Nate Knows Nada

I’m in the midst of grading, revising a syllabus, dealing with resident
tutor applications, and digging out of our 2+ feet of snow, courtesy of
this weekend’s blizzard.  So there’s a ton on my plate right now,
without actually interacting with news or opinion.

I’m sure that I’ll eventually have a thought or two.

I have recently become rather distracted by Apple lust.  That is,
I’d like to get a new computer and I’m ready to go back to Mac. 
All the signs are there: open source and the UNIX core
have made Macs
amenable to the stuff I want to do that I couldn’t a few years back on
a Mac (stats work and such), the interface and the design are so much
prettier and nicer than my Windows box, they just don’t crash, I want
to be able to use some stuff that you can’t get in Windows (NetNewsWire
and iLife especially), and they’re light and slim.  And the new OS
X Tiger comes out soon.  Also, loathe to admit it as I am, the new
Office 2004 for Mac has some sweet features, including the Notebook.

I’ve had my eye on the 15″ G4 PowerBook with the SuperDrive.  But
does anyone know enough about the relative merits of the 15″ vs. the
12″ PB with SuperDrive?  Would I be O.K. with the smaller
one?  Mostly, I’m concerned about going from the 15″ screen I’m on
now back down to a 12″…. But the slightly slower processor and some of the other pieces are also something to think about.

Unfortunately, I do not have $2000 right now (although I might have
some wiggle room in a couple of months).  So for the time being, I
will have to think adulterous thoughts in my heart.  Not quite idle desire, but something like it.

UPDATE:  I got some good suggestions in the comments.  I
should be a bit clearer that I intend to use any new computer to do
statistical work, using either Stata or R. 
It sounds like the
1.33GHz G4 on a 12″ (with SuperDrive) is adequate.  True? 
‘Cause I can get one with Apple Care (3 year extended warranty) for
$1750.  Or do you all think that the high-end iBook would do it?

…And, yes, I have returned from methods camp.

On some level, it really was like summer camp — the intense experience
that forges apparently meaningful friendships.  Only time will
tell how many of these people will end up being actual friends (as
opposed to conference drinking buddies — which are valuable, too,
don’t get me wrong).  But the re-entry to the real world is
disorienting.  As one friend (I’m pretty sure about that) put it:

so, I can’t help thinking that it’s incredibly irresponsible of
[the organizers] to let all of as leave Arizona without some sort of
real world reentry program. I’ve spent the weekend in seclusion in my
apartment; there are so many bloody PEOPLE all over the place and I’m
getting tired of continually thinking I see someone from IQRM and then
having them turn around and feeling disappointed and disoriented
(again). I figure, though, if IQRM was a temporary retreat to
adolescence, then each day I can regain a year and within a couple
weeks be back to my normal, somewhat jaded, less drama-prone self.

Yes.  Drama.  That’s another element of summer camp.

Here’s to re-integration with our fellow jaded day-to-day life people….

UPDATE: Andrew puts it thus:

I got an email today from someone I was out there with… and talk about
warmth. I fear that I may have made lifelong friends in two short
weeks. It, of course, remains to be seen if the two weeks out west was
really a Breakfast Club type of thing. But here’s to hoping that it
isn’t. I’m too old for those kind of things anymore, and besides, these
people wear well.

Precisely.

You go to Sedona, and several different people take pictures.

I imagine more IQRM photos will go up at Andrew’s.

A couple of the ones of me are objectionable, simply because I got caught looking bad.  Hmm.

I am at Arizona State University, for the next week and a half, attending a research methods learning workshop.  Wireless in the hotel is sometimes spotty, and we have “homework.”

But I’ll do my best to keep thinking aloud.  And I’ll try not to
bore you with discussions of descriptive inference vs. causal
inference….

Christmas is almost here!

I’m spending it in a monastery, which many people seem to think is a
bit odd.  But if you regard it as a religious holiday, it’s not
THAT odd, I think.

I sent out cards today.  Almost all of them.  I figure that
since Christmas is 12 days long, they’ll arrive during Christmas.

One nice thing that I have become reacquainted with in the monastery is
the value of silence.  The SSJE brothers do not have a vow of
silence, but they do try to keep a quiet atmosphere.  And so one
doesn’t have to talk very much if one doesn’t want to.  And it’s
something of a relief not to have to interact with people
verbally.  But it forces you to deal with them more intimately, by
looking at their face and their eyes (which I think we can often avoid
in day-to-day life and work), and seeing what’s written there.

May you have a Merry Christmas, full of light, peace, and joy.

And I’ll be back in a few days.

Got it at 9 am this morning.  Fantastic.

The album-ender.  Prayer.  It’s no wonder that I return to them for advice on living, listening, and God.

Take these shoes
Click clacking down some dead end street
Take these shoes
And make them fit
Take this shirt
Polyester white trash made in nowhere
Take this shirt
And make it clean, clean
Take this soul
Stranded in some skin and bones
Take this soul
And make it sing

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I’m waiting for the dawn

Take these hands
Teach them what to carry
Take these hands
Don’t make a fist
Take this mouth
So quick to criticise
Take this mouth
Give it a kiss

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I’m waiting for the dawn

Still waiting for the dawn, the sun is coming up
The sun is coming up on the ocean
This love is like a drop in the ocean
This love is like a drop in the ocean

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, tell me now
Why the dark before the dawn?

Take this city
A city should be shining on a hill
Take this city
If it be your will

What no man can own, no man can take
Take this heart
Take this heart
Take this heart
And make it break

Lyrics: Bono & The Edge

From Rolling Stone’s review of the album:

Halfway through the excellent new U2 album, Bono announces, “I like
the sound of my own voice.” Well-said, lad; well-said. Ever since
U2 started making noise in Dublin several hundred bloody Sundays
ago, Bono has grooved to the sound of his own gargantuan rockness.
Ego, shmego — this is one rock-star madman who should never scale
down his epic ambitions. As the old Zen proverb goes, you will find
no reasonable men on the tops of great mountains, and U2’s
brilliance is their refusal to be reasonable. U2 were a drag in the
1990s, when they were trying to be cool, ironic hipsters. Feh!
Nobody wants a skinny Santa, and for damn sure nobody wants a
hipster Bono. We want him over the top, playing with unforgettable
fire. We want him to sing in Latin or feed the world or play Jesus
to the lepers in his head. We want him to be Bono. Nobody else is
even remotely qualified.

U2 bring that old-school, wide-awake fervor to How to
Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. The last time we heard from them,
All That You Can’t Leave Behind, U2 were auditioning for
the job of the World’s Biggest Rock & Roll Band. They trimmed
the Euro-techno pomp, sped up the tempos and let the Edge define
the songs with his revitalized guitar. Well, they got the job.

On Atomic Bomb, they’re not auditioning anymore. This
is grandiose music from grandiose men, sweatlessly confident in the
execution of their duties. Hardly any of the eleven songs break the
five-minute mark or stray from the punchy formula of All That
You Can’t Leave Behind. They’ve gotten over their midcareer
anxiety about whether they’re cool enough. Now, they just hand it
to the Edge and let it rip.

During the course of Atomic Bomb, you will be urged to
ponder death (“Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own”), birth
(“Original of the Species”), God (“Yahweh”), love (“A Man and a
Woman”), war (“Love and Peace or Else”) and peace (“City of
Blinding Lights”), which barely gives you time to ponder whether
the bassist has been listening to Interpol. “Vertigo” sets the
pace, a thirty-second ad jingle blown up to three great minutes,
with a riff nicked from Sonic Youth’s “Dirty Boots.” “City of
Blinding Lights” begins with a long Edge guitar intro, building
into a bittersweet lament. “Yahweh” continues a U2 tradition, the
album-closing chitchat with the Lord. It’s too long and too slow,
but that’s part of the tradition

…It’s a reminder that what makes U2 so big
isn’t really their clever ideas, or even their intelligence — it’s
the warmth that all too few rock stars have any idea how to turn
into music.

I’ve been meaning to write, but I’ve been sucked deep into the bowels of Red Sox
Nation for the last three weeks, so like everyone else here in New England, I
have been subsisting on too little sleep for too many
days.

{pictureRef (, align:”left”)}It’s been a mad whirlwind of
a baseball ride here.  Two weekends ago, BF and I were on the
South Shore of Mass. Bay (about 25 miles to the south of Boston on the
coast), on a weekend retreat with the other graduate students in his
department, and we were there, soaked in misery and gin, the night that
the Sox lost to the Yankees 19-8.  Ignominious.  Everyone was
at the point of crying, yet again, as it looked like another year of
oh-so-familiar defeat for Boston.  But then they started to
win.  Unbelievably, they couldn’t seem to be killed.  On
Monday night, I finally gave up past 1 AM in the 13th inning, and heard
later that they won in the fourth.  On Tuesday, when it took 6
hours for them to win for the third time in a row, I was there for
almost the whole thing, except for the hour of the game that occurred
while I was in class.  Every pitch in the final two inning was
agony; the friends I was watching the game with paced the floor,
groaned painfully, and could barely look through their fingers to see
how each ball thrown had fared.  On Wednesday, we watched for what
was, in fact, hours, and again, the final two inning were an experiment
in masochism.  Brian, and my friend Mike, and a couple of other
New Englanders were just waiting for the Sox to screw it up again, as
they had so many times in the past.  Each bad pitch was met with
an exclamation like, “Oh, God, it’s starting.  They’re messing it
up.  Why is he in there?  We gotta take him out of the
game.  They’ve killed our hopes so many times, why is this
different.  Why did I even hope that it would happen this
year?”  Red Sox fans (Bostonians, even New Englanders) are not an
optimistic people.  I think that if you lived here for any length
of time, with the provinciality, the weather, and whatever else, the
sunny elements of any person’s personality would be quickly burnished
away.

But then they did it. 
Silence.  Then screams of joy.  We had defeated the “Evil Empire” in the House
that Ruth Built, and we’d done what no other baseball team had ever done
before.  From 0-3 to 4-3, and the first time to the Series in 18 years.  We
poured out of the house where we were watching the game, and headed into Harvard
Square.  Passing through Harvard Yard, we saw the jubilation.  The John Harvard
statue dressed in Red Sox gear, the Harvard University band playing, Hundreds of
students bouncing up and down and yelling as loud as they could.  We passed
quickly into the square, and there, all traffic had been stopped.  Easily over a
thousand people thronged all over th square, covering the pedestrian zones, the
roads, the storefronts, basically any surface upon which one could stand.  The
band moved out and began to play even more loudly.  Cheers started: “Let’s go,
Red Sox!”, “Yankees Suck!”, “Here we go, Red Sox!”  We stayed for at least half
an hour, until about 1 AM, and the crowd never
dissipated.

We got to sleep for two days.  Then,
the series started, and all of Red Sox Nation went back to very late nights,
sitting on the edge of chairs, and waiting.  We drew blood from our knuckles as
we chewed upon them, and we kept waiting for them to mess it up.  Only on the
third night did people begin to think that it might happen.  Even on the fourth
night, most of Red Sox Nation kept waiting for a shoe to drop somewhere.  And
then it didn’t.  And New England exhaled after holding its breath for 86
years.

The last three days have been a whirl of
Red Sox Madness.  People still haven’t slept.  The victory parade was today, and
over three million people lined up on the parade route today, standing in the
coolness and the drizzle for up to four hours to watch the team and the
oldtimers still alive from previous attempts at the title ride by in Duck Boats.
(There are tours that you can take of Boston in Duck Boats, amphibious personnel
carriers from military surplus that have been made into tour vehicles that drive
the streets and then take a quick spin in the Charles River.)  The parade wound
all through downtown, and then it took a couple of laps along the river basin,
staying close into the Boston and Cambridge
shores.

Crazy stuff has been happening as a result
of this.  One local couple had originally taken their wedding vows years ago,
promising to remain together “until death do you part or the Red Sox win the
series.”  They renewed their vows this week.  Grown men were moved to tears, as
they recalled that their fathers and grandfathers had waited for this event for
much of their lives.  The Boston Globe put out its edition on Thursday with the
largest headline I’ve ever seen (YES!!! in four-inch letters) and calling it the
“Victory edition.”  Sox retrospectives have been going on TV much of the latter
portion of the week.  Everywhere I go, I hear snatchets of people talking —
police officers, construction workers, Harvard profs, bank tellers, merchants,
homeless guys — talking about what many of them regard as perhaps the most
spectacular event of their lives.  Perhaps most surprisingly, Bostonians have
been remarkably cheerful on the streets, in trains, and in stores.  (This is
highly unusual, especially as we’re moving deeper into autumn.)  They’re not
even thinking about next season and what it means to no longer be the perpetual
losers of major league baseball (a role that seems left to the Cubs now. 
Incidentally, the Cubs are apparently SO cursed that even having ex-Cubs on your
team means that you will lose.  In both of the last two series, the team with
the most ex-Cubs lost — New York had 5, St. Louis 3, and Boston
2.).

This city is sports-crazy, but this last week
has been more than I can really describe adequately.