The Deception of the Thrush

haha that is a hilarious analysis, i enjoyed it and i do think it's true. when i started reading your post, i couldn't help but think how absurd it was that anyone would care what anyone else would eat (that people could even get annoyed about it). and just as that thought came up, you wrote "perhaps their reaction isn't so absurd"! the whole scenario sounds like something jerry seinfeld would've come up with for his show years ago. i think social gatherings are replete with such examples of competition - for instance, at a christmas party i decided to stop by, i didn't realize it was a formal affair and dressed casually. this backfired when i arrived and everyone was suited up . . . i felt like turning right around and heading out the door. much like a metaphor for my life, i decided to stay and stick out like a sore thumb. who knows the judgments conferred. even within the social context of family, i've found similarities to your elitist eating situation. conformity and competition seem to pervade so many social situations in so many different forms.

on another note, i finally finished the book. i enjoyed reading it immensely. there were times i couldn't stop laughing despite the sadness intertwined with the comedy. i noticed the brother's k reference and appreciated the quote about having the serenity to accept the things i can't change, etc. i found it both hilarious and affecting. i could go on about this book for a long time - like his explanation of newton's 3rd law - that will stick in my mind for a long time.

i noticed you had an old post about camus, i don't remember when it was, but he's an old favorite of mine. it's been a few years since i've read anything of his, but i think i may read the plague again. perhaps that will be my next literary excursion!

haha that is a hilarious analysis, i enjoyed it and i do think it's true. when i started reading your post, i couldn't help but think how absurd it was that anyone would care what anyone else would eat (that people could even get annoyed about it). and just as that thought came up, you wrote "perhaps their reaction isn't so absurd"! the whole scenario sounds like something jerry seinfeld would've come up with for his show years ago. i think social gatherings are replete with such examples of competition - for instance, at a christmas party i decided to stop by, i didn't realize it was a formal affair and dressed casually. this backfired when i arrived and everyone was suited up . . . i felt like turning right around and heading out the door. much like a metaphor for my life, i decided to stay and stick out like a sore thumb. who knows the judgments conferred. even within the social context of family, i've found similarities to your elitist eating situation. conformity and competition seem to pervade so many social situations in so many different forms.

on another note, i finally finished the book. i enjoyed reading it immensely. there were times i couldn't stop laughing despite the sadness intertwined with the comedy. i noticed the brother's k reference and appreciated the quote about having the serenity to accept the things i can't change, etc. i found it both hilarious and affecting. i could go on about this book for a long time - like his explanation of newton's 3rd law - that will stick in my mind for a long time.

i noticed you had an old post about camus, i don't remember when it was, but he's an old favorite of mine. it's been a few years since i've read anything of his, but i think i may read the plague again. perhaps that will be my next literary excursion!

i apologize for the double posting - the internet wasn't working properly and when i posted my comment it didn't show up, so i thought everything i wrote had vanished! so i went back and tried posting it again only to find out that it posted twice.

so it goes.

Hey Vivek--
Thanks for the comments--I once again apologize for being so late in responding.
The pervasiveness of competition is annoying -- I assume it's universal though perhaps it takes different forms depending on the culture and so on. I guess it's not all that bad -- Adam Smith's invisible hand could work in all arenas of life, not just increasing our economic productivity but also our collective health, if it pushes us to eat better -- but it can get old, and one wishes that the competitive impulse could just be quiet sometimes.

Congrats on finishing Slaughterhouse-Five! Yes, I thought the "grant me the serenity" mantra fit in well with the rest of the themes in the book -- apathy and fatalism in the face of problems that seem too overwhelming to confront. Or something like that. As for Camus, I will confess to never having read an entire book by him -- I've just read essays, like his arguments against suicide and the Myth of Sisyphus. The Plague I don't know much about. If you do read it, I'd be interested in your comments.

Karin,

Thanks for replying to my post - because I have not actually met you, I always feel some apprehension/hesitation posting as though it might be annoying or invasive or something (and then of course I triple post by accident!), so there's no need to apologize for a late response, I'm just glad to get one! I get the sense that these concerns of mine are largely self-created, but I thought I'd just put that out there anyway.

That is true about competition, I wonder if there is really a better system out there . . . yet I also wonder who truly benefits from competition (I suppose those who compete and "win"). From the medical perspective, the idea that competition is creating incredible medical technology at an incredible rate with such high demand and short supply makes the technology prohibitively expensive such that a large portion of the burden of medical costs comes from these competitive innovations, and disparities between those who have access to these innovations and those that don't increase as a result (that's the greatest run-on sentence I've written in a while!). I wonder if the advances due to competition and the vast socioeconomic problems that result can ever be reconciled.

The slaughterhouse bug has infected my household - my father has read the book and now my mother is starting to read it . . . I have no idea how she will react to it, but however she does, I think it will be amusing (I'm thinking utter confusion or taking indignant offense)! Maybe she just wants to understand why my father and I kept saying "so it goes" for everything over the past few weeks.

Camus . . . I get the feeling that he managed to encapsulate his philosophy in everything he wrote, so you've got a good idea of his other works already through "Sisyphus" and his essays. He incorporated his thoughts on suicide in "The Fall" - come to think of it, that book has a sort of "slaughterhouse" feeling to it. Of course, that would make sense since Camus was labeled as a so-called "absurdist", but if you have time for a short Camus novel sometime, you may find "The Fall" stimulating. I read "The Plague" many years ago, but that was at the beginning of my foray into literature. I also read Hesse's "Steppenwolf" around the same time. 5 or 6 years later now I get the sense that I will gain a different understanding reading these books again the second (or even third) time through.

I read an old post you wrote in the beginning of your blog about your older brother - it was really sweet - I think of my older sister much in the same way. She has done so much for me and has really helped me along my path in profound ways, like the sort of guidance that decides the course of my life. I think she benefits the organization she works for far greater than she benefits from the organization - them having her is really a steal. She's smart smart smart, but without being pretentious at all. I could keep going on with the analogies. Ahh, older siblings. . . Anyway, are you still in grad school? If so, how is it going?

I will certainly comment on "The Plague" the best I can, though it will be a while before I have the time to get through it. It's really in the same vein as other books we have discussed - it's quite epic in scope in its attempt to encapsulate the human condition in all its forms and colors, but for me, it's his lyricism and imagery that I love. I must admit that I am drawn to exactly that - with Hesse, Camus, Sartre, Dostoyevski, I'm seduced by their style of writing and evocative imagery (and of course the content!)

I hope you are enjoying the holidays!

Happy New Year, Karin!

Hi Vivek, Happy New Year to you as well. I should write a new entry. The blog is looking stale and oh-so-2006.

As for grad school -- I am still in school, in my third year in a cognitive psychology program. It can be frustrating. So it goes.

Health care and inequality -- yes, well, that's hard for an armchair economist/policy wonk to answer. To be healthy and alive is a wonderous thing and it is always lovely to see new ways to remain in that state of well-being. The question concerns the effect that these medical advances have on everyone's access to quality health care. Obviously, at least some people in the population will have the resources to take advantage of new technologies and meds and so on. And some won't, or at least they won't be able to take advantage of them to the same extent as more affluent patients do. Or worse, some patients will actually lose access to treatments that were previously within reach, due to benefit cuts that are the indirect result of costly new procedures and drugs. It is not clear to me whether we are facing this latter case -- people losing health care access that they previously had -- or the former -- some people not gaining access to the new treatments that some wealthier patients can afford. I'm not saying that either case is desirable. But the second case suggests that medical developments cause some collateral damage, so to speak.

So in the absence of any sort of sophisticated analysis of the issue, I guess one simple step anyone could take is to just take better care of themselves. Tending one's own garden, I guess.

Will be interesting to see what your mother thinks of Slaughter-house Five. As for me, I am still working on the Brothers Karamazov, albeit very very slowly.

I remember at the very end of Voltaire's Candide a quote about tending one's own garden - a summation of the whole satire. The old lesson that has perhaps been most consistently ignored over the ages.

My mother hasn't picked up the book in a while, I think it will be a slow process . . . though I overheard her mentioning it to a friend over the phone and describing Billy Pilgrim as kind of nuts. My father thinks Vonnegut is nuts. I'm not sure why though, I feel differently. . .his words felt sane to me. I think my mother's interpretation may be entirely different from mine when she's done with it. About the Brother's K - I remember reading it for almost 3 days in a row during the monsoon season in a village hut in southern India a few years ago. There was nowhere to go and nothing else to do. I couldn't put it down. Though my mind could not piece everything together upon completion - I had so many questions and thoughts with no one to share them with. I remember receiving blank stares from some of the Indians when I tried explaining what I just finished reading. Perhaps I will take the book up again soon and read it more slowly this time. When you finish it, I would like to hear your thoughts on it.

What are your thoughts on the wikipedia post on cognitive psychology? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_psychology) Is it representative? I recognized Ebbinghaus and Piaget's names from passages I've read, but never took a course in cognitive psychology. I think I would've enjoyed it in undergrad, it sounds really interesting, and if wikipedia is correct in its definition, then it's something I think about quite often without even knowing it. . .

Yes, now that we are into 2007, perhaps it is time for the Deception of the Thrush blog to catch up with the times and become more hip and "with it"! :o)~

Hey Karin,

I thought you'd get a kick out of this. I was reading a passage about the polarization of electric charge in clouds and lightning, and one of the scientists with a theory on this is named "Bernard Vonnegut". I was highly amused by the sentence that followed his introduction:

"A more recent convection model of the polarization process is offered by Bernard Vonnegut and Charles B. Moore, who contend that the primary cause of electrical charge formation in clouds is the capture of ionized (electrically charged) gas molecules by water droplets. The ions, so the theory goes, are absorbed by the droplets and transported by updrafts and downdrafts to various portions of the cloud."

". . .so the theory goes . . ." it's subtle, but I wonder if the author included that intentionally!

Hey Vivek,
Interesting quote there -- maybe the author had to read Slaughterhouse-Five in high school and was unconsciously guided towards that kind of wording :-) What leads to you to read about the polarization of clouds? I don't even know what the word "convection" means. I'm starting a course in neurophysiology now, and we're spending several days on the principles of electricity -- yet another field where I have discovered that I am entirely ignorant. Anyways, I like drawing the little diagrams with the squiggly resistor things.

Vonnegut, I think, believes that he himself is crazy, or at least he likes to present himself that way. So your father may be right.

I read the Wikipedia entry on cognitive psychology. It's okay, I guess; it's probably a difficult field to summarize. The intro paragraph that talks about gestalt psychology seems a bit out of place. But I like the Neisser quote that defines cogntive psychology not as a subset of psychological phenomena but rather as a particular perspective towards explaining the mechanisms that drive those phenomena.
To be honest these are heady days in our little discipline because of the emergence of this gigantic field of cognitive neuroscience, in which I think I am considered a marginal participant by virtue of the fMRI work that I do (and the fact that I take courses like neurophysiology). There's a split -- some psychologists embrace the integration of neuroscience into their work, and believe it provides additional elaboration for how mental processes come about, while others think that we're not yet ready to gracefully map the abstract principles of the mind to the concrete workings of the brain. There's truth to both of these arguments.

Anyways, I was going to go out for a run but yet again it is raining in our fair city. So, alas, back to electrical circuits.

Hi Karin,

I got that quote from a verbal reasoning section on a practice MCAT exam. 10 more days to go until the exam day. . . Although, a topic like electricity would very likely show up on the physical sciences section, it was less about the science and more about the argument put forth by the author. We're expected to know the basics of bio, inorganic chem, organic chem, and physics - so electricity is certainly covered there, squiggly resistors and all :o)

When I was looking up something about a correlation between frequency and photon intensity, I stumbled upon the term "eigenvector" which I noticed you had posted about before. I had no idea what it was before, but it seems to be something about multiplying a vector quantity by a scalar . . . is that right? It sounded much more complex than that though, I am so far removed from mathematics - I know just enough to answer a basic physics problem. I've even forgotten a lot of calculus, though I vaguely remember a few ubiquitous concepts like integrals and derivatives and so on. . .

fMRI sounds like just the sort of topic that might show up on the physical sciences section, or even the biological sciences section for that matter - it seems to incorporate all of those disciplines from the oxygen dissociation curve of hemoglobin to hemoglobin's dia/paramagnetic properties. Now with integrating those aspects into psychological considerations, these days indeed sound heady and fascinating!

I do not wish for rain here - we had an ice storm in 1991 and last week when it rained, it froze! Though I have to admit that there's something strikingly beautiful about frozen branches enclosed by clear ice, as if it had been carved by a sculptor. . .but driving, let alone walking, on frozen ground was quite precarious! Well, now it's all turned to snow, and probably for awhile. At least the season has finally bestowed some sense of consistency (and the poor confused birds finally get it - that now in mid-january it's really time to fly south!)

Well, off I go to bed, probably to drift off to sleep with parallel circuit and capacitor problems floating in my mind. It's probably no better than sheep - with sheep I'm sure I'd see them jumping over a fence and would turn the whole scene into a projectile motion problem!

I do agree with the exaple - when we go out for lunch..