Guitars, cadillacs

There’s lots of things that I’d like to write about, but there’s never as much time for blog-writing as I’d like. Some of these entries may eventually be written. But since there’s about five people that read this, if you’re that interested in one of the ones that doesn’t eventually get written, just ask me! Anyways, here are some things that I thought I’d write about but haven’t yet:

• The new Decemberists album “The Crane Wife” is pretty incredible, and a real leap for them above their previous work
• I saw Sparta for the second time. Awesome again. They also have a new album out.
• Picked up new albums from The Tragically Hip, and the Be Good Tanyas
• Hey, I went to Vancouver!
• I saw the Bodyworlds 3 exhibit in Vancouver, and wasn’t really crazy about it, but that might have just been me
• I think some guitar chords are way over-represented in popular music because of the layout of the fretboard, and I thought that it was kind of like the spandrels of San Marco

Me With Nothing To Say

Fall is here in Montreal. Falling leaves, crisp mornings, early sunsets, me waking up freezing cold because I’ve left the windows open again. I’ve probably said it before, but Fall is my favourite time of year here. To celebrate Fall’s arrival, here are my Top 5 6, all-time, desert island, favourite songs that are either about or remind-me-about Fall. In no particular order:

1. Iron & Wine - Sixteen, Maybe Less
2. Yo La Tengo - Autumn Sweater
3. Wilco - One by One
4. The Tragically Hip - Fiddler’s Green
5. Pearl Jam - Off He Goes
6. Nick Drake - Pink Moon

Posted Without Comment

Recent Shows

Jay and I saw two shows this past week, so here’s a post about that. We saw Mastodon at the Spectrum, then later that week we saw M. Ward at Sala Rossa. Both shows were excellent, but I suspect Jay and I were probably the only people to be at both shows. Videos below! Both bands featured really incredible musicians, albeit talented in completely different ways. Whereas the guys in Mastodon probably spent years in their bedrooms chained to ever-quickening metronomes, M. Ward has a much more jazz- and folk-influenced style.

All Is Quiet On New Year's Day

Today is the first day of the new academic year here at McGill. Time for all the undergrads to come back, to meet a bunch of new people, and to see everyone who’s been off in the field come back. I’ll be busy as ever this term, TAing courses in evolution and bioinformatics, and playing intramural ice hockey, volleyball, and Ultimate.

No More Bike

Man, my bike got stolen. That sucks!

More On Listening To Music: The Tragically Hip Edition

Or, “Moron Listening To Music”, if you prefer. A friend of mine paid me what I thought was a pretty nice compliment the other day. He wrote “Your opinion of an album a few days after you buy it is almost always the opinion I'll have of the album years later”. He was referring to the Hip’s album “Music @ Work”, which I thought was pretty good at the time, while he was quite disappointed with it.

So I was trying to think of why I actually liked the album. Most of the time, when I first form my opinion of an album, it’s strictly an intuitive thing. Does it have a good beat, and can I dance to it? (Aside: I tried to Google the origin of that phrase and was totally unsuccessful - anyone know?). Or more specifically, for me, does it make me invent some new stupid dance, or give me chills, or get caught in my head for days? Only after living with the album for awhile do I try to go back and articulate what it is about a song or an album that makes it work for me. This is something that’s always fun, and often surprising, in that I’ll usually realize I was completely misinterpreting a song. Or, more rewardingly, that the song had perfectly captured a moment in my life and I’d only picked up on it subconsciously at the time.

Listening to “Music @ Work” again today, there are really only four songs on it that make the album for me, and the rest is kind of forgettable. The lead track, “Music @ Work”, is just a great Hip rocker. But I think that “Lake Fever”, “Stay”, and “As I Wind Down The Pines” are some of the best things the Hip have ever done. I think what I like most about these songs is their intimacy. “Lake Fever” is basically “Bobcaygeon Part II”, which can’t be a bad thing. “Stay” is a fantastic, vulnerable love song that really captures loneliness and the need for companionship. Similarly, “As I Wind Down The Pines” is one of the few Hip songs where they manage to do more with less. Simple guitar lines and simple lyrics, but slightly out-of-sync with each other, forcing you to pay attention.

Gord Downie is always interesting as a lyricist, but I think that on the earlier albums he’s struggling a little to find his voice - trying to write big blustery “rock lyrics” without the Jagger swagger to really pull it off. And on the more recent albums, he’s descended into a bit of an obsession with words - to the detriment of the interplay between the words and the music. But on Phantom Power (unquestionably the best Hip album) and Music@Work he seems to hit a sweet spot.

And since I probably won’t write about the Hip here for a long time, if ever, my only two other strongly-held opinions about them are: (1) Gord Downie should not be allowed to play guitar live on “Wheat Kings” and “Nautical Disaster” because it absolutely murders his vocal delivery and (2) The Fully Completely / Day For Night album duo is over-rated.

Back in the City

The yeast course is done, and I’m back in Montreal. I learned a lot, met some great people, and didn’t sleep much for three weeks. So here I am, trying to get back to full speed at work, find a new apartment, get rid of my old one, and catch up on sleep. Here’s a picture of the group (click for a bigger version), I’ll try to write more (ha!) and put up some more pictures later.



One of the events held at the banquet was a song competition, where each group would attempt to insult the others through song. Here’s one I wrote, set to the melody of “California Girls” by the Beach Boys, that I creatively called “Cerevisiae Girls”. I’m not sure whether I should capitalize the ‘C’ in cerevisiae in this case, and I’m also not sure whether worrying about that or just the song in general disqualifies me from coolness. Here it is...

Verse 1


Well yeast are really hip
I really dig those genes we share
And with double-fusion PCR
I can knock any gene in there

Verse 2


With the green fluorescent protein
I can make any gene alight
And I know I’ll always have enough
A billion cells in just one night

Chorus


They wish they all could work on Saccharomy-
(Wish they all could work on Saccharomy-)
They wish they all could work on Saccharomyces

Verse 3


Expression people just watch lights shine
And nematodes are just so bland
The microscopists are only looking in
Without tetrads how can you understand?

Verse 4


I’ve been all around Cold Spring Harbor
And I’ve seen all kinds of work
So I couldn’t wait to get back to my yeast
Back to the greatest system in the world

Repeat Chorus 2x

CSHL Day 12

Day Twelve, our first day off after eleven very long, very intense, very satisfying days. I had hoped to write and read a lot today, but ended up mostly sleeping.

I’ve learned a lot about yeast genetics, pulled some tetrads, met some great people, and heard some great science. The external support for the course is great also - I’ve had some surreal moments thinking “I’d better not spill my beer on this $100,000 microscope”. And since I need to leave now for more drinks, here are some budding yeast cells stained with calcufluor. The bright spots are the bud scars, I took the picture using a Zeiss Axio Imager system.

CSHL Day 1

Woke up. Went for a run. Finished writing a talk. Spent fifteen hours hearing about and fiddling with yeast. Going to sleep now.

CSHL Day 0

One thing this space is good for is for impromptu travel diaries. I don’t have a camera with me this trip, so unfortunately there probably won’t be any pictures. But anyways, after 11 hours of busses, borders, trains, and one van, I’ve arrived at CSHL.

One thing I find funny when travelling is getting so caught up in trying to catch the aforementioned trains, busses, etc., that when I realized the bus I was on went to the Port Authority, and not Penn Station as I had thought, I actually spent awhile trying to figure out elaborate transportation plans for how to get there before realizing that I could just walk ten blocks.

The CSHL campus is pretty gorgeous - a collection of hold houses re-fitted into research and teaching labs, nestled at the base of Cold Spring Harbor. Here’s a satellite view of the campus, I’m at the base of the inner harbour right now. It’s much less humid here than Montreal, and it feels really nice to get out of the city for awhile.

Now, time to write a talk for tomorrow! Updates in the future will probably be something like “Woke up. Spent Twelve Hours Fiddling With Yeast. Going to Sleep Now.”

Back To The Ocean

Hey, I’m heading to Long Island for three weeks! I’ll be attending the Yeast Genetics and Genomics course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. Three weeks of late nights in the lab, and lots of yeast talk.

Since I don’t really do any field work, I never get a chance to grow a cool field-work beard. So I’m taking this opportunity to give it a shot. Pictures may or may not follow.

Speciation by Musical Isolation

One of the principal mechanisms thought to be responsible for the evolution of new species is the process of allopatric speciation. Simply put, populations that are capable of interbreeding are separated for a long period of time (by, for example, a mountain range or ocean). Out of contact with each other, each new subpopulation adapts to its new environment, while neutral genetic changes also accumulate. After enough time has elapsed, the two subpopulations may no longer be able to breed with each other, because of the accumulated genetic changes in each.

I’m kind of feeling this week like I’m undergoing a musical allopatric speciation event. I keep listening to music on my own, and if at some point I end up trying to talk about music with my friends, we’ll have nothing at all in common anymore. I mean seriously, how often can one person listen to Sweetheart of the Rodeo in one week, and still be able to interact with other people? I’ll have to move to South Carolina or something.

If future scientists are trying to decipher how I ended up here, I think it went something like Wilco -> Uncle Tupelo -> Gillian Welch -> Gram Parsons.

I Remember You Well

So there I was in my old blue raincoat watching the new Leonard Cohen biopic/concert film Leonard Cohen I’m Your Man. A lot of the artists in the film told their stories about how they first heard of him, so here’s mine. My dad used to play Leonard Cohen all the time, mostly the I’m Your Man album, and I thought it was the worst music in the world. I was probably ten years old at the time. He couldn’t sing! It was all cheesy eighties keyboards! One day, I thought I had a telling argument. In “Tower of Song”, he sings:

        I was born like this, I had no choice, I was born with the gift of a golden voice

This was clearly untrue! I thought I’d caught him in a lie, so we wouldn’t have to listen to it anymore! Aha!

This was also obviously before I’d heard of irony.

Anyways, the movie is pretty great, but probably only if you already like Leonard Cohen. It blends concert footage (from, strangely enough, Australia), interviews, and biographical footage collected from throughout Cohen’s life. The performances are a bit of a mixed bag - while some were incredible, some came off more like karaoke. I was surprised that I didn’t like Nick Cave’s performance of “I’m Your Man”, since I love Nick Cave and that song. There was also way too much U2. I’ve got more to say about the film, but I think I’ll save it for other posts.

Montréal Jazz Festival, Part I

Hey, the Jazz Festival has returned to Montreal! The Festival is one of the best things about summer here - two weeks of great, mostly free music. There’s a lot to say about the Festival, but for now I’ll just stick to a few things.

Each year, the Festival has a few big free shows, that typically draw tens of thousands of people down to Place des Arts. Sometimes they’re incredible, like Cirque du Soleil. Sometimes, like last night, it’s the Neville Brothers. I usually try to go to the big concerts, even when I’m not crazy about the artists, just because of the scope of the events.

So I tried, valiantly, to appreciate Aaron Neville’s crooning, but it just wasn’t happening (even after an afternoon of drinking and baseball). Luckily for us, there was a great band from France - Smooth playing at another stage. Billed as “an electro-jazz sung in English but grooving in the universal language of hip”, these guys were really good. Their sound was built up from their really funky rhythm section of a drummer and bass player, with a singer/guitarist/keyboardist on top.

That show was part of the Groove series at the Festival, which always has the best party music each year, and looks to be really solid again this year. Tonight, I’m going to try to see Gomez, but might not, because who starts a rock show at 6pm?

World Cup Predictions

I haven’t been able to watch too much of the World Cup so far because it falls during my workday, but here are some predictions anyways.

England will not win the World Cup. The only reason I say this is because their fans seem to have the same mentality as fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Charitably, blind optimism, less charitably, denial.

I’m rooting for Argentina again, which I think I’ve done since around 1994, when I was swayed by their cool blue jerseys, and old Disney cartoons that made me think everyone in the country was a cowboy.

Sushi and Tit for Tat

Since I’m ostensibly thinking about evolution a lot of the time, I started thinking about how I decide where to shop and eat in terms of game theory. I think that, when I’m in the process of deciding which restaurants to go to, or which airline to fly, or any decision like that, I play a pretty standard strategy of Tit-for-Tat.

A lot of evolutionary game theory is based on trying to answer questions relating to the evolution of cooperation. Cooperation at first seems counterintuitive from an evolutionary perspective: selection acts on organisms, and organisms that are selfish will generally end up with more resources than organisms that are unselfish, and so end up having more and better offspring. Selection should then generally favour selfish individuals over altruistic ones.

But altruism, and cooperation between organisms are quite commonly observed. How does this evolve? One classic, and tractable way of approaching the problem is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Briefly, in an iterated game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, two parties are subjected to repeated interactions with each other. Each round, they are able to select a strategy of cooperation or defection. The highest possible reward is for defecting when your partner cooperates, followed by both individuals cooperating, then both individuals defecting, and finally the worst possible outcome, cooperating while your partner defects. The object of the game is to select a strategy that maximizes your individual fitness over time.

The story of the original Prisoner’s Dilemma competition is really quite interesting, but I won’t repeat it here (read about it here if you’re interested). The relevant question is, what is the optimal strategy? If you know that your opponent will always cooperate, the best strategy is to always defect. Similarly, if you know your opponent will always defect, you should always defect too. But what if you don’t have any advance knowledge? What if your opponent’s strategy changes in response to yours? It turns out that a remarkably good strategy is a very simple one: Tit-for-Tat. Simply, a Tit-for-Tat strategy involves cooperating on the first turn, then repeating your opponents last move. If your opponent betrays you, betray them back next time. Tit-for-Tat is an evolutionarily stable strategy (or ESS), implying that a whole population playing this strategy cannot be invaded by individuals playing any other strategy.

Back to me and shopping. I was thinking that I’m just very boring and stuck in a rut of only going to a few places. I’ll give new places a chance, and if I enjoy them, I’ll return. As long as I keep having good experiences, I keep returning. But, if I’m unsatisfied, I don’t get mad, I just never return. So if I’m really playing Tit-for-Tat, it would seem that to get me back as a customer, a business would have to do something for me - a free pizza, or something like that. But even if I was offered something, I might just cynically take their offer, then never return anyways. So perhaps my strategy is “Cooperate until defected upon, then always defect, regardless of whether the opponent cooperates or defects”.

I’m not sure the analogy completely holds up - as a consumer, I usually have quite a bit of prior knowledge about a service before I enter the store. So I don’t just go out and try everything once, then only return to the places I like. Also, I have the advantage of knowing how likely I am to interact with that business in the future. In an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game, the players don’t know how many times they’ll interact in the future, otherwise defecting on the last turn is always the best strategy.

So maybe I am stuck in a rut of having a few favourite haunts. But at least this lets me feel like I’m just being strategic.

EDIT: There was an actual point to titling this post "Sushi and Tit for Tat", though I forgot about it when I actually wrote the post. The sushi place I've been going to recently always tosses in a few extra cucumber or avocado rolls. Awesome! Last time, however, they didn't. Do I keep going back, or have they betrayed me?

Thoughts on Writing About Music

I have a few entries on music that are stewing around in the back of my mind right now, and that may eventually get put up here. But thinking about those entries, and starting to write them, got me thinking about what I want to write about when I write about music.

I don’t think I’d be very good as an “objective” reviewer of music, and that’s not really my interest anyways. One of the writers that I’ve read for a few years online (Caryn Rose, formerly of 5h, now of jukeboxgraduate) once wrote something about how she wasn’t writing about music per se, she was writing about listening to music. That’s what I’d like to do here. Not an attempt at objectivity or ranking, but something much more subjective: how does it make me feel when I hear a song, what memories get dragged out, and does it make me tap my feet?

The first album I was going to write about was Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, but that one is cutting a little close to home right now. I’ve moved from “Simple Twist of Fate” and “You’re A Big Girl Now”, going briefly through “Idiot Wind”, and settled in now at “If You See Her, Say Hello” and “Buckets of Rain”, thanks for asking.

Instead I’d like to write about Pearl Jam, and their new album. This post will either eventually be complemented by a bunch of others, or will stand here alone mocking me! The plan is to go through the new album, track by track, with a few autobiographical detours thrown in as necessary.

Buying me off: Cheap and easy!

A few friends and I received free tickets to see Al Gore’s new movie, An Inconvenient Truth, the other night. I think the idea behind giving free tickets to people working in the sciences is that we’ll convince all our friends and acquaintances that it’s a really important, compelling, and scientifically rigorous movie. Since I’m easily bought, and the movie really was good, I don’t feel bad saying: This is a really important, compelling, and scientifically sound movie. Go see it if you get a chance.

The film focusses on Gore’s efforts to educate people about the global warming crisis, mainly by depicting scenes from a slideshow Gore regularly gives on the topic. The biggest potential stumbling-block for the film is that it’s as much about Gore and his work as it is about global warming. The presentation on global warming is interspersed with vignettes from Gore’s life, and travels, including stories about his family, his political career, and his failed presidential campaign. While I (and my friends) thought this approach might be at best a distraction from the movie’s message, and at worst a campaign ad for Gore ‘08, it actually serves the film quite well. Each story from Gore’s life serves to underline just why Gore has dedicated so much time to the issue, and why warming really is a moral issue that should transcend political or economical concerns.

As someone who’s seen more than his fair share of talks on atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming, it’s really easy for the material to come off as either terribly boring if it’s presented poorly, or terribly depressing if it’s presented well. One of the real achievements of the movie is in how it conveys the seriousness of global warming, while maintaining a sense of optimism and determination. Previous “insoluble” problems like ozone pollution have indeed been tackled, and at much less cost than doomsayers initially predicted.

The direction of the film is quite good, with many of the vignettes having a real autumnal quality to them. Though autumnal themes and 3/4 time are two of my main weaknesses, it’s still good. The most similar examples I can think of in tone are (cheesily enough) the voiceover monologues of Galadriel at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, and Private Witt’s voiceovers from “The Thin Red Line”.

As several other reviews I’ve looked at have noted, it’s really easy to ask at the end of the film: What might have been? What if the US had a president who really did care about science and the environment? Though I can’t imagine how he did it, Gore seems to be at peace with himself, and ready to move on. He’s doing a noble thing.

Obligatory Mac nerdness: Gore uses PowerBooks and Keynote throughout the film, which makes sense, since he’s on the board at Apple. They’ve put up a key to "An Inconvenient Truth" at their site .

We Should Spend More Time Together in Crowds

Interpreting a person’s intent from email messages has always frustrated me. All sorts of nuances present in normal conversation are lost, and internet-speak only makes it worse. I recently learned a few of my friends have a pretty good triple-tag-team textual parsing thing going on to try to interpret some of the emails they get from guys. So I thought it would be fun to write ambiguous emails, specifically designed to vex them. Here’s my first shot:

From: Rod
Subject: We should spend more time together in large crowds
Date: June 3, 2006 8:26:13 PM EDT (CA)
To: X

Dear X,

        I've really enjoyed the time we've spent together recently. You're like a sister to me (a sexy sister!). We should definitely hang out more - do you like Indian food? I know a really great place, but we'd have to go in a group of at least eight. Do you have many cute friends?

        Oh yeah, I couldn't stop thinking about that story you told me the other day - It made me laugh, and I was thinking about you all day. The girl I was talking to at the gym thought it was totally hilarious too.

        Anyways, I do think we should get together sometime soon and talk - maybe coffee? Or maybe drinks? I don't want you to think I'm moving too fast, but...

Kind regards,
Rod

p.s. My old friends Pat and Terry might be in town too - would it be cool if they came along?