Most beautiful chord progressions in history:

1. "Elegie" by Faure, the piano accompaniment towards the end while the cello is holding some note (it's like this string of three chords or so repeated twice... melts me every time)
2. "Sonts my Mother Taught me" by Dvorak, towards the end, it kind of slides down this beautiful line. SO SO beautiful... it's five seconds long, but I rewind over and over again.
3. The beginning six or so chords of Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor, Opus 85, Allegro Moderato... sucked me in eigth grade, and I haven't been the same since.
4. The end of Andrew Loyd Webber's "Music of the Night" (I think that's the right song)... it just climbs upward in this amazing pattern.
5. (my least favorite, but still awesome) Mahler's Symphonie Number 1 in D mvmt 2, the augmented or something pizzicato. I liked that a lot when I first heard it in early high school It's not beautiful the way my other favorites are, but it's characteristically brialliant Mahler.

Okay, back to studying... but I just love beautiful chord progressions so much that I had to share. I think I caught this love from my father, who made me appreciate them at a young age.

obligatory finals rap

If I see one more paired end on plasmid strings
if I have to deal with one more amino acid that metabolism brings
if I have drill one more hole to get to a rat's brain
I confirm to you that I just might go insane.

If I have to write one more essay about moral will
if I have to hold one more soft body that I have to kill
if I have to calculate the lod score on one more pedigree
I swear I think I might just flee away from MIT.

I'm tired of going to bed once the sun has risen
I'm sick of being too tired to make a real decision
I don't want to see another Gaussian fit
not even if my tuning curves depend on it.

It's getting old waking up with the same confused dreams
when everything is chemistry and nothing's as it seems
and it takes thirty minutes to convince my mind
I'm not speaking in light of the photosynthetic kind.

Yeah, it's this time of year that I forget my position
and not much can improve my annoyed disposition
because I'm always confused with my head in a daze,
population genetics putting my face in a haze.

So really I think it's about time for these exams to desist
so I can back to my mountains and the peace that I've missed
and quit spending nights in a pergutory of p-sets
struggling to assimilate knowledge my brain never gets.

They demand of you here that you give them your life
I think everyone here's enduring the same kind of strife
but it's about time for a summer vacation
so I can escape this insane fate-driven nation.

So watch citric acid and three factor crosses wash down the drain
until next September when I resume hell again.

una cosa mas

"Humans contain an estimated 14,000 square meters of inner mitochondrial membrane, which is the approximate equivalent of three football fields in the United States." -"Biochemistry" (Berg, Tymoczko, Stryer).

There are a lot of other staggering biological statistics rising from really folded up systems, like the astronomical length of the DNA in a single body if it's all stretched out. The demand for surface area has caused the evolution of these systems of really, really folded stuff.

My somewhat related point is that people should then find manifold dimensions a little less staggering. A lot of people can't really imagine string theory (including me I suppose) because the idea of manifold dimensions is so alien. But if the cumulative effect of a bunch of really tiny organelles inside of me can cover three football fields, whose to say there can't be a dimension wrapped up in a space too small for us to find? It seems to at least follow the same logic as our own biological demands.

Okay I really must go now.

Milgram experiments

I know that the results shocked (bad word choice...) everyone, but are they really that shocking?

It seems there are two views of externally derived morality. In the extreme view, we could say that kids derive all sense of morality by observing authority figures in their lives that they trust and deem to be morally capable (e.g parents). In the milder sense, kids at least rely on external authority figures to learn how to interpret their innate moral conscience. Either way, authority figures play an important role in the development of morality. Also, external moral development relies a lot on guilt. Moral culpability relies on the existence of choice.

Given those two observations (and the fact that I know they are true from my experiences killing rats, something I only find manageable because people I trust are doing it and because I feel like I don't have a choice), I think the Milgram results are not that surprising. First, the ethos of the authority figure is pretty strong. Even if the people feel innately as if they are doing something wrong, they are taught to defer their own moral judgments to more authoritative sources. Thus it makes sense that they defer moral judgment to the experimenter even while feeling very uncomfortable with the situation. Second, they are relieved of moral responsibility. Even if no one is forcing them to deliver the shocks, the situation in which the person with authority is giving commands relieves the subject of moral responsibility, which I think is essential in moral decision making and blame-laying.

The last point is disturbing to me... it means people act morally because of how it affects them rather than how it affects those involved. That's not really how I conceptualize morality. But I'm willing to admit it's a major factor.

Anyway, I seem to be in a minority that isn't surprised by the Milgram results. The one result that did suprise me was that a significant portion of people went to the maximum voltage even in the situation in which thay had to hold the victims hand to the device. I know the proximity effect decreased the strength of the result, but I think it didn't decrease it nearly enough. I think that proximity, in my opinion, should wipe away the effect of authority and the displacement of moral responsibility. But apparently not. So that much surprised me.

Kant is *the* folk psychologist?

So this fellow... Knobe, I think... did all these folk psychology experiments. Psychology is one field in which I think the folk version can be more accurate than the scientific version. I mean, theories may explain some behavior, but what better way to explain mental phenomena than the intuition of the mind itself? It's a little recursive, but it seems good enough to me. Anyway, this guy did experiments about people's ascription of blame/intentionality based on outcome. One paradigmatic experiment he did was a Gedanken experiment, so to speak, as so much philosophy degenerates to be.

Say there's a CEO (I don't like this example in particular because I think it enters a little too close into the thorny issues of corporate responsibility, but apparently it still got the results he wanted) that is told by an advisor that one of his marketing plans that will make the company a lot of money will harm the environment. Then imagine the same situation, except that his marketing plan will help the environment. Now imagine that in both situations he goes through with the plan.

The question was: in the first case, did the CEO intentionally harm the environment? And in the second case, did he intentionally help it?

So the results are that way more people are inclined to believe he intentionally harmed it rather than intentionally helped it (there are lots more examples by this Knobe guy). For instance, think about how different the statements "he harmed the environment in order to increase profits" and "he helped the environment in order to increase profits." The first one sounds much better, yes?

So my idea upon hearing this (I should have done the reading, but I am swamped with failling genetics tests and writing data analysis programs) was that it sounded very deontological in a way. I suggested this to the people giving a presentation on the topic, and they kind of shot me down, saying it was more about intentionality than ethics. But I thought about while our professor talked, and it really semeed to me that ascriptions of intentionality in folk psychology really depend on ethics.

So finally I suggested this again (I think I was really annoying today; I talked a lot, but I no longer care) to our professor, and it turns out that in a way I'm very right. The theory that makes the most sense about this folk psychology business is that we view actions as intentionally good when they are guided by a moral imperitive (categorial imperative) and intentionally bad whenever they violate a moral norm, no matter what was guiding them. This is a nonsensible asymmetry by many philosophies, but it fits really nicely into Kant. By deontology, the good consequences of an action don't have any bearing on making the action good; goodness is derived soleyl from the agent's moral considerations. So the CEO happens to help the environment. However, he is not guided by morality or any imperative. Thus we are inclined to say that his good action was not intentional. Whereas if he violates the norm that the environment is a good thing to have around, it doesn't really matter what his ultimate intention is, the violation is intentional. This makes sense if you look at things through deontological eyes. The good action is good if it is deontologically good, not just teleologically good. The bad action is bad because there was a step at which moral guidelines were not just merely ignored but actually actively violated.

I think this is really interesting because people (me included at times) think Kant is so out there, and that his ethics is so impractical. But it turns out that our own folk psychology ideas are very Kantian. Interesting. Very interesting.

Despite my exhaustion, I wanted to take my boyfriend out for his birthday. But I haven't slept more than a few hours in days, and I didn't sleep at all last night.

By 1:20 a.m. at the bus stop, I was hallucinating. I saw the sides of the enclosure moving around. A guitar that a man was carrying turned into a black labaorador. Nothing was what it should have been. Including my brain.

Conversation at 1:30 a.m.
Me: There was this kid that was trying to break the record for staying awake who stayed awake for like eleven days, and he did it without caffeine which is remarkable.
My boyfriend: Oh?
Me: Yeah. I can hardly make it two sandwiches.
My boyfriend: ...what?

As soon as I said the word "sandwiches," I felt profound confusion. Because it wasn't the word I was trying to say. Deep down in the sleep-deprived recesses of my consciousness, I had had the word "days" ready instead. However, despite this rational intention, somehow the word "sandwiches," a blip of random noise in the neural net, came out instead. And for a few seconds I just sat there in complete shock, trying to make sense of the disarray that had occurred.

I was so tired. I've never had such a blatant verbal confirmation of my exhaustion. And sandwhiches? really? Where in the world did that come from?