Anyway, the Manhattan rental market is quite different from most in a few ways. Obviously a lot of it's driven by the fact that a Manhattan address is highly sought-after, leading to a very low vacancy rate (sometimes quoted as 0.5%, although I think it's higher at the moment) and vastly higher rents than in other U.S. cities. I'd heard from several sources that competition for any given apartment can be fierce, and it's best to apply for a unit on the spot if it looks good, since it may not be available later. However, right now (maybe due to the recession) this didn't seem to be the case. There were a surprising number of vacancies, a number of landlords were offering "specials" with a discount of several hundred dollars per month, and I felt comfortable taking a couple days to consider my options without the units I liked being snapped up.

Another unusual feature of the New York market is that many apartments are only available through a broker. The typical New York apartment search involves hiring a broker to spend a day or two showing available units; when the lease is signed the broker collects a substantial fee from the renter, typically 15% of the annual rent.

The broker is definitely the easiest way to go if you're on a tight schedule, but my take is that if you've got time to do the research, there's no need to go through a broker: there are a number of landlords who will rent apartments directly. The trick is finding them, but luckily we have the internet. Craigslist has a separate listing for no-fee apartments, and one can find recommendations of no-fee management companies around the web (here for example). There's also a book that I found extremely useful called The Nouveau Native's No Fee New York: it has not only general advice for apartment hunting in New York, but also a very comprehensive list of landlords offering no-fee rentals. Many of these landlords list availabilities on their websites, which made it very easy to put together a shortlist before I even got to New York.

From that point it was just like searching for an apartment anywhere else, only with much, much higher rents. Landlords in New York tend to require a lot of documentation to prove that you'll be able to pay: at least a letter of employment and usually also bank statements and pay stubs, and sometimes tax returns and W-2s. If you're coming from out of town, it's a good idea to take this stuff with you so you can apply on the spot.

I ended up renting from a management company called Archstone, and it was such a good experience that I want to mention them here. I was able to walk into two of their buildings without an appointment and get full tours from very helpful leasing agents; on top of that the website has a lot of information, and even lets you apply online. They have properties all over the country so it's worth checking out if you're in the market somewhere other than Manhattan.

Anyway, the housing search turned out to be surprisingly easy given all the tales of woe I'd heard about the Manhattan rental market. Now I'm working on the next challenge: getting all my stuff across the country and into the new apartment.

I saw Forbidden Kingdom yesterday: it's a decent movie, with entertaining fight scenes; if you go in hoping to see Jackie Chan and Jet Li perform some entertaining kung fu, you won't be disappointed.

However, it's actually a movie about hanging out with Jackie Chan and Jet Li, and consequently the main character isn't (despite the movie posters) either of the two Hong Kong stars, but a teenager played by Michael Angarano. I'm sure there's a strong constituency for the "going on adventures with Jackie Chan and Jet Li" story, but for those of us who just want to see people get kicked in the face, Angarano's character only gets in the way. On the other hand, there's plenty of good fighting so it's not a big disappointment, and having a broader audience helps movies like this get made, so I can't really complain.

Unfortunately, this aspect of the film is made infinitely worse through the egregious use of one of my least favorite plot devices: the ordinary teenager from the real world who gets transported to a fantasy kingdom (which he then must save before returning home). As far as I'm concerned, any narrative that employs this lame plot is digging itself a huge hole right at the start, and will have to be exceedingly brilliant to make up for it. There are lots of good reasons to avoid this plot, and especially the implementation in Forbidden Kingdom:

• It's lazy writing. This plot is a way to avoid a couple of the challenges of writing in a heroic fantasy setting: the need to explain the special rules of the fantasy world to the audience, and the lack of a character the audience can relate to in a cast populated by legendary heroes. Dragging in a character from the real world is an easy solution to these problems that saves the writer from having to do anything sophisticated (such as a show-don't-tell approach to presenting the setting, or writing complex heroic characters with realistic flaws and motivations).

• It insults the audience. Because it's really not that hard to stick a relatable character in a heroic setting—even young children recognize that the farmboy or the hobbit is supposed to be the audience stand-in. The "ordinary teenager from our world" is the most literal interpretation of the relatable character (short of a Choose Your Own Adventure story told in the second person) and suggests that the writers didn't think the audience could handle anything more subtle.

• It strains suspension of disbelief. A self-contained fantasy world is easier to accept than one in which people from the modern world are randomly popping in and out. Furthermore, it wrecks the sense of otherworldliness to have someone walking around wearing jeans and spouting American slang. There's less immersion with a constant reminder of the real world in the center of the frame; a good fantasy should make the audience temporarily forget where they are.

• It contains disturbing racial overtones. This plot device would have been bad enough if the teenager had been from Shanghai. But the use of the Boston setting and Michael Angarano suggests that the filmmakers decided that, in a film set in Fantasy China, a Chinese lead wouldn't have been white enough or American enough for American audiences. Now, it may be true that the film will make more money with an American lead (although it's interesting that he doesn't appear on the posters). Nevertheless, such shameless pandering is ugly. And equally disturbing is the imperialist notion that powerful warriors like Jackie Chan and Jet Li couldn't save China until the American (with no special skills or talents) showed up.

Now, I don't want to say that this plot can never be done well, but it takes some excellent writing to save it. The anime Fushigi Yuugi is one example where this trope succeeds, due mostly to strong plotting and characterization. The film of The NeverEnding Story does a good job but keeps the real-world protagonist at a distance from the fantasy world for most of the narrative. On the other hand, one of the several flaws of The Chronicles of Narnia is its repeated use of this device.

More generally, I think the approach of inserting ordinary, relatable characters into a story about legendary heroes is way overused. In the fantasy genre, I much prefer stories without an obvious audience stand-in but with heroes who may have extraordinary abilities but have complex and human personalities. My favorite Chinese fantasy films—Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the underrated House of Flying Daggers—take the latter approach.

Going back to Forbidden Kingdom for a moment, I've just spent a lot of time trashing its plot, but of course in a movie like this the story is secondary to the spectacle. So this shouldn't be considered a pan of the movie as a whole; however, this glaring flaw in the story does detract a bit from the experience.

• Juno: 2 stars
  
• Forgetting Sarah Marshall: 1 star
  
• Be Kind, Rewind: 0 stars

Anyway, I saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall today, and found that it exceeded expectations in several categories, not just Belle & Sebastian songs but also general hilarity, Jason Bateman cameos, and (regrettably) full frontal male nudity. If you've ever seen a romantic comedy before you know the entire plot, but this isn't what drives the humor so much as the interplay between the four principal characters. I place this one in the second tier of Judd Apatow productions: on par with Superbad, not quite as good as 40 Year Old Virgin or Knocked Up.

Reading the Wikipedia entry for Marshall writer and star Jason Segel, I see that he will be writing and directing the next Muppets movie. I'm looking forward to this as long as it doesn't involve him appearing naked again.

I haven't been blogging much lately, due to a combination of travel, job interviews, visitors, generally being away from the internet, and the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl. However, now that my job search has reached a conclusion, I felt an announcement was in order. I've just accepted an offer from Morgan Stanley, where I'll be working in the Process Driven Trading group as a Quantitative Research Associate.

This is obviously a major career change for me. Those who have followed my posts related to career issues and academia know that I have been dissatisfied with the usual academic physicist career track for a while now, but I only started to seriously consider finance as an alternative about a year ago. There's a commonly-held belief in the physics community that finance is where you end up if you don't make the cut in physics, and that the work in that field, while lucrative, is just not very interesting; this led me to rule out the option for a long time without really looking into it. However, in talking to people who work in finance I came to realize that there are intellectual rewards to be found there, and that it was a worthwhile option to investigate. And finance contains the type of problems I enjoy working on in experimental physics—mainly related to working with data and optimizing experimental parameters—without involving hardware-related issues that I won't miss (such as soldering and handling cryogens), and bringing in some (mainly game-theoretic) topics I've long been interested in but haven't had a chance to pursue seriously.

Over the course of my job search I did find many positions that were ultimately unappealing, either because of the role or the personalities of the people I met. PDT on the other hand combined an intellectually interesting position with an attractive work environment and a group of people I will enjoy working with. Throughout my job search I have considered those factors to be more important than which field I end up in, and it's the main reason I ended up accepting their offer. An additional advantage is the location; while I'll very much miss California, I'm excited to have the opportunity to live in New York City. (The photo at the top of this post is misleading, as I'll be working at Morgan Stanley's headquarters in Times Square rather than downtown—Wall Street in the metonymic sense, not the literal one.)

One thing I will miss in leaving physics is the sense of working on something fundamental, of learning something profound about how the universe works. This does have real value, and while markets are interesting systems, studying them won't be quite the same from that perspective. On the other hand, they say that to find your ideal job, you should look at what you like to do in your spare time. And as many of you know, what I do outside the lab is play games, on the tabletop or the TV screen. I love planning strategies and the distinct pleasures of a successful play. The finance industry is the biggest game in the world, and I'm excited to be joining in.

A commuter who travels one hour, one way, would have to make 40% more than his current salary to be as fully satisfied with his life as a noncommuter, say economists Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer of the University of Zurich's Institute for Empirical Research in Economics.

This will of course be an extremely relevant issue for me soon, once it's time to relocate. Depending on where I end up working, it could be in competition with some of my other criteria, such as living in a walkable neighborhood. If I take a job in, say, Manhattan, short commute and neighborhood walkability pretty much coincide, but if it's in an exurban office park somewhere I have to trade off one for the other. This in turn feeds back somewhat into my job decisions. In some ways I have it easy, though: being single, I only have one commute to worry about. The minimization problem for two-income households is certainly more complicated...

The canonical length of a pop song is three minutes, and a look at the tracklist reveals that this band is very dedicated to that principle. The mean track length is 2:59, with a standard deviation of 6 seconds. (Steven Merritt has said that he was aiming for three-minute songs on this record.)

As for the actual music, it may be my preference for female vocalists but the songs where Shirley Simms sings (rather than Merritt) are definitely the best: "Drive On, Driver", "The Nun's Litany", and "Till the Bitter End" in that order. The lyrics are clever and often amusing: the "Litany", rather than being a religious song, is an exhibitionist fantasy, and the following track "Zombie Boy" is not speaking metaphorically, nor is the relationship with said zombie simply a platonic one based on brains alone.

There are a few skippable tracks on the CD: notably "Too Drunk to Dream", and "Mr. Mistletoe", which might be suffering from my bias against Christmas music (even if Christmas isn't actually the focus of the song). Mostly, though, the quality of the songs stays pretty high.

They don't seem to have posted any tracks for free download and I don't see a good place to stream them (of course, there's always MySpace), but I recommend sampling 30 seconds of "Drive On, Driver" or "The Nun's Litany" at an online music store. It's a fun album and worth checking out.

Among all singles, just 16% say they are currently looking for a romantic partner. That amounts to 7% of the adult population. Some 55% of singles report no active interest in seeking a romantic partner. This is especially true for women, for those who have been widowed or divorced, and for older singles. Yet even among the youngest adults, the zest for romance is somewhat muted: 38% of singles ages 18-29 say they are not currently looking for a romantic partner, compared to 22% in that age cohort who are looking for partners. The rest say they are in committed relationships.

1. Simple preference. Some people decide that, despite the dominant cultural paradigm, this kind of relationship just isn't something they want.
   
2. Dating sucks. The process of finding a partner is so unpleasant that some people give up, or wait for a more favorable environment.
   
3. Small dating pool. This is the one the Pew survey actually investigates at some level, asking the people who are looking if there are good prospects in the community. Outside of urban areas they are not very optimistic about this.
   
4. Practical issues. Some people have very full schedules and don't have the time or the resources for dating. A variety of other personal circumstances don't allow for entering a relationship (or make it quite difficult). Alternatively, they just prioritize other interests.
   
5. Signaling. Actively looking for a partner is often interpreted as a sign of desperation, and can be counterproductive, so people say they aren't to project more self-assurance. Maybe this effect extends to survey responses.
   
6. Dating works. People looking for partners tend to find them sooner or later, removing them from the category of interest. The more efficient this process is, the more selection bias you get in this kind of survey: people for whom being in a relationship is important are underrepresented in the singles group, because they don't stay in this category for long periods of time.

We had the Senate vote to grant retroactive immunity to telecoms who participated in the warrantless wiretapping program. The Dodd/Feingold amendment, which would have held the telecoms accountable for breaking the law, was soundly rejected by a 31-67 vote. It's probably too much at this point to expect Republicans to stand up for the rule of law, but it's shameful that so many Democrats voted nay here. Once again I wonder why the increasingly useless Dianne Feinstein is one of the senators from California. Meanwhile, Obama voted for the amendment, but Clinton didn't bother to show up. I'll give her some slack since the vote wasn't close, but some leadership on this issue from her might have helped.

Meanwhile, the military is finally preparing to file charges against some of the Guantanamo detainees; they are seeking the death penalty. Parts of the article inadvertently highlight just how badly this system has gone wrong.

Col. Steven David, the chief military defense lawyer for the Guantánamo cases, who must provide detainees with military lawyers, said he did not have six lawyers available to take the cases, which the Pentagon described as a milestone in the war on terror.

In addition, he noted, a tangle of questions are unanswered in the military commission system, which has yet to begin a single trial. They include whether waterboarding constitutes torture, how statements obtained by coercion are to be handled, whether detainees may be so psychologically damaged that they may not be able to assist in their defense and exactly what the rules of the trials are to be.

The fact that any of these things are questions at all is appalling. Yes, waterboarding is torture. If this isn't obvious from a simple description of the procedure (and it should be), it's obvious from the fact that it has historically been used to torture people. No, statements obtained through torture should not be admissible as evidence. Historically, the primary use of torture has been to obtain false confessions, and there's no reason whatsoever to think this information is reliable. It's horrifying that any of this is even up for debate in this country.

Whether or not these men are guilty of the charges against them, executing them based on statements elicited through torture will not be just. That would make these military commissions no better than the show trials Stalin used against his political opponents. I can only hope that the military comes to its senses on this and gives these men a fair trial.

Meanwhile, as long as we're charging people with war crimes, let's do Donald Rumsfeld next: he personally approved the torture of these detainees.

Regarding these questions, I have no idea and can say very little. I'm more concerned about the one Yahoo service I actually use, Flickr, being assimilated into the Microsoft collective. I've always liked Flickr's clean and simple page layout, and would rather not see it turn into MSN Flickr with a look more like this. Hopefully Microsoft will do what Yahoo did when they bought it and leave Flickr with some independence.

Actually, I use a second Yahoo service: del.icio.us. It's true that I almost never posted there since I opened the account, but last week I revived it, and I'm contemplating cross-posting those links to the main blog. (More on this later.) However, del.icio.us has always been ugly, but at least it's ugly in an uncluttered way, which is basically the opposite of Microsoft Ugly.

Anyway, here's hoping Microsoft takes a hands-off approach to Yahoo's Web 2.0 acquisitions.