies to be born with flippers? great.

mom and dad sent me their wii fit for the summer. i love this game except for when it asks me to breathe deeply and i get a big lungful of secondhand marijuana smoke, it makes me miss DC and my oddly isolated apartment.

am i crazy to think that michigan’s problems are actually less worse than california’s? obviously the numbers right now don’t reflect that, but it seems that michigan’s problems, besides detroit’s city governance, are very clear: the state needs more jobs, more economic growth.

california, on the other hand, is deeply dysfunctional and humungous. the government feebly tries to fix overcomplex system, and what happens?

Confused and bored by the wonky and tangled wording on the ballot, most voters ignored the election entirely. Those who did turn out rejected all measures except one that freezes legislators’ pay during budget-deficit years—a ritualised form of venting general anger.

the budget, which they haven’t been able to pass on-time in years, leaves state agencies near broke for months, and the number of ballot initiatives it puts forward each year is absurd (12 in 2008? what normal person can keep track of that?) california actually has viable industries, yet it still is in a severe budget crisis. plus, no one in michigan wants to split the state into four parts. i’d much rather be jennifer granholm than arnold swarzenegger.

not b/c his life was hard, but b/c he clearly did not handle it well. is it just me or does it seem like he’s blaming everyone and everything else for all his problems?

For Sotomayor and Thomas, Paths Diverge at Race

Ms. Sotomayor and Mr. Thomas missed each other at Yale by only a few years, but they might as well have studied at entirely different institutions.

Given her standout record at Princeton, said James A. Thomas, a former dean of admissions, Ms. Sotomayor’s background had little role in her acceptance to the school. Again, she immersed herself in Puerto Rican issues, winning a spot on the law review with an article about Puerto Rico’s rights to resources in its seabed, leading the minority students’ association and urging the administration to hire a tenured Hispanic faculty member. (A quarter-century later, she is still pressing the school on the issue.)

Mr. Thomas, though, felt out of place from the moment he arrived and only became more disaffected. He had listed his race on his application and later felt haunted by the decision.

“I was among the elite, and I knew that no amount of striving could make me one of them,” he wrote. He ran into financial troubles and applied for scholarship money from a wealthy Yale family, a process he found humiliating. Friends recall that he insisted on dressing like a field hand, in overalls and a hat.

Shared Rejection

Mr. Thomas and Ms. Sotomayor did have one experience in common: law firm interviewers asked them if they really deserved their slots at Yale, implying that they might not have been accepted if they were white.

Ms. Sotomayor fought back so intensely — against a Washington firm, now merged with another — that she surprised even some of the school’s Hispanics. She filed a complaint with a faculty-student panel, which rejected the firm’s initial letter of apology and asked for a stronger one. Minority and women’s groups covered campus with fliers supporting her. Ms. Sotomayor eventually dropped her complaint, but the firm had already suffered a blow to its reputation.

Mr. Thomas was more private about the experience — even some friends do not recall it — but he took it hard. With rejection letters piling up, he feared he would not be able to support his wife and young son.

The problem, Mr. Thomas concluded, was affirmative action. Whites would not hire him, he concluded, because no one believed he had attended Yale on his own merits. He felt acute betrayal: his education was supposed to put him on equal footing, but he was not offered the jobs that his white classmates were getting. He saved the pile of rejection letters, he said in a speech years later.

“It was futile for me to suppose that I could escape the stigmatizing effects of racial preference,” he wrote in his autobiography.