Les Bonnes Choses

A quickie from effamy? Two can play that game. Except this one has been in the works since this past weekend. I just didn't feel like typing it out in the car on my iPhone.

This weekend, Asher was baptized along with his youngest cousin, in what appears to have been a vain effort to drive the devil out of the baby. During the baptism, you are promising to instill good Christian values in your child. Some people go the extra mile and also instill the bad Christian values, like telling them that gays are an abomination, for example. But I'm lazy, so I just do the bare minimum, which means taking advantage of teaching opportunities when they present themselves. Like Saturday morning, for example. One of Jude's cousins is, for lack of a better word, bossy. And when she doesn't get her way, she gets quite sullen. I don't remember what order it was with which her playmates weren't complying, but the noncompliance resulted in her declaring that she "doesn't like them anymore."

I was in the room, listening to this all transpire, and thought, WWJD? Turn the other cheek of course. "Jude," I said, "when someone tells you they don't like you, tell them ``that's okay, I like you anyways´´," which is how the two of them replied to their sullen and now verbally neutered playmate. I like subtle. Zealotry and blowing up infidels has no place in civilized society. If you really want to get under someone's skin, try passive-aggressiveness. It's what Jesus would do.

I'm back from Psychonomics 2010, which was much different from conferences of yore: Many of the usual suspects were conspicuously absent; I was unable to find a store within walking distance (liberally defined) that sold shirts; and I gave my first big conference talk. It was nice to visit with the old chums, however, and dinner with Albert at the House of Meat the night before my talk showed me I could slip into the role of a professional academic.

As for the talk itself, it went quite well. In usual fashion, I was calm up until about 90 seconds before I was to step up to the podium, but my heart stopped racing after the first slide, and the rest proceeded without difficulty. I was a little disappointed that hardly anyone in the crowd threw their underwear on to the stage, but was later reassured by a veteran speaker that it is not customary to do so.

So I am now halfway through a very abbreviated work week, and am just now getting to taking care of a number of matters that I have been putting off forever. Since September, the television has been on for about 6 hours, cumulatively, and I have been meaning to cancel the cable to save a bit of money for most of that time. I encountered little resistance when I called, but didn't believe the customer service representative when she said she had "never hear *that* one before" when I told her it was because I didn't watch TV. Even if it weren't true, it seems that would be the excuse I would make up if I wanted to cancel the cable. I took care of some other business, but decided that writing about it would probably expose me to some sort of fraud. So instead, I'll just talk about how it's very curious that the last 4 digits of my social security number, 858-43-2020, relate in numerology to my mother's maiden name, Lipschitz.

St. Louis. Gateway to the West. Why am I up late at a hotel in St. Louis on a Friday night? A couple of reasons. I just finished practicing a talk I am going to give tomorrow at the Psychonomics conference where I hope to find members of several hiring committees sneaking in a freebie job talk. Not that I would have been sleeping anyways. At around 4:30 this afternoon, I stopped by a Starbucks and ordered a large black tea. With some help from the store manager, a genuinely bemused barista eventually handed me a piping hot cup that required two cardboard sleeves, and was thus too hot to drink immediately. It wasn't until 10 minutes later when I realized it had steeped more than long enough that I took the lid off to find two large tea bags, each more than enough to brew an entire pot of tea.

The caffeine hit certainly got me through the rest of the day, but I hope it doesn't keep me up all night. I think I may be coming down, however. A couple of hours ago, I may have acted on my idea to put socks on some of my colleague's doorknobs.

Okay, it's not that often that a blog-complete thought just drops on my lap like this. Usually they percolate for a few days, during which time they get pushed aside and sometimes forgotten altogether, leading to week-long lapses. Thank goodness for psychological researchers, on whom you can usually count to do something bizarre. In this case, it was a study on mind wandering about which I read just now on The Ceeb.

In their study, the researchers used an iPhone app, one of the few I apparently haven't downloaded, to track people's mind wandering at random intervals. That's fine and well. Kudos to them for being tech savvy (though not so hardcore as to hack the Half-Life game engine).

Does that count as a citation?

Anyways, here's the Bonnes Choses-ready passage that caught my eye:

The real-time data showed that on average, people reported that their minds were wandering 46.9 per cent of time, and no less than 30 per cent of the time during every activity except making love.

Ahem. Excuse me? The only way I can see that statistic being collected would be for participants in their study to have engaged in coitus interruptus to answer their damn iPhones. I mean, people actually did! And while the Catholic Church might approve of this method of birth control, I can't imagine participants were adequately remunerated, even if the authors gave away the damn iPhones to go with their app. Plus, now the participants are stuck with AT&T contracts. I think the Harvard IRB is going to hear about this.

I know that a number of people prefer to read these posts as they are imported on Facebook, rather than wait for the monthly print edition to hit the newsstands. What? your local newsstand doesn't carry Les Bonnes Choses? Be sure to let them know that you will take your business elsewhere until you see the Les Bonnes Choses masthead beside the New Yorker.

But back to the story at hand: A number of popular websites, including Facebook, have a security flaw whereby a thirteen year old with a laptop using a freely downloadable Firefox plug-in can snag the file that says "I am so-and-so, and I am logged into Facebook", and pretend to be you. Not only can this be done, apparently it already has. Why is this bad? Have you ever written a drunken email? Allowing a 13 year old boy to post to your friends walls on your behalf would be, like, a kajillion times worse. And it's not just the 13 year old boys you have to worry about either; it's the girls too. Imagine how tedious it would have to be to have to explain to thirty friends that, no, you do not really 'like' Justin Bieber or the Twilight Series. So especially if you are in a public location, do not use a wireless connection to check out your Facebook page.

There is one upside, though. If you do actually drunkenly reveal your appreciation of Justin Bieber's music late one night, and have regrets the next morning, you now have plausible deniability to fall back on.

Addendum: Hotmail has this same security flaw at this time, though gmail thankfully does not.

So, in case you haven't heard, some guy boarded a Canada-bound Air Canada plane in Hong Kong wearing about 5 hours of special effects makeup:


Part way through the flight, the passenger, appearing as the elderly Caucasian male pictured on the right, went to the bathroom and emerged as the young Asian male pictured on the left. Though they did not realize their normal coffee had been replaced with Folgers crystals, other passengers did notice that the elderly man in seat 5F was replaced by a drift racer.

So, I look forward to the next time I go through airport security when, in addition to displaying my liquids and gels, opening up and turning on my laptop and removing my shoes, I'm going to have to demonstrate that my face is attached.

I've mused on this before, but the sense of smell is kind of wacky. They say that smells are one of the most powerful triggers for digging up old memories, so it might not just be coincidental that the olfactory bulb (the brain part that does the smelling) is wired right up to the amygdala (one of the brain parts that does the emotion). I speak very loosely, of course, but this isn't Nature Neuroscience, so whatever. One of the funny things about your sense of smell (including the part of smell that we refer to as taste) is that it's rather gullible. Go grab yourself an orange Crush. Go on, now have a sip. Mmmmmmm, orangey. Now go dig through your rotting bin of good intentions you call a vegetable crisper, find and peel yourself an orange and try wedge. They don't taste a damn bit alike, do they?



You know what else doesn't smell like its label? Ocean Mist. On the way back from the airport, I sat in a taxi cab run by some dude who was apparently excessively conscious about maintaining a no-B-O cabbie public image. Hanging from the mirror was an Ocean Mist air freshener. On the back of the seat behind my head was another air freshener. And piped in from the front seat was some flexible hose with a plastic tube drilled with hose that seemed to deliver a fan-driven payload of Ocean Mist. I've never lived near the ocean, but I've been to Yarmouth in the fog, and I live about a 10 minute walk from one of the Great Lakes. Whatever trick they pulled to make everyone think that Dimetapp tastes like grapes, my nose is not buying it. You want ocean mist? Puree a bucket of wet seaweed and a small flounder and throw it in front of a box fan. There's your ocean mist. That air freshener? It smelled like someone stuffed a LUSH franchise up my nose. How bad was it? My shirt still smelled like air freshener at the end of the day. And I had been wearing a zipped up jacket in the cab.