I know Advisor always tells me not to hope for significant results when I analyze my data, but for results that show the truth. However looking at reviewer comments on the poster for my master’s study, I think what they really care about are significant, clear results, and not the muddled mess of “truthful” results that I actually obtained. XD lol, joy.

“With the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a species, we have created an environment so complex, fast-paced, and information-laden that we must increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended.”

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion — Robert B. Cialdini

Being the TA for multivariate statistics is really kicking my butt. I wonder, do the students in this class care as much about statistics (and the subtle differences in interpretations of the various effects) as I do? I certainly hope so, because if not I’m seriously wasting my time giving so much feedback on the homework assignments. I try to go faster and not to get caught up making comments here and there, but I just can’t help it. It’s like that one xkcd comic (especially the roll-over text, lol) — I can’t come to bed, someone is wrong on the internet homework. What am I supposed to do, just leave it? Then they’ll keep being wrong! XD

Back to grading.

What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong! http://xkcd.com/386/

There’s a cool post on the Evolutionary Psychology blog from yesterday: “What bowerbirds and imagineers have in common.” Intrigued? Go have a look.

I wonder how the males would react if they only had access to one size of pebbles. Would they spend a lot of extra time searching for more? Or maybe they wouldn’t care as much unless there were plenty of other males around; if there weren’t many other birds with which to compete, maybe they wouldn’t need to build their nests according to that gradient. Or maybe they wouldn’t be as sensitive to that sort of environmental cue? Hm.

I wonder how the female birds would choose between different birds of different sizes, if not all of them were using this nest-building technique. So for example, if one male bird was forced to make his nest with just one size of pebbles because that’s all he had access to, but he was big, and a second male bird was able to make his nest with the small-large gradient described in the afore-mentioned blog (which was reporting on a study published in Current Biology), but he was smaller than the first bird, which male would the female pick? Will she be able to easily tell which is bigger right away?

In any case, the study as Robert Kurzban summarizes it and the connection he makes to the Disney imagineers is pretty cool

So while reading for one of my classes, I found out about TESS and WEXTOR. Joygasm! ^-^;

So for a while now I haven’t bothered to make my own coffee at home anymore because it was always turning out nasty. This weekend, I figured out the problem — it’s the splenda! I’ve always loved splenda in my coffee before, so wtf is going on now, splenda? In any case, my coffee tastes way better without it. But now I have to find a new sweetener for when I want my coffee sweetened, and I would prefer for it not to be the full-calorie sugar. You see, some days I drink a lot of coffee and those teaspoons can really add up, and the calorie-free thing was the whole reason I used splenda anyway.

I guess I have to stick to coffee with creamer/milk or plain old black coffee for now.

In other news, quals are coming up and I’m going to fail miserably. kthxbai.

I finally got the Google apps on my BlackBerry  to work with my nachtimwald domain, yay!

Today I moved all my music to the Windows partition of my computer. I died just a little inside.

For a long time Rhythmbox had been having problems downloading and storing some of the podcasts I listen to, namely, some of the Scientific American ones. I decided a couples months ago to just download iTunes on Windows so that I could download and sync the problematic podcasts there. This was an okay system for a while, but then I started using Banshee, which happily was able to handle my podcasts. Unfortuantely, this solution didn’t last long because once I had updated my iPod software, Banshee couldn’t recognize the music anymore. It could reformat all of it, but then it showed up weird on my iPod and my podcasts couldn’t be found under the podcasts menu; I had to use the search function to find them. Further, when I would sync with iTunes on Windows again, it would freak out and not know how to deal with my iPod. So I switched back to Rhythmbox for the purpose of syncing music, Banshee for the purpose of downloading and listening to some of my podcasts while on my Ubuntu partition (but not syncing), and iTunes on Windows 7 for the purpose of downloading and syncing my Scientific American podcasts.

So John suggested that I simply move all my music to my Windows partition and just use iTunes whenever I wanted to sync my iPod. To listen to music while on my linux partition, I could have Rhythmbox and/or Banshee mount my Windows partition and then play from that music library. iTunes has no problem downloading any of the podcasts I subscribe to, so using iTunes alone should help me avoid the issues I was having with podcasts and with software compatibility issues I brought on myself by using multiple programs. Further, I can now listen to my music while on my Windows partition while I’m using SPSS (even though simply listening to my iPod while running my multiple regressions has always been good enough for me).

But now Steve Jobs has won; he wanted me using iTunes exclusively for my iPod all along, didn’t he? Bastard.