Thursday, July 26, 2012

cloud

Hey! Internet post!

I still do not have a "smart phone" (the quotes there represent my fingers doing the quote gesture as I say "smart phone"). So, you might think that I am behind on the internet times.

But no! If you think this you are wrong. I use three computers (home, office, and lab), and they are all linked together. They share a Dropbox, which has basically replaced FTP in my daily file-shuffling. From what I hear, once MEEI has finished eating SERI, they're going to do away with our FTP server anyways, so that's fine. My computers also are all equipped with Logmein, so I can use any of them from anywhere, so long as they remain connected. Effectively, all three computers can be used as one.

Those are both pretty basic, though. The thing I'm excited about is SVN: version control. D* just taught me about this last week, and I'm already using it to manage my manuscripts. You create a repository to store files for a project, and it contains all versions of the project over time, as you make changes. It is amazing.

Sophisticated users, e.g. software developers, will give SVN its own server so it can be accessed from multiple locations by different users. What I'm doing is leaving the repositories on Dropbox; so, wherever I am, so long as the files are synchronized (i.e. as long as the internet is working between the two relevant computers), I can always get to the current version of my files. This is great. I don't have to worry about whether I'm moving the right ones, or which were the most recent versions (on which computer) after a long pause in a project - the most recent versions are all contained in the central Dropbox location, and I don't have to think about it. I'm sure there's a pitfall there.

The Dropbox is backed up on the lab and office computers, but I haven't set up a backup on my laptop yet. Need to do that. Anyways, I feel this is a great advance in organization. We'll see what my files look like after a few years of this. Next big modeling project should definitely take advantage of this system!

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

height and a black belt

two posts in a day, this is bad.

just been meaning to write this down: saturday afternoon I leave the apt to go to tkd, walking down the sidewalk, take off my glasses to blow off some dust, then go to put them back on, and they snap in half. so my glasses broke.

i go to tkd, not wearing glasses, and not really able to precisely recognize faces beyond a couple of meters. in the distance i see a woman practicing something, a black belt, with mid-length black hair pulled back in a ponytail. at first i think, that's j*, just i guess because her style and general characteristics seemed right. but then i thought, no, that's not her, she's too small. i got a little closer, and yes, this woman was too small to be j* - a couple of inches shorter than me. a little closer and, then, yes - it was indeed j*.

i felt certain that j* was taller than me - if you had asked me before how tall i thought j* was, i would have guessed, oh, maybe 6' or so, she's a real amazon. apparently she's closer to 5'8". taller than the average woman, and still an amazon, okay, but not what i thought. in my mind, i guess, her high status (at tkd) had me convinced that she was actually larger than in reality. i've noticed this effect before (it's been studied for a long time, and probably known forever), but never in a context like this: certain that a person had a relatively unusual trait (woman taller than me), and then unable to recognize her because i don't see the trait, when it was never there in the first place.

"she's actual size, but she seems much bigger to me"

City System

A couple of years ago, - no, oh God, nearly 3 years ago - I got talked into trying to write a Nanowrimo novel. I made it to the end of November with something like 15,000 words, about 35k short (of the official 50k target), but then I kept going, and finally stopped towards the end of the spring in 2010. There was other writing that was more important, and I had reached what seemed like a good stopping point, about halfway through the story - and, coincidentally, I had reached 50,000 words.

Anyways, I still think about the story sometimes. Maybe someday I'll finish it. Yesterday I was thinking about the world that I had set up, vaguely, in the background. It's a reflection of some of my political thinking, but I never made any of it really concrete, just alluding to details here and there. A lot more of it is put together in my head than there in the story. Since it's on my mind, though, I thought maybe I'd write some of it out here. First some background for the background:

The story is centered on a few characters over the course of two days of what I would call the Second NEL Crisis. The setting is the distant future (the year Akan Era 852, sometime during the fourth millennium of the Common Era), on the planet Akan, populated by hundreds of millions of humans. Soon after the initial phases of the colonization, interstellar ships stopped arriving from Earth, and there has been no contact between the worlds in more than 800 years. It is unknown what stopped the ships, but some sort of natural or man-made disaster is assumed to have severely disrupted Earth's civilization, which was already dangerously unstable.

The Akan civilization is based around something called the City System, where the only sovereign entities are city-states, of which there are hundreds, and where certain rules maintain the independence and adaptability of the units of the System. Different Cities (always capitalized in this context) operate under different rules, according to their own preferences. Some may be libertarian or anarchistic, some may be communistic or totalitarian, etc., but they all have to abide by certain City Laws, established long ago, which ensure the stability of the overall system. There must be a dozen or more of these Laws, but I have only really thought about a few of of them:

The 1st City Law institutes an Intercity Congress, where revisions to the original laws are discussed and passed. Decisions can only be made through consensus of the entire body, so as new Cities are added, deliberations slow down more and more. Revisions to the Laws typically take decades. The more immediate responsibility of the IC is to monitor the City Law Enforcement Agency, which is discussed below.

The 2nd City Law is that no City may make administrative decisions for another: the Independence Law. Administrative control is measured quantitatively, and if more than half of a City's administration can be traced to other Cities, then it is the responsibility of demonstrably independent Cities to rectify the problem through mediation. Naturally, the methods for measuring control are controversial, and change with the times, but they have to be universally applied and agreed on through consensus. A result of the consensus requirement is that while the control measures do change with the times, they change very slowly, and the main problem with them is usually that they are seen as out of date. Consensus on new terms can take generations, and only a few dozen methods have been fully instituted over the 852 years of Akan history.

The 3rd City Law is that all citizens must be able to enter and leave Cities freely: the Open City Law. So, Cities cannot block entry by citizens, and cannot prevent citizens from leaving. The standard exception to this rule is that citizens may be arrested or imprisoned; immigration and emigration, however, are held to be out of the fundamental control of the Cities. Some cities may have such strange and insular cultures that few outsiders want to join, or that few insiders feel capable of disconnecting, but these situations are quantified as matters of individual choice and not City coercion. Cities may have requirements for City registration, and may tax insiders or outsiders differently, but requirements are quantified as prohibitive or not. Again, the methods by which such quantifications are made are instituted by consensus, and change but slowly. Before and after the comet Yandel-Yokum impact of AE832, the 3rd Law was widely suspended as Cities struggled to accommodate enormous population transfers from destroyed or abandoned Cities. This disruption of the System resulted in numerous crises across Akan, including the First NLE Crisis of AE835.

The 4th City Law is that intercity aggression and standing armies are jointly prohibited. Police forces, when they exist, are required to demonstrate that they cannot project force beyond the borders of their respective Cities. Intercity violence triggers intervention from other, non-involved Cities. Given that much of human life in AE852 is virtual, lived through machines and computer networks distributed, in some cases, over many Cities, just what constitutes 'force' is a recurring controversy. It is currently agreed that physical and virtual force should generally be treated as equivalent.

The Tensor Law, effectively the Last City Law (if I knew exactly how many there were, it would be the Nth), institutes the agency of the City Law Enforcers. These are a system of inspector-judges who quietly monitor and evaluate the legal performance of the Cities. Their power derives from the CLE Tensor, a mathematical instantiation of the City Laws, to which individual CLEs (in English, "see-el-eez", not "kleez") are neurologically bound - the Tensor acts as a key for the agents, giving them unrestricted access to City networks all over Akan, but also acts as a strict behavioral constraint: agents are prohibited from directly interfering in City affairs. All of their judgments and observations are reported through public channels to the Intercity Congress, although they strive to act in secrecy. The CLEs are not under the direct control of the IC, however: they act autonomously in accord with the Tensor. CLEs are widely seen as incorruptible and infallible. Changes to the Tensor, like changes to any individual City Law, require IC consensus, and happen only very, very slowly.

By the way, a story from a while back was told from the point of view of an individual CLE.

Other Laws establish the responsibilities and limits of Intercity governance of natural resources, of interplanetary space, and of inhabited areas outside City borders.

The Second NLE Crisis, the subject of the novel, is where this system is subjected to a serious and perhaps permanent breach. What happens when the best course of action is to abandon a deeply entrained system that has persisted for nearly a thousand years?

Friday, July 20, 2012

update

that last entry was kind of embarrassing. guess it's worthwhile to keep a record of peaks in frustration.

anyways, kind of better now. with the data from the new rivalry experiment, i was 1) making an error in the processing, and 2) even with the error corrected it was a dumb analysis. i did the 'better' analysis, which i had had in mind but thought would be more complicated than it was (and which did require that that error was fixed), and got basically what i was looking for: before a target is reported as seen, there is an increase in its strength.

i then tried to expand it out, looking for effects in non-target locations. this also seems to work; i'll have to figure out how to separate the effects of spatial correlation in target strength, i.e. a part (maybe the major part) of these peripheral effects will be non-interesting because they will be firmly tied to the central target effect.

i also will need to make the analysis more specific, since each time a target is reported, it matters whether the transition is from a different report or an absence of report. this makes a difference in how the data are interpreted: 1) the increase in stimulus strength caused a dominance change (if there was an immediately previous report of a different target), 2) the increase in stimulus strength firmed up an indeterminate state (if the previous report was 'mixed'), or 3) the increase in stimulus strength made the current dominance state noticeable, i.e. made the target color visible.3

so, i expect that i will need much more data to make these sorts of different relationships clear. i will collect another half-hour's worth of data today, then i'll have more than an hour total. may be able to get something interesting out of that...

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

pathetic

okay, i was trying to use this site as a journal, somewhere i could type as a habit, and then take advantage of the indexing and all-in-the-same-placeness of it. the cloudiness, as the kids call it.

but now, for more than a week, i'm just whining into it. whine whine whine. i'm getting sick of myself, and here i have myself, whining into a recording. and i'm keeping score. and i actually look at the web stats to see if anyone visits, even though i am basically not linked to anything. well, i'm linked to the facebook profile, but apparently i don't have any stalkers.

today i got reviews back on a paper submitted more than 3 months ago. not terrible - the editor seems to like it, and one reviewer seems fine with it, and the other reviewer was ambivalent. but they all hate my writing. yes. dense, detailed, opaque, confusing. i keep.. getting.. those.. comments. why? this time, i'm going to blame it on the process. this paper took 2 years and a dozen versions to get assembled and submitted. the main result was scooped, so i came up with some more peripheral material and tried to integrate it, while at the same time trying to please my boss by going along with his terminology suggestions. well, i think the peripheral stuff is going to get cut, at least mostly, and i'm going to go for standard wording. i tried to write for commoners, and it didn't work. the strain was showing. so i'm going to go back to writing for myself, which is what i did in the currently almost-done paper that's about to be sent to the same journal.

okay, that was that whine. next, i talk with a colleague today, t*, and he shows me what he's working on, and mentions that his paper is out on his previous project, and i'm so jealous. not so much jealous of him, as i am hateful of myself. i feel like i've done everything wrong. every single thing. wrong.

then, to top that off, i collect a half hour's worth of data - which is more than it sounds like - on this new experiment i've been slowly, gradually, painstakingly working towards getting started. the basic form of the data, the form i had been looking at in the pilot experiment, looked just fine. then i thought i'd take a shot at the planned analysis, correlation between recording data and video statistics - nothing. flat lines. garbage. i really hope i did something wrong, or that i'm really not thinking about the computations in the right way, otherwise, it's really back to the drawing board. this should have worked.

so, day of self-hate and frustration complete. whine whine whine. who are you, what are you doing here?

Monday, July 16, 2012

ghosts

(I hate to go on and on about a stupid birthday, but it did cause some notable disruptions, including:)

Three nights of the 33rd birthday: three friends of birthdays past, present, and future.

Actually, they didn't come in that order. Here is the account, in pseudo-archaic English, for distance and comedy:

Birthday eve, I drank with the Man of the Past, in an empty pub in the Old Town. Fifteen years older than yours truly, this dissipated fellow, his life a perpetual shambles. Failed in love, in work, trapped forever in some youthful heyday. I have not followed his path, but he brings to mind other possibilities, other ways to fail. Should I feel fear or relief?

Birthday night, I met with the Man of the Future. Nine years younger he, the enthusiastic student, excited thinker. We drank in a crowded tavern in the student ghetto, talked philosophy and science. Across the street we went, and watched a metal show. I never was exactly in his place, but there are clear parallels. Wonder I where he'll go, and where I've gone. Should I feel elation or regret?

Birthday morrow, in the morning I met with the Man of the Now. Our age is the same, down to half a year. We drank coffee in a crowded diner, ate eggs and toast. We went to the market, and I shewed him the Cleveland Circle. We aren't the same, but neither is ahead, neither is behind, neither is greater, neither is smaller. The magnitude of our respective courses seems the same. I feel what I am today.

This weird trilogy is a fact. I wondered if I could make a little parable out of it, and that's the best I will do. I'm going to tag this entry as a coincidence, although really it's an instance of symmetry, which maybe actually is a type of coincidence - or, maybe coincidences are types of symmetry. Argh.

Friday, July 13, 2012

birthday post!

(general dispatch)
Ok, so, I was born on Friday the 13th of July, 1979. Five years later, in 1984, the date fell on Friday again; then again six years later, in 1990; then again 11 years later, in 2001. It happened again in 2007, which completed a whole cycle: 5/6/11/6. This is how the constant seven day cycle of week days aliases with the yearly cycle of 365+1/4 days. So, the next time this will happen will be in 2018; then a long wait until 2029; and so on. This 28-year 5/6/11/6 cycle keeps up until the end of this century, when we skip the leap year in 2100. Then there's a phase shift, where the position of the cycle moves - but the cycle continues. The same cycle holds whatever your birthday is (the phases are different), unless you were born on leap day, in which case you have a much, much, much slower cycle.

The point is, I may be 33 solar cycles old, but I am only through 5 solar-week cycles, and I am barely more than 1 meta-solar-week old.

***

i am now 33.

gonna try to accomplish some work today. on so many verges at once, how can i fail?

also, i think that this is technically my 200th post on this journal/blog/thing. could change later, since maybe someday i will go back and clean out some of the less respectable ones, making this less than 200th. i am not above that.

but on my 33rd birthday, this was my 200th post, that will be true whatever i do.

excelsior!

Thursday, July 12, 2012

a poem about physics

begin by recognizing everything
once all facts are forgot

only when all was forgotten
can we say it was known

then the tense is correct

air presses me, i press the earth
but we don't pass through

these texts,
they say what we once knew

you learn the math
and the shape of space

you learn the motion of the worlds
and the age of the expanse

and you learn its end and beginning
because these are what we remember

but the heart is forgot
these pieces, that produce these ends

see how they mesh together

all have these types
and all are countered

some are manifest
while others abide

some transmit
while others hide

the forces four are only fragments
at the start there was just one

but we can bring them back
together with effort

give it a try
some of the elements
are soft

break them apart
to see what they are

break space itself
see what a piece becomes

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

no i

hey.

got this paper to work on - been working on it all day. for the last month or two, actually, with some interruptions. also, got that report to finish. and still haven't started collecting data on that rivalry thing. and what's new? anything else in the pipeline? not exactly. a bunch of computer stuff. got to write a review paper for a conference. need to generate some new grant ideas.

don't really feel like doing any of that right now. back kind of hurts. hurt it last year. spent a month on the first version of the fellowship proposal, spent a month sitting typing and reading. got out of that month, went and worked out hard. got tired, worn out. no problem. came home, picked up the cat bucket - not going to explain what the cat bucket is or why it needs to be picked up - and sproing, something went. so now it comes and goes, and now it's summer, time to train and work, and it's come. aggravation.

this summer is like stasis. waiting. nothing happening now. no big changes. no big plans. nothing to look forward to. nothing to be afraid of. turning 33 friday. 33.

could be playing the piano, but the neighbors don't like it so late. got a complaint a few weeks ago. oh well. could be reading a book. started a good one this weekend. "daily life in china on the eve of the mongol invasion". jacques gernet, 1959. academic study, history, culture, anthropology. gift from elizabeth, probably 17 or so years ago. never read it. it's been waiting for this moment, when finally it gets picked up, finally in the right place at the right time.

so, still getting books from elizabeth, she's been gone more than 2 years now.

will do that. get up in a minute, go lay on the bed and read that book. too much sitting here, waiting to start work, start at 11, finish at 1. why? sometimes it's a good idea. not always. jingping just came over, now the mind is changing. might type a bit on that paper. discussion has points to add. ideas to arrange. the rest is basically done. a few features to fix. not many decisions left.

what else? seemed like there was something else. days seem empty. nothing new coming in. jingping so busy. work is all ethereal. birthday coming. dread.

supposed to go out with r* tomorrow night. see if he shows. intuitive estimate odds 4-1 against. joked elliptically about going drinking with j*, then felt guilty about it.

dread and boredom. o july!

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

ALL NEW DIALOGUE, FIRST IN FIVE YEARS

Ezek: You came so close. I can appreciate that.

Imelda: You know, I did. I really did.

Ezek: And you really didn't have a plan?

Imelda: I didn't. I just sat down, wrote out a title - all in caps, -emphasizing my commitment - and then started to improvise.

Ezek: I sense a bit of weaseling there.

Imelda: Yes, started to. You know, you always hear that starting is the hardest part.

Ezek: Yep.

Imelda: So, you think that, if you just start, then the job is half done. You've gotten through the block, broken the ice, established a front, and then -

Ezek: I know.

Imelda: You realize that you've only started to start.

Ezek: And that you haven't actually started. You've been through this before, haven't you?

Imelda: Oh, so many times. In fact, most times.

Ezek: It's a kind of purgatory, isn't it? You're not in the empty expanse, staring at the blank sheet, wondering how to fill it, or waiting for it to be filled, but you aren't filling it, either.

Imelda: It's an illusion. You're filling something, but not the sheet before you. It's like the sheet was there, but you put another, false, sheet on top of it, and set to filling it instead.

Ezek: But it's so close.

Imelda: So close.

Ezek: Well, if I had to choose from amongst the different ways of missing a target, the trick start is a good one. At least you have something to show when you're done.

Imelda: But it's just navel-gazing. It's you sitting there, talking with yourself, about a failure, and only very transparently as if it's a sort of new beginning, some sort of accomplishment.

Ezek: In your line of work, navel-gazing is worth something, isn't it?

Imelda: Not if you show it off. These things are supposed to broil for a while.

Ezek: Huh.

Imelda: Come to think of it...

Ezek: What is it?

Imelda: What was it that I was going to do, but did this instead?

Ezek: You were going to write a dialogue. First in five years!

Imelda: Isn't that what I'm doing?

Ezek: But it's about your immediate failure to do so, isn't it? Right away, from the very start, you declared it a failure and then went on to explore the phenomenon of failing in that specific fashion.

Imelda: So why does that make for an invalid dialogue? I can just decide, here and now, that it isn't a failure.

Ezek: That would make a sort of fiction out of everything that came before, wouldn't it?

Imelda: I think that for this sort of thing, all we need is a consensus. A consensus on success.

Ezek: That our dialogue isn't just an avoidant anti-dialogue?

Imelda: What do you say?

Ezek: It would justify our presence, to a degree...

Imelda: It complicates the subject, but it creates an interesting symmetry to the whole thing. Do you see?

Ezek: Ah. Ah! I do!

Imelda: Then you agree?

Ezek: We'll say that this was the plan all along.

Imelda: That was a close one!

Ezek: It really was.

Sunday, July 08, 2012

sunday afternoon, procrastinating, politics

slight headache today. was reading this morning and kept getting a pre-scotoma sort of feeling, as though the letters were hard to see and overlaid with a faint sort of phosphene criss-cross, but there never was any scotoma, and the phosphene sensation was very ethereal. i suspect this headache is due to my having slept until 10:39 this morning.

***

not a very productive week. i managed to get the video rivalry experiment into working condition, but never actually cut a prism setup to start trying to collect some data. really, i want to get j* to cut the prisms for me, but she's never around. definitely will start early this week. i also finally started writing the ADI report. pretty dry stuff. most of the report will be figures showing that nothing is happening, accompanied by captions that explain as much.

***

i get randomly preoccupied with politics sometimes, so i thought i'd sit here and type out a bit on my political thinking. why not? i think writing this stuff down gets it out of the system. i don't like thinking about it - this sort of thing, writing it down and looking at it is sort of like spitting into a cup: you can't deny that it came from you, but you don't want to ingest it again. seeing this stuff in print might keep it out of my mind for a while.

okay, i'm basically a libertarian. i don't like saying that, because my general impression of libertarians is that they're kind of hateful and resentful of the way things are, and i feel that (even though, truly, i do have a lot of hate bundled deep down inside) i am more apathetic and discouraged than either of these qualities. i think that it is undeniable that in times of crisis, big and small, the state grows and accumulates power, and refuses to give it up. it just gets bigger and bigger, and acquires more and more power and responsibility, and consumes more and more resources, and becomes more and more inscrutable.

this sort of reaction to the government might also make me an anarchist, and when i was younger i considered myself one. the only books on political thought that i've ever read were proudhon, kropotkin, chomsky, and zinn. but as time has gone by, i have decided that anarchism, and socialism, can only be useful in the social sense, and not in the economic sense. people cannot agree on what they need, and what they deserve in return for what they produce, and on who controls what resource, unless there is a system of incentives and disincentives in place, and i think that the only such incentives that can work in the long term are free markets and law enforcement. so, i think we need capitalists and police, which means i cannot be a true socialist or an anarchist. i do think that capitalists should be more progressively taxed, and that police should be governed more closely by the people they serve.

i'm not impressed with democracy. i don't know why people must be able to decide on their own laws, when most people don't understand things very well beyond their own private spheres. i would be more in favor of a technocratic meritocracy running things, with democratically instructed public taxation and democratically elected police leadership. the main benefits of democratic government are that official corruption and state violence against the people are minimized. corruption is addressed by making it so that corrupt officials cannot possibly be reelected because of their reputations; violence is prevented because different arms of the state will be pushed by the people to prosecute excesses. i don't think that the way to get these benefits is, necessarily, to elect all legislators and executives, and even judges. the people need power to impeach corrupt officials, which can be done through referendum; they need power to investigate and monitor the bureaucracy, which can be done through some democratically controlled agency; and they need power to punish reckless state violence, which can be done through the same democratic means. it also would seem to be a good idea to put taxation in the hands of a democratic agency, or require all taxes to be subject to referendum. the state should only carry out functions that the people are willing to pay for.

basically, the democratic branch of government should be purposed with supervising the other branches, with the mandate of preventing corruption and violence in specific ways. the effective branches of the government would be run like a corporate meritocracy, setting goals for the purpose of improving and advancing the condition of the city or state that they govern. laws would pertain entirely to protection and advancement of commerce, public safety, and civil rights. there's the rub, i guess - what constitutes these pillars, and how to achieve them - but i think that a meritocratic technocracy, strongly bound by public supervision, would be better than the power and charisma driven system of institutional demagoguery that we have now.

so, i am in favor of a sort of libertarian technocracy. both the r* and d* party are corrupt, writing laws for the good of private industries, rather than for the good of commerce itself; they both lie constantly to the public and favor the opaque system of government that we have now, i.e. they both are opposed to public supervision of the state; the r* party is fine with social backwardness and feudal ignorance of human desire for freedom - a position they call "social conservatism", while the d* party pushes public reliance on dictates from the state, and the idea that all problems should be remedied by the state, which they call "progressivism"; they're both prone to doing stupid, wasteful things because in the short term it gets them reelected. i think that the people should be free to fail and be stupid and fat and suffer, unless they explicitly volunteer to pay for the alternative - not to say i'm against safety nets, just cradles - which i think means i cannot be a d*. i also think that traditionalism and nationalism are backwards and harmful, and that the state should be a modulatory force for progress, which i think means i cannot be a r*.

anyways, unless there is some big change coming, this year will be the first of many in the future that i will no longer vote for d*s as i have in the past (i did vote for a r* mayor once). i feel pretty stupid for having written this, but there it is. please get out of my head now, politics.

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

scintillating scotoma 3.b




I just can't let this go. Maybe this is as far as I can get with it for the time being. I wasn't satisfied with the straight-line model of the CSD wave that I had been playing with, because there was just no straightforward way of figuring out direction, origin, speed, etc. But I had a great idea: say the wave is like a surface wave, with a point origin, spreading out in every direction at a the same speed. Maybe this isn't true; it may be that the phenomenon is limited to V1; it may be that the origin is, e.g., the interface between cortical areas; it may be that the speed or direction varies. The first isn't a problem, but if we assume the second two (point origin, constant velocity) are true, or close to true, then we can come up with the simple model you see in the gif above: according to my June 24 data (fit with a lazy grid search), the CSD is a surface wave, traveling at (exactly!) 3mm/min, arising within about 3mm of the V1/V2 border, near the foveal confluence.

I'm not going to go into detail here about the spatial properties of the wave. It's simple, that's enough for you.

Anyways, nothing crazy here; this is all consistent so far with what I understand of the published research so far. It's a lot of fun figuring out how to create and convert all these maps, and it's amazing just how solid those parameter estimates are given the data. Sometime soon I'll look deeper into it, hopefully I can put it off for a while.