Primordial Chaos

Wash Away by Hil St. Soul. Another recent addition to my musical world. What I love about Pandora is starting with a station of a favorite artist and since Pandora plays music similar to that artist (or song) you find all kinds of music you might not have otherwise. I listen to Pandora a lot (like right now) and it's crazy how many more artists I found from the few I started with. Or even songs from artists I would have ignored that I like. Since music is such a big deal to me, I love this. I don't listen to the radio, and without Pandora I'd basically be only be listening to only the music I have, nothing new would get to me. But not only do I get new music, but music similar to stuff I like already! This is my Pandora profile with all my stations and stuff, it also shows what I've liked or disliked or stations I've added recently: http://www.pandora.com/people/valkyrianangel
 
I LOVE this song. I love the idea behind it, I love the sound, her voice, the message...this song got filed in my "Life" music. Music I use to pick me up, keep me going, keep me motivated.


If I had to pick a "college road trip" song for me and my dad, it'd be Curtis Mayfield's Move On Up. My dad introduced me to Curtis, and that song was one of the first 3 in my "Life" music. Use The Force by Jamiroquai and Hidden Charm by Van Hunt are the other 2. Both of which seem really obvious but aren't. Anyways, I used to do a cover of that song when I was playing guitar in bistros around town, and probably still have the sheet music for it. I STRONGLY associate this song with my dad, I think he finally understands me, by and by. :) ( I got teary-eyed writing that. :') < happy cry)

LOBOS! A lot of basketball talk this post. :P The Big Dance starts Thursday, and my Lobos play Montana at 9:40 PM Eastern time. GO LOBOS! Now, I'm not worried about this game in particular but the experience overall. I've been all hyped up about them, they've been in the news a lot, there are people watching us closely. Lobos turned down a reality series about the team even. We have a 3 seed in the tournament, which is GREAT. Because we lost our last game, we got knocked down from a 2 to a 3, but we're just glad to be there! The fact they ranked us so highly seed-wise is a compliment to the team, who are really nice guys. I just hope this whole experience isn't a major mental shock to them and it ends badly.

If I hear another word about John Wall (Kentucky) I'm gonna start putting people's faces into walls. So the dude is a freshman who is playing well on one of the top teams in the country. The hype around him is so fucking bloated. Hey, I'm not saying he isn't good, he is. But, probably because we're not a big name/big conference team, our Darington Hobson, AKA Butter, is basically being ignored beyond normal attention when the Lobos get in the news. The dude is impressive, and from a smaller I've said this before, but he leads our team in rebounds AND points per game by a good bit. Which kinda sounds like a ballhog except he also leads the teams in ASSISTS. He's out on the court leading in rebounds and points per game ALL WHILE SHARING THE BALL SO MUCH HE LEADS IN ASSISTS TOO. Why isn't someone looking at him and being like, holy shit this guy is on it, because that's impressive. He's our star player, but he completely plays as part of the team, you don't see a Lobos game and it looks like Darington Hobson and the Lobos. You just see Lobos.

A lot of these other teams have one guy they rely heavily on and if he's out then they're in trouble. Reading through team infos about how to beat that team, I realized it's A LOT. So and so isn't playing 100 percent yet and that'll mean trouble if he doesn't get there. Or so and so is out with an injury, so this team has to really alter their strategy and lineup after using the same one all season with success. We don't fall apart if one of our guys is out for like foul trouble or something. We might not be 100%, but it's not like we turn into a doormat either. UNM doesn't have the money or prestige like some of these other schools, but for a team predicted to be 5th in our conference of 9 and a conference that is usually derided at that, and for a team who wasn't even predicted to go to the Big Dance's Consolation Tournament the NIT, we're doing pretty damn good thank you. NIT is where the Heels ended up, sadly. National champions to NIT. Hell of a fall from grace.

Our coach wouldn't put names on the jerseys, all you see on the back is the word Lobos and the number because he wanted to foster this idea of working as a team and nothing but. I like that. I don't give a shit who you are (regardless of team), I wanna see how your TEAM plays. Speaking of, people trash our conference, the Mountain West/MWC, regularly. We're not a big name conference with big name basketball teams who have won before, if not multiple times, like Kansas, North Carolina (not so hot this year), Texas, Duke, Syracuse, Kentucky, all of whom have OTHER big name basketball teams they play against in conference play. People seem to think because these other teams play each other both in and out of conference, and they're like the elites of college basketball, the rest aren't experienced with constantly ranked teams. Our conference only has 9 teams, most of the other big name ones are 12-16. We're like the awkward kid everyone picks last and doesn't wanna play ball with, that's really how we're regarded. Out of 9 teams WE SENT 4 TO THE BIG DANCE. It's not like it's UNM and 3 bottom feeder 15/16 seeds. The other seeds are ranked 7, 8, and 11. And us at 3, of course. That is pretty damn good thank you very much. And we don't get much out of conference play because people think we'll be a doormat and not a challenge. I think some people have caught on lately. :)

There are still a lot who haven't. Just about any website doing bracket stuff says UNM is way overrated and was seeded way too high, and we might even not make it past the first game against a 14 seed. If we have an off day, sure we can be out the first round. But to look at our whole season and say that? So we have 7, 8, and 11 seeds we played in the MWC. But we played a little out of conference, quite a few are seeded fucking teams too. It's not like we got all our wins against bottom feeders (there's a few though). NM State, 12 seed, Texas A&M 5 seed and we beat them as a non-ranked team while they were ranked, California 8 seed, I mean there's 347 or so teams, and only 64 go to the Dance. So we've played some decent teams, and some teams who are usually on the ball but had a bad year yet they act like we got a 3 seed by beating the local high school team. Drives me fucking crazy. I hope our guys don't mentally buy into this shit. My point being 1) for me to rant and 2) damn, give out some credit and that goes for our rivals but fellow MWCers too. Some new teams in the mix, teams people who usually go to the Dance have never played. It's all about prestige and money and name recognition. You know what is pretty sobering? These are all just college kids. 18-22 demographic. And think of the fact there are a lot of adults betting a lot of money on these kids and they better goddamn win or that person is out whatever money and now loathes a group of college kids because they didn't win a b-ball game. The hype, the fame and the pressure. It's kinda surreal. Of course, it's psychologically interesting too, which appeals to me.

I said a lot of basketball talk. I even have my two brackets, but I didn't gamble because that seems dirty to basically use your fav team to win money. Whatever. I have two brackets because one is me hardcore dreaming, and the other one is the realistic and based in math and performance bracket.
This basketball thing has been fun as hell. Going to the games and being an asshole is REALLY fun. :P

I wasn't going to write more, but now I am. :P See, I'm a purgatory junior, my fall semester I was a sophomore and my spring semester I'm a junior based solely on credit hours. Depending on where I go to school, I have about 2-2.5 years left, much closer to 2 for most part. 2 years. Guess what you need to do one year before you graduate, as a junior, because your senior year is when you send out applications? THE FUCKING GRE. On top of that, for Psychology there's a subject test GRE too. So I got a year to make sure I'm ready. Thank god I am nerd and kept all my psychology books. :) Now, because the subject part of the GRE was a very recent discovery to me, I get all OH SHIT, and start looking up practice tests and questions to get a feel for what I need to know. At first quick skim through 205 practice questions, I'm thinking I'm fucked, UNM didn't teach me shit, etc. BUT, I went back to read again, and slower so I could write down that area to study.

Seriously, it's BASIC fucking psych questions worded differently and with more complicated vocabulary. For example:

An experimenter who incorrectly rejcts the null hypothesis commits what kind of error?
A) systematic
B) random
C) Type I 
D) false alarm <- wtf? REALLY? that's an answer?
E) fundamental attribution error

First, this is super basic intro stats stuff. (Type I for you who don't know or don't remember basic stats) You can commit a Type I or a Type II. Now, let me show you how the other answers are worded to throw someone off but are blatant bullshit to anyone with a vocabulary. Systematic means there's a system, a method, a plan to it. Since you only judge the hypothesis after the experiment (this seems obvious), and the error had nothing to do with the experiment but the researcher, then this is horseshit. Also, it implies you somehow planned the error as part of your method. The question implies the researcher only made a mistake, so it's not like fudging results or anything. Random, well, I could see someone getting stuck here but if you're applying to graduate school you should really know this. A random error is one that happens, well randomly. This can't really happen in an experiment, especially psych. Even doing a brain scan if something is screwed up or the machine is mis-calibrated or whatever, you see it right then and there and redo the scan at some point. When brain scans are screwy it's really obvious. If you're watching TV and suddenly a random area of your TV goes black, 1) you need a new TV, but 2) you're going to notice a big black square on the screen. It's like that, but not always black squares. Say one of your subjects screws up a questionnaire, random, yes, but that just skews your results. The anomalies within an experiment mess up your data, but if you base your rejection/retention of the hypothesis on the data, your conclusion will correspond with the data. So random is basically saying oh it was an accident, but it couldn't be because the researcher made that decision based off of their data and apparently sucks at stats. Type I is the right answer, and the false alarm answer made me sigh. On an entrance exam to graduate school, this isn't like some high school test. False alarm. Anyone who picks that answer shouldn't be in grad school, that should be automatic rejection. Though if they pick that I can bet they didn't pass the damn thing anyways. Fundamental attribution error, I like this answer A LOT. It's a couple of big words that people have a general idea of the meaning. First glance it looks like, oh, a basic error of attributing something incorrectly. Seems like a probable research kind of fuck up. But, what exactly is the research attributing? Making a decision from the data isn't attributing anything. It's not a feature or function of anything, you didn't make an error assigning something to something, and definitely not something basic if you're analyzing data. You made a mathematical error.

However, I like this question because if you don't remember that in order to reject or retain the null hypothesis, you have to prove it is statistically significant and that's math, this answer has you. But as much as they beat it into your head of how you prove or how others proved something is statistically significant, you should kinda know this. Every psych class at UNM does it. Well, he found this gene for this disorder by proving there's less than a 5% chance of this being an accident, or he proved his hypothesis using the numbers from his data (that kinda screams math at me for some reason), you hear that all damn semester in every damn psych class. What the hell else do you have you can prove with but numbers? I saw all of that bs the first time I read the question. I knew the answer too, but I could have easily weeded things out with a strong vocabulary. I'm not really concerned about the subject test now, I may take it as soon as next fall. It's just basic intro classes questions rewritten with big words. I took a different practice subject test, timed and everything, because I couldn't really believe this. 840/990. 99th percentile. I took another, 850, 99th percentile.

I tend to test HIGHER on tests like the GRE, SAT, ACT, etc. on the actual test because I'm in a completely quiet room, I like the bright lights, I'm at a desk with a pencil in my hand which is nothing new and I'm being left alone. Testing environments make me relax. The standardized type of tests also tend to aim for the status quo, and I'm kinda above that so they tend to be easier.Of course, the school I'm eying doesn't require the subject test but others do and always safe than sorry. Besides, won't hurt me if they see my subject scores, even if I score quite a bit lower because I've got some room for screwing up score wise, lol.

Long post, but hey. Reading is good for you. :)

~A.