I've been busy visting with family and writing a paper that was ridiculously assigned so that it could only be completed over Thanksgiving break, so my moments to write have been few.

Barney has been teething lately, so we've been giving him rawhide bones to chew on to try and keep him away from more important things like our remote controls and our cats. Because he loves the bones, it's been pretty effective in limiting his inappropriate chewing, but I guess I didn't realize the true extent of his passion until today. He'd gnawed down his old bone to pretty much a nub, so we decided to give him a new one. He got really excited when he saw it, and when Sarah gave it to him, he grabbed it and ran to one of our upholstered chairs to start chewing as soon as possible. Then, with all the excitement, a little pee squirted out.

A little part of me wishes that I could get so excited from everyday things that a little pee would come out.

Things I did yesterday, a long list.

5:30 AM
Ate breakfast.
Edited the materials for a new study.
Made soup.
Went to church.
Got gas.
Went to Costco.
Ate soup.
Cleaned and rearranged the pantry.
Ate 1/4 of an Oreo cheesecake.
Cleaned and rearranged the garage.
Raked and composted leaves.
Mowed the lawn.
Hung a clock.
Hung a sign.
Reinstalled (properly) a door.
Installed a light fixture on a ceiling fan.
Ate a snack.
Watched TV.
Went to bed.
9:30 PM

This morning, after dropping me off at the train station, Sarah dropped Barney off for his mandatory neutering (the shelter where we adopted him will 'prosecute' us if we don't do it by December something or other). Also this morning, the bus had a distinct urine smell. Wait a minute... Somebody call the AP!!! Neutering your dog causes city buses to smell like pee!!! I've made a discovery!!!!

Correlation does not mean causation. Call the AP.

I got an email the other day from my university saying that they were going to raise tuition next year about 6%. Though I wish they wouldn't do it, I recognize that it's pretty typical. For example, the AP reported today that the regents of the University of California (UCLA, UC Berkley, etc.) announced that they were raising tuition 32%, marking a threefold increase in tuition in the last decade! Atrocious, right?

Then I bothered to actually look at some numbers. Next year, it will cost students in the UC system about $10,000 for tuition only (no room and board). At my school, it will cost undergrads $30,000 for tuition only. For some reason, I'm not feeling all that sorry for all those who are complaining in California.

Every workday for the past few weeks, I've been leaving home around 6:45 AM and getting back home around 6:45 PM. Part of this is due to the public transit schedule, but a larger part is due to the fact that I've been running a couple of studies and doing a ton of data analysis on top of my regular workload. The funny thing is that I'm pretty sure I've been enjoying it.

I've never been excited about doing research, but I've not exactly hated it either. In the past, I'd always seen it as a necessary step in the long path to a college teaching position, and I've been involved in an acceptable amount of research even though I always would have preferred to have been learning something in class. As it turns out, I now find my classes to be pretty much getting in the way of my research and my own learning that I'd like to be doing on my own, being directed by my own self.

In reality, I think what really happened is that I found out that when I do research, there's pretty much no one who gets to tell me what to do. Sure I have to follow rules and ask for permissions and submit to the wishes of my various advisers, but there's also no one telling me what topics I have to investigate or exactly how I have to go about investigating them.

Unfortunately, I've been sick for a week, so I doubt that I can sustain my current pace without some ill effects. But even if I get burned out soon, I'm sleeping 8+ hours a night, eating 3 meals (and one snack!) a day, and playing basketball a few times a week when I'm not sick. So it's not like I'd be better off spending my free time watching TV instead of doing work.

On the other hand, in a month, or a year, or a decade, I'm sure I'll want to throw all the world's research into the garbage and open a bakery. So goes the cyclical nature of life.

In the news today:

President Obama bowed to the emperor of Japan, and lots of conservatives are mad. The American leader should stand tall in front of other leaders, they say. Personally, I applaud diplomacy with our allies. I reject the idea that our leader should be the supreme authortarian leader of the world. If we were talking about Lord Voldamort of Iran, on the other hand...

Despite the buzz from her new book, Sarah Palin's popularity and credibility continue their descent into the abyss. A real shame. Too bad no one predicted a year ago that she wasn't qualified to lead a girl scout troop, much less a tiny city, much less a sparsely populated state (a job she quit to make money on a book tour), much less a country. Oh wait, someone did say something like that. A lot. It was me.

A new study on some people from some island off the coast of nowhere says that you can predict a person's future criminality by their startle response at three years of age (whether they jump when you startle them with a loud noise). Criminal masterminds don't jump as much. Point one: a relationship between two things doesn't mean one causes the other. Point two: there's no point two--A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TWO VARIABLES DOESN'T MEAN YOU CAN INFER CAUSALITY. I am not going to say this again. (Yes I am.)

There was another likely heart attack on the train this morning. It was in another train car, so I didn't really see what happened, but there was one major difference: on three different occasions, the conductor announced over the intercom that there was a medical emergency, and he asked if there was a doctor or nurse on board. This call for help could have been because the staff on the train was better prepared after the last time, but I also couldn't help but wonder if it was because this person was White and affluent (I saw him when they wheeled him off the train), whereas the last one was Black and homeless (who was forced--literally--to walk off the train). According to the conductor, the White guy didn't even want medical attention. The Black guy couldn't even move and could barely speak.

On the bus today, the bus driver almost rear-ended a car in front of us. The bus driver's response: "I need a drink." Later the driver announced to the bus that her sister just had twins. From an adult female in the back of the bus, "Ain't her butt hurt?!" I had to try and stifle my laughter because I was sitting next to one of my professors. Good times on public transit.

The other day at the gas station, a van cut in front of me in line. I ended up at a pump at the same time as the van anyway, so I wans't terribly concerned. When an older gentleman (65ish) got out of the passenger seat, I laughingly said, "You kind of cut in front of me there, sir." His response? "You weren't in line, and you're dumb!"

Wow. Really? So I went about pumping my gas, and as I thought about it, I figured that they (an older woman was driving) could have made an honest mistake. I went over to say that it was ok if it had been an accident. "It wasn't an accident!," he said as me moved menacingly toward me. Really? Menacingly?

Then the woman got out of the car, walked right up to my face (all 4'10" of her), and gave me the finger. "Go back to your car, a**hole!," she shrilled as she told her husband to stop talking to "that piece of trash." I told him I was sorry for the life he must be living, and I walked away.

She followed me to my car, wrote down my license plate number, and yelled back to her husband, "Ohhhh, and he's a Yankee!!!" As if that explained my 'behavior.' Sorry to tell you lady: that war is over, and the Yankees won, so I guess that makes us all Yankees. Even those of us who are missing some teeth and are filled with vitriol and spite and perhaps demons or turds of some sort. I told her to "have a nice day," and I drove off.

In an unrelated matter, if anyone wants to get me a Taser for Christmas, I wouldn't turn it down.

I noticed an unkempt man on the train this morning. He stood out because I've started to be able to recognize all the regular riders. He was wearing a dirty sweatshirt with the hood up. He looked back at me with bloodshot eyes as I walked past him to my usual seat. He looked troubled. A few stops later, he staggered past me to exit the train, and I briefly wondered where he might be going.

I turned my attention back to the book I was studying, but as the train pulled away, I heard and felt a loud thump, kind of like the noise the wheels of a plane make when they're pulled back into the plane's body after takeoff. "New train noise," I thought.

I didn't think more of it, but a man in front of me pivoted in his seat to look and see what was going on. "Hey!", he said. I turned around and saw the man crumpled motionless on the floor of the train, about a foot behind my seat. He looked dead. He wasn't. He was clutching his skinny left arm and contorted in pain. He hadn't been drunk when he staggered by me before, he had been having a heart attack.

I whipped out my cell phone to call 911. It wasn't on. By the time it had booted up, the train attendant had made his way to us and was radioing dispatch to have the paramedics meet us at the next stop, which wasn't for about 10 minutes because we were in the middle of nowhere, not even near a road. It felt like eternity. He was clearly getting worse. His lips were turning blue. I thought about yelling across the train to see if anyone had an aspirin to give him, but I didn't want to make it worse if he wasn't having a heart attack or was already taking something else.

I led him in some cognitive-behavioral pain reduction breathing exercises instead. His lips lost the blue tinge, but that might have been a coincidence. When we finally reached the next station the paramedics were gruff as they examined him, helped him to his feet, and made their way out of the train. I couldn't see any more as the train pulled away.

The other passengers resumed their usual morning conversations about TV and the weather and what they'd had for breakfast, and the train schedule. I tried to go back to my book. I could only stare at the pages.

I've recently become a firm believer in the idea that sale prices are worthless indicators of something's value. Yes, there are times when you can get discounts on products, but stores don't generally do things for the benefit of their customers. So, when something is marked down from $199.99 to $99.00, it's unlikely that you're actually getting something worth more than $100.00. That being said...

Yesterday Sarah and I went mattress shopping. We weren't intent on buying anything, but we do have two spare bedrooms that we eventually wanted to get beds for. Long story short, I used some negotiation techniques I've been studying. I walked around the store and made the salesman chase us every time he tried to show us something. I offered to buy two if the price was good. I offered to buy a manufacturer's sample. I allowed him to believe he offended me (which got me the manager's discount). I even asked for a better price flat out--and got it--and then asked for a better price flat out again--and got it. All told, we ended up with one high end mattress, one quality mattress, two sets of box springs, two frames, delivery, and setup. Total listed price: $2,000+. Price we paid: $780.

Yet as much as I worked the salesman, I couldn't help but wonder if somehow he was still working me. I'm sure he was.

I've been running a study all day today in a computer lab on campus, and all day, I've felt like I was on some sort of extended caffeine buzz: I've been flitting around like a hummingbird and talking about 2x as fast as I normally do. Me on fast-forward. Me on research.

I guess there's something strangely exhilarating about waiting to see if the results of the study I've designed are going to turn out like I think. Because if they do, in the next few days, I'll have scientifically proven (or maybe 'scientifically suggested' would be more accurate) something about human nature that has never before been scientifically proven/suggested--which is the point of all scientific research, not something special about my study.

Worst case scenario, the data will show that I was wrong, and I'll get some sort of research hangover. I'll deal with that as it comes.

I read a news report today about some research that was recently done investigating the connection between a high fat diet and symptoms of depression. The results indicated that a high fat diet is connected with increased levels of depression, such that those people with more depressive symptoms also tended to eat the highest proportions of fat. The news article suggested that, obviously, a diet high in fat causes depression.

No researcher with even a rudimentary knowledge of statistics would ever contend that the results of this study could even begin to suggest that a high fat diet causes depression (which may or may not be the case, but this research can't prove anything either way); however, the media likes to grab these stories for quick and easy headlines.

Here's a news headline for you: Pirates Cause Global Climate Change. As everyone knows, piracy has been on the rise. So has climate change. Therefore, pirates cause climate change. Right? Right??!!?? But wait, maybe there's a third variable. Maybe there's some other explanation. Maybe depressed people try to make themselves feel better by eating lots of Doritos. What about that? What about that!??

IF ANYONE OUT THERE IS LISTENING, A SIMPLE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TWO VARIABLES DOES NOT MEAN ONE CAUSES THE OTHER.