At my office, we often go to a place called Hamilton Deli, where they have a menu full of sandwiches that have interesting names. One day at lunch, some of us started talking about what our sandwiches would be if we could have our own sandwiches named after us, so I made my cubicle whiteboard into the CCNMTL Sandwich Menu, and invited people to add their sandwich to the menu. A week and a half ago, while we were at a different Deli, called “M2M”, one of my coworkers (Dan) had the crazy idea that we should post “The Mattes” up on the supplemental menu there! Basically, they had a bunch of cheap-looking printouts that were taped onto the deli counter glass, and we figured we could easily imitate them. So another one of my coworkers, Anders, gave Dan his camera and, after putting a quarter up on the glass for a scale-marker, Dan took this photo.

Back in the office, Dan prepares a Word document that looked exactly like the menu! After handing it off to me for refinement, I played around with the layout of the ingredients, but I thought we should go back a second time to take a look at their conventions and measure the height of the sheet. A day or two later, we went back for a second reconnaisance mission and I took a close look at how they listed their sandwich ingredients. I’ll spare you the details I took a measurement of the menu sheet using a napkin that I held up to it and folded at the edge. I also noticed that their menus had a thin laminate, and decided that I could make use of a laminating sheet I got for free at the vendor fair. After printing out the sheet, laminating it, and rubbing it around on my filthy windowsill for some “aging” effects, it was ready to go… but we needed to wait for the right time!

I figured that the Friday after Columbia’s commencement would be a pretty dead time, and Dan said that 12:45 was a fairly dead time for lunch, so we went for it. I had four of my coworkers come with me to M2M, and I had the sign in my hand, tape on the edges, ready to go. We walked in, and to my alarm, the place was not at all empty. There were several people in line ahead of us! Luckily, by the time we got in position in front of the case, nobody had come in behind us. While two of my accomplices leaned into the counter to my left and put their elbows up on the counter to block the view of any casual observers, I quickly placed the sign using the hand-motion I had envisioned so that it would make as little noise as possible and would be executed in less than a second. It was perfectly horizontal, but about a half inch too high. It didn’t matter, because it was up. Somehow, neither I nor any of my accomplices lost their composure. I asked Anders to take a picture of me in front of the sign, and here is the proof. My accomplice’s face has been obscured for his protection ;-). M2M makes tasty sandwiches, but nothing tasted as good as our victory! Here is a close-up shot.

After our victory, we pondered the potential impact of our rogue sandwich. We figured that if The Mattes stayed up for a week, it was probably going to stay up there forever. We thought… what if they renovated the place and added The Mattes to their permanent menu? What if they printed it on their take-out menu? What if other delis started to carry The Mattes? It could become the next “Monte Cristo” or “Reuben” and be an instantly-recognized sandwich name across the country! Unfortunately, when I went in this morning… the sign was not there. It had been removed sometime during the weekend. It was a big letdown, but we had a ton of fun making it happen. Hopefully, the M2M people have a sense of humor and they thought it was funny, too.

Why is this recipe named after Paris Hilton? When you taste the sauce you will find yourself uttering her trademarked phrase: “That’s Hot!” This is a Japanese-influenced recipe, using grated ginger, pressed garlic, and wasabi for heat, and mirin for a sweet taste. The marinade and sauce use mainly soy sauce as the base. This is a lot of work, but really tasty!

Required Equipment:

• Grater
• Garlic Press
• Peeler or paring knife
• bowl for marinating
• small mixing bowl for sauce prep
• Skillet
• Small saucepot

Ingredients for Marinade:

• 1/2 a stick of grated ginger
• 2 cloves of pressed garlic
• a little bit of wasabi mayonaise
• enough soy sauce to cover the chicken

Ingredients for Sauce:

• 1/3 a stick of grated ginger
• 2 cloves of pressed garlic
• some wasabi mayonaise
• a small amount of mirin
• a good amount of soy sauce
• a small amount of flour and water

The Chicken:

• 2 Chicken breasts
• small amounts of olive oil and soy sauce

Suggested serving: serves 2, try also grilling/frying portabella mushroms with some soy sauce and EV olive oil, then mixing them in with white rice and the chicken on top.

Procedure:

• Peel and grate 1/2 a stick of fresh ginger into the marinade bowl.
• Press the garlic into the bowl.
• Add some wasabi mayonaise. I’m not sure if this actually makes much of a difference in the marinade!
• Now add soy sauce. There should be enough soy sauce to cover the chicken, and there should also be enough garlic and ginger to coat the chicken while its soaking.
• Add the chicken to the marinade, and mix it around so that it gets covered with garlic and ginger and soaking in soy sauce. Cover this with saran wrap or a lid and put it back in the fridge for some time. I did it for an hour and it was great.
• While the chicken is marinating, you can prepare the sauce. Start by grating the rest of your ginger and pressing the garlic into the mixing bowl.
• Add some wasabi mayonaise, to taste. Unlike in the marinade, I am sure you will taste this, so gauge your taste appropriately.
• Add some mirin, so that the sauce becomes like a chunky syrup. This is the only source of sweetness in this recipe, so don’t be too conservative with it if you want it to come out sweet.
• Add soy sauce, so that the sauce now becomes a thick light brown liquid.
• Add some flour and water (mix together first so there are no lumps) to expand and thicken the sauce a bit.
• Now you can do your dishes and wash everything you don’t need any more! Or, if you’ve got a dishwasher, you can load it up I suppose
• When the chicken has marinated for a while (I let it go for 1 hour), it will have soaked up the marinade and should apear reddish brown. Take it out of the fridge so it warms up a bit.
• Prepare your skillet: heat it up on low heat, and add olive oil and some soy sauce, mixing it up a bit. These two ingredients will not blend, but that’s okay as long as they are distributed.
• Slowly add your chicken. If it’s too cold and the pan is really hot, you may cause the oil to get angry and leap out of the pan, so be careful.
• When you’ve got about 5-10 minutes remaining, put the sauce into the saucepot and heat it so it will simmer off a little bit of water by the time your chicken is ready.
• When the chicken is ready, you’re ready! As I said before, I fried some portabella mushroom slices in extra-virgin olive oil and soy sauce, and mixed them in with some white rice, put the chicken on top and then poured the sauce on it all.
• When you first taste the dish, you must say “mmm…. that’s hot!”

When it comes to choosing what kind of career we pursue, I think most people would agree that they would prefer one that makes them a whole lot of money. However, I think a lot of people who have the means to land themselves a high-paying job may not give this issue enough thought. If you will be working 10-hour days and it’s going to be hell for those 10 hours, is that worth making a six-figure salary?

A week has 168 hours in it. Let’s say you want to get 6 hours of sleep every night… that takes away 42 hours, leaving 126 hours. Take away the 50 hours of your week doing hard work that you don’t enjoy, you are left with 76 hours a week to enjoy yourself. Not too bad, but what if you were enjoying yourself during those 50 hours (or you worked less hours)? You’d be enjoying yourself for 126 hours a week.

I guess a big factor in all this is… how much does it matter to you that you don’t enjoy what you spend most of your day doing 5 days a week? I would not choose a high-salary job if I didn’t enjoy it. Are people like me foolish for insisting on a job that we enjoy? Try thinking about this in terms of “tolerance”… Maybe we have a low “bad time tolerance” and we will choose to avoid having a bad time at the cost of ever having a luxurious lifestyle. On the other hand, maybe the high-salary people’s “good time tolerance” is so high that they need to have a crazy wild time just to feel any enjoyment?

Once time is lost, you never get it back. However, money comes and goes… it’s variable. So how much money is your free time worth? I had to answer this question when I began raising my rate for freelance work, because it was a direct trade-off: free time for dollars. I can’t say I love my freelance work, but it’s not so bad. I would, however, much rather be doing other things. So how much money is your free time worth? I guess it depends on how much you enjoy performing the service you’re selling… but after a certain point, the less free time you have, the more it’s worth! I know when I was younger, I wanted to make sure I had lots of free time. I would spend most of that time playing video games… now I waste my time writing weblog entries that nobody reads If someone wanted to pay me for doing this, how much could I ask for? Shouldn’t I theoretically not feel the need to be compensated since I’d be doing it anyway?

I just read a really interesting editorial on msn slate and I thought it was worthy of posting a link to it here. This article is Judith Shulevitz’s take on why strict churches are so strong. Here is an excerpt:

Among the nondevout, piety of this magnitude is often dismissed as a social pathology. The mildly religious are more respectful but no more helpful; they just shake their heads and say, fine for them, but not for me. Not even the pious have figured out how to communicate to the rest of the world why strict religious observance appeals to them. They just say that they do what they do because God wants them to do it—an argument that simply isn’t going to make sense to a nonbeliever. Or they lay claim to moral superiority, which, if you believe that morality derives from God, is pretty much the same as saying you’re doing what God wants you to do.

Let’s forget all about whether or not there is a God and assume that a hypothetical person believes in God. What determines how devout this person will be? Does this person choose the strict conservative church or the more progressive church? In most cases it’s probably the person’s upbringing that determines how devout they will be, but sometimes when a person moves to a new area they can make a choice as to how to lead their religious life. I know religious people who range from atheist jews, who strictly obey kosher rules and fast during Yom Kippur, to someone who has travelled the world for missionary teaching excursions. Clearly, people can be as religious as they want to be. This essay I linked to is a great discussion of why strict churches are popular, but it made me wonder what a person’s pyschological motivation for that decision would be.

Even though I read Nim for my psychology class, it is still a book and therefore I realized I need to review it! “Nim” is the story of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was socialized in a human environment with the hopes of seeing whether or not he would develop human-like communication abilities through sign language. This experiment spanned several years and was conducted at Columbia University by Herbert Terrace (whom I have not yet talked to, but I have gotten fleeting glimpses of him around the Psych building).

I think the most interesting aspect of this book is that it tells about the experiment in a narrative form, and spends a great deal of time not just on Nim, but also on the people involved in the experiment. I won’t ruin the book by saying what happens, but it was a really compelling, thought-provoking, and amusing read. Highly recommended for anyone interested in linguistics, apes, or cognition! If psychology is not “your bag” then you probably would find this book a bit heavy. Nonetheless, Terrace did a surprisingly good job of describing the people involved and by the end of the book I felt like I would miss some of them afterwards! I’m going to give Nim 4/5 stars.

When I was little, I think dodgeball was my favorite activity. I loved it in gym class, I loved it in camp. I didn’t understand why it wasn’t in the olympics. Although it’s been years since I’ve played it, and I now understand why it will never be an olympic sport, I was still really excited to see a movie about it.

Dodgeball stars Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller as rival gym owners who find there way into a dodgeball competition. There are lots of funny scenes, lots of great surprise celebrity cameos, and it was all in all a good time. Surprisingly, I didn’t find Ben Stiller’s performance all that funny. He was good, but not Zoolander good. I actually thought Justin Long probably gave the best performance of the movie! Hopefully he’ll continue to make comedies.

Basically, this movie was just plain fun. Not especially brilliant, but that’s not what comedies are often for. 3/5 stars.

Branded to Kill was lent to me by a movie-aficionado friend, and he promised me it was the weirdest thing I would have ever seen (He was wrong! This is still the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen!) . It’s a criterion collection disc, but it’s packaging suggests that it’s pretty offbeat and crazy. From what I gather, this is a genre of Japanese film which is nearly unheard of in the USA, even though in Japan, it is well-known. It seems like even in Japan, this kind of thing must be considered a “B-movie”, though. It’s called “Nikkatsu Action” and it seems to have been created by Studio Nikkatsu. See this fan site for some info and pictures. It is, from what I can tell: dark, overly-dramatic, artsy action :-).

Anyway… this movie was certainly different! It dives right into the thick of things, and the whirlwind continues throughout the movie. It gets a little boring at times, but it definitely won’t put you to sleep. The subtitles should keep you awake anyway. It’s just that at times, things get so weird that you can’t help but be thrown awkwardly back into reality and ask “what the fuck is going on here?” I think the only artsy action movie I’ve ever seen before this was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but that was a classy movie, whereas this is decidedly low-class and very reminiscent of film noir.

Also of interest, the star of this movie, Jo Shishido, has the most distracting cheeks you’ll ever see on a movie star! In the fifties, Jo decided to get plastic surgery and enhance his cheekbones to make him look more like a “bad guy,” and this somehow helped his career take off! See here for before and after photos.

Overall, this movie was novel, interesting, thought-provoking, and funny. However, I just didn’t love it! It was very odd, and although sometimes I react positively to odd movies, I reacted negatively to most of the oddities in this movie. See this only if you love artsy movies and action movies! 3/5 stars!

In Go, once a piece is placed on the board it can never be moved (unless it gets captured, in which case it is removed). This means you must place your stones with the utmost efficiency and effectiveness! Any waste on your part is an opportunity for your opponent to be more productive. There are two terms that apply to the notion of who currently has the initiative in play: sente and gote. Sente means that a player’s move will demand a direct response, so if I make a move “in sente,” that means that if you ignore the move and play at an unrelated area of the board, my follow-up play might be extremely bad for you. Gote means that a player’s move does not demand a direct response. After I play a gote move, you can play wherever you want on your turn because my move does not threaten a follow-up. The notions of sente and gote are somewhat subjective, but, like most things in go, they emerge as an undeniable truth for experienced players.

Clearly, it is in your best interest to maintain sente as often as possible, because that way you essentially control the direction of play, and your opponent will be responding to your moves while you get to place your stones where it works best for you. One of the best concepts I ever learned was that of “making territory while attacking.” This is, in my mind, one of the most important strategies in the game because moves that fit this strategy will both give you profit and maintain your control over the direction of play, allowing you to do the same thing the next turn! This is an extremely productive way to play, and although it is difficult to draw direct analogies between this strategy for the game of go and the game of life, it is a good moral to follow: be productive! Take initiative and you will actually exert influence on others, rather than merely responding to others.

I hope nobody follows this advice literally and attacks other people in the hopes of creating territory for themselves. That sounds like gang warfare! The “direction of play” concept applies to life a lot more than the whole attacking/territory part. A common occurence is a string of sente moves which create some desired shape, followed by a very valuable but gote move which does not demand a reply. The proverb that governs this kind of playing is “Play urgent moves before big moves.” This means: respond to those moves that demand a response, and when the opportunity arises, play that big valuable move you’ve been wanting to play. This proverb applies to the player who is responding to the player who has sente. For the player who has sente, it is important to note that it’s not always appropriate to attack and demand a response. It is sometimes better to play a big gote move rather than an attacking sente move. This judgement is a crucial one, and takes a very long time to refine. Similarly, in life it is important to strike a balance between taking initiative all the time and being passive all the time.

This movie is adapted from the very popular book, which I have reviewed here. I am really impressed with the quality of the adaptation, as they did not mess with the overall theme and feeling of it very much. It is still very much a seemingly random string of events, and it is still funny and brilliant.

Whenever movies are adapted from books, it’s fair to judge it in three ways: modifications, additions, and subtractions. I honestly can’t say I recall exactly what they subtracted from the book, but I guess that’s a good thing. They added some stuff which I truly think helped the adaptation (no spoilers), and the modifications were mostly harmless (pun intended for those who’ve read the book).

Sam Rockwell was a fantastic Zaphod Beeblebrox, Mos Def was a very good Ford, and Martin Freeman was a very good Arthur, although I can’t say he was magnetic. Nebbishy protagonists are rarely likeable, though, so it’s fine. The adorable Zooey Deschanel was a greatTrillian. Again, the characters were so dry in the book, that by comparison they are relatively vivid on screen. Maybe it was just that Zaphod was so completely off-the-wall that he made the others look boring! I hated his character, but he stole the show and Sam Rockwell totally kicked ass in that role. Apparently Jim Carey was considered for the role, and I am so glad he didn’t get it because it would have been just another Jim Carrey performance and it would have really taken away from the rest of the movie. Instead, Rockwell played Zaphod like a hyperactive 9-year-old with a huge ego and a sex drive.

Like I said earlier, the movie basically sticks with the “randomness” of the book, but they managed to develop Martin’s character much more than in the book, and his relationship with Trillian is much more clear and plays a central role in his motivation. Adding romance to an otherwise nerdy/action/sci-fi movie is often a recipe for disaster, but they were extremely cautious with this addition and it ended up helping, not hurting. Whether or not the randomness was irritating is a matter of opinion. I can give a thumbs up when a movie deviates from the normal, expected structure, but it’s frustrating when it doesn’t amount to much. I think this was a satisfying deviation, and overall I enjoyed it… so I’m giving this movie 4 stars. Fans of the book will not be disappointed!

Before you see the movie, learn some more about dolphins!

In case you’ve been wondering why I have not been writing much, why I have taken a while to return your e-mails, etc., this is why (please click that link, it’s funny). I’ve been taking a metacognition class at Columbia this semester, and we had to write a final paper on basically anything we wanted. It had to be about 10 pages and include 2-4 references. In all honesty, I put more time and effort into this paper than any other paper in my life, even though I have written longer papers. That photo of the stack of books is a bit misleading, but I thought it would be funny to show it first and explain after. I actually did take out eleven books from 3 different libraries, requested 4 articles over inter-library loan, read a book chapter from the author’s web site, and hand-copied a paper from a journal… but I didn’t read it all! There were 2 articles I didn’t read past the intro, three books that I never read more than 5 pages from, the most pages I read from any single book was probably 55-60 pages, and on average I probably read 15 pages each from the rest of them.

The problem was that I decided to write about something we barely covered at all in class: developmental cognition. If I can make a reference to “The Matrix”: I didn’t know how far the rabbit hole went. As a result of my ignorance of the topic, I would read about it some, and decide on an area I wanted to write about. Then I would research that area a bit and discover that it’s got a number of sub-areas to it. I would have to extend my thesis, or research more detail and cut down my thesis. I was also having trouble grasping a thesis because it seemed like everything was already discovered and agreed upon. I originally wanted to write about what makes people want to share their thoughts with other people; a very broad topic, far too complex to write a thesis about. I then shifted towards what inspires our first words, so I took out a bunch of books on linguistic development. I then saw that this was also far too complex, and cut off the linguistic part and decided to concentrate on prelinguistic development and enculturation. However, enculturation was again far too complex, so I had to cut it down to prelinguistic development. I submitted a thesis on this to the professor who said she thinks it could work, but she couldn’t see how I could do it in less than 50 pages! I ended up cutting off the last 1/3 of my thesis, which was the part that I didn’t realize could cover 40 pages, and thanks to an extension I finished the paper! It was 10 and a half pages with 5 references.

If you’d like to read the paper, here it is!

Fever Pitch had a lot of potential: the Farrely Brothers directing, Drew Barrymore, Jimmy Fallon, a baseball love story… but unfortunately it just didn’t work out. This was the worst movie I’ve seen in years. The plot was so predictable you could walk out of the theater within 20 minutes and guess the rest of the movie (and you might as well walk out after that anyway, unless you’re dying to see Johnny Damon’s cameo). This movie is for Red Sox fans only!

Here is the basic plot (semi-spoiler): Jimmy Fallon plays the most hardcore Red Sox fan on Earth, who is having trouble sharing his passion for the Sox with the women he gets involved with. Drew Barrymore is a successful business woman who is having trouble finding a nice guy who she connects with. They meet, fall in “love” (it’s hard to tell from the acting)… of course the fandom gets in the way of the relationship, and you can guess the rest. There is hardly any Farrely Brothers nuttiness to keep you laughing and Jimmy Fallon is a painfully bad actor. Drew Barrymore did her best, but she couldn’t re-write the script so it’s unfortunate she had to be a part of this wreck of a movie.

I suppose if I were a Sox fan, I would have been amused enough by the degree to which Fallon’s character is into the Sox, and there is a good amount of in-game footage as well as nice scenes at Fenway. Fandom has a way of making rational people pretty irrational (myself included), so I can forgive any Red Sox fan who liked this movie There is a cameo by Johnny Damon, Jason Varitek, and Trot Nixon. I’ve heard the movie that this is loosely based on is much better, so you might want to check out the original Fever Pitch, which is about soccer instead of baseball.