All Those Other Things I Said I'd Write About...

...and one more thing... The Knife of Never Letting Go-- I know I already said this, but let me say it again... Thanks a lot, Jana! As if I don't have enough to think about, you give me this book I can't put down. Begh! So good! Book club possibility? It's a YA novel that takes place in some distant future where people of Earth have settled on another planet, and the aliens sent out this germ to kill the humans but it only killed the women and made the men able to read each others' minds. And it's really good!

At any rate, I've put it down long enough to update this thing as promised. I'll start with the stuff the least amount of people know about and then filter into the things the satellite friends may not know but may want to know-- and I assure you, you will know, in time.

So first off-- the flight back. My dad took me to the airport, where I found out my flight had been canceled, but no biggie. They scheduled me for the next flight to Minneapolis instead of NYC and told me the plane would arrive about an hour later than expected in Heathrow. Me, ever the timely planner, had scheduled my train ticket to Leicester to be 3 hours after landing. I thought I'd give myself some "just in case" time and also time to have a nice long lunch. Well, I used up most of my "just in case time" for this flight, so I didn't have any time for lunch when I landed, unfortunately.

Nevertheless, The flight out wasn't as bad as it could have been. I hate the piddly regional jets though, so I guess if I have to go through with them, it's better to do it before than after the long 8-hour international flight. When we took off, there was a lot of turbulence, and I felt slightly queasy, and my hands started to tingle cos all the blood was rushing to my core, but I controlled my breathing and drank some club soda and didn't puke thank god.

We landed smoothly enough, and before I knew it I was on the Boeing 767 out of Minneapolis-- quite a fancy airport, by the way. I wa surprised. It had this real-sized mall right there with all the terminals branching off on all sides. Anyway, my seat mate was this annoyingly chatty girl from Bristol, who basically decided we were best friends right then and there.

"Have you ever been to Bristol?" she asked.
"No."
"Oooo! You have to go! There's this posh bar and all sorts of cool stuff, you could crash at my place and I could take you to all the best places."
"Er, yeah, that sounds nice," I said in a weak attempt to shut her up.

"I was just in Seattle visiting my uncle-- I loooved it, it was so beautiful, we went all over the Olympic Peninsula, too-- I love musicals! I love Wicked!"

"I saw Wicked on the West End," this American woman to my left piped up. She leaned over me to chat with my seat mate, and was obviously very impressed by the fact that a real British person was sitting right there chittering like a squirrel.

"I've seen Wicked," I offered. She ignored me.

"Oh, you saw it on the West End, cooool!" my seat mate enthused. She started tapping off West End shows she'd seen. "...but Wicked is my favorite! The woman who wrote it is an American, you know."

"No," I corrected her. "It was a man, Steven Schwartz, he wrote the music to some Disney movies, too..."

They stared blankly at me and I just sat back and ignored them while they went on and on about really nothing.

"I saw Les Mis when it first came out in 1985," the woman piped up. I jumped back into the conversation at that.

"Really?" I said, obviously impressed. "That's so cool. Did you see the 20th anniversary concert last year?"

"I saw it on PBS," she said.

"Yeah, it was great-- but you know, Joe Jonas as Marius..." I trailed off with an uneasy look on my face. She didn't say anything in response so I added, "...not so good."

She stared blankly at me for a second, then turned back to my seat mate and they were at it again.

I sighed and plugged in my headphones to watch Due Date which wasn't so bad, but it wasn't really good either. I tried to go to sleep after that, and I dozed in and out of sleep for a bit, but it was so cold I had to wrap myself up in my winter coat and that flimsy little Delta Airlines blanket and I was still freezing my ass off.

"Sorry for the cold," a flight attendant said after a couple of hours. "It's only in your seat area. Something's wrong with the temperature control right here."

Great, thanks. Just my luck.

I read The Stand for a little bit. The superflu had killed everyone it was going to kill and now all the main characters were about to start their respective journeys into the wildnerness of a post-apocalyptic world.

We hit the ground soon enough, with a great banging "KA-BLUMP-A-BLUMP" cos the pilot didn't know how to land, I guess. A couple people felt they had to raise their voices and someone laughed behind me. Thrill seeker. Everything went smoothly after that, though. Got through customs OK, picked up my bag (one of the first ones out), hopped the next hour-long tube train to St. Pancras, and had a couple minutes there to hit the bathroom and brush my teeth before heading to the East Midlands platform.

Got to Leicester with no problem and met Jana at the station. She was carrying a child's wheely backpack.

"It's for my library books," she explained. "But I thought you could squeeze your laptop in here." We squished it in as good as we could, but the bag wouldn't zip all the way. She clattered with it up London road.

"Ugh, it's too short," Jana said, indicating the wheely bag's handle as she stooped to hold on to it.

"Why'd you get such a small bag?" I asked.

"I didn't know it would be so short!"

"That's a little kid's bag."

"Well..."

"You know those baby strollers you see five year old's wheeling around, the pretend strollers you wouldn't actually want to put a real baby in? Well, that's the wheely bag equivalent."

"Whatever!"

Jana and I bickered amiably all the way back to my house, where we dropped my stuff off and I spent a couple of hours getting unpacked and cleaned up. I'd been up since 8AM the previous morning, and I was bent on staying up until a decent bedtime hour in England so that I could get back into the time zone.

Jana asked me to come over, so I picked up some curry on the way there and we ate dinner with some homemade French cider she'd bought down at a world market. I drank some and made a face.

"Blegh," was my verdict.

"I know," Jana said, swirling the alcohol expertly. "See how it has that cloudy color? It's still fermenting, that's why it's bitter." She had taken a wine tasting class a couple of years ago.

"Why'd you buy it?" I asked.

"Well, the sample I tasted was just fine," she said. "But the guy gave me the reject bottle-- I bet that's why it was so cheap."

We finished off the bottle and went up to Jana's room to watch some Youtube. I fell asleep almost instantly, but forced myself awake again.

"I was sleeping," I said.

"I know," she said. I fell asleep again for a couple of minutes, then shook myself awake. I glanced at my watch. "Nine-thirty," I said. "Okay, I'm going home."

"All right, see ya."

I went back home and fell asleep until 8AM the following morning. Too tired, went back to sleep. My alarm woke me at 10. Still tired. I finally woke up for reals at 12:30-ish. Yep. 14 hours of sleep.

I turned on my phone.

"Wake up sleepy!" a text buzzed as soon as it was on. Jana had sent it about 15 minutes earlier.

I texted her back. "Awake now."

"Wow, you're up late. Let's go to the city centre!"

We had decided to find the De Montfort University library, which was apparently open and staffed even though it was the day of the royal wedding (a national holiday, indeed).

We found William on our way there, lounging in Victoria Park after his run, and we picked him up for the journey. It was a really nice day, and we just walked around lazily. Jana looked at some Art of Walt Disney books at the library for her thesis, and then we traipsed back to the good university.

Blah dee blah, this is going longer than I thought, as usual... Skip ahead to today, since last night was just hanging at Jana's place again (also as usual), and here I am. I've been back in England for 2 days. Woke up at 10:20 this morning. Slowly getting back into the right time zone.

Oh yeah, and this whole time, I've been furiously e-mailing the Head of my Course (HOC, remember?), my adviser, and the people with the PhD program in Rome. So the HOC said I can actually finish my Master's thesis early because I told him the PhD program wants it finished by July 31. So now I'm freaking out (also also as usual) about getting everything finished in time!

Because I still need to run a few more subjects, write my thesis, send in my application for the PhD program (which asks for pages and pages of new material as it is, including a project proposal), get ready for BPS, write my talk for EPS, and all that on top of my coursework I still haven't sent in (I have one paper with NO reference list right now), and I have a stats exam on the 9th. OY! All this in 3 months. I have 3 months to finish everything now.

OK so I have a meeting with my adviser about all the things I have to do, on May 3.
The BPS conference is May 4-6.
The stats exam is on May 9.
My coursework is due May 12.
My application is due May 31.
I don't remember which days the EPS conference takes place (sometime in July).
And I'm to finish my 6-8000 words thesis and have it defended by July 31.

Three months. I can do it. I can! I caaaannn!!!

Now might be a good time to get into the project idea I have for the PhD program. Let me tell you, it's a good one. I e-mailed the professor in charge of the program and asked him if it was an appropriate topic and he said it was swell. Listen to this:

Emotional biological motion and Autistic Spectrum Disorders.

OK back up... let's see. So at one point in the past, a lab got some dancers and actors together and asked them to go through the motions of different emotions in front of a camera. For example, the researcher said, "Gimme anger!" and the body-conscious professionals balled their hands into fists and stomped forward with big, over-exaggerated movements. "Gimme fear!" They raised their palms and jumped backwards. Etc. There were six different emotions filmed, and at one point, the researchers put little reflective dots on these dancing/acting bodies and turned off the lights, and all you could see were the dots of light making the motions, and you could see the impression of a body there.

These are called point light displays. Now a lot of researchers use these films of point light displays for all different experiments, and I want to use them for this:

SO autistic individuals have a hard time decoding emotion from movements. They are not very conscious of their own body movements, either. They have a hard time with social things in general, and emotional motion is one of them, and that includes facial expressions as well as whole body movements.

Well, the project I came up with has to do with scanning autistic brains while they watch point light displays versus full light displays, and they will have to say what emotion is being expressed. I would also give them scenarios they will have to figure out the ending to based on these movements.

"A man witnesses a robbery," I would say. "He reacts like this:" (I'll show the video of either fear or anger here). "Do you think the man decided to help the victim, or run away?"

I will also ask Theory of Mind questions, such as:

"A man goes to work and leaves his dog home alone. The dog breaks an expensive vase while the man is gone. The man comes home from work and he looks like this:" (I'll show the video of either anger or calm here.) "Do you think the man knows his vase is broken?"

Etc. That is how the study will pan out. I will go through these scenarios, and I'm going to add into the project idea that I'd like to use fMRI to see what's going on in the ASD brain while all of this is happening. And I would like to know if people with ASD are better at inferring emotion from point light displays or full light displays, or if they are better at the emotional scenarios or theory of mind scenarios. I might add in a normal control to the mix. I might suggest that point light displays could be used to teach emotional biological motion to people with ASD.

Anyway, that's it. I don't know how that one came into my brain but that's that. Obviously this is just an idea-- the prof said it wouldn't necessarily be what I'm gonna do for my PhD cos I'd have to discuss it with whoever my tutor would be and it would have to fit into their research as well. At this point, I just don't care... as I've said before, I just want to study Cognitive Neuroscience and learn fMRI. And if I can do that, no matter what subject I'm studying, I don't care-- I'll do it. And this program pays well... REALLY well for a graduate program. I'd be lucky to get it, and I really really hope I do!

Okay, now I said I'd discuss other things... like the Creation Museum. Wow, I don't know, I'm kinda burning out my typing fingers, but let's have a go...

So my mom and I decided to take a short trip south on Easter weekend. We drove through Amish country on Friday and stayed in a hotel in Kentucky that gave us discount Creation Museum tickets for the next day. It rained all weekend, but it wasn't too bad as we were driving to the museum on Saturday morning. We got there and it's this big fancy building with dinosaur statues standing outside.

The first thing we did was go see a planetarium show. It wasn't a real planetarium, but a digital one, but the show was still impressive for its visual effects. You could see Earth, all the planets and their trajectories around the sun, and then it zoomed out in the wider universe into other star systems and galaxies. The narrator wasn't preachy, he just said things like, "Look at what God has created!" in between saying things I had learned in my college astronomy class. However, he did stress the fact that "The Big Bang could not have happened, because..." and he went off about the universe not really expanding, and young stars being next to old stars, etc. Some things that didn't really make sense, but I guess make sense to the Creationists, so there you have it.

We left the planetarium and there was this herptologist outside in khaki carrying a snake around his arm.

"Come see me show later!" he was telling the crowd. "Here, take this." He handed me the snake and it was the coolest thing ever. That was when I decided that one day, I will own a Ball Python (which is what that particular snake was), and I will hold it and feel its strong muscle wrap around my arm-- so cool! It just coils and bobs like the empty-eyed little coiling monster that it is.

The museum itself was quite impressive. It's set up like a natural history museum, and they spared no expense creating lavish fake gardens, archaeological dig sites, anamatronic dinosaurs, all sorts of great things. A big part of the museum was the role of dinosaurs in the bible.

Dinosaurs were called dragons in the early years of Earth (no older than 6000 years). They roamed the garden of Eden in the time of Adam and ate vegetation until the fall of man. All animals were vegetarian in the garden of Eden, and nothing died, and there were no thorns on plants, or diseases or mutations. My mother piped up questions throughout the whole exhibit: "But if everyone was immortal, the Earth would have been overpopulated long before now!... But if the dinosaurs were taken aboard Noah's Ark, how did they become extinct all at once?" I tried to be helpful and answer her questions the way a Creationist might. If there were any atheists there that day, I wouldn't be counted among them!

I think the reason immortal people wouldn't have overpopulated is hinted at in the long lifespans of those who came after Adam. His sons all lived close to 1000 years, and each of them only had one kid or so in their lifetimes. I think 1 kid every 1000 years could keep a population down, even if you were immortal.

As for the dinos, they never did say.

But yes, it is true-- dinosaurs were taken aboard the Ark. And here's something I never knew but probably should have-- only Noah's family was saved. So I guess we are all descendents of Noah. Not like that did any good, though-- I would hate to see the state of the world if the rotten people of ages past hadn't died, seeing as we good folks are pretty terrible as it is. Guess we're in for another flood soon?

It was also interesting that all the periods of history-- Triassic, Jurassic, Precambrian, etc-- are all referred to simply as sediment layers by the Creationists. During the flood, different kind of sediment settled at different times-- floating forests were turned into coal, etc-- and all the layers we attribute to diffeent "periods" are actually just various layers of Earth that settled at different times over the course of a one year global flood. That's the thing-- the Creationists compacted all of anthropological and geological history into a short period to fit it all into 6000 years. Pangaea became the continents in a year. The last ice age lasted only a hundred years or so. Neanderthal and Homo erectus were just nomadic humans cut off from their cultures.

All of the world's 6000 year history is catalogued in a 20ft. map-- very detailed in its descriptions and timelines, and such a cool cool thing-- my mom bought a copy for my dad, and when we got home we just sat there and read as much as we could as we spread the map through the hallway.

By the time we left the Creation Museum, it was raining pretty hard... we tried to head further south, but we were just following the storm, and when tornado warnings started blaring over the radio, we just turned around and drovce back home. I didn't mind though-- I liked spending Sunday at my parents' house-- one more day I got to spend with the whole fam before I left that Wednesday.

I spent a couple more days with my friends, we went to Chagrin Falls one last time, and I had a good ol' fashioned all-American pancake breakfast with Matt at a quaint diner by his house before heading home to finish packing.

I was sad to leave, and I would like to be able to go back as soon as possible. And hopefully, now that I will finish my thesis in July, perhaps I will be able to go back mucher sooner than I'd first thought! Of course I might stick around to try to learn MATLAB if I don't have the time before July 31, but I hope I can get some practice in before then. I guess we'll see. We'll just see!

Okay, I've been writing this thing way too long now.. but it's done! That's making up for 2 weeks of silence I guess!