March 21st, 2008 nick
make God cry, according to Colbert. But doing my state taxes this year was about as tear-free as any tax session I’ve ever had. With my federal taxes in hand, it took me less than 10 minutes to complete and submit my state taxes online. It was awesome.
The peas are up but now the tomato and basil seedlings are leggy, craning high and far towards the grow light or the sunlight, depending on which batch they are in. Can we slow down their seeming unhealthy growth? Any fellow gardeners have tips or suggestions?
Posted in gardening, miscellany | 2 Comments »
March 21st, 2008 nick
We watched the first two episodes of Season 2 of the Wire tonight. This is playing with fire, especially with only a few weeks to go before my orals — no time to get sucked into McNulty’s latest antics. And yet…
Posted in books & movies, miscellany, pastimes | No Comments »
March 19th, 2008 nick
Johanna got an op-ed piece in the Washington Post on Monday on how for-profit companies want to be able to run debt management companies that will “give advice” to people in debt. Sounds like a bad idea to me.
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March 19th, 2008 nick
We hit up the Woodberry Kitchen tonight; a place kind of like the Dogwood — the same emphasis on local, seasonal food, a rustic decor and $20-$30 entrees. Bottom line: great food. We savored a Ancho Sage Sausage starter with baked beans and then moved on to a cider-brined pork chop (most tenderest porkest chopest I’ve ever had) and short ribs with an amazing red wine sauce. So, a little heavy on the meat dishes, but damn was it ever good. The crowd seemed a little too Roland Park, i.e. white-haired and gussied up, but what could we expect from a place next to the new Woodberry condos serving expensive local food?
My favorite menu touch is that they advertise the Baltimore City tap water on the menu and will serve it to you in tall capped glass bottles, with added carbonation. Sweet.
The server was a little rushed or overworked. He always seemed to be running somewhere, which did make us feel a little less at ease. But he did bring us some delicious bread and flavorful butter. We may have to start buying butter from the milk guys at market. We didn’t quite realize what we were missing.
And, while we passed on dessert, we savored a ride back home on the Hampden Shuttle Bug, whose first stop is just a few steps outside the restaurant. Probably only my second or third time on the bus system in Baltimore. It’s that bad. But this time it hit the spot.
Posted in date night, food | No Comments »
March 19th, 2008 nick
The only thing that annoyed me about watching Obama’s speech on race in America on YouTube today was the obnoxious tabloid-like headlines that CNN kept updating along the bottom. Including the title of this post. It was like having your
own personal New York Post headline writer jamming his latest “gem” in your face after every memorable (or not) line.
Other than that, the speech was amazing. Johanna and I sat through all 45 minutes of it, captivated by the fact that anyone, let along a politician running for President, would be that honest about the racial problems in America. And not just the problems, and the detailed psychology on each side, black and white, but how to look past the problems and see a common vision for a (cue the campaign message) more inclusive, less polarized country.
He got me. After all these months of holding out, saying that I wasn’t quite sure just how much of a difference there was, supporting Obama but not quite wholeheartedly, he got me to bite this time with what came across as a honest, complex and personal reflection on the problems that face America. Am I guilty of the liberal white guilt, finally feeling like I can absolve myself by donating to the Obama08 campaign? Maybe. But I’d rather think of it as being guilty of being charmed by a thoughtful reflection on a huge, important, and all too often ignored challenge in this country. I have this vision of his advisors saying to Hillary’s and Ferraro’s image on can the TV, “do you really want us to go there? because we can go there. we can play this game ….” and then whipping out the pen and starting to write this speech. Or maybe they’ve had it written for months, just waiting to break it out.
Well, congrats Barack. You just earned a $50 contribution from the 611.
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March 17th, 2008 nick
it’s been a mostly quiet weekend. Paul and I did the PoNY track workout yesterday. A fairly light pre-season set of plyos and a few hard laps around the track, but nothing too bad. This is the first time in years that I’m psyched enough about an ultimate season to be training this early. There’s buzz that a great coed team is going to come together in the DC/Baltimore area. And so far, the men’s team from NYC is still telling me that I can try out for them.
Last weekend, Becca and I hit up the Bodies exhibit. Even though she griped that the textual explanations of things weren’t good enough (they probably weren’t — I didn’t pay that much attention to them), the bodies themselves were pretty captivating. There were some where the nerves were preserved and looked like little pieces of floss hung between the muscles. Others where they’d slice away a knee-cap or a big butt muscle so you could look underneath it. The muscles themselves looked a little like big things of beef jerky. Becca thought that if you saw someone you knew that you’d be able to recognize them. I said that I disagreed except for on the ones where they leave the facial skin intact. Also, the room of fetuses and a pregnant mother were pretty amazing. They had little vials with babies that ranged from a few weeks to a few months old. Even on one of the little babies you could see these little fingers, about the width of a few hairs. Really tiny!
I’ve been starting to tense up about writing this big paper. It’s coming along all right so far (32 pages and counting…) but there’s still a lot of work to do. The first draft is due to Ron in a week. I’ve started to procrastinate by playing Scrabulous Blitz games (4 minutes long, place as many words as you can on your own board). It’s hard, but addictive.
The peas finally poked out this weekend. Looks like the newer seeds from Fedco had a better germination rate than the older ones from last year.
Posted in friends, gardening, ultimate | No Comments »
March 17th, 2008 nick
There’s a movement afoot in the Biostats department to get a wiki up on the department webpage where students (and others too) can create a master cheat-sheet for how to get the most out of your computer: compendium of tips and tricks for the casual user but with a focus also on programs that all of us stats students know and love, like Emacs, LaTeX, R, etc…
Since the last time I had to build the machine up from scratch (back when I got agrippa in the spring of 2004), things have gotten a lot easier. There were many things that I had to hack in one way or another last time that this time work like a charm out of the box. While it’s nice to know that if something goes wrong, I might know where to turn to fix it, it’s also nice to not have to deal with it and spend time focusing on more important stuff.
So, here’s a link to Nick’s official Mac installation notes. They’re rough and not fully explained in places — feel free to email me or drop a comment on this post if something doesn’t make sense or links have been updated, etc…
Posted in tech | No Comments »
March 14th, 2008 nick
We went to the Golden West tonight for date night. I forgot just how much fun their decor is. They’d added some branches hovering near the ceiling with some wooden chimes dangling off. Also, there were some new chinese wind sock fish hanging from the tin-cobbled rafters. The waiters there give the black-jeans-black-Tshirt hipster waitrons at the Rocket a run for their money. Lots of big-rimmed glasses and tight jeans and striped button-up shirts with those trendy little pearl buttons. Whatever. The service was good, the food unusal (Johanna got a coconut curry with eggs and sweet potato!) and our elegant and run-down-yet-elegant-corner-couch-velvet-clad-spring-sagging-booth-seating arrangement kept us snuggling up to each other all evening.
My burger was a little underdone (I didn’t ask for it medium-well, neither did our waitron ask how I’d like it) but the fried pickles (another elbow-jab at the Rocket?) were good, as were the garlic fries. $45 including tip and a pitcher (1/2 price) of Dogfish Head, and we were set for the evening. It’s funny, as much as I like it here, this isn’t the first time I’ve come away from a dinner reeling a little bit from the richness (or underdoneness, in this case) of the food.
Posted in date night, food | 1 Comment »
March 8th, 2008 nick
An article in the Sun this morning got me thinking about placebos. Like good wine (according to recent research), the effect of a placebo can vary with its cost. If we perceive it to be a more expensive drug, we’ll find it to be more effective than we might otherwise. So when and how do we start to prescribe placebos to people? If part of the treatment is keeping the patient in the dark about what they are really being prescribed, how much latitude (if any) should a doctor have for keeping patients and their families in the dark about a treatment? And if you will respond better to a more expensive treatment, shouldn’t sound medical advice dictate that you should be prescribed an expensive treatment?
Lots of weird questions here. But it doesn’t seem like there’s much way to take advantage of the placebo effect in a way that is ethical. Maybe a doctor could keep a stash of sugar pills and call them “samples” of a fancy new expensive drug. Maybe a doctor could keep the family of a patient in the loop, but not the patient. But all of these things involve some kind of deception on the part of the doctor. Is there something in the Hippocratic oath against that?
One article [subscription required -- sorry, I hate doing that], from a fairly recent issue of the BMJ suggests that
[t]he way that the physician reports the nature of the placebo she is offering is important here, as she tries to maximise the therapeutic effect without being dishonest with the patient. A possible statement might take the form of: “I would like to offer you a pill which I believe can help lessen your suffering. I do not know exactly how it works. I have other pills to offer whose mechanism is clearer, but I am not sure that they will work better for you, and they may also entail more serious side effects.” In this manner, the physician is being open and honest with the patient.
And they continue, offering a set of practical guidelines:
The following rules might serve the physician as guidelines for the justified use of placebo in clinical practice:
- The intentions of the physician must be benevolent: her only concern the wellbeing of the patient. No economical, professional, or emotional interest should interfere with her decision.
- The placebo, when offered, must be given in the spirit of assuaging the patient’s suffering, and not merely mollifying him, silencing him, or otherwise failing to address his distress.
- When proven ineffective the placebo should be immediately withdrawn. In these circumstances, not only is the placebo useless, but it also undermines the subsequent effectiveness of medication by undoing the patient’s conditioned response and expectation of being helped.
- The placebo cannot be given in place of another medication that the physician reasonably expects to be more effective. Administration of placebo should be considered when a patient is refractory to standard treatment, suffers from its side effects, or is in a situation where standard treatment does not exist.
- The physician should not hesitate to respond honestly when asked about the nature and anticipated effects of the placebo treatment he is offering.
- If the patient is helped by the placebo, discontinuing the placebo, in absence of a more effective treatment, would be unethical.
The last point here is interesting too — how once it becomes an acceptable treatment, you can’t take it away!
Posted in miscellany | No Comments »
March 6th, 2008 nick
Grano tonight. The new “pasta bar” on the Avenue, at Hickory I think. It is what it claims to be, a little bar/diner place that serves pasta. The food wasn’t amazing, but it was not that expensive either. $30 for two dinners, including a salad and garlic bread. It was good pasta, served by a guy with a legitimate Italian accent who would drop “bene”’s an “ciao”’s in the course of conversation. The tomato sauces were less thick than the ones that we usually make, but my fusili puttanesca had a nice dose of capers and olives and was pretty tasty.
Posted in date night, food | 2 Comments »