On the delayed tasks, injections of higher concentration of D1 agonists to well-trained rats tended to cause rats to revisit the previously baited training phase arms preferentially, indicating that they were perseverating to previously rewarded locations (Zahrt et al., 1997; Floresco and Phillips, 2001). In contrast, D1 antagonists injected into the PFC of well-trained rats caused them to visit arms in a random manner, suggesting that these rats were unable to direct responding to locations predicted by previously acquired information (Seamans et al., 1998). Random responding implies that each arm location was of equal importance, while perseveration implies that a greater weight was given to certain arm locations.

(Seamans and Yang, “The principal features and mechanisms of dopamine modulation in the prefrontal cortex”)

Oh hey explore/exploit, didn’t expect to see you here, how’ve you been buddy??

They were doing the same thing last week: she seems to be the one making the noises, which he mimics more loudly.

I hardly ever get properly angry.  Probably way out in the lower end of the bell curve on that one.  And while I do sometimes hate specific people, it never feels quite like the powerful force that “hate” is made out to be.  It’s time-limited, something that appears after a specific incident and naturally fades without any conscious effort, like a minor wound.

But this is not to say that I am a sunny, uncritical soul.  I have plenty of negative opinions (most left unvoiced) about many people and many behaviors.  And there’s an associated emotion.  But it isn’t really anger at a person – I would call it disappointment at the world.

For some reason, my mind’s natural approach to these things is to see the bad behavior as though it is a flaw in a work of art.  People who hate The Big Bang Theory don’t hate Sheldon Cooper (who doesn’t exist outside the TV and cannot affect your life), they hate the people who wrote Sheldon Cooper.  It’s like that.  What always stands out to me about bad behavior is the banality of it, the reiteration of tired “tropes,” the way it produces situations which everyone – including the perpetrator – would roll their eyes at if they had a little distance.

Not all bad behavior is like this.  Some people relish the bad situations they create, without reservations.  And some things in human life really are difficult, fundamentally so – in which case the failures are (Greek-)tragic.  And yet so many failures are – when viewed from this “artistic” perspective – not tragic but comedic, sitcomedic, repetitive, uninspired and uninspiring, not even excitingly awful.

We’ve all seen this episode before, or we might as well have, they’re repeating material from Season 4, which was cliched even when it came out.  Even the perpetrators, the designated villains of this arc, are stuck in looping sitcom hell with the rest of us.  I wish they could be freed, too.

Besides “disappointing,” the word that most often comes to mind is “tedious.”

Disappointment at the world is, perhaps, an intuitive attempt to solve the deep problems involved in assigning blame.  People who damage others are often damaged themselves; every villain has an origin story (they’re making a third reboot next year, we can see the origin story in theaters again, aren’t you excited?).

Two families are having a feud: at some semi-regular interval, someone from one family will murder someone from the other, in revenge for the last such murder.  If we place the responsibility in the hands of the family most recent victimized, and the blame upon the most recent aggressor, then things will keep flipping back and forth.  This is stupid, and also unfair.  “Why should I have to be the bigger man now, when instead of being the bigger man, he just shot my brother?”  This person has a point.  And so the thing I resent is not the latest aggressor, but in some distributed way, the whole cycle.  Someone should stop this – no, not necessarily you, perhaps it would even take multiple people, but somehow, through little exertions of human will, the cycle should be broken.

I use it because it provides a familiar example of a “cycle,” but the feud may be misleading in other respects.  Too dramatic, too many opportunities for real and deep feeling, too difficult to solve.  Imagine the same cyclical structure, but smaller, pettier, on the scale of little choices that are easy to resist if one consciously tries, everywhere acting to make the world more vacuous, more predictably bad, more like the bad old joke which we are all trying to escape in the first place.  Anger or hatred would dignify the joke too much, would imply a suspension of disbelief that I reserve for better writers.  What feels appropriate is disappointment.

It was supposed to be better than this – bad in a better way, at least.

New hip trend: superfluously attributing normal actions and outcomes to divine intervention, Iliad-style

“then Pallas Athene came to me, speaking of the midday sun and of the hunger in my belly, so I ate lunch”

“but Phoebus Apollo clouded my mind with fear and confusion, and that’s why I forgot my keys“

The chorus of the plaintive official classic “Where Are You, General I Long For?” runs, “The harder the cold autumn wind blows / the more I yearn for the warm bosom of the General.”

Indeed, the Leader’s published remarks are always trite: “Rainbow trout is a good fish, tasty and nutritious.”

I’m reading B. R. Myers’ book “The Cleanest Race,” about North Korea, and it’s short (~150 pp.) and utterly fascinating

I keep wanting to quote bits from it here, but I’d end up quoting like half the book, there’s so much good stuff in there

Myers is clearly a polemical writer, and he spends a lot of time ranting about other North Korea analysts (he speculates that they get things wrong because they don’t know Korean well enough – he’s like “I know this is uncharitable but I call them like I see them”), so I am taking the book with a grain of salt, and I am curious whether anyone’s written a strong critical response to it

THIS SONG FROM ROMEO AND JULIET THE MUSICAL MAY PRESAGE THE KIND OF POSTMODERN FEUDALISM THE HIGH CORPORATE EXECUTIVES (READ: FUTURE FEUDAL LORDS) WILL CHOOSE TO ENACT.