Showing posts with label coincidences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label coincidences. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

mixed signals

 The other day I walked into the kitchen to see the following mundane happenings:

1) Daughter sitting at the kitchen counter eating a snack out of a bowl.

2) Wife sitting on a kids chair with son in lap, clipping his toenails.

These were about 8 feet apart. I casually looked at one, then the other, then back again, and got a flash of revulsion at having just seen my daughter casually clipping and eating toenails!

This incorrect impression instantly resolved. The higher level aspects of these two distinct happenings were briefly entangled. There are many ways to explain this, two come to my mind:

1) On foveating an event, the higher-level contents (recognizing-what-is-happening) are present in my experience, but on looking away, they are reduced and only a vague 'pointer' is retained (so that I can look back at the interesting event to re-experience the full thing). In this case, the reduction was delayed or incomplete, so that when I looked at one event, the previously foveated one was still in-mind, and so they briefly overlapped. Since the higher-level contents are strongly enforced by the lower-level contents, which are completely forced by the retinal input, the intermingling was brief and the 'correct' contents survived.

2) Different events can simultaneously be in experience, but they are normally cordoned off from one another. In this case, the cordon was briefly broken and the two sets of high-level contents were mixed - maybe from one leaking into the other.

I think that 1) is the more likely alternative. I doubt that multiple sets of high-level contents can be simultaneously experienced, since they inevitably will sometimes involve common contents (in this case, both would have involved 'person/child/fingers/kitchen/etcetc'), and so would naturally be inextricable. Instead, my impression that I can simultaneously entertain different sets of high-level contents must instead be due to keeping one set in detail, the object of attention, while the other is reduced to something more like a pointer which can be quickly grabbed by attention to reconstitute the whole set.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

anxiety, nighttime kitchens, broken foot

Yep. So, I guess 2014 is the year that HAZ goes back to sleep, waking up now and then for a random update.

I suppose that when I'm especially introspective or, dare I say it, depressed, I write here more. Or anxious. Which is to say that lately I haven't been these things. There's a bit of desolation, loneliness, but I know that's temporary, so it's not actually that hard. And what I'm doing otherwise, during the days, is so fulfilling that there's not much energy left to fuel anxiety.

So that's why I'm not here much lately.

Tonight, as I left the lab, about 8:30, I went to the kitchen to get a candy bar. I don't usually do this, but my foot is kind of broken and I felt like I needed an extra boost for the walk home.

Coincidentally, the candy bar was called 'Boost'.

I walk into the kitchen - or cafeteria, or as the Australians call it, 'tea room', and it's dark out, but the lamps over the lunch tables are on, and there's a smell, something I can't identify, musty, an odor that didn't belong there. And suddenly I'm a kid, sneaking into the kitchen in my mother's parents house after everyone's gone to sleep, to look through the cupboards for cookies or crackers. The light was somehow the same, the smell of course was key - memory is so strange - and, certainly, my action was parallel. A few times I've done the same thing, probably once a week to be honest, but there's always someone else there, and I'm too embarrassed to let someone see me taking a candy bar. Ha!

So I stood there for a dozen seconds and observed the memory, and I could *see* Elizabeth's kitchen, and feel the space of their house around me. The light, the smell, the feeling of night time and quiet and not wanting to wake anyone, and being by yourself.

What else is there? Interesting birds. Doves with tall feather crests on top of their heads. Mynas fighting with their reflections in windows. They're my favorites lately, jovial, nervous birds.

Going on a camping trip tomorrow! With a broken foot! I went running Tuesday, barefoot, and it was totally fine. Short on oxygen, but didn't notice a single mechanical problem, not one false step, and I was concentrated on the feet, on the ground. But Wednesday morning I get out of bed and it hurts - and the long walk home at night, man oh man, on a bad foot. I strained some ligament or tendon or something, can feel a bruise, left foot, outside/top about halfway down. At first it felt like it was in the ankle or heel, but it's migrating. Hope it's better tomorrow, so I can do some hiking..

Had a sort-of headache a week or so ago, but they seem basically to have stopped, so we may need to revise the subtitle of this journal.

Sunday, December 22, 2013

something which seems to be true

  
Where D is distance between the subscripted cities, indicated by their airport codes, r is the radius of the earth, and p is population of the subscripted city.

Since I realized this, I've felt much more conflicted about my coming trip. Separated from my wife for what might be 6 months, in what is by the above measures the most distant city on earth from where I am now (of comparable or larger size). On the other hand, maybe it's symbolic of escape from a long feeling of being trapped - not with the wife, but with the job. Kind of proves I am free, and at the same time there's a cost. There's no cost function in these equations...

The first one was my first thought, just looking at distance weighted by whether the city population is at least as big as Boston's. Melbourne is top there, though Sydney is very close - finding different estimates for population makes the difference, but I think I'm using good numbers - Boston's 'metro' population and Melbourne's similar extent both include 4.2 million people.

The second function is more specific obviously, excluding cities that are larger or smaller, and maybe it's a little more comfortable, but I do prefer the first one.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

prime day

today is a prime sequence day: 7-11-13. this is the next-to-last time this will happen this century; the last one will be 11-13-17. Last Prime Day sounds ominous.

the preceding is only really true in places, i.e. the USA, where we use the month-day-year notation for dates (and if we ignore the century count). if we use the more typical ordering of day-month-year, the Last Prime Day will be this November 7th: 7-11-13, and then no more until the 1st of February, 2103. (the first American Prime Day of the next century will be January 2nd of the same year).

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.

Sunday, February 05, 2012

Two Dilemmas

The Train Dilemma:
If you run to catch a train which from a distance you saw pull into the station, it will depart just as you arrive. Next time, you will believe you can't catch it, and you will walk. If you walk to the station believing you can't catch the train, it will still depart just as you arrive. You will believe that if you had run you would have caught it, so next time, you will run. Ad infinitum.

Assume that all other things being equal, walking is preferable to running.

e.g.
run_speed >> walk_speed
distance / run_speed = "t_to_departure" + epsilon (very small interval), therefore just walk
distance / walk_speed = "t_to_departure" + epsilon, therefore run

The illusion here, or the problem in reasoning, is that the departure time of the train is somehow correlated with your decision to run or walk. If this is so, then the correct solution is to retain your dignity and walk coolly to the station every time. But it is unlikely that this is so.

Clearly the solution to this problem is to run every time, but it might take you a few failures to convince yourself of that. I've been in this situation many times on the way home from TKD, walking down the alley off Brookline that leads to Fenway Station; that's exactly where the D-Train comes out of the underground, and if when I get to the end of the alley I hear a distant screeching of metal wheels on metal rails, I know the train is coming, and I know I should start running.

The Bus Dilemma:
Let's say you have multiple paths to a destination, one of which includes a bus ride, but you don't know the schedule, only that the bus comes at a certain interval.

The dilemma here is whether or not to take your other option. Often, you might feel that you have committed enough time to waiting for the bus that you should abandon other options and just wait until the next one comes - otherwise, you've wasted all that time.

If the following propositions are true, then the dilemma occurs:
1. time_by_bus < time_by_other
2. time_by_bus + bus_period > time_by_other
3. bus_phase is unknown or undependable

If these are true, then it can be hard to decide just what to do. Keep waiting, or take the other route?

Again, the answer is probabilistic. If the bus phase is unknown, we can represent 'wait time' as a uniformly distributed random variable in the interval [0 bus_period]. We can then combine the after-weight travel times for the bus and the other route in the following way:

t_wasted = rand[0 bus_period] + t_bus - t_other

If t_wasted is positive, then the wait was too long and time would have been saved by taking the other route. If it's negative, then the wait was worth it, and time was saved by taking the bus. How do you use this to decide what to do? First off, look at what happens if t_bus and t_other are equal - in that case, t_wasted will always be positive, i.e. it makes no sense to wait at all, and you should take the other route every time.

At the very least, you want to break even on average. To do this, (t_bus - t_other) has to be equal to negative half the bus period, i.e. taking the other route should take as long as taking the bus plus half of the maximum wait time. Otherwise it's just not worth it, unless you get lucky. That's why those three propositions are necessary; otherwise you'll always know what to do.

After writing this out, I googled "bus dilemma", and what do you know: there's an arxiv paper on a similar problem. Here, he's considering whether to wait or walk along the same route (in which case you can also try to account for the chances you might have to catch the bus as you're walking), which wasn't how I was thinking of it, even though it's similar to the main example I had in mind. I was thinking about two situations: the bus stop in front of my old building in Louisville, where the bus came every 20 minutes or so, took 5 minutes to take you to campus, and was set against a 20 minute walk to campus. On average in this case, you would come out ahead, but I eventually decided waiting was boring, and the few minutes gained on average were better spent walking down 3rd Street.

The other example is of coming home from Davis Square in Cambridge, and deciding whether or not to catch the 86 bus home from Harvard Square or to take the D train home from Park Street. That one is more complicated since there are multiple waits involved, but since several times I've gotten lost looking for the 86 bus stop, the problem has run through my mind several times there...

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

tubely

I got an interesting email this morning - actually two of them. They were spam on my gmail account, which is interesting because I almost never get spam on that account. They were sent from the account of someone I know incidentally - actually by way of two incidents. That's a funny story, I'll tell it now, in parentheses:

(I go to a Taekwondo club, and most of the other people who go there are like me, normal slobs, not genuine atheletes or fighters, though there are many of those. Anyways, one of the people I had conversed with a few times was the mother of a child student, who would come to classes when her son was there. So, okay, we "knew" one another, saw eachother maybe once every week or two. So then, last summer, I'm shopping for a piano, looking at Craigslist ads. I see a total of 4 pianos. The second one (I bought the 3rd), I show up at the person's house to check it out - and it's the lady from Taekwondo. Very weird, in a city of a million people, that 1/4 piano ads answered contain a person you know. Oh well, that's the story.)

So, I'm apparently on this lady's email contacts list because of the piano interaction. She must have fallen for this Tubely thing - I'm still not sure exactly what Tubely is - and it dumped "invites" to everyone on her contacts list. It sounds like this is the typical Tubely MO.

The interesting thing about the emails (I got two simultaneous copies of the invite) is that they contained the sender's IP address. I have no idea why. I knew it was the lady's work address because 1) I know that she works at another Harvard-affiliated research institute, and 2) the address resolved to another computer on the Harvard network.

The emails were sent around 7:40am today, so she gets to her office at least by 7:40am. It's creepy that spam can reveal that sort of detail about you. Embarrassing and creepy.

And, it seems pretty weird, that spam would want to be giving out your exact location on the internet, through a Webmail service. Maybe it's an effort to *not* look like spam, by showing that you originate from the actual sender, as if IP addresses are obviously familiar or not. Oh well, who knows.