Last Wednesday, I decided to go and see Lyric Opera of Chicago's performance of Cinderella. I had received an email advertising cheap student tickets, and I was able to secure a seat in a box: in the upper row of boxes, but right in the center. It was funny entering the theater through a private door for the eight of us (I think about five of the occupants were a group of friends). I was worried I would feel underdressed, but I was wearing a buttoned shirt and trousers as usual and the others seemed to be similarly dressed.
I have to say, the performance was largely pleasant but forgettable. I would easily recommend it to opera fans, but not bother encouraging the ambivalent to attend. I did find the story a bit slow moving, and lacking in characters. Especially a women's chorus: I don't see how a story heavily based on a ball can do without one! I did like Cinderella and the prince's interactions, especially how they began. He had dressed himself up as his valet, so she met and began to fall in love with him not knowing he was the prince (and later refused the "prince"'s attentions since she loved his "valet").
I also saw a couple of interesting seminars in the last week and a half. The first was by John Grunsfeld, a former astronaut and now deputy administrator of NASA for the science program. He gave a nice overview of several of the scientific discoveries that have been made by NASA missions recently. And showed us some videos from his time in space. Apparently at the end of a mission, the scientists do childish experiments, while the pilots play video games (in particular, the "land the space shuttle safely" video game: he said he tried to encourage the playing of that game!).
The second was by Michael Oppenheimer, a climate science and policy researcher. He spoke in particular about quantifying uncertainty in the expected sea level rise due to climate change. The biggest difficulty in making global predictions is not knowing how Antarctica melts. East Antarctica is very stable and nothing to worry about, but much of West Antarctica could melt this century and cause the better part of a metre of sea level rise. Or maybe it won't. On a more local scale, there are difficult to quantify effects, like how the changing distribution of the mass of water will influence sea levels gravitationally, or changing temperatures flow on through changed currents to an unexpectedly high or low rise. Current predictions don't give local policymakers much to go on, and the default position seems to be to do nothing.
He talked about the value of expert elicitation as a means of prediction: ask experts for their best estimate of various parameters, some of which are known, and weight their answers regarding unknown quantities by the accuracy with which they are able to assess known quantities. It seems reasonable, but still subject to substantial human biases. For example, he showed a plot of predicted sea level rise due to the effects of Antarctica, and just using measured data to inform the models, there was a very wide range of potential outcomes, including that it would have a negative effect (that there would be an increase of snowfall due to moisture patterns in the atmosphere, taking water out of the ocean-atmosphere circulation). Experts reduced the uncertainty, but just by lopping off almost the entire region below zero, not by compressing it uniformly as any reasonable model should. So we're anchored to particular outcomes because they "feel" right: we're not willing as humans to admit that if a process has some predictable effect plus a large set of difficult to predict effects, the latter could be just as likely to be in the opposite direction as the same. So it was a thought-provoking talk, but the example he gave showed more of a weakness than a strength, in my opinion.
Other than that, it's been games with Sarita, pretending to be a vending machine at grad dinner, watching snatches of the baseball playoffs on TV, Asian foods with Keigo... and plenty of work!
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