umm...

lately: struggling to prioritize. a recurrent state, been a few months. not too bad this time.

list:
1. have interview thursday; should be studying guy's papers. have been, but not for a few days. meant to get back to it tonight. gonna be too late soon.
2. started drafting new adaptation paper today. should be easy, taking forever.
3. spent much of last week designing a metric for a new study/paper (the paper is the study), then quit working on it as soon as i got it working.
4. trying to corral a bunch of coauthors into working on a paper i collaborated on but am only interested in to the point that i don't want to look too bad when it is someday published.
5. returned to my mind is an offer i made a guy earlier in the summer to give him a demo of an idea, which i need to follow up on.
6. for some stupid reason, writing a paper and doing computations on simulating/demonstrating cat vision, using it as a vehicle to talk about the idea of simulating/demonstrating vision pictorially.

may i return here soon and look upon this list and despair.

may may may

May's a slow month even when I don't go to VSS, I guess. One post last year in May, and may be this is the only one for 2014.

Bunches of stuff going on. Flying into Huntsville Wednesday. Procrastinating on a short fellowship application to go to Melbourne. Pestering a professor in Nashville for a job. Doing lots of cleanup work in Boston, finishing big papers, reviewing other people's papers, fixing RA projects, starting little papers. Practicing Chopin waltzes and Bach sinfonias to pass the time. Read Plato's Apology and Crito last week, still haven't committed to Phaedo. Started playing RoTK XI again this weekend. Cleared out of the kitchen on orders from my landlord. Playing with natural scene statistics, inventing new analyses. Always, always trying to learn Chinese.

Despite all this, I feel as though I'm doing nothing at all. Perhaps this is an explanation? I don't know, I haven't read it.

punched in the head

title says it all. punched a few times in the head, and now i have a headache. feels migrainish. it is possible that getting punched in the head in just the right way can trigger a migraine. or maybe i have a concussion? i do have a big red bruise on my forehead, so maybe the pain is on the outside, muscular, and i just can't tell the difference since it's all just front-of-the-head.

anyways.

**edit, 0:23, 8/27/12
the bruise is still there, fading, and the flesh is a bit tender - worse yesterday - but the headache was gone when i woke up saturday morning.

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.

Not locking my bike, and letting it get stolen

Man. So, I go to China, and before I go I put my bike in the stairwell, inside my building, where you need a key to get inside. I've already locked the wheel on Jingping's bike, and so naturally I tell myself to lock my bike, but apparently I forget. I get back from China 18 days later, and my bicycle is gone.

Now, it is my fault, and I am an idiot, for not putting the lock on the bicycle wheel. I know this. But I also blame one of my neighbors, though I don't know which one. Either 1) someone propped the outside door open so they could move something, or because they were too dumb to take their key with them, allowing one of the wandering neighborhood thieves to wander by, walk in an open door, and find my unprotected bike, or 2) one of my neighbors is himself a thief, or closely associates with thieves.

Muggings, break-ins, car windows smashed in, stuff stolen, bike seat taken. I am an idiot for living through all of these things and still not locking my bicycle.

Getting my bike seat stolen, and buying an inadequate replacement

Oh gosh! Someone stole the seat right off my bicycle last week while it was locked up outside the building where I work every day. This brings us to the first point at which I am an idiot. At some point late in the afternoon I walked over to the music building to play the piano for a little while. The bicycle seat thief was probably at that very moment stealing the seat off my bicycle, and all I would have had to do was turn my head to the left, to see the spot beside the building where I had locked said bicycle, thereby catching the thief red-handed and giving myself an opportunity to interrupt him and given him a good talking to. So, I am an idiot for not casually checking on the status of my bicycle seat a good hour or so before I noticed it stolen, since I would have had some tiny chance of saving it.

Next, I waited a week to buy a new one, punishing myself by riding everyday to and from school without a seat, which is both dangerous and very difficult, since you basically have to stand the whole time, raising your center of gravity and making your legs do more work than usual. It also makes it impossible to pedal constantly, so you have to pedal in short bursts, which makes it even more difficult.

Anyway, I waited a week to buy a new one, and when I did, I bought a twenty dollar one at a bike shop, and it seemed comparable to the original, which was a pretty good seat for a $100 Walmart bike. Only when I got home with it did I explicitly realize that I couldn't attach this new seat, since the post connecting seat and bike had also been stolen. I went back to the bike shop, and asked about this, and they said I should bring the bike in since the post is measured in millimeters, and there are 18 different sizes, and it would be pretty tough for me to get that precision with an old wooden yardstick. At this point, I got a parking ticket for not paying the meter, and the guy was in the process of calling in a tow truck at the moment I came out of the shop, so that was close.

So, I return to the bike shop a third time with my bike, and they tell me it's $16 for the post thingie. I think to myself, at this rate replacing all the parts in my bike would cost probably $1000 dollars, so this is already an imprudent course of action, spending $36 for a new seat. So I get all cheap all of a sudden (yeah, right), and ask to exchange the $20 seat I previously bought for the cheapest one they had, which was just $10 and is basically a piece of hard plastic. So there's the second part: I am an idiot for thinking a comfortable bike seat is not worth $10, though my idiocy may be vindicated if someone also steals this new seat. Maybe they would have been more likely to steal the nicer one. I'm still an idiot. Idiot.

Playing computer games when I should be studying

I have lots of things I should be doing. I should be working on my qualifying exam, which is this long paper which has to be researched and all that stuff. I am writing it, but it's pretty slow. Also, I should be constantly designing new experiments, and recruiting subjects, and running in my own experiments. I am doing these things, but it all feels kind of half-assed. What I'm all about is playing with this WWII strategy game I downloaded a couple of months ago. It's really hard to stop, and I've wasted many, many hours playing with it instead of reading/writing/programming. I am supposed to be a grownup doing work, not a kid playing video games. I am completely and hugely an idiot.

Going to the grocery store and buying almost nothing

The original post was much too long. I went to the grocery store and didn't buy anything but a quart of heavy cream. Went back later that night, and still didn't buy groceries, just bought some weird cheese. Finally went back again today, and bought groceries. Idiot.

Insurance is for crap

So I had a toothache, and I figured I ought to go to the dentist. Before going, I go real quick and sign up for some extra plan on my student health insurance because it promised that it was very likely that it would cover "up to" 50% on dental work. It cost like $25, I think. So, I wind up going to the dental school because it will be cheaper anyway, and they pull two of my teeth out after taking some x-rays, and charge me some money, and I wait to see if the insurance will cover anything. A while ago a very nice lady at the dental school calls me to basically tell me that the insurance won't cover anything. I have to pay for all my tooth-pulling, which is fine with me, but I paid $25 for nothing. I sure am an idiot.

Waiting in line for coffee at the starbucks in the library next to the robot librarian monstrosity thing

Also too long. This is the short version. Read the title. I am an idiot.

Waiting for the bus instead of riding a bike

Today I waited for 45 minutes to catch a bus to the garage just about 2 miles from my house. I could have ridden my bike and gotten there in less than 15 minutes. I am really an idiot.

at this moment i'm gathering energy for a car ride to Bowling Green Kentucky! i'm going to drive there, in my recently slightly repaired blue Toyota car of nearly 7 years (and of seven modifiers! no, eight! no, nine! no...), to drop off a proposal which might allow me to get paid again for another year!

the topic of the proposal is behavioral testing of potential perceptual and cognitive modes of common household appliances, specifically toasters. the null hypothesis is that there will turn out to be no perceptual or cognitive modes whatsoever for toasters, though i don't know if there will be enough external validity to extend those findings to other appliances.

but, we never know what will happen. science can reveal wonderful things to us, if we listen closely to it, and try to estimate whether or not it has cognitive or perceptual modes which would serve as a substrate for the admittedly anthropomorphic property of revalatory capacity. this doesn't mean anything at all. i am an idiot.

now i have to drive! drive drive drive! drive!