Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts

Monday, January 12, 2015

coming back online

I'm back!

What to report?

Hm..

You're back without a report?

I might need time to prepare one.

We're hoping for regular reports, you know.

Would you take a picture?

We don't usually publish pictures, but let's see what you have.

Ah, well...

No pictures?

I thought you could take mine.

I see.

Next time I'll have something.

Don't wait six months again, okay?

I'll try.

See you soon.

Monday, December 30, 2013

300

Quickly, and as a year-ender for 2013:

According to my records, this is my 300th post on this "blog".

I started keeping this journal as part of a social exercise with the two Michaels, back in 2005 - we kept it going for a couple of years and then it waned and quit. But I came back! I changed the name and url a few times, but it's the same journal as from the start, although without the social aspect (aka "other people reading what I write") my entries have gotten longer and more self-involved/thoughtful. So there's that. This stupid blogspot blog has become my personal journal, for better or worse.

So, 300 posts. That's enough for some statistical analysis; it's enough just to look at some plots:



You can see where the Everyone-Is-Dead flame sputtered out through 2008, and where it rekindled with my lonely "internet phase", during the lonely Boston Spring of 2010. The big boost last year, at the beginning of which I renamed the journal XUEXIXS, or HAZ, was a conscious effort to recharge my writing, get my thoughts out on paper more frequently, as I perceived - well, I felt like my mind was withering away. It worked! It also means that the large majority of what's been written on this blog, in word count especially (if you haven't noticed, I get lengthy when no one is reading), has been written in the past 2 years.



Here's something nice: a year-averaged chart, showing the average of an "activity index" I came up with (basically the ratio of a month's activity to the past 12 months average activity; the axes are unitless, so unlabeled) - I seem to become more active in late spring, holding on through the summer, and fading through the winter. That is definitely how certain aspects of my productivity seem to work - my on-paper productivity accelerates as winter ends, while my hands-on productivity tends to increase in the fall.

[posts by day]

I'm not sure if there's a plot there or not. It's easier to get the monthly counts out of this site than the dates-per-plot, but if I succeeded, there's a polar histogram of days there. What day/s does it peak on? I can't dare to make a prediction. But I will predict: Tuesday. It peaks on Tuesdays.

Excelsior!

Monday, October 14, 2013

objectivity

I finished Chalmers' book - The Conscious Mind - this weekend. A funny thing was that the next-to-last chapter, basically just a set of musings on the relationship between his proto-theory and artificial intelligence arguments, didn't interest me at all. This is funny because if this was 2001, I probably would have skimmed the book up to that chapter and then read it over and over and over again.

It's an excellent, important book. I wish I'd read it back when, but now was good enough timing. As I mentioned in a previous entry, just about all of my thinking on philosophy of mind and consciousness in this book; I think some of the ideas I developed naturally, like a lot of people do, but I've also read many of Chalmers' papers over the years, and a couple I've read many times, so he's undoubtedly responsible for straightening my thoughts on the subject.

But this book, it's one of those cases where reading is like sharpening your mind. You may have a set of knives, but you've let them clatter around in a drawer for a while, used one here and another there, and so they get banged up and dulled and maybe a bit tarnished, and so finally you sit down with the whetstone and a cloth and sharpen and clean, and there, a drawer full of shining, sharp knives. That's what it was like, reading this book.

In a way, it just sort of set me up with new vocabulary, or ways to structure my thinking about perception and experience, and why they are interesting, and what the alternatives are in thinking about how they are interesting. Sometimes, this is enough to take away from a book - it helps you organize, doesn't revolutionize your thought, but it helps you straighten things out, like putting the knives into categories, with the tips and blades all facing together.

But he also inspired me, and hopefully just at the right time (though I was asking for it, looking for it, so it's silly to bring up the notion of coincidence). He talks about psychophysics - although in more basic terms than the conventional science - and he presents it as a way of using subjective experience as evidence, as a thing to be explained. This was how I felt about it for a long time, but as the years and papers and experiments wheel on, you can't help but start to see things operationally, in terms of functions and moving parts, and you operationalize your subjects too, and they become black boxes that press buttons. This is so wrong!

It's wrong, and I used to know it was wrong, and I've maintained a sense that it's wrong - I recognize that this sense is part of what sets me against the West Coast internal noise crowd in modern psychophysics, and which allies me so much to the European tradition. But I'd kind of forgotten, explicitly, how it's something of a travesty against psychophysics to operationalize your subjects, especially if you're interested in psychophysics per se, and not in using it as a means to another worthy end.

What I'm rambling about is what we all know - when you have a subject in a psychophysics experiment, and you give them instructions on how to do the task, you are asking them to take hold of a phenomenal object, and to give you responses based on that object. Often the object is so ineffable that it can only be explained by example - 'this, you see this? when you see this, press this button; or, press this button when you think you see this, here'. The central object in the entire experiment is the thing that is seen. The instructions to the subject are the closest that the experimenter comes to the phenomenon of interest. But it's too easy, I see now, to slip into the mode of giving those instructions and then thinking that the phenomenon is in the data, and that by describing the data or understanding the data, you're understanding the phenomenon.

Ultimately, maybe, it's just semantics. Ultimately, all you have to analyze in any rigorous sense is the data. But I think that many psychophysicists forget, and start talking only about performance - I've done this many times now. I've gone long enough without enough inspiration, for years now, only seeing it peek through now and then, always having trouble circling back to the real object of fascination. But this book, Chalmers' book - or probably, just a few choice passages from the book - has renewed my clarity, and as I said, just in time, because I feel that the importance of these ideas, for my research and my writing and my very career, is swinging right into center stage.

Also, I have a headache right now, officially it's been 59 days since the last, longest gap since record keeping began (May 2012). I gave it a 3.5, but I'm going to go raise that to a 4.5 now, it's getting worse.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

update

no thoughts to essayize lately, at least none which aren't going into manuscripts. productive summer of writing so far, will have produced at least 4 papers of my own this summer and lots of stubs for future work. current paper is unfolding in an interesting way; collecting a little more data, should have it all done in another week or so.

going to montreal this weekend.

decision on postdoc i applied for won't come til octoberish. preparing faculty applications in the meantime.

migraine news: last friday night developed a fine, sharp, right-side headache, on the trainride home from seeing Pacific Rim - best movie i've seen in a movie theater *maybe ever* - came home, went to bed, couldn't sleep til 2am because of the pain.

interesting thing was, when i closed my eyes, i could see, faintly, these very, very fine striations, like looking at my thumbprints from 50cm distant; 20+ cpd. they would follow one direction and fade into the black/redness of the eyelight; then i would see the other orientation, and they would fade, and so on. they kind of had the appearance of the extreme eye movement striations, but finer. maybe they were from irritation of the optic nerve? i couldn't tell if they were in one eye or the other, only noticeable when both eyes were closed.

Thursday, July 04, 2013

titles are hard

woke up this morning, after nine, opened then closed my eyes, and saw a glittering arc in my left visual field: this is the fourth or fifth time now, at least (i could pin it to one of those if i looked back over these records) that this has happened as i awoke. the aura was typical, about 10 minutes or so in, already with the leftward midline jag, then arcing downward. like last time, when i woke in the middle of the night at a similar stage, i decided not to run and record the end of it, just laid there and observed.

i watched half of it with eyes closed, and the scintillations were a bit plainer that way, typical fortification spectrum. i noticed that even - or especially - with eyes closed, eye movements seem to briefly abolish my perception of the scintillations. with eyes open, the same seems to happen, but it's less plain. the scotoma was very thin, which i've noticed before with the early morning (and the previous, nighttime) auras.

a few minutes after i awoke the headache started, and i gave it a 3. left side aura, headache focused on right frontal nerve. might have peaked at 4 or so around or after noon, when i could feel it in my teeth, but now it's more like a 1, i have to shake my head or stand up to feel it.

july fourth! getting work done lately. checked the proofs of one paper and submitted another. need to revise a third. need to work on a fourth and a fifth, editing and improvements of unsubmitted papers. and then there's a sixth that needs to be written, outlined it in toronto. so it's been a good summer for papers, at least.

that's it for now. spending july 4 playing video games, need to get back to that before it's time to cook dinner.

Saturday, June 29, 2013

toronto

just in time to make it 2 for June:



Notes at the Robards Library on the U.Toronto campus, 3:30 pm on 6-26-13.

My feet are very tired. Got up this morning at 5, took a shower, kissed my wife goodbye, and went out to meet the waiting taxi. Had a coffee at the airport.

Got on the prop plane to Toronto at 6:30. Had a coffee on the plane, with a muffin and a cup of yogurt. Clearly I am thinking of food.

Looking out the plane window while we were still on the Boston tarmac, I noticed that I could see the flicker of sunlight through the propellers - I was sitting right next to the front of the left engine, on a plane that was two thirds empty - but only in my periphery. So the propellers were rotating no faster than 60 Hz. Once we went to take off and the engines revved up, I couldn't see the flicker anymore - revving up meaning revving faster, you see.

Got to Toronto by 9, the Billy Bishop airport, on a little island on the lake in front of the city. First person off the plane, last through customs. Canadian customs are actually pretty challenging! Dunno what was up with that.

Then, took a 1 minute ferry ride to the shore, and walked north on Bathurst street. Made it to Kensington market and found a little open air restaurant to get breakfast. It was almost 10. I was already soaked with sweat. Ninety degrees out, humid, and not a cloud in the sky, and I'm wandering the streets of a strange city with a 10 pound bag on my back and a poster tube on my arm. I had a cheese omelet, which came with salad and hashbrowns, it was pretty good. And toast.

I am so hungry. I then wandered for about an hour, through Toronto Chinatown, until I came to the Toronto Art Gallery or whatever it's called. Bought a ticket and discarded my luggage, and wandered the museum for 3 hours. Best part by far was the set of installations on the fourth floor, something I've never seen before: little repeating 3-d audiovisual pieces, rooms full of stuff with recordings playing - some of the recordings were little dramas, one was just a rainstorm, from start to finish. It was great. Had a coffee at the museum.

Then I left the museum and went the wrong way, south instead of north, deeper into the city instead of towards the University of Toronto. Finally I made it here, and now I'm resting in the library, cooling off and writing these notes. I took lots of little videos of my day so far.

From here, I need to 1) get something to eat, 2) get to a subway station, 3) figure out how to use the Toronto subway, and 4) use it to get to York, or as close as I can (then I have to take a bus, apparently). If all goes well I'll be at York University in no less than 90 minutes. Wish me luck! I'm so hungry.

part 2, 18:56pm, June 28 2013

Meeting is over. Sitting in the weird weird weird Billy Bishop Airport departure area/lounge. It would be much nicer if half the flights weren't delayed because of some storm.

Meeting was interesting. Had several talks with F.K., about my current in-review JOV paper, for which he is one of the reviewers; about my current little blur adapt project that I presented (to 3 people, I think) here at this meeting, he had some very helpful comments there; and on other random spatial vision lightness brightness topics. Lots of fun, I think talking to him made the whole meeting worthwhile.

Also met with D.G., as a sort of pre-interview for a postdoc position. Not sure I want to really apply. I was testing to see if it was something that might be up my alley, definitely far up it, but now I'm thinking maybe too far. It's probably too much of a stretch to try to work natural scenes and spatial vision into the level he's working at. I'll study his work over the next couple of weeks, then let him know.

Also managed lunch with F.W. to discuss migraine psychophysics. She seems to have cooled a bit on the migraine spatial vision business, but is still interested. Similar attitude to N.H. about the difficulty and unlikelihood of having migraineurs do vision tasks or perimetry during their auras, though I am not convinced. I will take the long view. M.D. is enthusiastic, I met with him last week. I am almost thinking of writing an entire proposal out, it seems it would be relatively straightforward. I feel I've put all the requisite pieces together, i.e. bounced ideas off all the important people. The main thing that's missing is predictions as to how certain psychophysical properties might be influenced, which is something that L.L. brought up on his own. So now, it seems I should get back to him.

Interesting things I saw... C.B.'s keynote address was pretty bad. I don't know what the general opinion was, but it seemed for the wrong audience - like he was addressing a bunch of visual physiologists in 1992. Don't know what was going on there. Good talks were R.K. on superior colliculus, showing us maps and explaining function, things that if I've ever learned them I've forgotten; G.L.'s talk was interesting, reading and training reading with CFL patients; H.W.'s talk was good, R.B.'s I thought was too much review; A.P.'s talk on form perception and V4 was very interesting. A.P.'s and R.K.'s were like little topical seminars on things I didn't know; I guess R.B.'s was similar but I already knew all of it. D.Z. gave a talk on how MRI magnets affect the fluid in the semicircular canals, resulting in constant nystagmus for anyone who gets into an MRI machine. I remember the slight shock I got the one time I was put in an MRI magnet, but I don't remember noticing nystagmus. I might have thought it was concentration problems, instead.

So that was the meeting. Mostly good, a little slow in some places. I got to attend the retirement of the great H.W.. Poster sessions were too brief, barely worth the trouble, though I did get F.K.'s comments and H.W. came by and didn't complain about anything, though he didn't volunteer compliments or suggestions either. He thought the phase filter was a neat idea, though.

***

Observations on Canada

The way of speech is different. They do say 'soarry' instead of 'sarry', and they say it a lot. I hear a lot of 'os' instead of 'as', 'possengers' instead of 'passengers'. There's something else, a character that feels narrow somehow. I don't know what 'narrow' means there, but it feels right, so I'm using a word that feels right to describe a feeling that I can't otherwise describe. May all be in my head.

The York campus, which is in the northern Toronto suburbs, had lots of animals. I saw a raccoon, a groundhog, and a rabbit, and lots of black squirrels. I saw the groundhog and the rabbit at the same time. I don't think I've seen a raccoon up close since I was a kid, probably out at the cabin or something. And I'm not sure I've ever seen a groundhog up close. This was all right in the middle of campus.

When I was trying to get up to York, just having gone into the Spadina station, I got turned around and lost and couldn't find my way. An older guy, long white hair bound up behind his head, heavy set, white beard, noticed that I looked confused, stopped, and told me where to go.

Again, I feel that the people are different. A part of it must be in the speech, which sounds American but is subtly different. I think a professional would be necessary to explain the differences completely. Multiple idioms that I've heard from C* and D*, many times up here. I wish I could explain the feeling better, because I don't think it's all language. Maybe more visits will resolve this place better for me. It may be because this is big Toronto City, but people seem to dress strangely, less conservatively than Americans in general. Gaudiness isn't standard but seems more common than on Boston streets, at least. I guess I can't generalize from Toronto to Canada. Toronto is clearly an immigrant city, I would say barely half the people I saw in the city were white, lots of Chinese, black, brown, etc. In that sense, it reminds me more of San Francisco or LA. It's very unlike Montreal, which did not have such an American appearance, and which at the same time was much more white.

Aside from the people, it looks exactly American. No obvious differences in infrastructure. The York campus has lots of tunnels and connected buildings, which I would guess is more due to the winter cold and snow and not some sort of Canadian preference for warrens. When I walked through the city I got feelings of China-ness somehow, I think because there was so much construction going on. Nothing about watching the streets makes it look different in any obvious way from watching American streets.

All flights are delayed by hours. Some are nearly canceled. I don't know what's going on, must have been a string of storms across the northeast.

First time ever, I saw another Tennesseean at a vision meeting. He was an undergraduate from MTSU of all places, said he was from Bellevue. I questioned him a bit and he just talked and talked. Despite being from Bellevue, he seemed not to have heard of Cheatham County or Kingston Springs, and so I didn't like him. Complained of Tennessee as a place to escape, where no one wants to return. How can you want to escape if you don't even know your surroundings? Not that I'm not ambivalent about this myself, and I'm half over as old as this guy, but I don't think I was ever that bad. Main thing that rubbed me wrong was that he talked too much, which I guess is just a personality trait. It will probably get him places, I don't know.

Back to Canada. The buses were just like American buses. The subways were regular subways, long cars like the China style, where you could walk from end to end. Spadina station where I first got on was a link between two lines, one of which I didn't travel on, but it looked a lot like the Boston green line, trolly cars running through tunnels. I would have liked to try that one. The friendly white-haired guy got off one of those.

Forgot to mention til now, had a headache yesterday morning, give it a 7, maybe even 8. Woke up with it and it got worse through the morning, coming and going. Quasi-hangover, but I'd just had 3 beers with a full dinner the night before, not enough for a real hangover, though I think the alcohol probably did cause it, in addition to dehydration from the long trek across the city and the general relief of arrival. Slept terribly Wednesday night, partly from the headache starting, and partly from Terry calling and texting me every 10 minutes starting around 6am, probably had barely 5 hours total.

Right eye trigeminal was sore, still sore today, but the headache disappeared over lunch yesterday, went from a 7 to nearly zero. I was still a bit dazed and confused, but got over it pretty quickly. Slept well last night, got at least 8 hours in, maybe more.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

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!

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

update march '13

nothing in particular to write about here, just an update on current events:

work
1. blur adapt paper is back in review; i want this one to be over.
2. classification spectrum paper nearing completion; i really like this one.
other work in progress (paper with SM et al, they seem receptive to my suggestions).
3. still need to discuss new experiment with CPT, putting that off; boss suggests writing up a paper on it to figure out which data needs replication the most.
4. started low-level talks with potential collaborators on the migraine-mapping stuff.
5. haven't applied for new jobs yet, NECO seems unlikely to respond.

other
6. reading a new book, "history of tennessee" by James Phelan, written in the 1880's (it's not tacitus, but it's free). he has a habit, sometimes interesting sometimes irritating, of making close analogies between seemingly asymmetric historical events, usually tennessee vs. england, and is fixated on 'anglo saxons'. interesting going at any rate--
7. on piano, mainly trying to master chopin's "minute waltz" over the past few weeks, if i can play it straight through in 2.5 minutes i'll be happy; also on music, greatly enjoying a 2 year old album of french electropop; the songs 'civilization' and 'ohio' are great background when your daydreaming about the colonization of america.
8. this paper on a rogue study using a research botnet to scan pretty much the entire internet is one of the most interesting things i've seen in a while. there's an awesome .gif figure in there, basically showing the earth's rotation in the average number of pingable public IP addresses plotted across the globe.
9. way too much time wasted on reddit, which i only just discovered lucky for me, and playing MH2.
10. i have a horrible, horrible urge to write a longer historical narrative centered around the life of Gideon Morgan. trying my best to resist...

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

pernicious advice?

"Better is the enemy of good enough."

Supposedly this was the motto of the Soviet Admiral Gorshkov. Voltaire had something similar to say, which Gorshkov was probably paraphrasing, and which translates to something more like "The perfect is the enemy of the good".

My mentor in graduate school often repeated this advice, and now with a few years hindsight, I've decided that this is, for a scientist, an especially bad mantra. It lends itself to 'significance seeking', where you collect results until you observe the effect you're looking for, and then stop collecting. If you've got what you want, why keep looking?

Anyways, I just was thinking about this phrase last night, as so many times before I was looking over a developing set of data with some disappointment at an unexpected turnaround in the meaning of the results; I thought to myself, "better is the enemy of good enough", and then I thought, "what? you haven't even finished the experiment yet!".

Point is, avoid mantras and mottos. If you have a hypothesis to test, do it. Choose your stopping point far in advance, and determine that whatever happens, this will be the test of this hypothesis; if you still aren't convinced one way or another after the test, do another one, but don't go thinking that the first one is invalidated somehow. There is no such thing as "good enough".

Monday, February 11, 2013

random report

random thoughts after a trip home:

politics:I had the idea that you can view different political philosophies by how they respond to (or acknowledge) a certain axiom, that the state is effectively the ultimate master of all people, that any individual is subject in all ways to the power of the government. Fascists acknowledge the axiom and embrace it, they treat the state as a parent and the people as children, and they endeavor to make the state worthy of this status and authority. Anarchists, while they also acknowledge the axiom, view it as the reason that there can be no state, why the state has to be overthrown and dismantled and prevented from recurring. Anarchists will say that people should be their own masters (or not even that), and that no one should ever make himself master of any other. Socialists are the third group that acknowledge the axiom, but they seek to make the state somehow equivalent with the people - through democratic means - so that while it is still true, it becomes unconcerning, since now the people are their own masters, through the mechanism of the state. American libertarians - and the model American political philosophy that is given lip service but not much actual credit - believe that the state has the potential, which has usually been fulfilled, to take on the role of master of all its subjects, but that it can be contained and controlled like a pack animal. I think that Americans in fact, in their popular political system, actually take on aspects simultaneously of socialism and fascism, believing that the state is a function of democracy at the same time that it is - and I think this is a contradiction with the first property - a benevolent external force that requires respect and adoration. The American left and right both take this attitude, but toward different aspects, although in my systematization they are mostly deluded into thinking that they are model Americans, i.e. libertarians. I guess I am closer to a libertarian than anything else, though if there is some label that applies to a half social anarchist half american libertarian, it would mostly cover me (I like NASA and public healthcare and the NIH).

headache: A really irritating headache on Friday, which I think was partly provoked by jumping jacks in the afternoon and magnified by beer in the evening. Two aspirin either did nothing to help or kept it from getting much worse. Not sure this was a migraine, but I think it was. I could feel it mostly above my right eye, and could actually touch it at the supraorbital foramen. By this I mean that by pressing on this spot, I could modulate the main locus of pain; this is a common sort of property of my headaches. This is just one specific branch of the trigeminal nerve, and except for some slight twinge of pain in my right maxilla, I couldn't find any other specific locus. So, I don't know if this qualifies as 'migraine', or if it's actually some sort of ophthalmic nerve neuritis, but just by scanning a google search of 'migraine and trigeminal nerve', you can see that there is thought to be a strong link between migraine pain and over-excitatory dysfunction of neurons in the trigeminal nucleus, so...

Also, had a nice conversation with my aunt about migraine. So along with my mother and her, she says that my grandmother also had headaches, but not my grandfather, so that must be where it comes from.

work/writing: I realized that the project I'm currently working on would be good to divide into two papers: one on the broader aspects of blur adaptation and the connection to contrast adaptation (which I hope to have data on by the end of this week), and the other on the absence of phase-blur adaptation. The latter might make a good PLoS-1 paper.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

frustration '13

so, this past summer, my boss tells me that he's invited to give a retrospective paper on a particular topic as it pertains to a meeting he's been a regular at for almost 20 years. he asks if i'd be interested in writing it with him, and i honestly said no, i don't know the meeting that well, it's not really my core area, i don't have time now to do a retrospective which means all sorts of reading and research that i don't need to do on old things that nobody cares about anymore, and there are other things i'd rather be doing. he seemed to agree and said okay, we won't do it. then, a week later he tells me he agreed to supply the paper, as if i'd agreed, and so i didn't put up a second protest, except probably for a confused look on my face.

so here we are now, the paper is due, i've written it and spent a few good weeks on it, and i'm satisfied with it. i'm not even going to the meeting to present it. so now he wants to continue making changes and modifications to the structure of the thing, and he wants me to make the presentation for him. this is really frustrating. it's too late to fight it, because the paper is there on the schedule, he's going to present it, and i don't *want* to present it, and if i refuse to make the presentation he's not going to be able to do it himself, and it will just cause a fight and a falling out, which is bad because we're currently on good terms.

this is very frustrating. i'm put, again, in this position of paralysis, where there are several other things that i want to do, or need to get done, and instead i have to do this pointless job instead, and so i wind up doing next to nothing. i'm like a ghostwriter. how is this research? i have papers to revise and resubmit, papers to complete and submit, papers to write and complete, experiments to finish and write up, and instead i'm struggling over this stupid retrospective on a topic that i think is basically irrelevant, and in which my *conclusions* are that that work done on this topic over a 20 year period are basically irrelevant. the paper itself begs the question of why the paper has even been written. i think i made a big mistake in letting myself get put into this assignment.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

reading about history

An idle essay on history, for the holiday!

In the past couple of years, a good portion of my recreational reading has been history, and some of that has been by ancient historians: Plutarch, Sima Qian, Livy. For the past few weeks, I've been alternating between two books, a collection of abridged Livy (from the Ad Urbe Condita) and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is a study of how language is connected, or can potentially be connected, to reality. I'm not claiming to fully understand the Wittgenstein, but there has been an interaction.

There are lots of reasons why reading history is enjoyable. The main reason, for me, is that it is so edifying: you are learning how the world came to be the way that it is, and you're also learning about certain constancies of the human condition, mistakes and actions and etc that have been repeated over and over again for thousands of years. Another reason is that it is entertaining in the same way that reading fiction is entertaining: there are heroes and villains, victories and tragedies, and all of it is ambiguous and complex, at least in hindsight.

What the TLP made me think about was this (although not in the confusing terms of propositions, pictures, facts, etc): the page one reads is a surface into which has been pressed different shapes. When one reads, one is feeling these shapes, and mentally reconstructing whatever it was that impressed them. When one reads fiction, the impressor is, supposedly, always secondhand, in that it is the mind of the author that has been impressed, and the author has reconstructed ideas based on those impression, recombined them into mental realities, and then created new impressions based on those mental realities in the page. One then uses those impressions to reconstruct the author's mental realities. Since these reconstructions are not based on physical reality, they constitute in the language of the TLP false facts (although, strictly, many of the components of these false facts must be true; a falsehood cannot be sensible if it is not seemingly possible, its possibility being dictated by the local truth of its parts).

When one reads history, then the intention is that physical reality is impressed into the page, and that when one reads history and reconstructs his own mental realities, these should be (or be close to being) true facts. This is the intention of the honest historian, but he must inevitably fail, because he cannot base all, or even most, of his impressions on physical realities. Historians gain their knowledge by reading what was written by others before them, and then they compile what they have read into narratives that can be understood holistically by others. The historian must judge what are true and false facts, and impress only the true facts. Since other writers may not have thought of themselves as historians, and may not have been intent on impressing true facts, these judgments will be difficult, and the historian will sometimes fail.

So, when reading history as a naive consumer of text like myself, one is in the interesting situation of feeling out these impressions and forming mental reconstructions of the impressors, which are actually impressions of reconstructions of impressors that are actually reconstructions themselves and et cetera. Some of the impressions are mostly true (with local falsehoods), and some must be mostly false (with local truths). It's like Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail, except there's no reward or punishment for deciding that one or another fact is true or false. In reading fiction, the decision is implicit in the definition, but in reading history, you get the sense of walking along the true side of a very fuzzy edge, a transition into the false side. This transition gets broader and broader the further back in time one goes.

This then gets back to another issue which I'd like to write about sometime: the ubiquity of blur. All systems for transmitting information lose local details before they lose fundamentals. High spatial frequencies are lost in image formation; high temporal frequencies are lost as sound travels through a medium; sharp edges on an object are worn down by friction over time; genetic mutations effect molecular changes in the phenotype; and the details of history - names, dates, the precise unfolding of events - are misremembered or, mostly, forgotten. These are details in the literary sense, but they seem exactly analogous to physical details: what happened in Caesar's final days? Did he go to the forum in spite of warnings? Was Brutus really his son? These sorts of details, the answers to these sorts of questions, are permanently forgotten, but we know the larger, deeper, important events: Caesar was murdered by a conspiracy of Senators.

Interestingly, in the same way that a knife might be sharpened, or faded images might be retouched, old stories about the past might be sharpened up with added details; doped with false facts, to bring them into narrative focus. Caesar was warned about the Ides of March; he saw Brutus and said, "You too, my son?" The doping could also be with irrelevant facts: this is what you could buy from a street vendor in those days, this is what the men and women of this station wore on their feet. This sharpening, false or irrelevant, is enjoyable in a special way when it comes from someone who was writing more than 2000 years ago, because it is more immediate: nothing (except for the translator) has touched these impressions since they were formed. It's like holding something very, very old in your hands.