I was at the gym the other day, and as I was leaving, I was walking behind two young kids (age 8-10) who were on their way home to dinner. Here's their dialogue.

Kid 1: I can't wait to get home. We're having my favorite food: baked pasta with a red sauce. What's your favorite food?
Me: Pasta with red sauce, what's your problem, kid?
Kid 2: Umm... Ummm... Steak! No, that's not what it's called.
Kid 1: I like pasta. And pizza.
Me: That's better.
Kid 1: And brisket.
Me: Brisket!? I don't think I've ever even eaten brisket!
Kid 1: And corned beef. I love corned beef.
Kid 2: Yeah, that's it! Corned beef! From Zimmerman's.
Me: Wait, what!? What's happening?
Kid 1: Are you from Ann Arbor?
Kid 2: Yes.
Kid 1: Me too.
Me: Oh. So that's what it's like to be the child of a yuppie...

I don't know how many of you looked at my sister and brother-in-law's new peanut, I mean baby, but I noticed that, when you magnify the picture of the ultrasound, the kid already looks a lot like a certain uncle to be. It's grainy, but it's uncanny really. I took the liberty of giving you the enlarged version below.

Every once in a while, I get a migraine. A lot of people say they get 'migraines,' but I'm not talking about a headache here. I mean that, every once in a while, I get a MIGRAINE. They usually hurt so much that I have to go to sleep. When I wake up, the pain is typically a little better, but I still feel like I've been hit in the head with a baseball bat. This dull ache usually lessens over the course of a few days--almost like recovering from being hit in the head with a baseball bat.

Anyway, before every migraine, I have a weird visual phenomena that's lets me know the pain is coming. Typically, it comes in the form of a jagged line of light that cuts through my visual field on the right side of my body. It's super annoying, and I usually can't wait for the pain to come so that it will go away, and so that I'll be sure that I'm not going blind. Almost always, it interferes with my vision for about an hour, goes away, and is replaced by the headache.

On Saturday, I'd finished my reading for the day (7 hours worth), and Sarah and I were headed to the mall to wander around. Halfway there, a jagged flash of light slashed through my left visual field; this one was spectacular, accompanied by a rotating ball of fire. Although the visual artifacts had never come on the left before, I knew what was coming.

As usual, the vision problem lasted for about an hour. But during that hour, I did wonder whether I was actually having a stroke, not a migraine. My fear started when I began having trouble seeing people's faces and reading signs: I knew they were there, I just couldn't make them out. Later, faces looked like Picasso paintings. And I mean EXACTLY like Picasso paintings. It was like I was in an art gallery. A disturbing, disturbing art gallery.

It's actually pretty scary to consider that you might be having a stroke. I even told Sarah that, if I started having trouble communicating or my face started sagging, we needed to go to the hospital. But at the end of an hour, the headache came and the vision problems went away. No stroke. Just a regular old baseball bat to the head. When I thought about it later, I realized what had been happening.

See, visual signals on the left are typically processed by the right side of the brain. That early artifact on the left was likely indicative of a problem on the right side of my brain (i.e., a migraine = swollen blood vessels; swollen blood vessels = impaired functioning) . The right side of the brain is theorized to be in charge of visual processing and facial perception. No wonder I couldn't read very well or make out faces. I even found out that there's a neuroscientist who likes to argue that Picasso's cubism was the result of migraines.

If only I could paint!

Here's where I must not have been clear in my last post:

1. There's no mystery is Joshua 2. The spies went to see Rahab because they wanted to have sex while they were on a mission from God.
   
2. Reading Joshua 2 in this light would give an entirely new meaning to the wheeling and dealing that the spies did with Rahab. She uses the information to blackmail them, and they essentially beg her to keep their 'secret' when they come back to invade (i.e., don't tell anyone what we did).
3. If you are familiar with the traditional interpretation of the passage, you will probably balk at the idea that the 'secret' might be about sex, however (a) the spies were already safe from the angry citizens of Jericho when they made the deal with Rahab, so (b) the 'secret' they want her to keep doesn't seem like it would be that they are hiding; it could instead be the embarrassing fact that they've had sex with a prostitute and non-Israelite.
   
4. I was wondering why no commentators talk about this, because it seems CENTRAL to the interpretation of the passage.

I have to go, the cat just barfed on the bathroom rug. It's a glamorous life I live.

Joshua 2:1

Then Joshua the son of Nun sent two men as spies secretly from Shittim, saying, "Go, view the land, especially Jericho " So they went and came into the house of a harlot whose name was Rahab, and lodged there.

I was reading a different translation (NASB) of this passage than I normally do (NIV), and something struck me as different. In this chapter, Joshua, the military and political leader of the wandering Israelites, has sent two spies into enemy territory to check out the land and assess for potential vulnerabilities. Here was my thought process.

1. Harlot? Why not just say prostitute?
2. Prostitute? Why do two spies stay with a prostitute?
3. Hey! I know why two out-of-towners go to see a prostitute! To have sex with her!
   
4. How come everybody always talks about Rahab's righteousness and nobody ever talks about (a) the fact that the spies were depraved, and (b) the fact that it was their that depravity almost caused them to get caught and killed?
   
5. What happens in Jericho stays in Jericho.
   

I taught about the introductory principles of behavioral psychology in my classes last week. The beginnings of the topic are pretty simple: 1) figure out what is rewarding to your subject, 2) reward the behaviors that you want to increase, 3) ignore the behaviors that you want to decrease. During the lecture, I had the following exchange with a student:

Student: I noticed that you always say "Good question!" whenever anyone asks a question in class. Are you doing this stuff to us, and like, messing with us?
Me: (rewarding the act of posing a question) Good question!
Class: (laughs)
Me: (ignoring the implication that I'm manipulating students, which I am) No, but that is a good question. What do you think?
Student: I don't know. You just seem to always be really nice about questions.
Me: (It's working! It's working!) That's true. I try to encourage participation and questions.
Student: Oh ok. I get it.
Me: Anyway, that was a good question. Does anyone else have any questions?
Class: (hands go up)

Skinner lives.

It's been a busy week. There are probably some real things I could post about (happy birthday grandma!), but this morning I'm unfortunately left with only two choices. I can either write some witty post about the religious groups who have recently been invading campus and screaming at everyone who walks by about how everybody is going to go to Hell, OR I can maintain my basic hygiene and take a shower and shave for the first time in three days.

Stupid social norms.

2008: when Chinese desserts go commercial.

Recently, I went to a local service organization to observe some kids with autistic spectrum disorders. For the most part, I didn't interact much with the kids; although in one instance, a little girl with bright eyes and a toothy smile stared at me from across the room. With a grin and unwavering eye contact, she maneuvered over to where I was sitting on the floor and then thrust her nose about an inch from mine. She grabbed my face with both her hands and exclaimed, "Aaaaahhhhh baaaaaaahhhhh!"

I was intrigued. I had no idea if this was typical behavior for her, if it was great that she was trying to initiate an interaction, or if it was inappropriate social behavior that she wasn't supposed to be engaging in. Nobody was telling her to stop, so I said, "Hi!" She repeated, more insistently this time, "Aaaaahhhhh baaaaaaahhhhh!!!" I didn't respond, and she let go of my face but continued to stare insistently into my eyes. When her mom finally dragged her away, I said "Bye!" To which she responded, "Aaaaahhhhh baaaaaaahhhhh?" I'll always wonder what she wanted.

As part of my duties at the university, I work for a few hours a week for a lab in the department. My lab is a pretty large one: it's run by a professor who is very interested in research, so we have lots of projects going on and lots of graduate students who are involved in running things. Every week, we all meet for an hour to discuss how things are going with our various projects. Lately, the professor has been assigning articles for us to read at home so that we can talk about them during the meetings and think about their implications for our experiments.

I take my duties pretty seriously, so I always take the time to do the assigned readings, ever so tedious as they may be. Most of my labmates do not necessarily have the same outlook. They usually ask me to summarize the articles for them before our meetings. And I do. Because if I don't, we'll have nothing to talk about during the meeting, and it will be super boring and awkward.

Last week when we were talking about the articles, the supervising professor was tiptoeing around things, acting as if he hadn't read them either. Later he said flat out, "I didn't actually get around to reading this article this week. I had a lot going on. Could someone summarize it for me?" As you might have guessed, all heads turned expectantly in my direction. As it turns out, one is the loneliest number.

I feel like I should be getting a bump in pay.

I was thinking the other day about 'supernatural' events. Scientists and those in the academic world have a real problem with some of the claims of Christianity, namely those that require a violation of a natural law. So for example, if I were to claim that Jesus was raised from the dead, they would say that such an event is impossible according to scientific laws and therefore didn't happen.

What I realized is that all natural laws are based entirely on observation of events. We know that objects on earth fall to the ground at 9.8 m/sec squared because every time we get out our measuring devices and start watching objects fall to the ground, they always seem to fall at that speed. In other words, a law is a law because we've never observed any violation of the law. If we were to reliably observe some violation, say an object that consistently falls at 100 m/sec squared, then we would have to rethink our law.

And this wouldn't be a problem; this happens in science with some regularity: new information leads to changes in laws or to changes in they way we think about the natural world. No one had observed bacteria in the time of Louis Pasteur, and some people ridiculed him for his insistence that 'invisible' creatures (he couldn't see the bacteria) were polluting things. However, once he found tangible evidence of microorganisms, his detractors had to rethink the nature of disease.

I think you can see the problem with claims against Christian belief in 'supernatural' events. Jesus was raised from the dead you say? We've never observed anything like that before. It must not have happened. There are germs contaminating our milk you say? We've never observed anything like that before. It must not be happening.

You can feel free to drink all the unpasteurized milk you want, but I'm going to go ahead and assert that, until we've been able to observe everything in the universe for all of time, scientific laws are always going to be subject to change, and it's always going to remain a scientific possibility that Christ was raised from the dead.

Bruce Springsteen is coming to town for an Obama rally, and students, faculty, and staff at my university are eligible for free tickets. The students don't seem very excited about it, but the *ahem* 'mature' ladies I work with at the counseling center are ridiculously giddy. On Thursday, a bunch of people left in the middle of work to go down to the box office to pick up their free tickets. I'm not going to the concert, but someone asked if I would come down as well--so she could have my ticket. We were waiting for the ticket window to open when I observed the following interaction between a 30-ish female cowoker and a young male student who happened to be walking through.

Student: What's with this line?
Coworker: The Boss is coming!
Student: The who?
Coworker: (Incredulous look) The Boss. Bruce Springsteen. He's giving a concert!
Student: Bruce who?
Coworker: (Dejected look) Springsteen. Bruce Springsteen.
Student: Oh! Is he that old guy who plays acoustic guitar?

Everyone gets old sometime. Today just happened to be her day.

I was prepping a class for a quiz yesterday, and I was just about to pass it out when I was interrupted in the middle of, "So if there are no more questions..."

Student: I wasn't here last week, what should I do?
Me: (dumbfounded silence)
Student: (dumbfounded silence)
Me: Well, you have two options: (a) take the quiz, or (b) don't take the quiz. Best case scenario, you get 100%. Worst case scenario you get 0%. If you don't take the quiz, you automatically get a zero, so taking the quiz would probably be helpful.
Student: (thinking about what to do)
Me: (dumbfounded silence)
Student: I guess I'll take the quiz.

Not everyone should go to college.