Stuff and nonsense

I got back Sunday night from a conference in San Diego - the Society for Research in Psychopathology. It was in the same general area as the last conference I was at in San Diego, but this time there were only about 200 psychopathology researchers in town, rather than 30,000 neuroscientists, so it felt a little different. But we went to a bunch of good restaurants, some good bars, danced to a good band, enjoyed the lack of indoor smoking, did a lot of walking around, and even did some conferencing. We saw Old Town San Diego and went to a restaurant that featured over 150 tequilas. You'll be happy (or disappointed) to know that I didn't sample all of them. Later in the night we visited Old Town, it started raining. This, apparently, was some earth-shattering phenomenon. We heard person after person say something to the effect of, "Is it raining?" I guess it's rare there.

Everyone should listen to my sister Kate's radio show, Monday nights at 7pm (eastern) on the big Radio Volta. Local authors read their stuff. Kate talks. Kate reads her stuff. It's good. But the trick is, it's only on the interweb. So go to the website and LISTEN.

Other fun things lately: midnight movies. I'm a big fan. A theater here shows them every week. The first one I indulged in was The Goonies which, for the entirety of my life, I would always announce that I had not seen, which was always followed by a huge, "WHAAAAAAAAT???!?" by anyone within earshot, with this exclamation growing louder and more outraged with each passing year that I had not yet seen said movie. Well, I remedied all these a few weeks ago when I finally saw it. I was pleased. I also enjoyed the "Truffle Shuffle" contest they had before the show. But even better than all this was a few weeks later - The Muppet Movie. Classic. A childhood favorite. It was quite an experience. No contest beforehand, but I think it was better that way. There's something about seeing movies like that among a whole audience of people that makes them better. A communal experience for a movie that I have only ever experienced on video with, at most, a couple of people.

Finally, for the science nerds in the house (you know who you are): some guy at Johns Hopkins compiled the Top 10 worst scientific graphs. I can't say that I can tell what's bad about all of them, but I think it's funny that there can be such a thing as really bad scientific figures, especially ones that have been accepted for publication. Plus, there's a discussion of each figure on the site to explain it to you.

Oh, and one last thing (as I am watching baseball)...One thing that I've seen over and over in baseball games and only just now struck me as weird: with all the technology that is available (including phones, headsets, people in booths, etc.), the way that the manager of a baseball team changes pitchers is, he walks out towards the mound, and about halfway there he waves one of his hands (right or left), depending on which pitcher he'd like. Rather than getting on the phone in the dugout and saying, "Yes, this is the manager, I'd like you to send in the right-handed pitcher from the bullpen now please. Thank you kindly," he instead trudges out and does the equivalent of baseball semaphore in order to convey a pretty important piece of information. Hence, the famous Ozzy Guillen "Give me the big fat guy" signal in the playoffs last year. It's a big mystery to me.