{"id":1073,"date":"2013-02-15T00:33:15","date_gmt":"2013-02-15T07:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.talyarkoni.org\/blog\/?p=1073"},"modified":"2013-02-15T00:36:10","modified_gmt":"2013-02-15T07:36:10","slug":"several-half-truths-and-one-blatant-unrepenting-lie-about-my-recent-whereabouts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/2013\/02\/15\/several-half-truths-and-one-blatant-unrepenting-lie-about-my-recent-whereabouts\/","title":{"rendered":"several half-truths, and one blatant, unrepenting lie about my recent whereabouts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Apparently time does a thing that is much like flying. Seems like just yesterday I was sitting here in this chair, sipping on martinis, and pleasantly humming old show tunes while cranking out <del>several high-quality blog posts an hour<\/del> a mediocre blog post every week or two. But then! Then I got distracted! And blinked! And fell asleep in my chair! And then when I looked up again, 8 months had passed! With no blog posts!<\/p>\n<p>Granted, on the Badness Scale, which runs from 1 to Imminent Apocalypse, this one clocks in at a solid 1.04. But still, eight months is a long time to be gone&#8211;about 3,000 internet years. So I figured I&#8217;d write a short post about the events of the past eight months before setting about the business of trying (and perhaps failing) to post here more regularly. Also, to keep things interesting, I&#8217;ve thrown in one fake bullet. See if you can spot the impostor.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I started <a href=\"http:\/\/pilab.psy.utexas.edu\">my own lab<\/a>! You can tell it&#8217;s a completely legitimate scientific operation because it has (a) a fancy new website, (b) <a href=\"http:\/\/pilab.psy.utexas.edu\/people\">other members<\/a> besides me (some of whom I admittedly had to coerce into &#8216;joining&#8217;), and (c) weekly meetings. (As far as I can tell, these are all the necessary requirements for official labhood.) I decided to call my very legitimate scientific lab the Psychoinformatics Lab. Partly because I like how it sounds, and partly because it&#8217;s vaguely descriptive of the research I do. But mostly because it results in a catchy abbreviation: PILab. (It&#8217;s pronounced Pieeeeeeeeeee lab&#8211;the last 10 e&#8217;s are silent.)<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve been slowly writing and re-writing the Neurosynth codebase. <a href=\"http:\/\/neurosynth.org\">Neurosynth<\/a> is a thing made out of software that lets neuroimaging researchers very crudely stitch together one giant brain image out of other smaller brain images. It&#8217;s kind of like a collage, except that unlike most collages, in this case the sum is usually not more than its parts. In fact, the sum tends to look a lot like its parts. In any case, with some hard work and a very large serving of good luck, I managed to land a R01 grant from the NIH last summer, which will allow me to continue stitching images for a few more years. From my perspective, this is a very good thing, for two reasons. FIrst, because it means I&#8217;m not unemployed right now (I&#8217;m a big fan of employment, you see); and secondly, because I&#8217;m finding the stitching surprisingly enjoyable. If you enjoy stitching software into brain images, please <a href=\"http:\/\/github.com\/neurosynth\/neurosynth\">help out<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>I published a bunch of <a href=\"http:\/\/pilab.psy.utexas.edu\/publications\">papers<\/a> in 2012, so, according to my CV at least, it was a good year for me professionally. Actually, I think it was a <em>deceptively<\/em> good year&#8211;meaning, I don&#8217;t think I did any more work than I did in previous years, but various factors (old projects coming to fruition, a bunch of papers all getting accepted at the same time, etc.) conspired to produce more publications in 2012. This kind of stuff has a tendency to balance out in fairly short order though, so I fully expect to rack up a grand total of zero publications in 2013.<\/li>\n<li>I went to Iceland! And England! And France! And Germany! And the Netherlands! And Canada! And Austin, Texas! Plus some other places. I know many people spend a lot of their time on the road and think hopping across various oceans is no big deal, but, well, it is to me, so <strong>BACK OFF<\/strong>. Anyway, it&#8217;s been nice to have the opportunity to travel more. And to combine business and pleasure. I am not one of those people&#8211;I think you call them &#8216;sane&#8217;&#8211;who prefer to keep their work life and their personal life cleanly compartmentalized, and try to cram all their work into specific parts of the year and then save a few days or weeks here and there to do nothing but roll around on the beach or ski down frighteningly tall mountains. I find I&#8217;m happiest when I get to spend one part of the day giving a talk or meeting with some people to discuss the way <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/search?hl=en&amp;site=&amp;tbm=isch&amp;source=hp&amp;biw=1434&amp;bih=802&amp;q=movement+artifact+fmri&amp;oq=movement+artifact+fmri&amp;gs_l=img.3...956.2963.0.3059.22.11.0.10.10.0.100.469.10j1.11.0...0.0...1ac.1.3.img.uJZTXRlZmb4#hl=en&amp;site&amp;tbm=isch&amp;source=hp&amp;q=movement+artifact+fmri&amp;oq=movement+artifact+fmri&amp;gs_l=img.3...956.2963.0.3059.22.11.0.10.10.0.100.469.10j1.11.0...0.0...1ac.1.3.img.uJZTXRlZmb4&amp;pws=0&amp;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&amp;bvm=bv.42553238,d.aWc&amp;fp=d875a23c259b947c&amp;biw=1434&amp;bih=802\">the edges of the brain blur when you shake your head<\/a>, and then another part of the day roaming around De Jordaan asking passers-by, in a stilted Dutch, &#8220;where can I find some more of those baby cheeses?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>On a more personal note (as the archives of this blog <a href=\"http:\/\/www.talyarkoni.org\/blog\/2011\/01\/23\/to-each-their-own-addiction\/\">will attest<\/a>, I have no shame when it comes to publicly divulging embarrassing personal details), my wife and I celebrated our fifth anniversary a few weeks ago. I think this one is called the <em>congratulations, you haven&#8217;t killed each other yet!<\/em> anniversary. Next up: the ten year anniversary, also known as the <em>but seriously, how are you both still alive?<\/em> decennial. Fortunately we&#8217;re not particularly sentimental people, so we celebrated our wooden achievement with some sushi, some sake, and <del>only 500 of our closest friends<\/del> an early bedtime (no, seriously&#8211;we went to bed early; that&#8217;s not a euphemism for anything).<\/li>\n<li>I contracted a bad case of vampirism while doing some prospecting work in the Yukon last summer. The details are a little bit sketchy, but I have a vague suspicion it happened on that one occasion when I was out gold panning in the middle of the night under a full moon and was brutally attacked by a man-sized bat that bit me several times on the neck. At least, that&#8217;s my best guess. But, whatever&#8211;now that my disease is in full bloom, it&#8217;s not so bad any more. I&#8217;ve become mostly nocturnal, and I have to snack on the blood of an unsuspecting undergraduate student once every month or two to keep from wasting away. But it seems like a small price to pay in return for eternal life, superhuman strength, and really pasty skin.<\/li>\n<li>Overall, I&#8217;m enjoying myself quite a bit. I recently read somewhere that people are, on average, happiest in their 30s. I also recently read somewhere else that people are, on average, least happy in their 30s. I resolve this apparent contradiction by simply opting to believe the first thing, because in my estimation, I am, on average, happiest in my 30s.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Ok, enough self-indulgent rambling. Looking over this list, it wasn&#8217;t even a very eventful eight months, so I really have no excuse for dropping the ball on this blogging thing. I will now attempt to resume posting one to two posts a month about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.talyarkoni.org\/blog\/2011\/10\/01\/the-new-york-times-blows-it-big-time-on-brain-imaging\/\">brain imaging<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.talyarkoni.org\/blog\/2010\/04\/06\/correlograms-are-correlicious\/\">correlograms<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.talyarkoni.org\/blog\/2010\/06\/02\/the-perils-of-digging-too-deep\/\">schweizel units<\/a>. This might be a good cue for you to hit the UNSUBSCRIBE button.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apparently time does a thing that is much like flying. Seems like just yesterday I was sitting here in this chair, sipping on martinis, and pleasantly humming old show tunes while cranking out several high-quality blog posts an hour a mediocre blog post every week or two. But then! Then I got distracted! And blinked! &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/2013\/02\/15\/several-half-truths-and-one-blatant-unrepenting-lie-about-my-recent-whereabouts\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">several half-truths, and one blatant, unrepenting lie about my recent whereabouts<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[607,517,606,608,605,604],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pEZxN-hj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1073"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1094,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions\/1094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}