Ethnicities

There's an awful lot of racial/ethnic diversity around here. Three different stories about that.

At work, we do a lot of surveys, which involve asking people what ethnic/racial group they are. First, we ask if they are Hispanic or not. Then we ask them if they are: white, African-American, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, or Other.

All the Hispanics tick other. Because they don't know that they are supposed to tick white. Someone, somewhere decided that being Hispanic is an ethnic group, not a racial group (or maybe that's the other way around) and so Hispanic people are white. Which is all very politically correct, if only the Hispanic people knew that they were white. But they don't. None of them. They never tick white, they always tick other. I asked if we could add Hispanic as a category, but we can't.



A friend of Susanne lives a couple of miles from us, and was applying to get her offspring into a school, but not the nearby school. The LA Unified School District has a complicated system of points for deciding what school you get into, if you don't want to get into the default school. One of the things you can get points for is for being an ethnic (or racial?) minority. He gets extra points for this, because he's white.


The boys school is quite a different mixture of ethnicities (and a reasonable number of children have parents of different ethnicities). But in that stereotyped way, the boys are not very good at telling black people apart. So whenever we are out, they are constantly seeing their friends. They don't think it's strange that the only friends they see are the black ones.

Computing Help

I've been doing a bit of teaching at Corporation of Current Employment. As is traditional when teaching I had trouble with the video projector and computer link up. Like they didn't work.

At University of Previous Employment, this would happen, so I'd phone up, and eventually a bored looking technician would fiddle with stuff, and sometimes, after about an hour, it would work.

One of the the nice things about Corporation of Current Employment is that the Computing people are very good, and very fast. So I phoned up, and within about three minutes, not one, but three people had arrived. They had obviously planned, because they came into the room, one went straight to the computer, one went to the projector, and one when to the box of network connections, pressed a button on the box (that I hadn't seen before) and it all came to life.

Too old for concerts

I went to a concert on Wednesday, for the first time in, ooh ages and ages. The doors opened at 8, so I was in line at 7:30 (I valet parked, to save a few precious minutes, plus it was $10, and non-valet was $6).

For some odd reason, Susanne didn't want to come (she compares Eels music to "whining as if they lived in Siberia"). So I stood on my own in the line. The person behind me was also standing in the line on their own. (Eels music attracts the kind of person who has no friends, it seems. Or maybe the kind of person who has no friends and likes Eels music). I asked them what the time was, and they replied in an English accent, their name turned out to be Hugh, and Hugh had come from New York, just to go to this concert.

Anyway, we sat down together (3rd row, thanks to our early arrival) and someone else with no friends (who liked the Eels) sat next to him. She was a librarian (I think) from Pasadena, and was more attractive than me. So he mostly chatted with her (inasmuch as one can chat in the 3rd row).

It turned out not be especially similar to other concerts. I asked someone working their what time it started (I needed to get food, before it started. He told me that the movie started at 8:40, and the band would come on at 10. Ten! That's past my bedtime! I'm going to be woken up at 6:30 tomorrow morning (if I'm lucky)!

And a movie? First I'd heard about a movie.

Well, to step back a bit. Eels (the band) consists of E, and a selection of other people who seem to change fairly regularly. (E is called E not for pretentious reasons, but because he is called Mark Everett, and he had a lot of friends when he was young called Mark. So they called him Mark E, or just E for short.

Now E's father was something of a famous physicist - which you might not have known. And that's not surprising, 'cos E didn't know that either until his father had died, and someone told him. The BBC made a documentary called Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives about Hugh Everett, but it's only ever been shown on BBC4, it's never been on in the US, and never been available to buy (as far as I can tell, and I've looked). Anyway, that was the the movie.

In the documentary, they tracked down people who had worked with Hugh Everett, and people who had been influenced by him. They told the story of Hugh's meeting with Niels Bohr, which didn't go so well, and put Hugh off academia for life. Everett tried to explain to Bohr why he was wrong about quantum mechanics. Bohr didn't like that. (The famous Schrodinger's cat was also an attempt to explain why Bohr was wrong. Although most people don't understand that.) E learned that there were physicists who called themselves Everettian physicists, and was genuinely surprised.

Anyway, back to the concert. After the movie, E came on a played a couple of songs solo, and then he introduced The Band, which consisted of Chet (or The Chet), who seemed to be able to play every instrument known to humanity. And several that weren't. Including the saw (which he played with a violin bow).



During the song Flyswatter, E played the piano, and Chet played the drums. Then E stopped playing the piano, and (without missing a beat) took over playing the drums, while Chet went to the piano. Then they swapped again (and again, without missing a drumbeat). That's what the first video shows on this page. (Changeovers are just after 3 minutes, and just after 5 minutes).

The biggest hit by Eels was Novocaine for the Soul, and E once said that no one told you that if you had a hit record, you were going to have to play it every day for the rest of your life. Try doing that without going completely fucking insane. So the question on everyone's lips (well, mine) was whether they'd play it. They did, but a rather unusual version. E played drums furiously, and sang, while Chet played lead slide guitar. Thanks to the power of the internet, there's a video here. (That was from the night before, and somewhere else, but you get the gist).

Another unusual feature of the night was that E has recently written a book, about his life. He said that if he read any of it, that would be pompous and pretentious. So he made Chet read two passages from it. One where he first arrived in LA, saw someone famous, gave them a tape that he'd made, and thought he'd made it. The second where he had returned from his sister's funeral, and his neighbour (who thought he's been on holiday) said she'd seen a female apparition walking into his house. Which I would have thought a cue for the song Friendly Ghost, but was actually a cue for Last Stop This Town which was also about his sister's death. (She committed suicide after a number of attempts, and the second album of Eels, Electro Shock Blues, is mostly about this. It's not the cheeriest record you've ever heard. But it is very good.)

Eels played a session on KCRW the day before, and the whole thing (40 minutes) was recorded (sound AND video).

I challenge anyone to listen to it all and say that Eels are not the world's finest band.

You can listen to it here:




You can watch the video here:


(Chet plays the saw during Bus Stop Boxer, which is at about 29 minutes.)

Teaching

Before I started working at Corporation of Current Employment, I agreed to do some teaching. They call it a half module (or something similar) which means that I have to do one 1.5 hour session per week for 10 weeks.

The students, on paper at least, are horribly high calibre. Several have written books on various subjects, one was a professor of economics in Brazil, several have degrees and graduate degrees in real sciences - like physics.

So I was slightly concerned about what I might know, and be able to tell them, that they didn't know. Well, except for jokes - obviously I'd know a lot of jokes that they didn't.

Anyway, it went surprisingly OK. I've always taught psychology students, or subjects reasonably closely related to psychology. Some things that psychology students seem to just know, these students struggled with. Other things they found very straightforward.

Their task, in the second week, was to construct a questionnaire to measure something that they were interested in, pilot it on each other, and then give it to as many people as they could. My favorite was a questionnaire that one group designed on relationship satisfaction. They decided that there should be three kinds of questions, one group should be 'satisfaction with sex life'. They came up with three items:

1. Are you satisfied with the frequency of your sex?
2. Are you satisfied with the quality of your sex?
3. Are you satisfied with the kinkiness of your sex?

Lots of Stuff

I have a weird contradiction with this blog. When I'm busy doing lots of exciting stuff, I've got lots of stuff to write about. But I don't have much time. But when I haven't got lots of stuff to do, I have more time to write it. But little to say.

So, here's a brief summary. We sold our house. I went back to York to sort it out, with a bunch of help from Robin. It all went remarkably smoothly (in the end, once we'd thrown enough money at various problems).

We've now got a fat wad of cash sitting in a bank in the UK, and every day I stare at the exchange rate graph and wonder when the best time to move it will be. I took lots of photos, and then left my camera at Jennifer's house, so I'll have to retrieve it when I go back in July.

Meanwhile, we've been vaguely looking at houses. But only vaguely, for two reasons. First, because prices seem to be dropping, and second because we can't get much of a mortgage before we've been here for 2 years (which will be in 5 months).

Flickr has just started allowing you to put videos on there, as well as photos. So here's my first video on Flickr. It's not very interesting. Sometimes I point the video at the boys in the hope that they might do something interesting or cute or unusual. But they didn't. What is slightly interesting is that I don't think they've stood still for that long before, for any reason at all. There must have been something very interesting in the water.

Boat Movie

Oma and Michael have been visiting, so we hired a boat. A fast boat. A boat that went fast enough to make Alex cry. Here's the video that Dan took.

Wooden Houses

Houses here are often made of wood. That means that they burn down in dramatic style. It also means that they float.

Why I've never been in a WalMart

I always thought that America was full of Wal-Marts. And despite having been here about 18 months, I've never been in one. That's not for principled reasons (like the fact that Wal-Mart is the country's leading seller of guns) , it's because I've almost never seen one. I saw one for the first time today (which is why I mention it), but didn't go in.

Then I get home and see these graphs. It turns out (if you're too lazy to click the link) that California (along with Massachusetts) has fewer Wal-Marts per person than all the other states.

Bouncing

I got some new video editing software, so I've been adding garish captions and titles to videos. Here's one of the boys bouncing on our bed. We were in the midst of changing the sheets, and they decided that their bedroom was too chaotic to play in.

And for those raised on a diet of instant gratification and MTV style attention spans, it's much shorter than the last one.

Nose Bill

We got a bill from the hospital for pulling the tape out of Daniel's nose. For a 'limited exam' (which consisted of taking his temperature) they charged $213, and for the actual removal of the tape (which was described as 'Foreign Body - Intranasal' the charge was $150, making a grand total of $363.00.

Using a formula that I wouldn't understand, even if I tried, the insurance company decided to pay $252.45 of that, leaving us to pay $110.55.

Which makes the NHS seem like a bargain.

In the same post, we had a bill from "Quest Diagnostics", 'cos I'd had a cholesterol test. Usually a trip to the doctor, for any reason, is $15, but this time they didn't charge me. And now I know why. This bill had a cholesterol test, a Lipoprotein (whatever that is) and a BMP (which I just looked up on Google - it's a Basic Metabolic Panel). That little lot came to $154.12, and again using their magic formula, the insurance company decided that they would pay $131.70 of that, and leave me with $22.42 to pay. These people had a nice website, so I could pay with a credit card and not have to worry about finding a stamp.

Now I look at the bill again, I realize this was for the first cholesterol test I had. I didn't know I was going to have a test, so I didn't fast. My bad cholesterol was low, but my good cholesterol was low too, so they decided to do another test. I'll await the next post.

Puppet Show

The boys had a brief period of non-destructive play. So I filmed it.

Notice that Cat E. Cat (that's his name) is carefully placed to watch the show.

DNA Test

I sent off for a DNA test from www.familytreedna.com, so that I can track my relatives, or something like that. I had to take DNA by scraping my cheek and popping it in a test tube thing. Just like on CSI. Except it was nothing like CSI.

First of all, I had to scrape for 60 seconds to get enough of a sample. Sarah (or 'the cute one off CSI' as we call her around here') can do it in about 4 seconds. But I suppose if they showed her doing for 60 seconds to each suspect, that would take up most of the program.

Then, I had to not eat for an hour beforehand. They never worry about that. I also had to take 3 samples, at least 4 hours apart, to make sure that it actually worked.

Now maybe I'll be added to some database and thrown into prison, as a result of some Crime Scene Investigator's failure to understand the prosecutor's fallacy.

Birthday

We went to a birthday party at Mountasia Family Fun Center in Santa Clarita.

It had go karts:

Which Alex didn't want to go on, so that's Dan with me.

Miniature golf, and some mad, unsteerable boats. For some reason, the videos I took were a bit random, but here they are anyway. With a somewhat inappropriate soundtrack (but I'm limited in my choice of soundtrack, for reasons that you're probably not interested in, dear reader). Oh, also, it was really windy so all the sound that was recorded originally was wind.

Nice sign on the entrance though, eh?

Cruising

The boys and I went for a bike ride (well, I went for a run next to them) along the beach bike path. (After Susanne had come and released the keys from the trunk of the car for me). They were so proud of how far and how fast they'd ridden that they posed for photos.

Alex

Dan

On knowing everything

When I was about the age of the twins, I thought that teachers were all knowing. (Before I left for school once, my mother told me that she was going to call the school, at 11 o'clock, to speak to my teacher. When I got to school, the teacher said that at 11 o'clock, she was going to get a phone call. I mean, wow!).

The boys seem to have a similar belief.

They asked me about my job, and one way to explain it is to say that, some of the time, I'm a bit like a teacher. They seem satisfied with that description (otherwise it's a bit beyond them - I tried to explain psychometrics once, but didn't get far).

Being children, they ask questions. Daniel asked "Daddy, if aeroplanes fly very high, why don't they crash into the moon or the Sun?" Alex interjected "Daddy isn't that kind of teacher. He doesn't know everything."

Hot on the left

The taps in our bathrooms don't have any sign on to say which is hot and which is cold. I presumed it had fallen off, or something like that.

Then, a couple of days ago, I realized that every tap I've seen here has the hot on the left. I wondered if that was some sort of massive coincidence - it's the sort of thing I can never prove (in a Popperian sort of way). So I typed "hot on the left" into Google. And it's true, in America, they put the hot tap on the left.

How sensible is that? Why doesn't every country do that?

I also learned that the brakes are the other way around on American bikes - the back brake is controlled with your right hand. I never really noticed that was the sensible way around to do it, until I moved here (with my UK bike) and realised that when I want to turn left, which is across the traffic, I need to brake with my right hand. My left hand is busy indicating, so I need to use the front brake. It would be nicer to use the back brake. I'd change them over, if I thought I'd ever get used to it.

Alex fell out of bed ...

... but didn't wake up.

They insist on sleeping with the light on. In the future they're going to regret that, because it means we can take photos like this one.

Viewing Statistics Quiz

I use Google Analytics, to see just how many people aren't reading this blog.

In the past month, there have been 408 page views, by 253 unique visitors.

One entry has been massively more popular than the rest. It's had 159 views (of the 408). The entry in second place has had 13 views. (That's ignoring the 113 people who looked at the home page).

We could make a quiz about that. Which entry was it? (Clue: almost all of them were sent here by Google.) But then I might forget to give the answer, and you might not notice it. So I'll post it below.



























It was the entry on sledding in Big Bear. It's hard to find information on where to go sledding in Big Bear.