Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Friday, October 05, 2012
Sunday, September 30, 2012
中秋快乐!
quick notes for the end of september:
week 1 of bring-your-laptop-to-work was a success; worked steadily in the lab every day, and came home each night to do particular jobs by hand, with pen and paper. extremely effective. laptop came back home friday night; going to continue this for the foreseeable future. should make the next MS revision and the following MS submission much easier.
headache last night, gradual onset; eventually focused pain above right eye socket; photophobia; went to bed, closed eyes, weird eigenlicht flicker, maybe 40-50Hz; what is that? slight headache remnant now, indistinct.
recent weirdness with reading text, usually notice in the morning; right now, left of fixation feels scotoma-like, but i can see there..
**
also, a story: when i sit at the kitchen table, in the chair by the window, i have a view of the pantry area, with the fridge and the back door. my leather sandals are wedged between the fridge and the wall, by the door, so i can wear them outside when i go to throw trash out.
i regularly mistake the sandals, peripherally, for Olive the Cat, sitting by the back door, wanting to go out. then i foveate them, and see that they are my sandals. this has happened repeatedly, maybe dozens of times: deja trompé!
week 1 of bring-your-laptop-to-work was a success; worked steadily in the lab every day, and came home each night to do particular jobs by hand, with pen and paper. extremely effective. laptop came back home friday night; going to continue this for the foreseeable future. should make the next MS revision and the following MS submission much easier.
headache last night, gradual onset; eventually focused pain above right eye socket; photophobia; went to bed, closed eyes, weird eigenlicht flicker, maybe 40-50Hz; what is that? slight headache remnant now, indistinct.
recent weirdness with reading text, usually notice in the morning; right now, left of fixation feels scotoma-like, but i can see there..
**
also, a story: when i sit at the kitchen table, in the chair by the window, i have a view of the pantry area, with the fridge and the back door. my leather sandals are wedged between the fridge and the wall, by the door, so i can wear them outside when i go to throw trash out.
i regularly mistake the sandals, peripherally, for Olive the Cat, sitting by the back door, wanting to go out. then i foveate them, and see that they are my sandals. this has happened repeatedly, maybe dozens of times: deja trompé!
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
why do i keep writing poems
Batten down the hatches!
In this electric squall
Or else we'll be sent to the deep -
The web will drown us all.
So home I'll go! To printed word,
With pen and paper work.
No opportunity to drift
Through forums or to lurk
In hiding from my calling,
I'll forge ideas by thought
And stare down syntax, words reform
To make all logic-wrought.
So batten down the hatches!
And keep the ship afloat
For though I'll try to steer us,
The net may wreck this boat.
In this electric squall
Or else we'll be sent to the deep -
The web will drown us all.
So home I'll go! To printed word,
With pen and paper work.
No opportunity to drift
Through forums or to lurk
In hiding from my calling,
I'll forge ideas by thought
And stare down syntax, words reform
To make all logic-wrought.
So batten down the hatches!
And keep the ship afloat
For though I'll try to steer us,
The net may wreck this boat.
Friday, September 21, 2012
grant, presentation, paper, model
Been trying to skip between several jobs: grant proposal with a looming deadline, modeling experiments for a paper revision with a looming deadline, looming conference presentation... well, the conference is over, and the grant is coming along, though I still do not believe I will make it.
The paper.. okay, another paper: poked an editor yesterday, and he came back with a 'minor revision' request, which I fulfilled by late afternoon today. So, finally, we have a journal article - in a 1.0 impact factor journal - to show for a 3 year postdoc. Sigh. Another in revision, in a better journal, but that's the big problem: I'm doing all these model tests, but I can't get any real momentum because I keep flipping back to the grant. Sigh. I keep complaining about the same thing. Need to set a deadline - 3 more years? - after which if I'm still making the same complaint, something needs to change.
Let's talk about the model stuff. I've talked about it already in the past few posts: in the original paper, I proposed a modification to an existing model, a minor modification, which was able to closely fit our data, but which was a bit complexified, and difficult to explain exactly why it worked as well as it did, and also unable to show how varying its parameters explained the variance in our data, etc. So, it "worked", but that's about all it did. It didn't explain much.
The existing model we call the "simple model". The simple model is indeed simple. It's so simple that it's almost meaningless, which is what frustrates me. Of course it's not that simple; you can interpret its components in very simplified, but real, visual system terms. And, it basically can describe our data, even when I complexify it just a bit to handle the extra complexity of our stimuli. And this complexification is fine, because it works best if I remove an odd hand-waving component that the original author had found it necessary to include to explain his data. Only... it doesn't quite work. The matching functions that make up the main set of data have slopes that are different in a pattern that is replicated by the simple model, but overall the model slopes are too shallow. I spent last week trying to find a dimension of the model that I could vary in order to shift the slopes up and down without destroying other aspects of its performance.. no dice.. fail fail fail.
So, I'm thinking that I can present a 'near miss': the model gets a lot of things right, and it fails to get everything right for reasons that I haven't thought hard enough about just yet. I really need to sit some afternoon and really think it out. Why, for the normal adaptor, is the matching function slope steeper than the identity line, but never steep enough? What is missing? Is it really the curvature of the CSF? How do I prove it?
Now, out of some horrible masochistic urge, I'm running the big image-based version of the "simple model". This version doesn't collapse the input and adaptation terms into single vectors until the 'blur decoding' stage. It seems like, really, some version of this has to work, but it hasn't come close yet. Looking at it now, though, I see that I did some strange things that are kind of hard to explain... Gonna give it another chance overnight.
The paper.. okay, another paper: poked an editor yesterday, and he came back with a 'minor revision' request, which I fulfilled by late afternoon today. So, finally, we have a journal article - in a 1.0 impact factor journal - to show for a 3 year postdoc. Sigh. Another in revision, in a better journal, but that's the big problem: I'm doing all these model tests, but I can't get any real momentum because I keep flipping back to the grant. Sigh. I keep complaining about the same thing. Need to set a deadline - 3 more years? - after which if I'm still making the same complaint, something needs to change.
Let's talk about the model stuff. I've talked about it already in the past few posts: in the original paper, I proposed a modification to an existing model, a minor modification, which was able to closely fit our data, but which was a bit complexified, and difficult to explain exactly why it worked as well as it did, and also unable to show how varying its parameters explained the variance in our data, etc. So, it "worked", but that's about all it did. It didn't explain much.
The existing model we call the "simple model". The simple model is indeed simple. It's so simple that it's almost meaningless, which is what frustrates me. Of course it's not that simple; you can interpret its components in very simplified, but real, visual system terms. And, it basically can describe our data, even when I complexify it just a bit to handle the extra complexity of our stimuli. And this complexification is fine, because it works best if I remove an odd hand-waving component that the original author had found it necessary to include to explain his data. Only... it doesn't quite work. The matching functions that make up the main set of data have slopes that are different in a pattern that is replicated by the simple model, but overall the model slopes are too shallow. I spent last week trying to find a dimension of the model that I could vary in order to shift the slopes up and down without destroying other aspects of its performance.. no dice.. fail fail fail.
So, I'm thinking that I can present a 'near miss': the model gets a lot of things right, and it fails to get everything right for reasons that I haven't thought hard enough about just yet. I really need to sit some afternoon and really think it out. Why, for the normal adaptor, is the matching function slope steeper than the identity line, but never steep enough? What is missing? Is it really the curvature of the CSF? How do I prove it?
Now, out of some horrible masochistic urge, I'm running the big image-based version of the "simple model". This version doesn't collapse the input and adaptation terms into single vectors until the 'blur decoding' stage. It seems like, really, some version of this has to work, but it hasn't come close yet. Looking at it now, though, I see that I did some strange things that are kind of hard to explain... Gonna give it another chance overnight.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
adaptomatic
Trying to figure out how to proceed with this adaptation paper, and I retreat here.
Minor problem is the rewrite: this will get done, not too worried about it. May be the last thing that gets done, since the major problem needs to be solved materially first.
Major problem is the modeling. The original paper details a complexified version of the model proposed by the authors of a paper that our paper basically replicates, accidentally. We were scooped, and so I thought that to novelify our paper, I would take their model and try to push it a little further, and do some extra analysis of it.
What I didn't do was what I should have done, which was to also test the simple model and show that it is somehow inadequate, and that complexification is therefore justified or necessary. I am actually ambivalent about this. My main idea was that we should take a model which has generalizable features and use it to explain the data; but, it's true that the more sophisticated version can't really be credited with achieving anything unless the simple one can also be shown to fail.
So the problem is that I have to do a lot of testing of the simple model. So, I decided that I would scrap the section that was already in the paper and replace it with an evaluation of the simple model, but make up for the lack of 'advance' by employing the simple model in a more realistic simulation of the actual experiments. This is what I've been trying to do, and basically failing at, for several weeks now.
The first idea was to use the simplest form of the model, but the most complete form of the stimuli: videos, played frame by frame and decomposed into the relevant stimulus bands, adaptation developing according to a simple differential equation with the same dimensions as the stimulus. This didn't work. Or, it almost worked. The problem is that adaptation just won't build up in the high frequency channels, unless it's way overpowered, which is against any bit of evidence I can think about. If high frequency adaptation were so strong, everything would be blurry all the time. I think it should be the weakest, or the slipperiest.
Soon after that, I gave up and retreated to the 'global sum' model, where instead of using 2d inputs, I use 0d inputs - i.e. the stimulus is treated as a scalar. I get the scalars from the real stimuli, and the same dynamic simulation is run. It's tons faster, of course, which makes it easier to play around with. I figured I would have found a solution by now.
See, it's so close. It's easy to get a solution, by adjusting the time constants, how they vary with frequency, and the masking strength, and get a set of simulated matching functions that look a lot like the human data. But I figure this is uninteresting. I have a set of data for 10 subjects, and they seem to vary in particular ways - but I can't get the simulated data to vary in the same way. If I can't do that, what is the point of the variability data?
Also, last night I spent some time looking closely at the statistics of the original test videos. There's something suspicious about them. Not wrong - I don't doubt that the slope change that was imposed was imposed correctly. But the way contrast changes with frequency and slope is not linear - it flattens out, at different frequencies, at the extreme slope changes. In the middle range, around zero, all contrasts change. Suspiciously like the gain peak, which I'm wondering isn't somehow an artifact of this sort of image manipulation.
I don't expect to figure that last bit out before the revision is done. But, I'm thinking it might be a good idea to play down the gain peak business, since I might wind up figuring out that e.g. adaptation is much more linear than it appears, and that the apparent flattening out is really an artifact of the procedure. I don't think I'll find that, but - did I mention I'm going to write a model-only paper after this one? - seems a good idea not to go too far out on a limb when there are doubts.
I have a nagging feeling that I gave up too soon on the image-based model...
Minor problem is the rewrite: this will get done, not too worried about it. May be the last thing that gets done, since the major problem needs to be solved materially first.
Major problem is the modeling. The original paper details a complexified version of the model proposed by the authors of a paper that our paper basically replicates, accidentally. We were scooped, and so I thought that to novelify our paper, I would take their model and try to push it a little further, and do some extra analysis of it.
What I didn't do was what I should have done, which was to also test the simple model and show that it is somehow inadequate, and that complexification is therefore justified or necessary. I am actually ambivalent about this. My main idea was that we should take a model which has generalizable features and use it to explain the data; but, it's true that the more sophisticated version can't really be credited with achieving anything unless the simple one can also be shown to fail.
So the problem is that I have to do a lot of testing of the simple model. So, I decided that I would scrap the section that was already in the paper and replace it with an evaluation of the simple model, but make up for the lack of 'advance' by employing the simple model in a more realistic simulation of the actual experiments. This is what I've been trying to do, and basically failing at, for several weeks now.
The first idea was to use the simplest form of the model, but the most complete form of the stimuli: videos, played frame by frame and decomposed into the relevant stimulus bands, adaptation developing according to a simple differential equation with the same dimensions as the stimulus. This didn't work. Or, it almost worked. The problem is that adaptation just won't build up in the high frequency channels, unless it's way overpowered, which is against any bit of evidence I can think about. If high frequency adaptation were so strong, everything would be blurry all the time. I think it should be the weakest, or the slipperiest.
Soon after that, I gave up and retreated to the 'global sum' model, where instead of using 2d inputs, I use 0d inputs - i.e. the stimulus is treated as a scalar. I get the scalars from the real stimuli, and the same dynamic simulation is run. It's tons faster, of course, which makes it easier to play around with. I figured I would have found a solution by now.
See, it's so close. It's easy to get a solution, by adjusting the time constants, how they vary with frequency, and the masking strength, and get a set of simulated matching functions that look a lot like the human data. But I figure this is uninteresting. I have a set of data for 10 subjects, and they seem to vary in particular ways - but I can't get the simulated data to vary in the same way. If I can't do that, what is the point of the variability data?
Also, last night I spent some time looking closely at the statistics of the original test videos. There's something suspicious about them. Not wrong - I don't doubt that the slope change that was imposed was imposed correctly. But the way contrast changes with frequency and slope is not linear - it flattens out, at different frequencies, at the extreme slope changes. In the middle range, around zero, all contrasts change. Suspiciously like the gain peak, which I'm wondering isn't somehow an artifact of this sort of image manipulation.
I don't expect to figure that last bit out before the revision is done. But, I'm thinking it might be a good idea to play down the gain peak business, since I might wind up figuring out that e.g. adaptation is much more linear than it appears, and that the apparent flattening out is really an artifact of the procedure. I don't think I'll find that, but - did I mention I'm going to write a model-only paper after this one? - seems a good idea not to go too far out on a limb when there are doubts.
I have a nagging feeling that I gave up too soon on the image-based model...
Friday, September 07, 2012
talk: 97%
did a dry run today for my FVM talk. i think it went well, but there was a good amount of feedback. (incidentally, earlier this week i came to the lab, and passed my preceptor e* talking with a familiar old guy in the hall; a few minutes later, e* brings the guy to my office and asks me to show him my work. the old guy was l.s., one of the elder statesmen of european psychophysics. turns out he had been a postdoc at the instutute more than 40 years ago, and was in town, and had just dropped in to see old friends.. i took him through my presentation at quarter speed, and he was very enthusiastic. made some suggestions about controlling for the 'knowledge' aspect of my stimuli and experiment design. took notes. had a good talk with him, he seems to know my grad school mentor well, knows all his students. so i didn't go to ECVP this week, but i got to spend a morning with one of its founders...)
anyways, the dry run: p* was the only one, as i guess i expected, to make real comments on the substance of the talk. he had two points/questions:
1. what happens if the two images are different, i.e. if they have different phase spectra? i have not tried to do this experiment, or to predict the result. i guess that technically, the model that i am evaluating would make clear predictions in such an experiment, and the perceptual process i am claiming to occur would be equally applicable. but, really, i am tacitly assuming that the similarity of the two images is tamping down noise that would otherwise be there, somehow in the spatial summation, that isn't actually reflected in the model but that would be there for the humans. but, it might work just fine. i should really try it out, just to see what happens... (*edit: i tested it in the afternoon, and the result is exactly the same. experiment is harder, and the normalization is wacky, but seems clear it works...)
2. don't the weighting functions look just like CSFs? isn't this what would happen if perceived contrasts were just CSF-weighted image contrasts? yeah, sure, but there's no reason to believe that this is how perceived contrast is computed. the flat-GC model is close to this. i wonder if i shouldn't just show a family of flat-GC models instead of a single one, with one of them having 0-weighted GC...
the other main criticism was of the slide with all the equations. this is the main thing i think i need to address. i need to remake that slide so it more naturally presents the system of processes that the equations represent. some sort of flow or wiring diagram, showing how the equations are nested...
also need to modify the explanation of the contrast randomization; not add information, but make clearer that the two contrast weighting vectors are indeed random and (basically) independent.
Sunday, September 02, 2012
random
I seem to have gotten into treating this thing as a migraine journal, so here: headache last night (Saturday). Strange one, came on slowly, from mid-afternoon, increased gradually until 10 or so, when it was actually pretty irritating. May be something else. It's kind of still here, vaguely. Front of the head, above-behind the eyes, but something about it is different. Dunno.
As for work, I should have done more this weekend. I have 3 current main foci: FVM presentation, blur adaptation revision, and R01 application.
The presentation is >90% done. I'm leaving it for a few days.
The blur adapt revision is 0% done. I'm trying to figure out what "simple" model to replace the section in the paper with. If I can't get it to work by the end of the week, I think I'll have to stick with the original "complicated" model, and *add* material (thus making it *more* complicated) to explain why the simple version can't be easily adapted to work. What this entails is about an hour of programming and 24 hours of running the simulations/measurements so I can see the results and decide on what isn't working and make changes and repeat the process. In the meantime, I do nothing productive. So:
R01 application is... well... I don't want to do it. It's futile, but it's my job. Will start soon. Should have started this weekend.
As for work, I should have done more this weekend. I have 3 current main foci: FVM presentation, blur adaptation revision, and R01 application.
The presentation is >90% done. I'm leaving it for a few days.
The blur adapt revision is 0% done. I'm trying to figure out what "simple" model to replace the section in the paper with. If I can't get it to work by the end of the week, I think I'll have to stick with the original "complicated" model, and *add* material (thus making it *more* complicated) to explain why the simple version can't be easily adapted to work. What this entails is about an hour of programming and 24 hours of running the simulations/measurements so I can see the results and decide on what isn't working and make changes and repeat the process. In the meantime, I do nothing productive. So:
R01 application is... well... I don't want to do it. It's futile, but it's my job. Will start soon. Should have started this weekend.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
ALL NEW DIALOGUE, FIRST IN FIVE YEARS
Ezek: You came so close. I can appreciate that.
Imelda: You know, I did. I really did.
Ezek: And you really didn't have a plan?
Imelda: I didn't. I just sat down, wrote out a title - all in caps, -emphasizing my commitment - and then started to improvise.
Ezek: I sense a bit of weaseling there.
Imelda: Yes, started to. You know, you always hear that starting is the hardest part.
Ezek: Yep.
Imelda: So, you think that, if you just start, then the job is half done. You've gotten through the block, broken the ice, established a front, and then -
Ezek: I know.
Imelda: You realize that you've only started to start.
Ezek: And that you haven't actually started. You've been through this before, haven't you?
Imelda: Oh, so many times. In fact, most times.
Ezek: It's a kind of purgatory, isn't it? You're not in the empty expanse, staring at the blank sheet, wondering how to fill it, or waiting for it to be filled, but you aren't filling it, either.
Imelda: It's an illusion. You're filling something, but not the sheet before you. It's like the sheet was there, but you put another, false, sheet on top of it, and set to filling it instead.
Ezek: But it's so close.
Imelda: So close.
Ezek: Well, if I had to choose from amongst the different ways of missing a target, the trick start is a good one. At least you have something to show when you're done.
Imelda: But it's just navel-gazing. It's you sitting there, talking with yourself, about a failure, and only very transparently as if it's a sort of new beginning, some sort of accomplishment.
Ezek: In your line of work, navel-gazing is worth something, isn't it?
Imelda: Not if you show it off. These things are supposed to broil for a while.
Ezek: Huh.
Imelda: Come to think of it...
Ezek: What is it?
Imelda: What was it that I was going to do, but did this instead?
Ezek: You were going to write a dialogue. First in five years!
Imelda: Isn't that what I'm doing?
Ezek: But it's about your immediate failure to do so, isn't it? Right away, from the very start, you declared it a failure and then went on to explore the phenomenon of failing in that specific fashion.
Imelda: So why does that make for an invalid dialogue? I can just decide, here and now, that it isn't a failure.
Ezek: That would make a sort of fiction out of everything that came before, wouldn't it?
Imelda: I think that for this sort of thing, all we need is a consensus. A consensus on success.
Ezek: That our dialogue isn't just an avoidant anti-dialogue?
Imelda: What do you say?
Ezek: It would justify our presence, to a degree...
Imelda: It complicates the subject, but it creates an interesting symmetry to the whole thing. Do you see?
Ezek: Ah. Ah! I do!
Imelda: Then you agree?
Ezek: We'll say that this was the plan all along.
Imelda: That was a close one!
Ezek: It really was.
Imelda: You know, I did. I really did.
Ezek: And you really didn't have a plan?
Imelda: I didn't. I just sat down, wrote out a title - all in caps, -emphasizing my commitment - and then started to improvise.
Ezek: I sense a bit of weaseling there.
Imelda: Yes, started to. You know, you always hear that starting is the hardest part.
Ezek: Yep.
Imelda: So, you think that, if you just start, then the job is half done. You've gotten through the block, broken the ice, established a front, and then -
Ezek: I know.
Imelda: You realize that you've only started to start.
Ezek: And that you haven't actually started. You've been through this before, haven't you?
Imelda: Oh, so many times. In fact, most times.
Ezek: It's a kind of purgatory, isn't it? You're not in the empty expanse, staring at the blank sheet, wondering how to fill it, or waiting for it to be filled, but you aren't filling it, either.
Imelda: It's an illusion. You're filling something, but not the sheet before you. It's like the sheet was there, but you put another, false, sheet on top of it, and set to filling it instead.
Ezek: But it's so close.
Imelda: So close.
Ezek: Well, if I had to choose from amongst the different ways of missing a target, the trick start is a good one. At least you have something to show when you're done.
Imelda: But it's just navel-gazing. It's you sitting there, talking with yourself, about a failure, and only very transparently as if it's a sort of new beginning, some sort of accomplishment.
Ezek: In your line of work, navel-gazing is worth something, isn't it?
Imelda: Not if you show it off. These things are supposed to broil for a while.
Ezek: Huh.
Imelda: Come to think of it...
Ezek: What is it?
Imelda: What was it that I was going to do, but did this instead?
Ezek: You were going to write a dialogue. First in five years!
Imelda: Isn't that what I'm doing?
Ezek: But it's about your immediate failure to do so, isn't it? Right away, from the very start, you declared it a failure and then went on to explore the phenomenon of failing in that specific fashion.
Imelda: So why does that make for an invalid dialogue? I can just decide, here and now, that it isn't a failure.
Ezek: That would make a sort of fiction out of everything that came before, wouldn't it?
Imelda: I think that for this sort of thing, all we need is a consensus. A consensus on success.
Ezek: That our dialogue isn't just an avoidant anti-dialogue?
Imelda: What do you say?
Ezek: It would justify our presence, to a degree...
Imelda: It complicates the subject, but it creates an interesting symmetry to the whole thing. Do you see?
Ezek: Ah. Ah! I do!
Imelda: Then you agree?
Ezek: We'll say that this was the plan all along.
Imelda: That was a close one!
Ezek: It really was.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Process
Draft 1: Write 5000 words in 2 days.
Draft 2: Delete 1000 words, change 500 words, write 250 words in 2 days.
Draft 4: Delete 250 words, change 100 words, write 50 words in 2 days.
Draft 8: Delete 50 words, change 20 words, write 10 words in 2 days.
Draft 16: Delete 10 words, change 5 words, write 2 words in 2 days.
Draft 32: Delete 2 words, change 2 words, write 1 word in 2 days.
Draft 33: Delete 500 words, change 250 words, write 1000 words in 2 days.
Draft 2: Delete 1000 words, change 500 words, write 250 words in 2 days.
Draft 4: Delete 250 words, change 100 words, write 50 words in 2 days.
Draft 8: Delete 50 words, change 20 words, write 10 words in 2 days.
Draft 16: Delete 10 words, change 5 words, write 2 words in 2 days.
Draft 32: Delete 2 words, change 2 words, write 1 word in 2 days.
Draft 33: Delete 500 words, change 250 words, write 1000 words in 2 days.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
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!
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!
Thursday, November 10, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
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.
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