streamline

double post!? see if i can finish this in 9 minutes.

i finally brought home a hard drive adaptor from the lab so i could copy old files - random stuff - from my mb-dead-old thinkpad. so then i waste an hour or so looking through old text files mostly, going back almost to the start of graduate school (7 years!).

i have older files from older drives, and the further back they go, the more i hate myself; or, the more i hope and pray that i've gotten better. i always write a lot - before i ramped up this dumb journal, i wrote a lot in text or word files that then got thrown in a folder somewhere, so i have piles of examples of my bad writing. not all of it is that bad, really - i like to read myself, i know. some of it is awful, and some of it is embarrassing for showing how wrong i was about something, or naive; and sometimes its revealing because i see that i've been fixated on one issue or another for so many years.

i get done with this and go to have a look at the perceived contrast paper, which i keep saying is almost done, and i realize something: i can save it. i can make it better. i mean, i already think it's a cool paper, but i also have a feeling that no one will be able to read it. but having just waded through a stack of old forgotten pages, and looking at a new stack, i now know what i have to do:

get rid of the complicated figures - three of them, four panels each - and replace with one simple figure with 2 panels. no more of those heatmaps. just plot the function peaks. then, all the model stuff goes to an appendix. anyone who cares already knows all that stuff, or they're the type that likes appendices, so just shunt the calculations off to after the end of the paper. those two steps will hugely streamline the paper, should improve it greatly, make it much more readable. are you brave enough? just when you thought you were done, and you just want to finish it, will you go the extra mile? of course you will!

***QUICKLY***

00:00, no double post!