weatherbuff.com and temperature

Because the weather changes so often in New England, many a time going from sunny and clear to thunderstorms in the span of half an hour, I check the weather forecast every morning to figure out what to wear and what hour it'll be safe to make my bike commute. Ever since I got caught in a thunderstorm, I've obsessed even more about the weather. I discovered weatherbuff.com in an effort to understand what causes thunderstorms, since one had just surprised me on the way home from the bike shop. What I like a lot about weatherbuff.com is that one can access satellite maps showing storm systems, etc. They are often updated every few minutes. Even though I use weather.com to get an idea of temperature and expected precipitation, I like having the visual map showing the extent and intensity of the storm system.

Speaking of temperature, an odd consequence of growing up in the States yet being a molecular biologist is that I have a complicated and still incomplete understanding of temperature. In the lab, we use the Celsius system to describe what temperatures to incubate reactions, for example. I have an idea what 4 degrees Celsius, 37 degrees Celsius , 65 degrees Celsius, etc are when it comes to water bath and room temperatures. (On cold winter days, sometimes I will walk into the 37 degrees Celsius room and hang out for a while to warm up.)

But when it comes to weather, my brain thinks only in Fahrenheit. I know this doesn't make that much sense, given that
1) I know how to convert from Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa.
2) I use Celsius temperatures all the time in lab.

My understanding of temperature as it relates to weather is crucial to me. In my mind I know what sorts of clothes I can wear in 35-45 degrees Fahrenheit weather versus ten degrees higher. There's a map somewhere in my brain where different outfits I own correlate to a specified range of temperature. Once I check weather.com for the expected temperatures, my mind determines which clothes I might be able to wear that day.

When Europeans tell me about the weather in their country, I start to feel lost. I don't have a sense of what I'd wear in 17 degrees Celsius weather versus 23 degrees Celsius. My mind has to make the calculations before I can grasp the meaning of those temperatures. It's an odd sort of blindness.

Subfunction: delusion

[Science]

I'm beginning to think that sanity and mental health are mutually exclusive states, that what our society calls "mentally healthy" is at the very least a somewhat delusional state.

I read George Orwell's "1984" back in high school. Winston Smith's exclamation that "Sanity is not statistical!" has stuck with me since then. I always thought about Smith's exclamation as being a defense of those in the minority (for their ideas and behaviors), but I wonder if Winston Smith could have made a stronger case that the majority is insane. It isn't so much because I wonder how "civilized" societies could condone torture and state murder of children, among other inhumanities (though I do), but because I think that the sort of people who get along well in our society always seem to be blissfully self-deluded.

When I'd read Andrew Solomon's piece in the New Yorker about depression ("Anatomy of Melancholy"), I came across a quote from Shelley Taylor that agreed with my suspicion:

The mildly depressed appear to have more accurate views of themselves, the world, and the future than do normal people. [They] clearly lack the illusions that in normal people promote mental health and buffer them against setbacks.

(From Taylor's book, "Positive Illusions," 1989)

Then while reading Alice Flaherty's book "The Midnight Disease," I came across a different but related observation about language abilities:

The neurologist Oliver Sacks tells of a ward of aphasic patients listening to President Reagan give a speech on television. Although unable to fully understand his words, the patients compensated by being particularly sensitive to his tone and inflections, which they found farcical. A patient with a right hemisphere lesion who could not judge tone was also present. She concentrated on Reagan's exact words - which she too found ridiculous. Sacks concluded from this that it takes a fully working brain to be deluded by politicians. Nancy Etcoff and her colleagues confirmed Sacks's anecdote experimentally
by showing that in a controlled setting aphasics had better lie-detecting ability than undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To me it seems that what we consider a fully functional brain (whether it regards the ability to understand language or to distort the image of reality such that it is more palatable) is a brain whose subfunction of delusion is intact. I seriously wonder how this function evolved. Do reptiles have it too? Or is it a "higher" cortical function reserved for so-called higher primates? I can see some advantages of self- and general delusion, but I think it could contribute to the ability to fall in love with bona fide assholes.

It's good to be home

Call me crazy, but I don't enjoy watching five-year-olds dressed in business suits sing love songs and gyrate to techno music. I used to think that talented kids performing on stage were cute. But now I can't help but view these mini-versions of adults as nothing more than the latest fashion trend of pimping out whatever and whomever we can. These kids, I might add, sound like chipmunks when they sing. I know they sing better than I could ever dream of singing, but still.

The idea of children as miniature adults is supposed to be from the Victorian era. People dressed kids as if they were adults and expected them to behave as such. Either that idea of children has not really gone away, or it's resurfaced in such pockets of culture as the Vietnamese music video that is playing ad infinitum at my parents' house.

Speaking of videos playing ad infinitum, the TV in our living room is always on, blazing one of the following selections from the VCR connected to it:

1. Vietnamese music video, featuring five-year-olds dressed in business suits singing love songs and gyrating to techno music. Also featuring bad Vietnamese versions of already bad songs such as "It's Raining Men," performed by awkwardly dressed (if you can call it that) Vietnamese women sporting umbrellas coordinated to match the color of their outfits (again, if you can call them that). Approximately 60% of the women performing in these videos have had plastic surgery, which is obvious from the fact that the components of their faces don't seem to match each other. About 95% wear too much makeup and would easily frighten me, should I chance upon them in a dark alley.
2. Vietnamese comedy sketch video. Uniquely long and unrelentingly un-funny.
3. Chinese drama epic (I am talking 25+ video tapes per serie), set usually in ancient China. Dubbed in Vietnamese, poorly acted, and even more poorly written. (I wish the people writing these epics would take to heart that "brevity is the soul of wit". It should not take 25+ video tapes to portray a story.)

The TV blazes unimpeded throughout dinner, though I admit that during dinner, the program switches to the local news. The dramatic theme music and recurrent stories about things about which nobody should really care ("A 38-year-old man found a goat in his backyard; the full story at 5:15"), combined with the glaring omission of news about which people should care, ensure that my headache from hours of hearing chipmunk-singing continues unimpeded.

But it's good to be home... with my laptop, a draft of my thesis, and plenty of reading material.

Icky guy episode du soir

"Come on, why won't you dance with me?"
"Uh... I just don't want to dance with guys."
"Will you dance with feminine guys or gay guys?"
"You're not feminine."
"I'm gay though."
"No you're not."
"How do you know?"
"Gay guys don't try so hard to dance with women."
"I just feel more comfortable around women."
"Okay, so which guys in the bar do you think are cute?"
"My boyfriend over there..." (pointing vaguely to the crowd)
"Why don't you introduce me to him?"
"Because I think you're cute."
"Then you're not gay."

To BeachBody.com:

I'm not fat. Just because I bought one of your exercise videos, it doesn't mean I'm utterly dissatisfied with my body. Maybe I bought it because it looked like a fun way to exercise. So stop offering me crash diet deals and sending me e-mails as if I obsess about having a perfect body. You feed unhealthy body complexes. Shame on you.