Crabby Birthday to Me!

"Thirty Seven?!?!"

As seems to be the usual way, my birthday morphed into a week long celebration. The distance from family and the vagaries of Amazon's shipping speeds meant that the gifts trickled in all week. Kelly had a final on Monday, so we just went out for Thai food (TRADITION!).

Saturday was the best though. Outro Michael (shown above) and his girlfriend, Candice, served an outstanding crab feast... replete with crab bisque, corn fritters, home-made sauces and half of a dungeness crab. We followed that up with a fantabulous Guinness cake baked by my wife. From there we went and saw Paula Poundstone perform her standup act.

It was fascinating to watch the live crab be dropped into the boiling water. On one hand, I felt a twinge of remorse. I think that feeling is a bizarre byproduct of our urbanized and gentrified lifestyles. Food is not something grown, raised or caught. It is something that magically appears in shrink-wrapped packaging on our shelves next to the Soylent Green. Heck, Kelly and I were amazed last year at watching eggplants grow. I figure, if I can't handle the reality of the process, I shouldn't be eating the food. And on the other hand, it was really freaking tasty.

I had a really hard time with my last California birthday (#29), and I was worried that this one would be similar. Thanks to some real support from my wife and friends (and the help of an income higher than a grad student), it was a very special and energizing experience. I miss all of you who are far away, but you will just have to work your way out here soon.

Book Recommendation Time

I just finished reading "On Being Certain. Believing You Are Right Even When You Are Not." by Robert Burton. Absolutely fascinating.

Why are so many people certain of things even when all the facts are contravening? Are they stupid or willfully ignorant? Why is one of those people occasionally staring back at me from the mirror?

The premise of the book is that logical reasoning and assessment of certainty take place in two separate parts of the brain. The "feeling of knowing" is more of a subconscious assessment than a deliberate weighing of facts and probabilities.

An example from the book. On the day after the Challenger explosion, a professor had freshman students write down what they thought and what they felt. Then when the students were seniors, he asked them to write down how they remembered feeling on the day after the Challenger explosion. In many cases, the two accounts were notably different. The interesting thing is that even when presented with their own recollections, many students disagreed that that was what they were feeling at the time. On student even says, "That's my handwriting, but that's not what happened."

The feeling of knowing can be present even without knowledge... "I know that guy's name, I just can't remember it right now." The feeling of knowing can be absent in the presence of knowledge... I know that I live 2500 miles away from my family but at some level it still doesn't seem real.

The author wanders around explaining how the brain works to produce this sensation and this part is a little tough to read... partly because he is telling me things that I "know" to be false. "My conscious thoughts are not some tip of the iceberg floating on vast body of shrouded cogitation hidden from view even to myself."

I plan on reading this book a second time to try and make some more sense of sections, but it has been very thought provoking. I also recommend Descarte's Error in this milieu, which I read many years ago.