Keith Jarrett and neuroscience. Sympathetically innervated sweat glands are the exception when it comes to neurotransmitters — their transmitter is acetylcholine, but you would expect norepinephrine! Whoah!

It’s the Köln Concert.

I checked out a blog I haven’t looked at in a while, and… dooce still has it. Here’s a paragraph from her letter to her daughter on the occasion of her daughter’s 6th birthday:

I remember the last exam I took in the last class I had in college and the feeling afterward being unlike anything I could describe, like I’d just been let out of a prison I had been in since I was five years old. Welcome to that prison. Only it’s worse! You have to take tests and earn good grades! At least in prison you can write on the walls and hit people!

Felix of avoision writes about the Puppet Bike in downtown Chicago. Essentially, a guy pedals to an intersection, where he then sets up a puppet booth with many different characters and music.

These “Choreographed cats” were captured by Felix at the Puppet Bike a few days ago. Mobile puppet booths are awesome!

More at thepuppetbike.com.

Charlie Brooker, in “How To Report The News” helps us realize that the news produced all around the world everyday is just a parody of a tired format:

“He unfortunately was boring, so to wake you up: this is an animated chart, this is a silhouette representing the average family, and this is a lighthouse keeper being beheaded by a laser beam.”

WATCH THIS! It is hilarious. And true.

Everyday, I want to become better, but I don’t mean that in a small way. I want to be wholly… Faster. Smarter. Nicer. Stronger. More imaginative. Pursuing these ideals drives me, like the fire drives the steam engine, from the inside. This all worked for me, back when I showed up to a job and then went home at peace… I pursued my own goals and reached for the gold rings that I put in front of me.

But now, in school, there’s something external that everyday tells me I must be smarter, faster, better — and if I’m not, someone will get hurt. This produces a toxic tension: I want to improve upon a bunch of pieces of me while they want me to improve on but a few.

I can’t satisfy myself and them. And it drives me crazy.

Mykala knows that, every single time I open a bottle of tap water that has been sealed for a while, I’ll comment how “isn’t it interesting that it smells like chlorine, it must have reached equilibrium between the chlorine in the water and the chlorine in the air.” Every single time.

And yet, she still loves me.

I don’t fully understand what’s going on in China. I do have some dispiriting facts, though.

• I know that the dirty manner in which China burns coal (on a truly vast scale) is a very very irresponsible, short-sigh­ted way to keep up with their rising energy demands.
• I know that their pollution problems are enormous.
• I know that they’re running out of water.
• I know that the government is cruel to most of its people, preferring a punishing, inexorable destruction of citizen’s lives if anything stands in the way of growth:

The equation of the Chinese growth story that is changing the world (and keeping U.S. Wal-Mart customers happy) is unforgiving: Ten percent annual expansion is the guarantor of the Communist Party’s hold on power and so everything will be done to sustain it. Agonized debate (think U.S. health care reform or Afghan deployment) is not for China. Bulldozers are more its thing.

Furthermore, there’s this pervasive idea about entitlement, which was very much front and center when China single-handedly derailed the Copenhagen conference on climate. Here’s the line of reasoning: all the great developed countries in the world had a period where they polluted an unimaginable amount and pursued growth at all costs. Britain, America, and all others employed children, killed workers, and polluted uncontrollably before eventually stabilizing into (more) sustainable, clean, industrial countries.

The problem is one of scale. Let’s say you’re Britain in the 1790s… making 20% of the stuff that the world uses. That’s 20% of the stuff for 1.2 billion people. Ok. Now, let’s say you’re China in the 2000s… making 70% of the stuff that the world uses. That’s 70% of the stuff for 6.8 billion people. And all these people are demanding far far more trinkets, baubles, and shinies than their counterparts 210 years ago.

China feels entitled to this fast, irresponsible growth period that all the great nations went through. BUT, since the world economy is now so huge, the potential for damage to people and natural resources has grown untenably large. China shouldn’t get the carte blanche that other nations got, because China can do so much more lasting damage than those countries could ever imagine doing.

But like I said, I still don’t fully understand what’s going on there. It doesn’t seem good.

Removing the Dividing Screen

At this point in time, in the middle of dental school, I’ve spent many many hours in lecture halls. Here’s what I’ve found: a lot of professors are disorganized, and as a result tend to descend into tangential (yet important for the exam!) monologues that stray far from the ugly PowerPoint slide at hand. During these all-too-frequent digressions, one must be ready to transcribe a lot of information very quickly. To accomplish this, I have slowly adopted the use of a laptop during lectures.

You may wonder why have I held on to my pen and paper for so long. In fact, there are a few reasons for delaying a full-time switch to a laptop. First, the lecture halls are steeply raked, causing one’s sight-lines to the professor to be cut off by a computer screen — this interference makes lectures much less effective. Second, laptop keys are noisy (any keyboard noise is terribly distracting in quiet lecture halls). Finally, the professor wonders what I’m doing behind that screen. So, the laptop is efficient, but it cuts me off by taking me out of the lecture and into laptop-land. Despite the isolation it fosters, my only option when I need to record scads of information in a very short period of time is a laptop.

Until now.

Imagine a device allowing me to remain engaged in the lecture through eye contact, record notes quickly yet silently, and store all my books in feather-light digital form.

My oh my, suddenly the iPad looks compelling for any student in my position.

In Which Alex Says “And” A Lot

I just took the National Board Dental Examination, Part I. And here’s the thing… the freakin’ thing takes over your mind. I was talking to a few of my classmates who also took it early, and I wondered aloud if they were experiencing what I had been: “In all of our lectures, do you keep picking up random facts and thinking damn, THAT’S what the answer was?!” They said that they too were experiencing this. They agreed: it is an unpleasant side effect of answering so many questions — your brain is constantly searching for the answers.

So, at the end of the day you sit there and think WOW I’m glad to be done with that. Then your brain says “well, you might have to take it again if it didn’t go well.” And then another part of your brain says, OK X percentage results in passing. Do you think you got that many right? Well, you think: I got Y percentage on that half practice test I took… that was good enough for passing. Yes, your brain replies: but the actual test was a hellish journey through arcane facts — do you think you did that well again? I really don’t know.

And then a part of you is so happy that it’s over for the time being that you’re just giddy. I stood in the kitchen, watching the bread for my sandwich toast… and I started thinking this thought: “Toast sure is great. Is there anything better than toast? Hot, crispy bread. Wow, toast is great. I should get the word out on toast.” And then I caught myself: “Heeeey now, you’re just happy that you don’t feel guilty every moment you aren’t studying for boards, because you took them!” And you circle back around to “But you might not be done studying — you might have to do the same thing all over again, but in the beautiful month of May.”

AAAAAAAHHHHHH.

I paid $265 to take this test on a computer, and it takes them 3 weeks to get the results back to me. THREE WEEKS. So, I anticipate I’ll be like this until then.

Right now, I’m sitting here on the couch next to Mykala, and our cat George is gently purring as he sleeps on my lap. I don’t care how I did.

“Kopplin’s Coffee creates some of the most brilliant coffees, tasty teas and delicious hot chocolate in the Midwest.”

Winner of “Best Barista” and “Best Coffee Shop” in the Twin Cities in 2009. We’re going! As soon as I get these boards taken next week.

Industrialization: we’ve lost the ability to grow our own food, build our own shelter, entertain ourselves, and now, walk:

Slightly more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008 because they got distracted and tripped, fell or ran into something while using a cellphone to talk or text. That was twice the number from 2007, which had nearly doubled from 2006, according to a study conducted by Ohio State University, which says it is the first to estimate such accidents.

Gomez has a song called “Bone Tired”. Ben Ottewell’s singing makes the lyrics sound much more poetic than they look in print. Anyhow, it’s an interesting song from my perspective of early semester exhaustion.

Oh no, why do you always complain?
Burn bright but you’re bone tired and feeling it

Anyhow, the song’s good… and (coincidentally) semi-relevant. Also: one of my competencies for graduation is to start a patient on a smoking cessation program. If you know anyone who a smoker and might be receptive to some information about quitting, or is interested in trying to quit, let me know.

Other competencies include doing a complete set of dentures for a patient. I’m excited about that, to think that I helped them to be able to chew again is really exciting to me.

This afternoon, I’ll go into clinic for the second time. I’ll observe a student dentist (or hygiene student) go through a full patient appointment. You have to check the patient’s chart, understand underlying medical conditions, scan for drug conflicts, meet the patient, find out why the patient is there, determine recent changes in their medical history, consult with specialists about treatment plans, possibly do some treatment, take radiographs, explain things to the patient, obtain consent, plan the time of the next visit, and on and on.

I definitely feel confident in my hand skills… but that’s a small part of the entire visit. There is so much to learn.

I’m nervous for the first time I do this solo, which could be within a week. I’m not good at small talk… but I still need to practice. So, “yes” to small talk… but not too much, since I could put myself in a conversational cul-de-sac. I feel a little low on the knowledge required to do a great job at this. I realize that’s why we’ll be doing this for the next 2 and a half years… but I really would prefer to get some more observing experience in before I see my first patient.

Oh, and if you do want to come in for an appointment with me, send me a message and the school will get you in.

We’ll take good care of you.

I always thought it was “threw the rock away”. Mykala corrected me: it’s actually “do the rockaway”. The latter does make more sense.

Jay Leno wants to move his show to the Tonight Show’s time spot, bumping Conan a half hour into the next day (12:05). In wonderfully well-written letter, Conan O’Brien Says He Won’t Host ‘Tonight Show’ After Leno - NYTimes Media Decoder Blog:

Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry about my hair; it’s always been that way.

I enjoy both Leno and Conan (additionally, Jimmy Fallon’s show could mature into a great asset). But NBC has royally screwed up their entire late night schedule. If Leno wasn’t ready to retire, they should’ve let things be for a while… Leno at 11:35, followed by Conan… and then they chould have put Jimmy Fallon on after that. But this quagmire looks like it is going to kill off the institution of ‘The Tonight Show’, Conan’s career, and poor Jimmy Fallon’s show (still in its infancy). What a mess.

Gail Collins is quite funny; more so than I realized. Take a look at her recent column “The Wizard With a Bad Plan”

I would like to offer two comments about this. One is that professional athletes should not Twitter. I got this thought from Ashley Mayo, a student at the Columbia Journalism School, who showed me an essay that she had written on the subject, which included a tweet from one of the Indiana Pacers containing the good news that he had begun the day with a triumph over irregularity.

Steve Silberman, in Wired: “Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.” Here’s the part of the article I found most fascinating:

In one study, Benedetti found that Alzheimer’s patients with impaired cognitive function get less pain relief from analgesic drugs than normal volunteers do. Using advanced methods of EEG analysis, he discovered that the connections between the patients’ prefrontal lobes and their opioid systems had been damaged. Healthy volunteers feel the benefit of medication plus a placebo boost. Patients who are unable to formulate ideas about the future because of cortical deficits, however, feel only the effect of the drug itself. The experiment suggests that because Alzheimer’s patients don’t get the benefits of anticipating the treatment, they require higher doses of painkillers to experience normal levels of relief.

Sometimes, you enact a smoking ban, and clubs refuse to abide by the new rules:

Elliott Marcus, an associate commissioner of the health department, said that he knew where the trouble spots were. “It’s these high-end places for people who think that the rules don’t apply to them,” he said.

Let me tell you about a mistake I’ve made: at some point in your life, you’ll think the rules don’t apply to you. This is probably not true. It certainly wasn’t for me. So don’t get cocky.

I always love these articles about “costly signaling” — the pursuit of real, not-fakable signals of your mating fitness. Take a look at Sex and shopping – it’s a guy thing - New Scientist (emphasis mine):

The results here were equally clear: men in the mating condition, compared with the non-mating condition, said they would spend more money on the conspicuous luxuries, and that they would actually spend less on the inconspicuous necessities; there was no effect on female consumption decisions. In contrast, women in the mating condition, compared with those in the non-mating condition, said they would spend more time on conspicuous pro-social volunteering, but no more time on the inconspicuous pro-social activities. Again, there was no effect on male volunteering.

In the age of advanced makeup and cosmetic surgery, physical fitness is still a great example of costly signaling. Consider men: “Hey look, I have the time, money, baseline health, and motivation to take care of my body” is quite obvious to even the casual observer and can not be faked by gastric bypass weight loss surgery. Or consider this: ownership of expensive things can not be faked… at least not in the long run. For women: you can’t fake volunteering — it’s a binary thing, you’re either out there or you aren’t.

I don’t think the conclusions of these four studies should be taken as final, gospel truth, but they are a good starting point for thinking about the different ways women and men signal one another. A particularly interesting conclusion from one of the studies: women looking for a short term relationship are swayed by the car a man drives, but those looking for a long term partner tend not to care about the care he drives.

Barbara Strauch, in How to Train the Aging Brain:

Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education, she says. Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different. In a history class, that might mean reading multiple viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view of the world.

Confronting people with whom you disagree will only raise your blood pressure — but absorbing, internalizing, and critiquing ideas that run orthogonal to the “well-trodden paths in [your] synapses” will keep your brain’s abilities honed.

HTMLGIANT’s Grammar Challenge, courtesy of David Foster Wallace, is composed of ten of the most difficult grammar questions I have ever attempted to answer. Mykala and I worked on it together and got… some answers correct. If the sentence “I only spent six weeks in Napa” looks wrong to you, then take a look at the remaining sentences!

Reading the New Yorker (thanks, Katy!) with the afternoon sunlight streaming in through the window may be the single best way to spend an hour of a cold winter afternoon.

Mykala and I made a quick list of things we did in 2009. Here are my notes from our conversation:

THINGS WE DID THIS YEAR

Got married
Went to Hawaii
Survived 5 semesters of school (combined)
Moved in together
First married Christmas
Camped
Bought a real tree
Attended a cat funeral

I really liked 2009. 2010 has been good so far.

The picture below is a stack of the materials I covered for 3 of my 7 classes this past fall semester. I read, generated, or memorized every single one of the pages below.

That’s 1826 pages of paper.

Now, keep in mind that I’m not saying I did anything particularly special here: all my 95 classmates had to cover the same material in the same amount of time. It’s just… a rather large stack of paper.

Help the indie film “Dear Mr. Watterson - a cinematic exploration of Calvin & Hobbes” meet it’s production budget by donating (follow the link for details). They’re over half of the way to their $12,000 goal — I hope to be able to contribute, myself. A bit about the film:

Dear Mr. Watterson is a film that will look to the readers and fans of Calvin & Hobbes to tell the story of the strip and its creator. As we explore the art and impact of Bill Watterson through this unique perspective, the undying appreciation and love of Calvin & Hobbes and the man behind it will be evident in the anecdotes, stories, and memories shared by readers of the strip and friends and colleagues of Mr. Watterson.

This sounds like a great film, I’m excited to see what this little round of fundraising will do.