I finally bothered to snap a photograph of one of these ads the other day when I was on the train.

Dr. Zizmor Subway Advertisement

I continue to be amused at both how prevalent and how slapdash they are. I mean, check it out: “treating New Yorker’s skin problems”. “Cleanup” as a verb. And not a comma in sight. And yet, they obviously put a lot of money into the ad campaign; they’re all over many of the IRT line trains that I’m frequently on. I even remember seeing one of these ads when I was briefly in NYC a few years back and remarking on how silly it was.

I wonder if Dr. Zizmor is NYC’s version of Eagle Insurance.

It all started harmlessly enough.

My friend Jeri asked me if I wanted to take a performance swing dance class with her. The routine in the class has a lot of aerials, something that’s been missing from my dance experience, and wasn’t an open-ended commitment, so I said “yes”, I’d be happy to take the class with her.

Meanwhile, one of my flatmates has been been trying to get me to join her for dance classes for a while. The ones she wanted to take this month were on Thursdays, and since Thursdays are my regular swing dance night anyway, I thought “why not”. I wasn’t really interested in the “basic 6” ballroom class she was taking, but I figured I’d join her for the bachata/meringue class and salsa class. Naturally, since the “basic 6” class was after the other two classes, and I was planning to drag her out to the Frim Fram jam, I decided at the last minute that I might as well take that too. It ended up being far too basic for either of us, so now we’re taking Argentine tango instead…

And naturally, I’m going out swing dancing tonight, after rehearsing with Jeri. Tomorrow I’ve got the performance class, followed by an intensive aerials workshop. If time permits, I may do a lindy hop workshop after that with Maggie and Paolo, then I’m going…wait for it…swing dancing.

And Sunday I will sleep.

I ran across several articles recently in rapid succession that all hit on a pet peeve of mine: talking about psychological disorders as a cause of people’s problems.

This article in New Scientist about a young woman with dyscalculia particularly pushed my buttons, because aside from this error, it’s an interesting and informative article. The sentence that exemplifies the author’s confusion is

She found that while her IQ is above average, her numerical ability is equivalent to that of an 11-year-old because she has something called dyscalculia.

This is completely backwards. “Jill”, the subject of the article, has dyscalculia because she is an otherwise intelligent person who has difficulties with mathematics.

The primary authority in the United States for what constitutes a psychological disorder is the APA‘s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Whether or not an individual has a disorder is determined by whether they meet a set of diagnostic criteria (roughly, whether or not they exhibit certain signs and symptoms); it does not imply anything about a likely cause. As the APA itself notes in the DSM, the diagnostic labels (names of psychological disorders) are just a “convenient shorthand” for those diagnostic criteria for mental health professionals. Or, to put it another way, psychological disorders are basically syndromes.

What does this mean? It means that statements along the lines of “so-and-so has problem X because she has psychological disorder Y” are generally going to be misleading. Such a statement implies that there’s some specific underlying cause for the person’s problems, probably one that is out of his or her control. In fact, stating that someone has been diagnosed with a psychological disorder implies neither.

This is not to say that “Jill” from the aforementioned New Scientist article couldn’t take some solace in her diagnosis. Not because there’s some specific, known cause for her difficulties, but because the fact that it’s considered a specific disorder probably means there are other people with similar problems. Based on the remainder of the article, it’s clear that it’s enough of a problem that there is research into possible causes.

I imagine that this cause-and-effect confusion stems in no small part from the fact that many diagnoses of physiological disorders, unlike psychological ones, do imply an etiology. Saying that someone has a fever and a cough because they have the flu, for example, is perfectly reasonable, because “having the flu” implies an infection with one of a specific strain of viruses. (Note that this is not true for all physiological disorders either: it’s also nonsensical to say something like “so-and-so has muscle aches because of chronic fatigue syndrome”.)

I’m going to be sending a note to New Scientist about this. More broadly, I hope that media sources will become more aware of this distinction in the future. I can only imagine that this ultimately contributes to overmedication and generally poor treatment of psychological problems, as people seek to put labels on their problems, mistaking them for a cause, and pressure their mental health care providers to fix that perceived “cause”.

An observation that I made to several people in the past couple of days:

If you are in New York, you do not order a “New York strip steak”. It’s just a “strip steak”.

If you are in New York, you do not order a “New York-style pizza”. It’s “pizza”. (Or New Yorkers think it is.)

If you are in Manhattan, you do still order a Manhattan.

As some of you may have heard, the company I work for is engaged in some pretty serious layoffs (roughly 5,300 people worldwide; ~11% of their workforce). Knowing that, you can probably imagine my reaction when I came in to the office this weekend to finish up some work for a database migration after a week-long vacation and discovered that my cubicle was vacant except for my personal effects. Notably, the two computers that had been there when I left, along with all their peripherals, were gone.

I was surprised that, if I had been laid off, I’d still have physical access to the building and network access. Confused, I called my manager, which only made things weirder: he didn’t know what was going on either. I rolled that around in my head for a bit, and the thought crossed my mind that if he didn’t know, maybe our entire team was gone. I wandered down to the trading floor, but his desk was still intact. I checked my email from another machine in the office, found that I was still able to get in, and that nothing in there indicated my untimely departure (though I did realize I forgot to set my out-of-office notification. Oops.)

I wandered in this morning, and surprised my cubicle-group-mates; they thought given my absence and the disappearance of my hardware that I’d been sacked. I limped along on another computer that wasn’t configured properly to let me do my work, but would at least let me check my email and do a few other things. I was finally able to confirm that yes, I was still employed…so who took my computer?

On the way back to my newly-appropriated desk, I had a thought: I wonder if someone thought that the equipment in my cubicle belonged to the previous occupant, who did leave the company recently. On a hunch, I called the helpdesk, and sure enough, this was in fact the case. In a couple of hours, I had my old machine back. Well, less the webcam, headset, and stereo cables. I guess those will come back tomorrow.

I guess I didn’t need to get any work done today anyway…

The final home bout for the Gotham Girls this year did not disappoint.

Both sides brought some serious skills to the track. The Bronx had a ton of raw horsepower. Bonnie Thunders and Luna Impact in particular were wickedly fast—I don’t think I ever saw a Queens jammer beat them off the line. Beyonslay, as always, put in a stellar blocking performance. I’m sure most folks are familiar with her active blocking skills, but where she really shone Saturday was her positional blocking. Once you get behind Beyonslay, you stay behind Beyonslay.

The Queens weren’t exactly slacking in the individual performance department either. Cheapskate was the Queen to watch, with mad blocker-evading skills all night long. Suzy Hotrod proved to be fearsome as well: where Cheapskate would bob and weave to cut through the pack, on more than one occasion, Suzy would smash right through it. (Remind me never to get in her way.)

What tipped the game, as always, was the teams’ ability to pull together. The Queens managed to discombobulate the Bronx more often than not. About two jams out of every three saw the Bronx’s jammer getting tangled up in the pack, while Cheapskate zipped around or Suzy Hotrod crashed through. By the half, the score was 100–37 Queens, and they held on to that lead. Despite an exciting 20-point jam by Bonnie Thunders, the game ended 161–113.

Congratulations to the Queens of Pain, the 2008 GGRD champions!

I stumbled across an article trying to explain what the square root of -1 (j) is. It’s pretty cool that the author’s trying to provide motivation for a not-immediately-intuitive mathematical construct. Unfortunately, the author made a goof that makes his example fall apart.

The place where he goes off the rails is:

In other words, the eigen values, are all values such that:

Ax = ex

Where A is the matrix whose eigenvalues we are trying to find, and e is the scalar eigen-value we are trying to solve for. x is any non-null (non-zero) vector.

What he should have said is that x is some non-zero vector. If x can be any vector, then to find values of e such that Ax = ex, we would need to solve (A–eI)x = 0 ⇒ (A–eI) = 0 ⇒ A = eI for e. No such e exists.

The author appears to be missing the fact that every eigenvalue of a linear transformation has an associated set of eigenvectors. In this case, the set of eigenvectors associated with the eigenvalue j is all multiples of [j, 1]. For these, and only these vectors does multiplying by j give the same result as rotating 90°. It doesn’t work for, for example, [1,1].

There is a sense in which mutliplying by j is a rotation, but it doesn’t do much to motivate a need for j in the first place. If you represent a complex number as a 2-vector, multiplying by j will rotate the number 90° in the complex plane. I.e, if z = x + yj = re^jθ, then jz = (by Euler’s identity) e^jπ/2 z = e^jπ/2 re^jθ = re^{j(θ + π/2)}.

If I were trying to motivate the creation of j as the square root of -1, the first example that comes to mind is AC circuit analysis. Euler’s identity makes it easy to view complex numbers as a point in a wave with a given phase and amplitude. You can generalize the notion of resistance into impedance, with capacitors and inductors having imaginary values, and solve for the steady-state solution much the same as you would with just resistors in a DC system. Sure, you can do it without using complex numbers, but it gets clumsy fast.

Please send delicious
Deep-dish to the Big Apple
It can’t be found here

This was an exciting bout, with some spectacular jams (including one 20-point scoring drive!).

I was told by someone at the last bout that Manhattan wasn’t all that good. It would appear that their information was slightly out of date. 🙂 The score was 72–30 Manhattan at the half, and they continued to expand their lead into a 146–91 victory.

The Mayhem have some good jammers—Em Dash is very quick, and Fisti Cuffs and GoGo BaiBai aren’t exactly pokey—but what utterly blew me away was their coordination as a team. Their defense was super-tight: a scene that repeated itself over and over throughout the game was a Bombshells jammer running into a wall of orange while Manhattan’s jammer whizzed by (or got whipped past). In one particularly good jam in the first half, Manhattan’s blockers managed to hold Li’l Red Terror back from even breaking through the pack while the Mayhem jammer got three grand slams.

Straight Razor put on a particularly good showing, and Pie was outstanding as a pivot—I swear she’s got eyes in the back of her head. They were also extremely adept at setting picks; Brooklyn’s blockers rarely got a crack at the Manhattan jammer without having to evade an opposing defender first. The only real downside to their defense was that, at least at first, they were a little too physical; there was a lot of time in the penalty box for the Mayhem, and Luna Impact got her bell rung about five minutes before the end of the first half…not cool.

This is not to disparage Brooklyn’s performance; Ani Dispanco and Li’l Red Terror proved they could get around the track in a hurry when they could break through the Manhattan defense. It seemed like by the end of the game they were getting frustrated, though, and playing a little rougher than was probably advisable—there was a series of three consecutive jams in the second half where the Brooklyn jammer ended up in the penalty box.

So far, I’ve been very happy with my first two GGRD experiences, and look forward to the next one.

Brooklyn and Manhattan get ready to jam

I stumbled across I Can Has Lead Jammer? randomly the other day. Lolcats + derby = lots of new backgrounds for me! Stop Talking—Stop Talking is currently gracing my desktop.