Divine intervention.

I'm far from home at my annual conference. Dr. Bane is here, and worse than ever before. While he didn't crash the board meetings, he has serially violated the graduate students: he forces them to listen to his grand delusions about his role in the creation of the universe for hours at a time. The more senior members of the society have begun a watch, and when we see a student with him for more than a few minutes, we invent some important errand that the student must go on right away.

Today, near the end of a talk, Dr. Bane walked into the lecture hall and tried to squeeze into a crowded front row. He knocked one of our Academy members off his chair. He stepped on a student's bag. He knocked over the table behind him, spilling water on everyone there.

Then. His. Pants. Fell. Off.

All the way down to the ankles. Biggest damn pair of tighty-whiteys I've ever seen. It took me at least an hour and a half to compose myself. Several people saw me running from the lecture hall in tears, and thought there'd been a death in my family.

You probably think I'm making this up. But I'm not.

Frustrations minor and major.

I am trying to switch from English to Continental. That is, I want to be a picker, not a thrower. In the middle of a project, I have gone from holding the yarn in my right hand to holding it in my left. Yeah, that's right, the middle of a project. Pretty crazy, huh? My hands hurt.

I have an undergraduate working in my lab this summer. I'm mentoring him through a nationwide program. He works very hard. Unfortunately, he doesn't understand a word I'm saying. It doesn't matter how I say it. Even in pictures, he doesn't understand. He writes down the phrases that come out of my mouth, hoping that if he writes down enough of them it will somehow make sense. I can see his frustration and I feel bad for him; at the same time I am hoping that he is coming to see that graduate school is not in his future.

Yawn.

Every so often I am struck down (or up) with insomnia. Like tonight.

Tonight is particularly bad. I went to bed at 10:30, and, as is my habit, opened a book and read a little. A little became a chapter, which became several chapters, which became the whole book by about 2:00 a.m.. Then, wide awake, I turned the light off and stared into the dark.

I got up to pee. I went back to bed. I got up to see if I could spot the raccoon that tripped the security light. I went back to bed. I tossed and turned. I itched and scratched. I composed opening paragraphs for talks, chapters, and papers. I thought about what color I should paint the bedroom and what kinds of window treatments I might like.

Maybe it was the book. Maybe it was the tea I had before bed. Maybe it was the snoring baby and her feet draped over my head and neck. Maybe it was the dog, sleeping on my feet. Maybe it was the snoring man on the other side of the bed. It was hopeless. I got up.

I'm writing out two talks that I'm giving in California next week. Maybe my present insomnia will permeate the essence of my talks, and no one will be able to fall asleep when I give them.

I wish Paul Cameron would just come out already.

I was on postdoc at [undisclosed location] when I first heard Simon LeVay present his work on biological bases of sexual orientation. LeVay acknowledged the limitations of this early work, but it was nonetheless very exciting and thought-provoking. Only later did I hear of Paul Cameron, who, in contrast, is a second-rate academic and second-rate psychologist with a pathological fear of sex. He has made it his mission to discredit the idea that homosexuality is not a choice, and he champions draconian sodomy laws.

Through Box Turtle Bulletin via Andrew Sullivan, I stumbled on Cameron's screed "Can Gay Rights Be Stopped?" It ranks right up there with First Samuel and The Turner Diaries: a hateful, violent, un-Christian manifesto wrapped up in "Christian" morals and virtues.

Kevin of Kevin's Space already took this pile of shit apart. But let me call your attention to a few paragraphs. Here's the first one:

...[H]omosexuals targeted ‘science.’ They correctly figured it would be tough sledding if they tried to change Christianity from within. But by capturing the professions and thereby science, the gay movement could trump Christianity. They knew that religious professionals — intimidated by the complexity of science and awed by its influence and accomplishments -— would eventually go along with them.

What can I say. He figured it out: Science has been driven by the gay agenda since Apollo 11. I bow to my homosexual overlords.

But here's the funniest bit, an attempt to bolster the credibility of his "research" institute and the "researchers" therein:

Because science is both elitist and highly competitive, it has garnered the admiration — and even awe — of non-scientists, while at the same time often befuddling them in its complexity. What many conservatives do not realize is how very difficult it is to be a top-notch scientist. While there are hundreds of thousands of professionals across the world engaged in science of one form or another, the ‘cream of the scientific crop’ rises to the top through the process of publishing in the scientific literature. Consider these facts: only 1% of Ph.D.s and M.D.s ever publish in a scientific journal; only 2% of those who publish ever place articles in one of the top handful of premier science journals; and only 10% of this last group is ever chosen to serve as ‘peer reviewers’ for those top journals, with the task of judging the quality of other scientists’ work. Nevertheless, one of the scientists at the Family Research Institute has been selected to do just that: be a peer-reviewer for the British Medical Journal, one of most well-respected scientific journals in the world.

Oh, really? Let's play with these numbers a bit. Suppose that in my own science there are 50,000 Ph.D.s alive today. (This is over-generous by about two orders of magnitude.) By Cameron's reckoning, therefore, only 500 (1%) of us are publishing in scientific journals. That means that only 10 (2%) of us are publishing in the "premier" journals. That leaves only one of us (10%) to review everyone else's papers for publication.

Snort.

I am an editor, and I am so desperate for reviewers that I am not ashamed to ask (good responsible) graduate students to serve as referees. The "elite" almost never agree to review; only the junior researchers fighting for visibility will volunteer. If I have a reasonably intelligent discussion with almost any credentialed person on a particular topic, then I will file that person's name away in my "potential reviewer" rolodex. Most of the journals in which I publish advertise shamelessly for reviewers in that blank space between the end of one paper and the beginning of the next.

One of Cameron's "scientists" was once asked to review something for the not-top-ranked British Medical Journal. Did this reviewer also publish something there? It is a fact that if a researcher submits a paper for publication in a specific journal, his/her name will be added to the list of potential reviewers for that journal even if the paper they submitted was a crackpotty piece of trash that was summarily rejected. There is no way for an editor to know this unless she herself reviewed and rejected the piece of trash in question. I try not to select reviewers whose work I recall rejecting, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

Cameron uses faked-up numbers and a mischaracterization of the peer-review process to convince his followers that his "science" is just as (or more) respectable that the science churned out by the godless researchers controlled by the Homosexual Cabal (TINHC). I know most of my readers can call bullshit on his arguments without any help from me, but I couldn't let this pass without another heaping helping of scorn and ridicule.

I will assume it was just coincidence that while I was typing this up, my Pandora stream selected Queen's Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy.

A pleasant interlude.

One of my dear readers outed me, despite my attempts at "deep cover." (Any reader in proximity to Ellesiouville knows exactly where I am, and readers in Square State are probably suspicious. But see the Disclaimer.) So we met for lunch, and a very nice person s/he turned out to be. Making new friends in real life is so much more fun than exchanging emails with virtual personalities -- not that I don't love y'all bunches!

If any of the rest of y'all think you're close by, drop me an email. Maybe I'll throw a party. The Angry Baker just brewed an English ale, and we can help him drink it.

In case the folks at Pixar read my blog, I would consider relocating for a permanent position.

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions in response to my call for help. I decided to use the mjpeg tools, and not to use an audio stream. I figured that a lot of beeping going off at the same time I was trying to explain the action in the film was probably not a good idea.

The movie shows a very simple dynamic system called a "sine-circle map." It's similar to what I would like to present in my talk. I generated the individual jpeg files (some 2000 or so) using R. The sine-circle map describes the coupled behavior of two oscillators. One oscillator, the "driving" or "forcing" oscillator, determines when the "%%%%" appears over the circle. The "%%%%" marks the beginning of each period of this oscillator. The second oscillator is shown more completely as the second hand sweeping around the circle.

Because the two oscillators are coupled, changes in the period of the driving oscillator are detected by the second oscillator which then changes its own period to compensate. After some time, the periods of the two oscillators will be the same, and their phases will match as well. Phase mismatches between the oscillators due to differences in period appear as a red wedge. The three time series plots from top to bottom show the period of the driving oscillator, the phase of the second oscillator, and the period of the second oscillator.

I had several issues in getting this all together, issues that resulted in stuttering between frames and sloppy, smeary aliasing. The stuttering looked like the movie got "stuck" between two frames and played them over and over (and over) again. You can see, if you have really good eyes and can filter the abomination that is the Google Video above, the slight smeariness that I was unable to eliminate completely. It appears most evidently as black smudges within the red slice when the driving oscillator reduces its period.

I found I had to use a low frame rate (25 frames per second) and that the jpegs could not exceed about 560 x 720 pixels. (I also learned that the image dimensions had to be divisible by 16. Why? I have no idea.) Most of my problems had something to do with the frame rate. With smaller images (just the circle alone, e.g.), I could go as high as 50 fps, but as soon as I added the plots I got stuttering and smear. It almost seemed like a memory problem, but the documentation for jpeg2yuv leaves much to be desired, and I really don't have the time to become an expert in jpeg and mpeg formats. So I just don't know.

I have one of the mpegs I hope to use for my talk finished, but I have several others yet to go. Even though I still have no clue what I'm doing, I hope that keeping the frame rate low and the jpegs as small as possible will produce acceptable video. Maybe, if my current proposal gets funded, I can hire someone to make them pretty.

Don't premeds take Psych 101?

Just shoot me now. From Majikthise, a canine Clever Hans that found Jesus.

And the dog's owner is a physician. A physician who claims that when her dog growls at a visitor, "he is 'scolding' the visitor, letting the person know he or she isn't living as Christians should."

Holy Hippocrates, Batman!