Psychophysics and Consciousness

I reread this paper by David Chalmers yesterday morning for the first time in several years. I had been reminded of it because of this commentary by Kaspar Meyer in Science last week. The commentary was mildly interesting, and pointed out some of the current neuroscience perspectives as to just what consciousness is: e.g. is it the sensory experience with a background of knowledge and cognitive processes ("bottom up"), or is it a sort of best-estimate of what reality is given current and recent circumstances, using sensory input as a sort of reality check ("top down")? He finishes off in what seemed to me to be pretty fuzzy territory, but it was at least evocative of interesting ideas.

I'm vaguely familiar with some of this stuff, but I've never gotten too deep into because it doesn't satisfy me the way the philosophers do. The neuroscientists are looking for the "neural correlates of consciousness", which I guess is all that one really can look for. What this science reveals is the structure of consciousness, i.e. what is and is not included, what are the boundaries and how are they determined by the nature of the brain, and as indicated above, what exactly is the seeming 'core', or experiential reference point, of conscious experience, in neurobiological terms.

It is good stuff, but it always seems to me that the proposed theories far outstrip the basic science that is supposed to underpin them (e.g., in the commentary, Meyer cites experiments that demonstrate internally generated excitation of sensory cortex, and more generally recurrent activation, as evidence for the interesting idea that perceptual experience "would result from signals that descend through the sensory systems, just as behavior results from signals that descend along the motor pathways"). I don't know, that seems a bit of cart before horse, but like I said, I've only ever really skimmed the surface of this research. Meyer, Damasio, Dehaene, these guys are all basically frontal cortex cognitive neuroscientists, not perception scientists, and I've never really had cause to sink into that part of the science.

Now, the Chalmers paper. That's what I was going to go on about, not the Meyer commentary...

Anyways, in that paper Chalmers isn't really describing new ideas or new ways of thinking about consciousness (there is a subsection on some sort of "Kripkean" analysis of some philosophical point which I think actually subtracted from my comprehension of other parts of the paper, but it doesn't seem crucial). What he does is lay out a taxonomy of theories of consciousness - and the consciousness he's talking about isn't the "easy" kind, as he calls it, i.e. the NCC business that Dehaene is always going on about, but the "hard" kind, i.e. the fact-of-phenomenal-experience. I was thinking about that taxonomy yesterday evening, and wondering how psychophysics as a science fits into it, whether or not it biases one towards one or another way of thinking about phenomenal consciousness and just what it could be, or where it might come from.

As far as I know, the only visual psychophysicist who has written extensively (in English) on the philosophy of perception is Stanley Klein. I'm sure there are others, probably some I have heard of, but for now I'm guessing that if they exist they are writing in German or Italian. Klein is a proponent of the idea that phenomenal consciousness has something to do with quantum physics. Chalmers categorizes this sort of idea as dualist, since it supposes that consciousness is a quantum epiphenomenon of the activity of the physical brain. In other words, there is the brain and its physical structure, then there is a corresponding, consequent pattern or structure of quantum effects, and it is those effects that correspond to subjective, phenomenal consciousness.

I never liked this idea, at all. It usually relies on the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics to make the connection between observation and collapse of a wave function, which is the same thing that leads to that horrible Schrodinger's cat story. Not that I'm qualified to really have an opinion on this stuff, but that interpretation - that multiple possibilities exist simultaneously until selected by "observation" - is obviously nonsense, and just exists to show that something is not properly understood about the whole situation.

Okay, so I've shown myself to be a quantum mechanics ignoramus. Anyways, the QM-as-consciousness stuff is a type of dualism according to Chalmers, and I think it's quasi-mysticism, but does it have any currency among psychophysicists? I doubt it. I think Klein carries it because he was a student of Feynman who went into psychology, and he couldn't help but make the connection. He's an order of magnitude smarter than I am, maybe, but I think he's wrong.

As scientists, we might expect that psychophysicists should be materialists according to Chalmers' taxonomy. When I first got interested in perception and psychophysics was back when I was reading every bit of Daniel Dennett that I could find, and he is really the popular standard bearer of materialist theories of phenomenology (or was back in the 90's; this was the same time that I read Blackmore's "Meme Machine", and became completely obsessed with those ideas for a good couple of years). The idea here is that consciousness, in a way, doesn't actually exist; all that exists is the interconnected and multilayered and recurrent set of mechanisms for relating sensation to action over many timescales; in other words, "the mind is what the brain does". The fact that we have the impression of "looking out", or of being somehow spatially immersed in our thoughts and percepts, is a sort of necessary fiction that helps all those mechanisms to bind together and work correctly.

I'm not sure, but I think that J.J. Gibson might have been the closest thing (in the previous academic age) to a philosophical materialist in vision science. I suppose that most vision scientists adhere to a much more nuanced form of materialism, since Gibsonian materialism, or direct realism, is not really in good repute these days. I really like the idea in general, and consider it a good null hypothesis for study of perception - i.e. the perceptual world is the physical world that we tend naively to identify it with, and not a "representation" of the physical, and a given brain is a locus of limitations on what is known or remembered or simply accessible about this world.

Cognitive and perceptual neuroscience in general usually makes claims about consciousness that are consistent with the materialist position, i.e. that consciousness is the set of processes and functions of the brain. Chalmers says this (about neuroscience) explicitly. I always feel, though, (and I think that somewhere I've seen a talk by Dehaene where he says as much) that this is a terminological confusion, and that the neuroscientists must generally know, but forget sometimes, that the hard problem of consciousness, of phenomenology, is not addressed by their studies. Again, you know, I just have superficial acquaintance with this research, and maybe it's a common complaint amongst the Dehaenists that outsiders are always complaining that they (Dehaenists) are claiming that they're studying something that they aren't, when of course, duh, the Dehaenists know the difference. Oh well.

Finally, we wrap things up by mentioning what Chalmers calls monism, which is ultimately pan-psychism or pan-subjectivism. Reality has its relational, "objective" properties, and also its intrinsic, "subjective" properties. Phenomenal consciousness is simply the intrinsic nature of a functioning brain. This is an old idea, thousands of years old maybe, but it's not scientific. It's anti-scientific, even, since it's a claim that science, being the study of the objective nature of reality, can by definition not touch phenomenal consciousness. I think this is probably the truth of things, too, and it's kind of irritating. Anyways, is this a common feeling amongst psychophysicists, that the ultimate object of their study (whether or not they admit it; behaviorist materialism is a necessary stance for formulating good scientific theories of perception) is by definition un-attainable? That might be the answer right there; there's an operational stance (materialism), and a functional stance (monism), and only one of them - the wrong one - will ever get you anywhere.

I guess I'm going to have to start questioning psychophysicists. It will require a certain amount of drunkenness, I'm sure...

chinese american economics II

during this year's China trip, Jingping and I had a few discussions re the issue of $-元 exchange rate, and I noticed a few more points.

so, the Chinese state controls the international value of the RMB, for reasons including the cycle explained in that previous post. i didn't state there that there's a special factor making that cycle necessary, factor being that exchanges are only possible through government-controlled agencies (i.e. Chinese banks, which are all state-run). the Chinese state is slowly allowing the value of the RMB to appreciate, by a few percent a year over the past few years, because they recognize that the power of the Chinese economy has outstripped the exchange rate.

in other words, Chinese labor and land - i.e. export - is no longer as cheap and plentiful for foreigners as it used to be, and foreign labor and land - i.e. import - is no longer obviously prohibitively expensive. the Chinese don't want to damage their export system, and they don't want to get overwhelmed with a whole new system of imports, so they're making the RMB adjustment very, very slowly.

this isn't what I noticed, though. this trip, the topic of American investment kept coming up, especially in the context of wealthy Chinese sending their high school or college age children to study in the US. this must be barely affordable even for the upper-middle-class Chinese that are doing it, because private schools in the US are expensive even for Americans. the skewed exchange rate makes it even more expensive, probably by a factor of 2 or more.

on top of this, Jingping's parents gave us a good amount of money to use for her optometry school bills; this is money that they otherwise would have lent to people in China for a small return. they recognized that Jingping taking a large US loan ("financial aid") and paying a large amount of interest would be more costly than giving her the money and thereby giving up their Chinese interest. but, it's still a loss this way, because simply by moving the cash to the US and waiting any meaningful interval of time, the value of the money will decrease.

you can think about this more generally, and in bigger numbers. moderately wealthy Chinese, i.e. those just above Jingping's parents, have enough to invest in their child's education, accepting the exchange rate loss because, well, it's their child. but for the very wealthy - which in China often means state officials, investment abroad means business interests. wealthy Chinese own property abroad, have money in foreign accounts which they use to do international business. they do this because of the operational freedom it gives them, and because their profit margins must be larger than the decline in value of the foreign currencies (i.e. $$) they're using.

but if the drop were too fast... the foreign calculations wouldn't change, and business might actually pick up a bit if it had any connection to markets that were now becoming available to Chinese spending. but for the wealthy Chinese controlling those businesses, their domestic profits could drop precipitously. they might even lose money in the short term.

so, it's not just about protection of the Chinese export economy, or protection against foreign export economies; it's also about protection of domestic profits from profits on foreign investments.

Quote of the week, from a new PNAS paper (sorry for the Harvard link, but it's not like anyone actually will be clicking on that!) on using genetic manipulations to get silkworms to produce spider-like silk:

"Silkworms can be cultivated en masse, but territorialism and cannibalism preclude spider farming as a viable manufacturing approach."

Priority Ranking

In another advance in procrastination, I have invented a method of ranking priorities of multiple projects. My primary reason for procrastination is still obscure, and we can just refer to it now by the shorthand term 'laziness'. However, I will maintain that important components of my procrastination include conflict between different projects, difficulty in efficiently organizing time, and inability to perceive in a useful or concrete way the relative priority of multiple alternative actions.

To address these three components, I decided simply to make a list of things which I have to work on, ranging from the immediate and obvious to the more wishful and distant. The list doesn't need to be deeply detailed, only superficially sketched, and it seems necessary that the different items should be mostly independent of one another. Having created this list, I then create a matrix of pairwise comparisons of priority of items in the list. The current list has twelve items, and so there are sixty-six comparisons to be made (twelve times twelve possible comparisons, minus the twelve identity comparisons, and then divided by two since order of comparison is assumed to be unimportant).

Each comparison is a rating on a three point scale. For each comparison, the following question is asked: "Given these two items (column, row), which is more important to work on right now?" If the first item has higher priority, the rating is 1.0; if the second item (i.e. not the first item), the rating is 0.0; if priority appears equivalent, the rating is 0.5. Below I've pasted in the current matrix. Only the values below the main diagonal are filled in; the main diagonal is null since these are meaningless comparisons, and the values above the main diagonal are automatically filled in as the inverse of the corresponding comparison below. Total priority for an item is simply the average over all rows for each column, and is shown in the leftmost column.


I think this system has potential! We'll see if it helps, and if I can keep up with it, updating it regularly. I haven't made up a scheme for what to do with projects that pass some sort of milestone; if a paper is finished (does that happen?), the item would probably just be removed from the list, while projects would transition to papers. There, I just made up a scheme!

Here's to organization!

design change

Look at the new design! I'm so excited. I'm going to post every day now, really.

We also have a new url, xuexixiangshang. This is the only configuration of 好好学习，天天向上 that worked as a valid prefix for blogger.com. It's a great slogan, and not quite as embarrassing as everyoneisdead, which belies that I didn't really expect this journal to last so long. Downside of changing the url is that my MS-WBT traffic is going to halt, though I guess eventually it will probably pick up again. Whatever!

Wuhu Environs

About five hundred kilometers upstream from the Pacific, the River runs east and then abruptly north. Sprawling eastward from the northern arm of this right angle is the City of Wuhu. The main body of the City is pressed up against the River, which is still the region's main artery for trade, though in turns railroads and now highways have added new arteries, enabling the City to sprawl away from the River in new directions, and to mix its influence with its neighbors.

To the south, the City begins to wrap around the River bend before it fades into farming villages and the occasional satellite towns that sit between and around the tips of the northernmost foothills of the Yellow Mountains. My wife was born in one of these towns, and her parents in another smaller one nearby, the two towns separated by a long fragment of those foothills, a little mountain with a northward spine. Her ancestors are buried on the slopes of that mountain.

Eastwards, there are marshes which have been engineered over centuries, or millennia, into networks of polders, surrounded by channels filled with water from distant rivers, on each of which sits a tiny village or a cluster of tended fields, or both. Some of these networks are regular, laid out in vast grids tens of kilometers across, showing from any vantage point the mark of some overarching plan, carried out long ago by the people of those marshes. Others follow no obvious pattern, except that there seems to be some average island size, similar to that constant size of the regular networks, and some acceptable deviation from this average, and an agreement amongst the people that they were going to reform the marshes into channels and islands.

Surrounded and out of options, the Hegemon Xiang Yu is said to have killed himself nearby, two-thousand two-hundred and fourteen years ago, and someone is supposed to have taken his horse's saddle up onto a mountain and buried it. That mountain gives its name to the City of Ma'anshan, which also presses up against the east bank of the River, fifty kilometers or so north of Wuhu. This City is known for making steel, and a ride through town will show you infinite smokestacks and gray air that covers everything, it is beautiful and terrible all at once.

Further north along the course of the River is the Southern Capital, and from there the River makes its final drive east where it breaks apart and becomes Shanghai. Across the River bend from Wuhu, north and west, is Chaohu, which has recently been dismembered by its neighboring Cities, most notably the provincial capital of Hefei, which sits even further along the same northwest vector.

Westwards, up the River, there is more, Hubei and Jiangxi and beyond, but there is more in every direction, and the mind follows the flow of the river back towards the Ocean in the east, and does not easily run against it, and these are enough reasons now to conclude and say that the City rules the neighborhood of that bend in the River.

MIT VPN

Just when I've lost interest in the internet, I get the following random email on my Gmail account (found it in the Junk folder):

Dear Outlook client, Notification ID: KG932J ========================================== - Please reconfigure your Microsoft Outlook information again . - Click on the link below to setup . http://outlook-mail-setup.gert54d.from-ks.com/index.php?id=KG932J ========================================== Microsoft Outlook 2012 .

Obviously this is a phishing thing. What's interesting is that the url refers to an IP address at MIT. The address is no longer active as far as I can tell, but it seems to have belonged to the MIT VPN network, because other addresses on the same /24 block are attached to vpn-ip.mit.edu urls.

So, my guess is that someone set up a site on the MIT VPN to direct their phishing business. That's all I've got.

Oh, coincidentally, just yesterday I was reading about VPNs, wondering about a convenient way to get past the China firewall from the inside. Seeing that MIT has a VPN makes me wonder if Harvard has one, and if I can use it...

Typical Monday through Friday

In the morning, at eight o’ clock, two alarms go off. The clock is next to his bed, and he reaches over to stop it, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. The radio is in the hallway, just outside the bedroom door, and he comprehends it to varying degrees.

Sometimes his wife is up before him, but usually not. He gets out of bed, finally, usually before nine. He makes coffee and takes a shower. He brushes his teeth and gets dressed. He packs his lunch and makes a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast. He fills a coffee cup and a thermos with coffee, adding enough milk to make it cool enough to drink quickly. He sits by the front door and listens to the radio news, eats his sandwich, and drinks the cup of coffee. If his wife is up, maybe they talk, or maybe she’s in the shower.

If he’s planning to go to tae kwon do that night, he takes his uniform, which is hanging from the radiator in the bedroom, folds it, puts it in a plastic sack, and packs it in his backpack. He gets ready to leave, puts on his shoes, speaks with his wife, kisses her, and goes out the door. If it’s raining, he takes an umbrella. If she’s up, she locks the door behind him, otherwise he takes his keys and locks it.

He steps outside and picks up the newspaper. He stops by the wall in front of his building, sets the thermos down, and puts most of the newspaper in his backpack, except for the front page. He sets off for Reservoir.

Walking down Sutherland Road on the right side, he may encounter some other people, but usually there are few, because most have already gone. He passes several other apartment buildings on his way. Often, there are workmen at one building or another, unloading things from their truck. Maybe he can hear them speaking Spanish to one another.

When he arrives at Cleveland Circle, he’ll try to walk straight through. Half the time, it’s not hard to do, since half the time the traffic is running across Beacon Street. Even if Beacon has the light, they might all have gone. Sometimes he stands and waits. This crossing is a convergence point from several directions, and more people seem to arrive from along Chestnut Hill than from Sutherland. Sometimes he sees someone interesting here, and can watch them until they all arrive at Reservoir.

At the other side of the Circle is Reservoir, but before he gets there he passes his dentists office. He owes the dentist money. He thinks he might have a toothache, but he’s not sure. He wonders if you can give yourself a toothache by focusing all your attention, and the tip of your tongue, on one healthy tooth. His mouth tastes like metal sometimes, since he got all those fillings last summer.

He arrives at Reservoir. It’s random. Sometimes he’s just in time; sometimes he’s just missed it; sometimes he waits. If he waits, he watches the people accumulate. Most of them he doesn’t recognize, but some he does. The people trickle in, then arrive in a wave when one of the buses arrive upstairs, then more trickle in, then the train arrives. He always tries to get on first, on the very back door. Usually he manages to be one of the first.

Unless he’s really late, there’s probably not a seat. He stands or sits, finishes his coffee, reads the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and people crowd on the train. More get on at Beaconsfield. He stares at people when he thinks they aren't noticing, but he assumes everyone else is doing the same thing. He compares nose shapes between two people. He tries to find two noses that are most different, and two that are most similar. He looks for noses that look like his. He is ceaselessly amazed by the irrational variance of noses.

More get on at Brooklines Hills and Village, but some get off there too. At Longwood, half the train gets off. Postdocs, doctors, students. Most of them are Asians.

Station by station, he gets closer to Government Center. Sometimes they make everybody get off at Park, and get on the next train. At Government Center, he always tries to be the first person off the train, out the back door. He can usually do it. By the time the train gets to Government Center, which is the last stop for the D train, there aren’t usually many people still on board.

If the escalator is open, he walks up and out of the station. If someone is standing on it, he curses under his breath and runs up the stairs. It’s a narrow escalator, no room to pass someone who’s just standing there. If someone is just standing there, they might clearly be a tourist and he forgives them. If they're looking at their phone, he sneers. He wonders why the others all line up to stand quietly behind, when he knows they all really want to climb.

Outside is Government Center, City Hall, the Federal Building. The plaza is bleak and impressive, every day. He walks down Cambridge Street towards Mass General. To cross Staniford, to get into the Institute, he usually dodges through traffic stopped at the light. He enters the Institute through the front door now, since his office moved to the other side of the building, and the receptionist always tries to talk to him about the weather. He doesn’t slow down, though.

He goes up the stairs to the second floor, down the hallway by the human resources offices, past the elevator and the second floor wetlabs, past the conference room, across the bridge to 2West, takes a right down the hall by the driving simulator, past the little kitchen where he microwaves his lunch every day, past the meeting room, past the restrooms, take a left, through the research assistant office, says good morning to Jackie at her desk, steps into his office, sets his backpack on his desk, hangs his jacket on his chair, sits down, and wakes his computer.

Andrew has gone to work.

not writing

He couldn’t think of how to start.

He couldn’t even start! If you can’t start, how can you continue? How can you then finish? Starting is fundamental. It’s the first thing. Starting comes before everything else. He decided that instead of starting, he’d circle around, try to sneak up on it. The frontal approach wasn’t working, but maybe there was a soft spot somewhere in the back. I’ll circle around, he thought.

He started to write about not knowing what to write about. In its own way, it was working. Letters were coming out. The letters came out through his fingers, pooled into words on the page, the words clumping into phrases and sentences. Was this the right way? The flanking maneuver continued, but the result had not yet been achieved. This isn’t what I want to write, he thought. I want to write something else. It’s up ahead now. Right up ahead.

Or is it? Have I gotten lost on the way? In avoiding the actual confrontation with the thing to be written, he had tried to creep around, to surprise the thing, to tackle it from an unsteady angle. But how long should the creep take? Should it go on and on like this? When should it stop? When has it failed? When has it almost succeeded?

His mind wandered, dragging with it the stream of letters and words and phrases and sentences. He thought about waiting for a bus when you’re going a distance that you could reasonably walk. A twenty minute walk or a three minute bus ride, that’s usually the choice. The problem is when you don’t know if you’ve just missed the bus, or if it’s about to come up over the horizon at any minute. The more time that goes by, the more likely it is that you have just missed it, and that it really might be another good long while before it shows up.

That’s what the flanking maneuver was like, but not really. Because really, a flanking maneuver fails in one of two ways. One, you get lost, or you arrive at position too late, and the enemy is just gone, and you have to start over again, and by the time you find them again you’re likely to be face-to-face, just like when you started. Two, the enemy might notice what you’re doing, and you arrive exactly where and when you intended, but they’re ready for you, and it’s face-to-face again. The first is worse, because then you have time to be demoralized and disappointed. The second is better, because when you arrive you’re ready to fight anyways, even though now the situation is maybe not exactly what you had planned.

It would be best if they didn’t know you were coming. If the thing to be written could just suddenly find itself being written, without knowing that it was being written, that would be ideal. But how realistic is that? The flanking maneuver was never a good idea. It could never work in this situation. No matter what, you wind up at the same point, with the thing to be written, waiting to be written, not being written.

memory

So, my office moved to the other side of the building a month or two ago. My lab is still over there near my old office, and that's also where the copier room is, and the kitchen where I get hot water to drink. So, I do still go over there frequently.

One thing I don't do over there so frequently is use the bathroom - there are two restrooms near the new office, so now I usually go there. These two restrooms are both unisex, and are next door to eachother, and are basically mirror images in layout. The old restroom is laid out differently.

So, just a few minutes ago, I go to the kitchen to get some water, set my mug on the coffee maker to wait for me, and go into the old restroom. This whole time, I'm thinking about the talk that Shrinivas gave a little while before. I do my quick business in the restroom, turn around to leave - and realize that something is wrong. I don't recognize my surroundings. I don't know where I am.

At first, it was kind of terrifying - I thought that I didn't know where I was at all, but quickly realized that, really, I just didn't know which bathroom I was in. The lighting, i.e. the color temperature, was unfamiliar. The layout seemed wrong. "Which one am I in?" I thought. "The left one or the right one?"

I stood there for a few seconds, and thought hard about what was wrong, then finally figured it out. I remembered the water, and that I must be in the old restroom.

That makes two times now that I was in that restroom and thought I was having a stroke. First time was the first time I had experienced a visual migraine aura, which was much more awesome than this.

1k/mo

Got over 1000 page views for the month of august, basically because last week was HUGE for my classic comedic dialogues and self-indulgent essays. No no no, really, it was MS-WBT server. Observe:
Yeah, I don't know what's going on. Whatever it is that causes people to google "MS-WBT server", and wind up here for a few seconds, got a little worse last week - visits increased by something like 30%. Google is weird, the internet is weird, MS-WBT server is weird.

Going to Nashville tonight!

self

I have been thinking frequently about who I am, and about whether who I am has changed over the years, and if so, how.

One thing I keep returning to is this feeling that I am losing myself, or that my self is somehow diminishing over time. What I mean is, I feel more and more that I am what I do, and what I see and feel, and the people I interact with - mainly Jingping (not that I think I am Jingping, no) - and the random thoughts that run through my mind when I'm away from things to do or people to interact with.

This isn't necessarily a problem. I don't mind being my thoughts, or being an interaction with my wife, or being the work that I do, or the procrastination that I put between myself and my work. These things, or parallel things, are what I think we all are. But parceling your self into these discrete components makes them identifiable, and subject to direct analysis, which can reveal things in stark detail that you realize you just don't like. There are some specific features that bother me.

When I was younger, I spent a large portion of my free time writing. I wrote stories, essays on my thinking, letters, etc. I did this because I wanted to. Now, I write because I have to - I do research, and I have to write about it to sustain my personal profession. There is always work to do, and when I feel willing to write, I feel I have to apply this will to work, not fun. So, I almost never write for fun anymore. Even worse, I realize that I distract myself from this sort of unease by reading what others have written. It's as though I'm replacing parts of myself with parts of other people.

Also, over the years, I more and more began to think of my self expression as excessive, or pretentious, or useless, and so I suppressed it. I think that my entire character is suppressed. This has not had the result of simply bottling up my character, but instead I think that in some ways I am withering away - I feel that even if I tried to go back to my old ways, of writing out my thoughts regularly, there would be less to write. This is why I am writing this entry, which even as I write it feels excessive, pretentious, and useless. I feel like I have to get a ball rolling, though.

Another thing that bothers me is what I think about. We all have recurring thoughts that irritate us, things that we don't want to think about but that we do anyways. Some of these things are fine at a high level, because they are features of our lives. But other things - news, politics, etc., I find myself repeatedly going through these internal monologues, not daily but frequently, on topics like the American military, US history, religion, politics. Why? I tell myself that I don't care about these things, or I try not to care - I have no effect on them, and they seem to have no effect on me. I feel infected. I want to think about my life, my wife, my work, about things I enjoy. I'm not a politician or a columnist - why do I obsess over these sorts of things? I have not figured this out. I do get a strong feeling that these sorts of thoughts erode my self - they are not me, they are other people, other places. They make me forget who I am.

I am not bothered by thinking about sex or violence, or obsessing about the aesthetics of the Green Line tunnels, or wanting to see if someone sent me an email or a Facebook message, or my shabby piano playing. These are aspects of my life, they are fine in themselves - some of these things may specifically implicate odd aspects of my personality, but so what?

Conclusions: I still exist, but I have doubts about the vitality of my existence. I have suppressed myself too much, and the empty spaces in my mind are more and more taken up with irrelevant puzzles. I'm thinking that a solution may be to do something like this regularly, do more writing for fun, try to be more expressive with other people, stop always trying to hide myself from the outside.

hypothetical question

Okay, so let's say you run the following experiment:

You want to compare different states of adaptation. The yardstick you're going to use to compare them is is a matching function. You have two stimuli, x and y, and you're going to assume that the associated matching function - your matching function model - is simple, like y = mx + b. You want to know how those function parameters, m and b, vary when the adaptation state changes.

To do the experiment, you keep one adaptation state constant in all conditions. You can do this because you have two stimuli, and you can adapt them separately. So, you have two adaptors, X and Y. You keep adaptor X the same in all conditions, but you vary adaptor Y. Since X doesn't change, you can then compare the effects of Y across conditions. Adaptor X is your baseline.

Within a subject, this design is fine. You can take your xy data from different X conditions and plot them on the same axes. You look at how the data for X1 differs from X2, for example. You fit your model to the X1 and X2 data, and find that mX1 is higher than mX2. You repeat the experiment with another subject and find the same pattern - the m values are different across subjects, but you see the same relative difference between mX1 and mX2 for every subject you test. You average the results together to show that mX1 is higher than mX2. This constitutes a result of your study.

But then...

You start to look at the individual data, at how the m values vary so much across individual subjects, but that within-subject difference is always there. You think, something is covarying between these two things, what could it be? Why is it that whatever value mX2 takes for a particular subject, mX1 is always higher?

Then you realize: Y. mX1 and mX2 might not vary at all, at least not to the extent that they appear to. Maybe its mY that's varying.

Look at that model from the point of view of Y. Then you have x = (mY)y + (bY). Turn it around, and you get y = (1/(mY))x + (bY)/(mY). This means that mX is inversely proportional to mY, so that measured values of mX1 and mX2 will be similarly affected by differences, across individual subjects, in the value of mY.

Well, this led somewhere, anyways.

zipper trucks

Yesterday I learned about the existence of zipper machines. We were driving back from Foxboro and there were all these little movable barriers on the interstate; I might have said something about them, and Matt explained that they were moved every day by big, slow-moving machines. I couldn't believe it, but you could see that the barriers were all linked together with springed, metal joints. I came home and looked it up, and found that link, and some youtube videos. I have to see one of these things in action...

Also, my poem output was way up over the last few weeks (like, above zero per week). They're all in drains like google or weekly report or facebook, so for posterity let's put them here. For my birthday, I made a haiku:
thirty-two years down
won't pick up another bit
for as many more

I thought that was clever.

Then, Murf decided to institute a Thursday google+ rhyme circle. Murf started with:
"i'm a serial gangsta, so don't you be hatin';
these rhymes are coming at you - 9600 baud ratin'.
i'm a cereal gangsta, pouring as smooth as silk
all o'er these fruity pebbles some quality soy milk."

I responded with:
"why's your baud so slow, must be messin' with your flow
don't hate, i got infinite bit rate,
symbols at the speed of light
like nuclear fission, constant information transmission,
a meltdown, crossin' synapses,
no lapses, my latency's good, it's understood 'cause i drink real milk
fortified, omega-3,
carbon chain, developin' my brain, got to sustain that spike train"

I was proud of that. Then one night this week I generated this for facebook:
"no frogs,
no crickets, 
no bugs at all. 
just air conditioners, 
and echoes of air conditioners. 
no, wait, 
i hear something- 
i hear a bug. 
what is it? 
what is it?"

That was kind of lame, but it was accurate. Then yesterday the Thursday rhyme circle was late. Murf began:
"Subjective speckle, what do you say?
650nm class IIIA
Black spots moving as I'm delighted;
Not in my same direction means I'm near-sighted."

And I responded with this:
"myopia, that's some shit
some negative lenses would fix it
stimulatin' those long wavelength cones
seein' red, thinkin' about homophones"

I am such a genius.

binary gregorian chronometry

11111.1111111110100110001110011

this is my age. my chronometer is about to roll over. about to get my sixth bit!

i've been posting these numbers on facebook for more than a week, and nobody has figured out yet what i'm doing.

i posted it once to google+, and murf got it right away.

so, win for murf!

this reminds me of my old toyota. we met when it was at 86,000 miles, and i was a spry 10010. we were together when it rolled over 100,000; when it crossed 111,111 and 123,456; when it crossed 186,000, and when it rolled over 200,000. we even made it to 222,222 miles together. then i had a crisis of faith when it was time to drive from louisville to boston, and we parted forever. i'll never see that odometer roll over to 238,000 miles, or to 300,000, or 333,333... we could have been together when my binary gregorian chronometer rolls over - it won't happen again for 32 more years.

but we won't be together tonight. the camry is gone. i miss you, 1991 blue toyota camry LE. we were friends. i'm sorry i left you behind.

lorica-in

Here's a mystery which I don't have time now to investigate, but I want to remember it for later.

Matlab has a constant open connection with.. itself.. through ports 4079 and 4080. All I can find is that 4080 is associated with something called "lorica", and 4079 with "SANtools". SANtools is a some sort of general utility for disc access, network storage.. I don't know what. It's familiar, I've encountered SANtools somewhere before, but can't remember. I have no idea what "lorica" could be.

Later.

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.

TeliaSonera

For the first time in a while, saw an outgoing packet that I didn't recognize.

It was a TCP packet sent to 213.155.157.32. This seems to be part of the telia.net domain, though this address doesn't actually have a domain name. Telia is a Swedish IP that extends throughout Europe. Hostsearch says the address is maintained by Akamai, which is based here in Cambridge MA, but that it's located in London - so this is an Akamai International host, accessed through the Telia network. The packet was sent by one of those generic svchost.exe processes, and I didn't notice it in time to see if netstat could have told me anything else.

The host has open http ports - my packet was sent to port 80, so maybe it was an attempt at opening an http session. Maybe some Microsoft component was checking for an update - I've noticed before that Microsoft updates are often hosted on Akamai servers - but it's weird that it tried with a single packet and gave up. Other option (more likely maybe) is that it was a long delayed "close connection" packet, from a website I had opened much earlier - the web browser had been closed for a while, though I don't remember how long it had been.

The packet was sent from port 22095. This doesn't appear to be associated with anything interesting...

Oh well, this was pretty boring.

How To Escape the Web

I have finally found a browser configuration that can reliably keep me from screwing around on the internet.

For a while I've had the Leechblock add-on for Firefox, which lets me dynamically (i.e. on-the-spot) add a site to a list, and then keep me from seeing it for some period of time. But I figured out early on that I could remove sites from the list with just a little work. Apparently, I just didn't know how to use Leechblock to the fullest of its abilities, because it's also possible to set it so that no changes at all to its configuration - except for adding addresses - are possible outside certain circumstances, which can be made very restrictive.

So, with Firefox, I am now prohibited from visiting my favorite places to read, visiting my favorite forums, and periodically checking Facebook to make sure that, still, no one has left me any messages.

But that leaves IE, which I quickly discovered is basically un-uninstallable. You can roll back to earlier versions, but you cannot, without more expertise than I have, remove it from XP. So I persisted this way for a while, with an old version of IE that at least made me nervous to go wandering around the web, for fear of Java trojans. I could sneak over to stupid IE to check for Facebook messages, or to see what the others were talking about on the forums, or to see what country was on fire today. I was basically controlling myself relatively well, but still not satisfied.

Solution: rather than try and figure out whether there's some Leechblock equivalent for IE, I rolled IE back up to the current version, went into the "content advisor" settings, and told it not to let me visit any websites that I haven't already rated as okay. I'm not even sure what a content advisor rating is - I was just testing to see what the setting did. It prevented me from looking at basically any website at all, making IE useless. But the key is that the content advisor has a password option, so that without the password you can't change the settings.

I set the password to something I made up on the spot, and I have no idea now what it was. It was actually a word, something like arduvon or.. I remembered it for a few minutes afterwards, and worried that I had memorized it, but it's gone!

I'm not completely protected, however. I could always download Chrome or something else, or roll IE back again. The first option can be prevented by just adding the Chrome site to the Leechblock list.

Anyways, I'm pretty satisfied with this.

yandex.ru

Another boring Sitemeter post. I'm so sorry.

Several interesting visitors recently, though I haven't kept notes and have forgotten the names of several. Someone in France came here and spent something like an hour viewing several dozen pages, I don't know why - they came in through the MS-WBT server page, though.

Someone came here through my link in Facebook, which never happens, and he looked at a few pages. I know who it was, but I won't embarrass him.

Anyway, page views are up for some reason - every day or two, someone flips through several pages, I don't know why that's happening now but not before - the MS-WBT page isn't changed, nothing is. Random winter boredom maybe?

Today there was a visitor about whom Sitemeter seemed to know nothing at all. I was curious, so tracerouted the entire IP block, and it led back to a cluster of sites named yandex.ru. This, apparently, is the Russian Google, a search engine suite. I don't know what hit the site, exactly, but maybe it was a yandexbot - the Googlebot comes every few days or weeks, maybe the yandexbot will start dropping by.

Anyways, that's pretty boring. Sorry.