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.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
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.
***
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.
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.
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