Sunday, July 08, 2012

sunday afternoon, procrastinating, politics

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

scintillating scotoma 3.b




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

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

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

Saturday, June 30, 2012

summary

Alright. It's been a lousy week overall. The migraine stuff was fun, but a distraction. Proposal failed. Barely managed to start work on what I was supposed to start at the beginning of the week. Actually, kind of a typical week. Also, my Diablo III hardcore character died, basically because I forgot to turn the video card on. So I am not playing that game anymore, ugh.

I'm downloading files for doing the driving-vid binocular rivalry experiment to my laptop now, so I can work on this at home. Must have data on this thing by the end of the week. I am optimistic, but I should have been here 3 days ago. Blame the migraine.

Really, the main reason for this entry is that by making it, I have 13 entries for the month of June. That's an all-time record for this journal: April 2010, when I was making all those internet posts, I was at 12, and May 2010 was 11. Technically that was my peak posting activity, though most of those entries were short "look what i saw" sorts of things. Most of my entries for this year, since I decided to double down and regenerate my writing skills, have been semi-substantial. I'm trying to get fluent again, and I think it's kind of working. Hopefully we'll take off from here.




Yeah, that's a plot for this journal (I am strenuously avoiding using the word "blog", though I fail now and then. I am intermittently succeeding at replacing "post" with "entry"). I have plots for everything. Abscissa is year, ordinate is number of entries. The blue markers are just counts; the red line is a 'recent activity' smoothing, just an exponential decay function applied to the data. I'm not going to analyze it here. Combined with my memory of time and place, it speaks for itself. Too bad you aren't me.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

priorities, summer 2012

augh... so bored... let's do a post on what i'm supposed to be doing right now, that i'm not doing: yes, it's time to catch up with the priority worksheet!

yes, i've been keeping it up to date every month or so.


there it is. the CI manuscript (MS_Class) is with E* right now, so i have a couple of days i could be devoting to the equivalent priority: ProjADI. but i don't want to do ProjADI. i am depressed about my failed fellowship application and all i want to do is work on modeling my stupid migraine auras, which is not what i am being paid to do, and which, as far as i can tell, does not promise to reveal anything sufficiently new or interesting to warrant spending my time on - i.e. unless i actually do start collection of real psychophysical data on that, it's not publishable. and, it's not on the priority list. migraine modeling has a priority of 0, do you hear that?

the next highest priority is ProjPrism, which i should get on with before all my subjects have moved on to other places. that's going to take some creative programming though, and i don't have a good idea yet of just how i'm going to do it. i really need to go and just sit down in the lab and figure it out. but i'm depressed, so that's my excuse. instead i'm here looking at the internet and writing a stupid journal entry on what i should be doing.

one more thing:


there you can see the evolution of my priorities over time. i do think this system is helpful in my evaluation of my projects. i do seem to be kicking off things with high priorities, though nothing has officially dropped off the list yet. waiting for reviews on two papers (MS_class and MS_blur); if those go okay, then maybe they can both be off the chart by end of the year. maybe MS_class, too.

Projs, though, need to get Projs moving. just sitting there. you're just sitting there. get up. go to the lab. go. go go go.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

scintillating scotoma 3.a

I went ahead and figured out how to do the cortex transform. there are many papers describing the equations; some good recent ones (like this one) which are basically reviews at the same time that they are tweaking one or another aspect of the basic model. It's not really that complicated; the log-polar transform is very similar, except that the angles are calculated outside the logarithm. The space-V1 transform is the logarithm of a complex number representing the spatial coordinates plus the limit of the foveal confluence. The paper I linked above describes what further steps can be taken to get the transform more precise, accounting for meridional anisotropies. they go further, but I stopped there. The basic model was proposed by E.L. Schwartz in 1977, and hasn't changed much since then; I'm using Schira et al's version with their shear equation, and some parameters they cite in another paper.



This is similar to the second plot from the last post, but you will notice the geometry is different, as it gets narrower towards the fovea (lower part). Colors indicate time in minutes as shown by the colorbar. The grid drawn in the background isn't labeled, but it's easy to understand if you've seen these before. The lines going up and down are, from left to right, the superior vertical meridian, the left superior 45 degree meridian, the left horizontal meridian, and so on. From bottom to top, the left-right lines are spaced 5 degrees of visual angle apart. You don't see the first one until about 30mm up. The origin in this plot, (0,0), is where the foveal representation converges with V2 and V3, the foveal confluence.

This is interesting, the foveal confluence. I probably had heard of this before and forgotten it. I actually stated to E* yesterday that I didn't know what was on the other side of the foveal edge of V1, though I knew that the edges are flanked all the way around by V2. In fact, V1, V2, and V3 foveae all meet in the same place. This is apparently a relatively poorly understood region of visual cortex; imaging and physiology studies have focused on the more peripheral regions. The reason is that it can't be certain of what is being studied if one looks closely at the confluence, since the three areas are mixed together in a fashion that is still not well understood. I'm going to read more about this (the main writing on it is by the same group as the paper I cited at top; this one explains things up front).

Okay, so that map. What can I do with it, now that I have the coordinates right (or as close to right as I can)? Yes: I can measure the rate of progression of the wave in cortical distance over time. Awesome. I don't have the best method worked out just yet, but here's my approximation, summarized in the last figure below:

On the left, we have the same coordinates as in the figure above. The plotted line is the mean, over time, of the recorded scotoma regions. This is not a great measure of position of the waves, since as they got further out and larger, I couldn't trace them completely, and because it took time to trace them, so at a given epoch a trace might be in one place, or another, and that shows up here as a back-and-forth wave, on top of whatever sort of limiting bias is imposed by the screen size, etc. Still, it's okay. We know this because of the next plot: On the right, we have the distance of that waggly trace (from its starting point near the bottom of the left plot) as a function of time. A straight line. That's not why we know it's okay; it's because of the slope of this line: 2.76 mm/min. This is extremely slow, but exactly in the realm of cortical spreading depression. Not going to give references on that (need to save some work for an actual paper on this business), but they're there. Pretty sure I'm doing this right.




Monday, June 25, 2012

scintillating scotoma 3

another event is now shimmering its way out into my far left periphery. i used the dynamic perimetry program i had written; seems to work. some improvements can be made; need to include warnings or preventions for the cursor going out of screen. should implement cursor size info/adjustment. maybe cursor color or shape.

i mention the last two because definitely, there is a general sort of aftereffect. it's scotoma-like, but with no clear location of the scotoma; i.e., it feels like things are missing, e.g. if i put my hand out about 15-20 degrees left, stuff just feels kind of scrambled. actually, there is definitely a blind spot about 30 degrees left, i just found it. this is too far to measure with this screen; perimetry stops at ~20 degrees, i guess.

again, i don't know what the precursors were. been depressed all weekend (see previous post); saw some funny spots yesterday, and got preoccupied with some really visible floaters yesterday afternoon at tkd, which is probably unrelated. seems like the main indicator is just a superstitious feeling that "i wonder if it's going to happen again". maybe that's the CSD running through my frontal lobe somewhere.

note that i'm basically having a monthly period: the first of these (that i recorded here) was April 24, then May 28, and now it's June 25 (24).

i've been meaning for a while to list the other occasions that i can remember. i may be able to remember them all. before these past three, it happened twice earlier this year: once was during, uh, sex, which was weird, in China (within a few days of new years), and the second was on a sunday afternoon in late january or early february, when i was on my way to tkd, walking around cleveland circle.

before that, probably have to go back a year. it's happened several times with me just sitting here at my computer; probably half the times. i announced a few on facebook. i woke up once, early last year, with the SS starting right off. makes me wonder if it happens sometimes when i'm sleeping. it's happened after sex a couple of times. only once in the lab, i think, after j** checking my eyes. except for that morning one, i think it's almost always at night.

i would guess that, all together, this has happened 10-15 times in the last 2.5 years. until now, i don't think it had happened in summertime, only winter and spring. lots of headaches, maybe biweekly on average, without interesting symptoms.

i think these map data will be usable, and better quality than the paint drawings. not as pretty, but i can just generate post hoc pictures. i'll process them in the next couple of days, probably tomorrow. basically, it seemed very similar to the last two times, except that after the first minute or two of scotoma (again, i noticed it had started because, suddenly, i couldn't read), which i managed to record, the scotoma disappeared, or at least i couldn't find it. i thought maybe i had scared it away, but then it returned, right on track. anyways, update later when maps and stats are done.

*update*

some plots: sorry, didn't label any axes. descriptions accompany each:


This is the progression in spatial coordinates. color represents time in minutes, which you see in the colorbar. i also tied marker size to time, to help represent the thickening of the scotoma with time. 


This is progression in logpolar coordinates; x-axis is degrees from leftwards (in the last post, i was coding angle relative to 'up'), y-axis is log(degecc + 1). now it looks a lot more like a straight wave, though there is a bend to it, as if the wave has a 160° trailing angle. maybe that would be straighter with a more realistic cortical space transform? maybe not. i'll get around to finding out later this summer.
 


This last one is just binning the previous plot into 10° strips, plotting logecc+1 against time (like in the previous headache post). if i assume that the speed of the wave is closest to the fastest estimate that i get from these kinds of fits (it must be faster, since i'm only measuring at an angle to the wave), then i estimate that for this event, the speed of the wave was at least 0.248 logecc+1 / min. this compares with estimates of 0.250 and 0.258 for the last two events (i cited a lower number last time; that was the median, this is the max). once i learn to transform logpolar into v1 coordinates, i'll bother to do the extra geometry to measure the true transverse speed of the wave.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

nope

okay, so, that grant i applied for? failed. not discussed. not.. even.. discussed.

so, that's disappointing. hit rate was just 10-15%, but i felt like i had something. i've seen others with the same fellowship, and i don't think what i was proposing was of any lower quality. maybe a bit further from the norm, proposing things two steps from what anyone had done before - probably better to go one step at a time. there's also the fact that i'm obviously an underachiever. i can't hide it anymore - CVs don't lie. an underachiever with an abnormal proposal.

hurts my feelings, i guess. how can it not? well.. like i've been telling everyone, as a preemptive defense, i knew i wouldn't get it. a long shot. but it wasn't some self-fulfilling bullshit. i did my best. there's good stuff in there, and i'll do it anyways. but not putting it in the top half, not putting it on par with the rest of the proposals. that does hurt. i was hoping for a rejection despite a good score.

i think i'll probably still get comments back on it. i think. d** got comments even when his wasn't discussed in the last round.

let's rephrase the bit about being an abnormal underachiever. how about.. outsider?

let's get romantic.
tell the truth.
you see yourself as an outsider,
don't you?

i don't do it on purpose.
i don't try to be on the outside
in order to satisfy some requirement
that i've set for myself.

it's just what happens.
it's what i'm drawn to.
i'm drawn away.

you make choices
that put you on the outside.
your mentor is an outsider, and
you are the outsider in the lab.

in groups of friends,
i am the one who isn't
part of the group,
who tagged along,
happily accepting all invitations.

the underachiever.
the one you don't know.
i reject what they accept.

always the quiet one.
the different one
who finds himself in strange places.

it shines through
even in an NIH fellowship proposal:
you are a risk.

yeah, screw you. i wrote all that. i wrote it, then edited it into a poem. it's because of my self consciousness, not in spite of it. i am afraid to confront what i am, but i just did it. fine, i'm mad, and my feelings are hurt. i'm a pretentious kid. i'm used to it.

have to get used to this, kid. i hear there's a whole career of this ahead. have to keep writing these things and sending them in. some will succeed, some won't. i'll keep doing what i want to do, this is my guarantee.

Monday, June 18, 2012

gain

why would a process vary with the square root of wavelength?

with constant bandwidth, e.g. receptive field area will vary with the square of frequency (of wavelength). the linear size (radius) of the r.f. will vary directly with wavelength. a process in volume would vary with the cube of wavelength. how do you go backwards from here?

okay, so the inhibitory inputs are all squared. i want the weights on these inputs to be proportional to the square root of filter wavelength. i could get a step closer by making the linear inputs proportional to wavelength before the squaring, which changes the question to:

why would a process vary with the inverse of spatial frequency? in my mind, the weights are still tied to the size of the r.f., so that the bigger it is, the more inhibitory connections it has. strictly speaking, this would make inhibition vary with the square of wavelength.

a bigger r.f. would have more inhibition, then. i am just making this up. so, an r.f. that's twice as big would have four times the inhibition. fine, but then why wouldn't it have four times the excitation? they would balance out. but maybe the excitation isn't balanced. maybe excitatory inputs are sparser and sparser for larger r.f.s. is that true?

if it's true, then effectively the gain for different wavelength r.f.s should increase with frequency, because the density of excitatory inputs should increase with frequency.


i feel like this is getting somewhere... atick and redlich, brady and field... somewhere in there...

Saturday, June 16, 2012

stupid lazy

Alright, two posts in a row of me admonishing myself. Publicly, in theory. In theory, this is more embarrassing than it actually is.

It's Saturday evening. I have done nothing all day. Nothing. Played a computer game all morning. Read the front page of the WSJ. Ate a bowl of noodles and drank a pot of coffee. Played some piano. Looked at lots of funny gifs. Tried again to get Endnote properly installed on this stupid computer, and failed. X.0.2 + Office 2007 + Windows 7 = not work.

I have that SID manuscript open. I need to clean it up, add in those two other references I found but haven't really read because they look really dull. They're just 'relevant', in a parallel sense, but nothing obviously consequent. That's what led me into that stupid Endnote cul-de-sac again. I can do it remotely, so what. Just now I opened up the For Authors page on the journal site.

The CI paper is fine. Adding the MTF into the calculations didn't have as big of an effect as I expected, or hoped. Scaled filters are pretty resilient.

I haven't studied Chinese much in a while. I could be doing that.

No, no. God dammit. SID paper. Finish the goddam paper and upload it. There is no excuse. The paper is finished. Send it in. Dammit. I hate you.


Thursday, June 14, 2012

ohhh...

morning, myself. heart.
end. voice. nightingale?

This is just a diversion. There are things in life, every day, that we want to reach out and touch, or interact with, or follow, or watch, but we can't, because there are other things that we have to do instead. Other things that we should do instead. Self control can be suppression of the self, but sometimes it is just being rational, maintaining normal, keeping things the way you want them. Your mind is made up of many different parts which, on their own, are not as intelligent as you are. They don't have the same priorities as you. They don't even have the same memories as you - some of them have only existed for a few days, or months, or years. Maybe, some of them, you can remember when they came into existence. You can remember, because you are the one governing the rest, corralling them. You have to choose, at these instances, what to do - even if these things in life are like lures, and you see that between you and this other possibility, even just what ultimately would be a fleeting bit of soon-to-be-nothing, is a transparent membrane of a single impulse.

It's just a diversion. Maybe don't go back there. Maybe come back here, and see what you did, to keep from going there. Remember what there is in other places. Keep things level. Life is hard.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

monitor MTF? sure!

Okay, so I need to know the spatial frequency transfer function of the monitor I've used to do most of my experiments over the past couple of years. I've never done this before, so I go around asking if anyone else has done it. I expected that at least B** would have measured a monitor MTF before, but he hadn't. I was surprised.

Still, B**'s lab has lots of nice tools, so I go in there to look around, and lo, T** is working on something using exactly what I need, a high speed photometer with a slit aperture. So today I borrowed it and set to work doing something I had never done and didn't know how to do. It was great fun.

D** helped me get the photometer head fixed in position. We strapped it with rubber bands to an adjustable headrest. I've started by just measuring along the raster. The slit is (T** says) 1mm, which is about 2.67 pixels on my display. I drifted (slowly) squarewave gratings with different wavelengths past the aperture - this was more complicated than it sounds. The monitor is run at 100Hz, and CRTs flash frames very rapidly, just a millisecond, so getting the photometer settings just right (it runs at 18Khz) took a bit of adjustment, and figuring out good settings for the gratings, slow-enough speed to drift them at (I'm limited by the 10 second block limit imposed by the photometer)..

Anyways, I got back temporal waveforms which I treat as identical to the spatial waveforms. As expected, the power of these waveforms drops off as the gratings get finer. But, I know that it drops off too fast, because of the aperture. If the aperture were exactly 1 pixel across, and if it were aligned precisely with the raster, and if a bunch of other things were true, then I could know that each epoch recorded by the photometer reflected the luminance of a pixel, and my measurements would reflect the monitor MTF. But, like I said, the aperture is 1mm, so each 10ms epoch is an aliased average over >2 pixels. I'm not even thinking about the reflections from the photometer head (there's a metal rim to the aperture T** had taped on there).

My solution: code an ideal monitor, record from it with the same sized aperture, and divide it out of the measurements. I can then guess a blur function - Gaussian - and fit that to my (4) data points. That's what I did: here is my first estimate of the vertical MTF of my Dell p1130 Trinitron:

The Nyquist limit for this display, at the distance modeled here, is about 23cpd, so I guess this Gaussian is in about the right place. It's hard to believe, though, because horizontal 1-pixel gratings look so sharp on this display. I feel like these must be underestimates of the transfer. I am nervous about how awful the vertical will be...

*edit*
It wasn't too bad, just a bit blurrier than the horizontal. Still makes me suspicious that I'm underestimating the horizontal. Not going to bother putting up plots, but here's my estimate of the pixel spread function (you can just see that it's a little broader left-right, that's the vertical blur):
 

Thursday, June 07, 2012

zimbra

internet post!

So, earlier today, I got an email from the "Security Operations Lead" at NASA Ames, saying that a whole batch of people's passwords and account names had been accessed. I had an account there for a meeting I went to earlier this month; coincidentally, immediately after attending that meeting, I noticed that one of my peripheral email accounts had been accessed, and at the time I blamed it on the hotel.

Just now, I get an email from something called Zimbra, informing me that:
You requested your Email Account  on June 7, 2012 at 11:02 PM CS to be deactivated and deleted from a location in with this IP number; 201.130.47.33.
2. Click on  (https://secure.zimbra.com/verifyf?intl=us&.partner= cancelrequest) to cancel this request; else your email account will be deactivated and deleted within 24 hours
The sender's address was "bankofcard@yahoo.com". Yeah. Zimbra is apparently some sort of open source email server software for Linux machines. So this doesn't have anything to do with Zimbra.

The IP address leads to a machine in Mexico, with the URL niie2e.nextel.com.mx. This machine seems to have all ports open, i.e. it's either a totally open proxy server, or some sort of disguise for something else.

That URL to 'secure.zimbra.com' was actually an alias in the email (no I did not click on it, I am not stupid), for "http://www.contactme.com/4fcf723e2e22a2000103d1b6". From their website I can't tell what the hell contactme is, but it looks their site was probably co-opted. I wonder what's there...

Anyways, the relationship to the NASA thing is just coincidental timing, but makes me a bit paranoid.

*edit 6-19-12*
Got called down to to the network office this morning to change my password; apparently the NASA thing had gotten distributed to everyone whose ids were leaked. The admin forwarded to me the info he'd gotten through the Harvard IT director, and based on that I found this:


http://pastebin.com/nSJ9Nn9Z

who knows how long that link will stay alive. anyways, it's a list of the email addresses, but no passwords, for everyone that attended that workshop.

the header on the document:

[HACKED] NASA.GOV - AMES RESEARCH CENTER - By ZYKLON B
 ...
Join me on twitter : https://twitter.com/#!/bzyklon

Author : ZYKLON B
Target : NASA Ames Research Center - Ocular Imaging Laboratory (ace.arc.nasa.gov)
Reason : Curiosity, Challenge.

IS THE TARGET COMPROMISED ? YES.
Note : NASA Glenn research center already hacked 5-6 weeks ago.

anyways, that's interesting. you look down the document, and there we all are! yeah, hackers have twitter accounts!

temporal friction

We came to see the problem as one of material friction, rather than of abstract entropy. Information was still the key, but it was finally clear that what we perceive as information is just the tip of an iceberg.

The resolution of the dark matter problem demonstrated that the deeper structure of reality is anisotropic, made up of tiny needles of entropy - a material structure, now, not a mathematical description. And these needles, they are all pointed towards the past. Whatever part of the universe that moves away from the past is brushed through those needles, which scrape and tear and lacerate the informational structure that we recognize as reality.

That reality we came to see as the product of a long process of selection - some informational structure is torn apart as soon as it forms, while some is hardier, even self-correcting. Life was a structure, we saw, that had adapted to a long path through the deeper universe, even making use of the dark matter anisotropies, to store and convert energy, to drive its own processes of selection and sub-adaptation. But no forms of life could navigate through the darkness. Not until the humans came, and then, for them, it became a prime concern.

We navigated the Earth's surface, its skies and its seas. We navigated the first darkness, of space, and the surfaces of other worlds. All the time, there was that constant abrasion, wearing off man after woman, nation after world, age after eon. All along, we were looking for the way through - the clear way through the darkness. We found it - as I said, we came to see the problem as one of material friction.

Moving against the anisotropy disrupts information. Moving with it smooths information, conforms it, puts it in neat rows and columns, but this has the strange effect of making life uninteresting. If you're adapted to something, then when you lose it you notice it's gone. It's the same with entropy - when you go through life with information conforming rather than disrupting, you go from senselessness to perfection. This can be beautiful, but too often it's just another level of senselessness, on top of the fact that conformative memory processes take a lot of time to install and master, and you find yourself missing the old order of things, no matter how far beyond human you've gone. To have your thoughts and actions gather energy, collect and bind heat, and deliver it into your body... a useful novelty, a tool or practice, but nothing fundamental.

What was interesting was when you could remove the anisotropy altogether. No arrow of time, except for what you choose to arrange. Laws of thermodynamics become adjustable, optional. When we learned not just to navigate through the darkness, but to engineer it to our own purposes, then...

That, more than any other development, was what changed us.

Tuesday, June 05, 2012

transit venus

SO, I had been planning to actually get my old reflector out and make a little projector to watch a bit of the transit, before the sun set today. but, it's been days since the sun was out, so I never had any chance to test anything; actually, with no way to test a setup, and with the forecast looking like it was going to be the way it was, I didn't wind up actually putting any of the parts together.

In other words, it was too cloudy to see it from Boston.

I've been watching the NASA feed of it, it's better than nothing. I think the transit will be over soon; I'll stay up as late as I can to see if I can't see the planet crossing the limb.

That picture is awesome, right? NASA again.

Sunday, June 03, 2012

sum.. sum.. summm... summation?



ok, so i'm working on this classification image paper, and it's going really well, and i'm pretty happy about it. i feel like i've got a good handle on it, i'm writing it in one big shot, the analyses are all good, the data are fine, it's all under control. i'm pretty happy about this one. i keep telling myself that, and then noticing that i keep telling myself that. i guess it's in contrast to the blur adaptation paper, which was such an ordeal (took 2 years, basically), and then the magnification paper, which just isn't much fun. i feel myself moving down that priority list - hey, i should do a post on the priority spreadsheet! i made some nice plots in there!

anyways, the CI paper, it's going well, but i'm constantly on the lookout for problems. so tonight, i finally thought of one. not a crucial, deep problem, but a problem with how i've calculated some of the modeling stuff, a serious enough problem that i'll probably have to redesign a bit of it before doing the final runthroughs. i'm writing this entry so i can just sort of kick off thinking of how to solve the problem. here it is, right plain as day in this little cluster of plots from last year's poster, which has become this fine little paper:

the problem is spatial summation - or, the problem is that you don't see anything about spatial summation in those plots. for the main models, i have a CSF that was measured using test-field-sized images. the thresholds measured must reflect a sort of spatial summation, then. the problem is, i've been using those thresholds to set the baseline thresholds for the models, and then summing over the spatial responses. i had kind of had an inkling that i was being lazy there, but had overlooked how obviously stupid that is. i haven't tested the models on the threshold tasks, but i think that they would necessarily get much lower thresholds than the humans; spatial summation should give you a lower overall threshold than you would get for any single location. i need to think of a quick way to solve this, because i don't want to wind up estimating the model CSF through simulations...

and the simulations then raise the problem of noise, and how many samples should there actually be, etc etc... i guess there are benefits to doing things the simple way first, but i think i've run myself into a weird little corner here. gonna need to talk to somebody about this, probably..

Monday, May 28, 2012

scintillating scotoma 2

another aura! (no post in a month, and now it is forced!)

right now it's flying out to the far left field, but there's also a weird 'rough patch', a bit nearer in that appeared late on. i got a good map. i didn't expect this one coming on at all, except for what i think is just sort of standard low-level paranoia which i've developed since this all started. it's hard to tell what's prodrome and what's just coincidental suspicion.

anyways, i was reading through a section of the classification image manuscript, and, yep, can't see the letters. i think that 8/10 of these things so far have begun while i was reading. not sure if that's because i spend the majority of my time working with text in one way or another, or if that actually pushes things over the edge.

***

it's been a few hours now. here's the map i drew of this last event:

similar to last time, except that it's in the left field this time. it started out below fixation, and did the slow arc outward, following a really similar path as the last one. below, i'll show you below just how similar they are.

as for the rough patch: in the plot above, notice that in the superior field there's some green (and hard-to-see gray) scribbles over the neat arcs; that was a region that i noticed late which wasn't blind, and wasn't flickering, but was clearly..  unclear. it's at about 10 degrees eccentricity, so it's hard to see well out there anyways, but it was obvious that something was wrong. i could see the scribbles that had already been drawn, but it was all very indistinct and jumbled, and i couldn't see the motion of the cursor even though i could tell that it was laying down green/gray scribbles of its own. without any other explanation, i'm going to guess that this was the fabled extrastriate scotoma - my V2 was getting some CSD!

ok, now some analysis. first, log-polar maps. i haven't gone and gotten/worked out a cortical remapping scheme, but putting things in in log-polar coordinates is almost as good. actually, what you do is put them in log(ecc+1)-polar space, so you can see where the fovea is (zero in case you're dull). here are logecc+1-polar-time plots for the last two events (lets say L = log(ecc+1), for easier reference):

time is measured here from start of recording. these data are smoothed versions of the drawn maps in 10 degree radial steps. the scales are the same except that these are for opposite hemifields. the z-axis is color coded.

i mean, you can just see that those two maps are almost identical. i got more data the second time because i wasn't occupied with working out a system (btw i was caught off-guard; i wrote a matlab script to record in real time, but it not work in matlab-64, and i put off doing the -32 install because... ah.. it's done now). the origin is similar - look at these plots:

sorry about the colors. these are the same data as in the scatter plots above, except these are collapsed over the x(angle)-axis. actually they aren't quite the same: here i've used linear regression to estimate the earliest time (before recording began) that the visual event could have begun, and subtracted it out of the time axis, so these plots start when recording began with respect to when i estimate the event began. so, basically, this aligns the data. 2 things: one, the rate of advance (remember that it's radial advance, so these technically are distorted plots; i assume that's why the slope changes with angle) is basically identical in the two cases, ~.16 L/m. and the origin, ie where it all begins, is ~180-170 degrees in both cases (that's directly below fixation).

i've got other analyses, but the above sums up the interesting stuff. i know i've seen these things do weirder things, following more difficult-to-understand courses, and i hope i see one of those next time i'm able to record this business.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

scintillating scotoma

a few minutes ago (~22:35), reading, and i notice that letters are hard to see. that sensation of having a bright afterimage at fixation; it's moving rightward, usually it's been leftward (I haven't taken notes on the past 2 occurrences, sadly..); this it is at least the first of the last 4 to go through the right field, if not longer.

it begins with just a weird sense of scotoma-ness, very near fixation, but the blind areas are hard to pin down - they seem to change very rapidly, or else it's more a sensation of blindness rather than actual blindness. it's strange how it sticks at fixation even as it arcs out into the periphery; it seems it always arcs into the lower field, after arcing just a bit above fixation. i've not noticed yet one passing across the field, maybe it is restricted to hemisphere?

it's almost gone at this point (almost 30 minutes after the first signs), and all that's left is a flickering at the very top of my visual field, as if there's a light flashing on my eyebrows; interestingly, if i look up, it disappears, which is strange because it should be attached to the field location. i can look up, it disappears, look down again and it reappears. maybe was an interaction with the reflection of room/computer lights off my eyeglass frames? can't test, it's all gone now..

and i have a headache (actually it started a few minutes in; the light show was so slow to start, i thought we were skipping straight to the headache for a few minutes, a bit of disappointment, but it worked out!)

also, some hints: today and yesterday, i several times wondered if i wasn't going to get a headache soon, without understanding why. not sure what sets off those feelings.. this afternoon, i thought i saw some flashes at some point when i was walking down the hallway, and that really made me suspicious; and, all day, really tight, painful muscle spasm throughout my upper back, both sides trapezius.

23:05

map below: i have a few of these now, should get to processing them this summer..



Edit: look at what this guy has done: http://www.pvanvalkenburgh.com/MigraineAura/MigraineAuraMaps.html. pretty amazing.

also, i did wind up writing a script to analyze these plots; once I get some stuff settled, i'll post those in a new entry.

Friday, April 20, 2012

lazy friday dark adapt


Spent afternoon of Friday, 4-20-12, with a ~3 log unit (~.2%) ND filter over my right eye. Made the following observations:
(Took the filter off after about 4 hours. It wasn’t bothering me much anymore, but I think the plastic and rubber stuff in the goggles was irritating my eyes, which were starting to feel kind of dry and red. Light adaptation is really fast, it’s just been a minute and the (formerly dark adapted) right eye’s image only seems slightly brighter than the left’s.)
  1. Noise: the dark adapted eye’s view is noisy, and the noise intrudes into the dominant view. It’s irritating. The dark adapted view isn’t being suppressed, though, it’s there like a ghost. Double images, from depth, are strikingly noticeable, not sure why.
  2. Pulfrich effect: first time I’ve really seen this work. I put my index fingers tip-to-tip and move one from side to side, fixating on the still one, and the moving finger looks like it’s rotating. My hand even feels like it’s rotating.
  3. Pulfrich effect 2: Fusion isn’t always working, but I seem to be ortho a lot of the time. I just noticed, though, that if I make quick motions, e.g. a flick of a finger, there’s a delay in the motion between the two eyes; the dark adapted image is delayed by several hundred milliseconds! Especially obvious if I focus at distance so I have a double image of the finger. Explains the strong Pulfrich effect.
  4. Noise 2: Just looked at some high frequency gratings. With the dark-adapted eye, the noise was very interesting, looked like waves moving along the grating orientation, i.e. along the bright and dark bars there’s a sort of undulating, grainy fluctuation.
  5. I still have foveal vision and color vision, but both are very weak. Dim foveal details are invisible. High contrast details (text, the high frequency gratings) are low contrast, smudgy..
  6. Motion is kind of irritating, I think because it brings about lots of uncomfortable Pulfrich-type effects. Even eye movements over a page of text can be bothersome, because there is always an accompanying, delayed motion. I’m guessing that the saccade cancellation is being dominated by the light-adapted eye, and so I’m seeing the dark-adapted saccades. I don’t notice a depth effect, but walking around in the hallways I do feel kind of unsteady, maybe because of motion interfering with stereopsis. If objects are still, stereopsis seems to be okay.
  7. If I take vertical and horizontal gratings (64c/512px), add them together, then look at them at 25% contrast from about 30cm (here at my desk), I don’t see a compound grating – I see patches of vertical and patches of horizontal. I’ve never noticed this before; I wonder what differences there are with scotopic vision and cross-orientation suppression..
  8. I tried to watch my light-adapted eye move in a mirror, but the dark-adapted eye just couldn't see well enough. I think a weaker filter would make it possible.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Memes and Pharmacies

That rivalry proposal went in last Monday with no problems, along with a long-festering manuscript, so it seems I took a week off from writing. Now I have progress reports to do, presentations to prepare, other manuscripts to complete, on and on.. I need to make sure I keep up with this journal, which seems to be helping in keeping my writing pace up.

Vacation is over!

About 12 years ago, I read the Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore. It was around the time that I decided to major in psychology, and I was reading all this Dan Dennett Douglas Hofstadter stuff, but it was her popular science book that really had a big effect on me - I would say that it changed my worldview completely, to the extent that I would identify myself as a memeticist when discussions of religion or that sort of thing came up (it was still college, see) - I really felt like it was a great idea, that human culture and human psychology could be explained as essentially a type of evolutionary biology. I still believe it, and so I suppose this book still really sits near the base of my philosophical side, even though I don't think about these things so much anymore.

I bring this up because the other night Jingping and I were talking about being tricked, since this was the topic of a Chinese textbook lesson I had just read, and I recounted the story of being completely conned by a thief once when I was a clerk working at CVS. I wound up going on more generally about working there, and I remembered that I had worked out a memetics-inspired 'model' of that store, which I hadn't thought about in a long time. One of the things about the memetics idea that had really gotten to me was that you could see social organizations as living creatures with their own biological processes - not that this is an idea original to Blackmore, and I'm sure that's not the first place I had heard it (like I said, I was also reading Dennett and Hofstadter at the time), but she did work it into a larger sort of scientistic system which seemed to simplify and unify a lot of questions.

Now I realize that the criticisms of memetics that I heard from professors in college (when I questioned them about it) were mostly right, in that it mostly consists of making analogies between systems; only in the last few years, with the whole online social networking advent, has a real science of something like memetics actually gotten off the ground (this is a neat example from a few weeks ago), and it's very different from what had been imagined when the idea was first getting around.

Anyways, I thought I'd detail here my biology-inspired model of a CVS store, ca. 2001. I have a notebook somewhere where I had detailed a whole system, with functional syntax and everything, for describing social organizations in terms of cellular, metabolic systems. This might have been the first time that I had tried to put together a comprehensive model of a system, now that I think of it. The store, I thought, was itself a cell in a larger CVS system dispersed across the city, which itself was a system dispersed across the country. I was mainly interested in the store level, where you could see different components acting as reagents. It was a strongly analogical system, but not completely analogical, to plant metabolism: a plants needs carbon, so it uses sunlight to break down carbon dioxide, releasing the unneeded oxygen back into the world. A store needs money, so it uses salable products to break down a money-human bond, releasing the human back into the world.

Of course, with plants the sunlight comes free from heaven - all the plant can do is spread out and try to catch it - while salable products must be delivered from another part of the CVS system: the distribution center. The distribution center emits reagents to the stores, where the money-human bond is broken down. The CVS system also emits catalytic agents into the world - advertisements - to facilitate the crucial reaction. The money absorbed by the system is energy which is used to drive the system through a reaction not unlike oxidation - the money-human bond is reformed systematically, with employees as the human component. This reformation is what really drives the system. Those new human-money bonds then go out into the world and fulfill the same function, breaking apart, as they interact with other businesses.

Looking at a business in this way totally changed the way I understood the world. Businesses, churches, governments, political parties, armies - all of them can be thought of as living creatures, or as organs of larger creatures, rather than as some sort of human means-to-an-end. By changing perspective between levels, we can see ourselves as means to the ends of these larger systems, just as our cells and organs are means to ours. Now I'm finally getting around to reading straight through Hofstadter's GEB, and so I can see that this general idea of shifting perspective across levels is an old one that has been astonishing people for a long time. But for me, coming to see human culture as as being alive was a fundamental shift in my intellectual development, one that hasn't really been superseded since. I haven't become a real memeticist yet, but it's all still there, underneath... these tiny tendrils of memetics live yet...

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

dream post!

recurring dream:

jingping and i are trying to get to the train station. the city is like a cross between boston and chicago - it's boston but with lots of overhead walkways and more of that chicagoesque feeling of sharp-edged criss-crossedness.

lots of things happen as we're on our way, it's like we're being chased, but the recurring part is where we get into the station and have to start climbing a stairwell, up and up. i know what's going to happen as the dream progresses. there's a fear of falling down the stairwell, but what happens is that it gets narrower and narrower, less and less place to put your feet, and you're crawling finally up a spiral tunnel, until you can't go further because there's just not enough space - around this point i know it's a dream, because i'm thinking that it can't really be this way, and i'm trying to change it because it's so damn uncomfortable. even in the dream, i'm thinking, why does this happen, why can't i fix it?

once it got to that point, i realized that my eyes were closed, but i couldn't open them, and yet i could still kind of see the twisting stairwell tunnel ahead - and there was a confusing sensation of being able to see but not being able to see, at the same time (interesting relevance to the visual consciousness stuff i was wondering about earlier, which is really why i'm writing it down). i was feeling around for the gap ahead, to see if i would fit, and i knew jingping was behind me and i couldn't back up, but i also felt like i could see it all...

i think i woke up soon after. i figure that noticing my eyes were closed and not being able to open them, and yet still having a sense of vision, must have been REM atonia - sleep paralysis, the sort of thing that gives you the feeling of being trapped and immobile in a bad dream.

anyways, i'm pretty sure i've had this dream a few times, the "shrinking stairwell dream".

dream post, yeah!

Monday, April 02, 2012

model update

I'm working on other things lately, but I did finally get that multi-channel rivalry model working - main problem was that I had written the convolution equations out wrong. I had to do the convolution there in the code because the filter array is irregular - there's no function to call for 2d irregular-array convolution, much less for switching the convolution between different layers.

Here's what I had done:

Z´(x) = Z´(x) + F(x)·Z(x), where x is a vector of spatial indices, Z is the differential equation describing the change in excitation or adaptation over time, F is basically just a 2-d Gaussian representing spatial spread of activation for the inhibitory or excitatory unit, and Z´ is (supposed to be) the differential convolved with the spread function.

Now that doesn't make any sense at all. I don't know what that is. In the actual code that equation was actually 3 lines long, with lots and lots of indices going on because the system has something like five dimensions to it; so, I couldn't see what nonsense it was.

This is how it is now:

Z´(x) = Z´(x) + sum(F(x)·Z(x))*F(x)

THAT is convolution. I discovered what was going on by looking at the filter values as images rather than as time plots; Z and Z´ didn't look different at all! Z´ should look like a blurred version of Z. Such a waste of time...

Anyways, it kind of works now. Different problems. Not working on it until later in April. The 'simple' single resolution model was used to generate some images for my NRSA application. Here's a sample simulation of strabismus (with eye movements):


Monday, March 26, 2012

standing at fenway station, thinking, as usual, "what's my problem", and i came up with a nice little self-referential, iterative statement of it: it's pablum, but i'm not usually this verbally clever, so let's write it down:

don't do what you don't believe
can't believe what you can't understand
won't understand what you won't do

so that's the problem; it's not exactly as i would normally say these things. if you asked me before i formulated this, i would probably say, "i don't like to do what i don't understand", and that's what i started out thinking. but then i asked, "why is that?", and decided that if i don't understand it, i can't really attach to it - then i saw the loop.

interestingly enough, the solution is the negation of the problem, literally:

do what you believe
believe what you understand
understand what you do

both of these statements have a sort of inertia; once you have one of the predicates, it starts rolling and keeps going. since they aren't specific, both statements are generative or productive - the referents don't need to be the same on each loop, but of course they should be logically linked.

(really, the middle statement isn't necessary in either one, with 'believe' replaced with 'understand' in the first line. i feel like the middle line adds some depth, though, so there it is.)