two posts in a day, this is bad.
just been meaning to write this down: saturday afternoon I leave the apt to go to tkd, walking down the sidewalk, take off my glasses to blow off some dust, then go to put them back on, and they snap in half. so my glasses broke.
i go to tkd, not wearing glasses, and not really able to precisely recognize faces beyond a couple of meters. in the distance i see a woman practicing something, a black belt, with mid-length black hair pulled back in a ponytail. at first i think, that's j*, just i guess because her style and general characteristics seemed right. but then i thought, no, that's not her, she's too small. i got a little closer, and yes, this woman was too small to be j* - a couple of inches shorter than me. a little closer and, then, yes - it was indeed j*.
i felt certain that j* was taller than me - if you had asked me before how tall i thought j* was, i would have guessed, oh, maybe 6' or so, she's a real amazon. apparently she's closer to 5'8". taller than the average woman, and still an amazon, okay, but not what i thought. in my mind, i guess, her high status (at tkd) had me convinced that she was actually larger than in reality. i've noticed this effect before (it's been studied for a long time, and probably known forever), but never in a context like this: certain that a person had a relatively unusual trait (woman taller than me), and then unable to recognize her because i don't see the trait, when it was never there in the first place.
"she's actual size, but she seems much bigger to me"
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
City System
A couple of years ago, - no, oh God, nearly 3 years ago - I got talked into trying to write a Nanowrimo novel. I made it to the end of November with something like 15,000 words, about 35k short (of the official 50k target), but then I kept going, and finally stopped towards the end of the spring in 2010. There was other writing that was more important, and I had reached what seemed like a good stopping point, about halfway through the story - and, coincidentally, I had reached 50,000 words.
Anyways, I still think about the story sometimes. Maybe someday I'll finish it. Yesterday I was thinking about the world that I had set up, vaguely, in the background. It's a reflection of some of my political thinking, but I never made any of it really concrete, just alluding to details here and there. A lot more of it is put together in my head than there in the story. Since it's on my mind, though, I thought maybe I'd write some of it out here. First some background for the background:
The story is centered on a few characters over the course of two days of what I would call the Second NEL Crisis. The setting is the distant future (the year Akan Era 852, sometime during the fourth millennium of the Common Era), on the planet Akan, populated by hundreds of millions of humans. Soon after the initial phases of the colonization, interstellar ships stopped arriving from Earth, and there has been no contact between the worlds in more than 800 years. It is unknown what stopped the ships, but some sort of natural or man-made disaster is assumed to have severely disrupted Earth's civilization, which was already dangerously unstable.
The Akan civilization is based around something called the City System, where the only sovereign entities are city-states, of which there are hundreds, and where certain rules maintain the independence and adaptability of the units of the System. Different Cities (always capitalized in this context) operate under different rules, according to their own preferences. Some may be libertarian or anarchistic, some may be communistic or totalitarian, etc., but they all have to abide by certain City Laws, established long ago, which ensure the stability of the overall system. There must be a dozen or more of these Laws, but I have only really thought about a few of of them:
The 1st City Law institutes an Intercity Congress, where revisions to the original laws are discussed and passed. Decisions can only be made through consensus of the entire body, so as new Cities are added, deliberations slow down more and more. Revisions to the Laws typically take decades. The more immediate responsibility of the IC is to monitor the City Law Enforcement Agency, which is discussed below.
The 2nd City Law is that no City may make administrative decisions for another: the Independence Law. Administrative control is measured quantitatively, and if more than half of a City's administration can be traced to other Cities, then it is the responsibility of demonstrably independent Cities to rectify the problem through mediation. Naturally, the methods for measuring control are controversial, and change with the times, but they have to be universally applied and agreed on through consensus. A result of the consensus requirement is that while the control measures do change with the times, they change very slowly, and the main problem with them is usually that they are seen as out of date. Consensus on new terms can take generations, and only a few dozen methods have been fully instituted over the 852 years of Akan history.
The 3rd City Law is that all citizens must be able to enter and leave Cities freely: the Open City Law. So, Cities cannot block entry by citizens, and cannot prevent citizens from leaving. The standard exception to this rule is that citizens may be arrested or imprisoned; immigration and emigration, however, are held to be out of the fundamental control of the Cities. Some cities may have such strange and insular cultures that few outsiders want to join, or that few insiders feel capable of disconnecting, but these situations are quantified as matters of individual choice and not City coercion. Cities may have requirements for City registration, and may tax insiders or outsiders differently, but requirements are quantified as prohibitive or not. Again, the methods by which such quantifications are made are instituted by consensus, and change but slowly. Before and after the comet Yandel-Yokum impact of AE832, the 3rd Law was widely suspended as Cities struggled to accommodate enormous population transfers from destroyed or abandoned Cities. This disruption of the System resulted in numerous crises across Akan, including the First NLE Crisis of AE835.
The 4th City Law is that intercity aggression and standing armies are jointly prohibited. Police forces, when they exist, are required to demonstrate that they cannot project force beyond the borders of their respective Cities. Intercity violence triggers intervention from other, non-involved Cities. Given that much of human life in AE852 is virtual, lived through machines and computer networks distributed, in some cases, over many Cities, just what constitutes 'force' is a recurring controversy. It is currently agreed that physical and virtual force should generally be treated as equivalent.
The Tensor Law, effectively the Last City Law (if I knew exactly how many there were, it would be the Nth), institutes the agency of the City Law Enforcers. These are a system of inspector-judges who quietly monitor and evaluate the legal performance of the Cities. Their power derives from the CLE Tensor, a mathematical instantiation of the City Laws, to which individual CLEs (in English, "see-el-eez", not "kleez") are neurologically bound - the Tensor acts as a key for the agents, giving them unrestricted access to City networks all over Akan, but also acts as a strict behavioral constraint: agents are prohibited from directly interfering in City affairs. All of their judgments and observations are reported through public channels to the Intercity Congress, although they strive to act in secrecy. The CLEs are not under the direct control of the IC, however: they act autonomously in accord with the Tensor. CLEs are widely seen as incorruptible and infallible. Changes to the Tensor, like changes to any individual City Law, require IC consensus, and happen only very, very slowly.
By the way, a story from a while back was told from the point of view of an individual CLE.
Other Laws establish the responsibilities and limits of Intercity governance of natural resources, of interplanetary space, and of inhabited areas outside City borders.
The Second NLE Crisis, the subject of the novel, is where this system is subjected to a serious and perhaps permanent breach. What happens when the best course of action is to abandon a deeply entrained system that has persisted for nearly a thousand years?
Anyways, I still think about the story sometimes. Maybe someday I'll finish it. Yesterday I was thinking about the world that I had set up, vaguely, in the background. It's a reflection of some of my political thinking, but I never made any of it really concrete, just alluding to details here and there. A lot more of it is put together in my head than there in the story. Since it's on my mind, though, I thought maybe I'd write some of it out here. First some background for the background:
The story is centered on a few characters over the course of two days of what I would call the Second NEL Crisis. The setting is the distant future (the year Akan Era 852, sometime during the fourth millennium of the Common Era), on the planet Akan, populated by hundreds of millions of humans. Soon after the initial phases of the colonization, interstellar ships stopped arriving from Earth, and there has been no contact between the worlds in more than 800 years. It is unknown what stopped the ships, but some sort of natural or man-made disaster is assumed to have severely disrupted Earth's civilization, which was already dangerously unstable.
The Akan civilization is based around something called the City System, where the only sovereign entities are city-states, of which there are hundreds, and where certain rules maintain the independence and adaptability of the units of the System. Different Cities (always capitalized in this context) operate under different rules, according to their own preferences. Some may be libertarian or anarchistic, some may be communistic or totalitarian, etc., but they all have to abide by certain City Laws, established long ago, which ensure the stability of the overall system. There must be a dozen or more of these Laws, but I have only really thought about a few of of them:
The 1st City Law institutes an Intercity Congress, where revisions to the original laws are discussed and passed. Decisions can only be made through consensus of the entire body, so as new Cities are added, deliberations slow down more and more. Revisions to the Laws typically take decades. The more immediate responsibility of the IC is to monitor the City Law Enforcement Agency, which is discussed below.
The 2nd City Law is that no City may make administrative decisions for another: the Independence Law. Administrative control is measured quantitatively, and if more than half of a City's administration can be traced to other Cities, then it is the responsibility of demonstrably independent Cities to rectify the problem through mediation. Naturally, the methods for measuring control are controversial, and change with the times, but they have to be universally applied and agreed on through consensus. A result of the consensus requirement is that while the control measures do change with the times, they change very slowly, and the main problem with them is usually that they are seen as out of date. Consensus on new terms can take generations, and only a few dozen methods have been fully instituted over the 852 years of Akan history.
The 3rd City Law is that all citizens must be able to enter and leave Cities freely: the Open City Law. So, Cities cannot block entry by citizens, and cannot prevent citizens from leaving. The standard exception to this rule is that citizens may be arrested or imprisoned; immigration and emigration, however, are held to be out of the fundamental control of the Cities. Some cities may have such strange and insular cultures that few outsiders want to join, or that few insiders feel capable of disconnecting, but these situations are quantified as matters of individual choice and not City coercion. Cities may have requirements for City registration, and may tax insiders or outsiders differently, but requirements are quantified as prohibitive or not. Again, the methods by which such quantifications are made are instituted by consensus, and change but slowly. Before and after the comet Yandel-Yokum impact of AE832, the 3rd Law was widely suspended as Cities struggled to accommodate enormous population transfers from destroyed or abandoned Cities. This disruption of the System resulted in numerous crises across Akan, including the First NLE Crisis of AE835.
The 4th City Law is that intercity aggression and standing armies are jointly prohibited. Police forces, when they exist, are required to demonstrate that they cannot project force beyond the borders of their respective Cities. Intercity violence triggers intervention from other, non-involved Cities. Given that much of human life in AE852 is virtual, lived through machines and computer networks distributed, in some cases, over many Cities, just what constitutes 'force' is a recurring controversy. It is currently agreed that physical and virtual force should generally be treated as equivalent.
The Tensor Law, effectively the Last City Law (if I knew exactly how many there were, it would be the Nth), institutes the agency of the City Law Enforcers. These are a system of inspector-judges who quietly monitor and evaluate the legal performance of the Cities. Their power derives from the CLE Tensor, a mathematical instantiation of the City Laws, to which individual CLEs (in English, "see-el-eez", not "kleez") are neurologically bound - the Tensor acts as a key for the agents, giving them unrestricted access to City networks all over Akan, but also acts as a strict behavioral constraint: agents are prohibited from directly interfering in City affairs. All of their judgments and observations are reported through public channels to the Intercity Congress, although they strive to act in secrecy. The CLEs are not under the direct control of the IC, however: they act autonomously in accord with the Tensor. CLEs are widely seen as incorruptible and infallible. Changes to the Tensor, like changes to any individual City Law, require IC consensus, and happen only very, very slowly.
By the way, a story from a while back was told from the point of view of an individual CLE.
Other Laws establish the responsibilities and limits of Intercity governance of natural resources, of interplanetary space, and of inhabited areas outside City borders.
The Second NLE Crisis, the subject of the novel, is where this system is subjected to a serious and perhaps permanent breach. What happens when the best course of action is to abandon a deeply entrained system that has persisted for nearly a thousand years?
Friday, July 20, 2012
update
that last entry was kind of embarrassing. guess it's worthwhile to keep a record of peaks in frustration.
anyways, kind of better now. with the data from the new rivalry experiment, i was 1) making an error in the processing, and 2) even with the error corrected it was a dumb analysis. i did the 'better' analysis, which i had had in mind but thought would be more complicated than it was (and which did require that that error was fixed), and got basically what i was looking for: before a target is reported as seen, there is an increase in its strength.
i then tried to expand it out, looking for effects in non-target locations. this also seems to work; i'll have to figure out how to separate the effects of spatial correlation in target strength, i.e. a part (maybe the major part) of these peripheral effects will be non-interesting because they will be firmly tied to the central target effect.
i also will need to make the analysis more specific, since each time a target is reported, it matters whether the transition is from a different report or an absence of report. this makes a difference in how the data are interpreted: 1) the increase in stimulus strength caused a dominance change (if there was an immediately previous report of a different target), 2) the increase in stimulus strength firmed up an indeterminate state (if the previous report was 'mixed'), or 3) the increase in stimulus strength made the current dominance state noticeable, i.e. made the target color visible.3
so, i expect that i will need much more data to make these sorts of different relationships clear. i will collect another half-hour's worth of data today, then i'll have more than an hour total. may be able to get something interesting out of that...
anyways, kind of better now. with the data from the new rivalry experiment, i was 1) making an error in the processing, and 2) even with the error corrected it was a dumb analysis. i did the 'better' analysis, which i had had in mind but thought would be more complicated than it was (and which did require that that error was fixed), and got basically what i was looking for: before a target is reported as seen, there is an increase in its strength.
i then tried to expand it out, looking for effects in non-target locations. this also seems to work; i'll have to figure out how to separate the effects of spatial correlation in target strength, i.e. a part (maybe the major part) of these peripheral effects will be non-interesting because they will be firmly tied to the central target effect.
i also will need to make the analysis more specific, since each time a target is reported, it matters whether the transition is from a different report or an absence of report. this makes a difference in how the data are interpreted: 1) the increase in stimulus strength caused a dominance change (if there was an immediately previous report of a different target), 2) the increase in stimulus strength firmed up an indeterminate state (if the previous report was 'mixed'), or 3) the increase in stimulus strength made the current dominance state noticeable, i.e. made the target color visible.3
so, i expect that i will need much more data to make these sorts of different relationships clear. i will collect another half-hour's worth of data today, then i'll have more than an hour total. may be able to get something interesting out of that...
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
pathetic
okay, i was trying to use this site as a journal, somewhere i could type as a habit, and then take advantage of the indexing and all-in-the-same-placeness of it. the cloudiness, as the kids call it.
but now, for more than a week, i'm just whining into it. whine whine whine. i'm getting sick of myself, and here i have myself, whining into a recording. and i'm keeping score. and i actually look at the web stats to see if anyone visits, even though i am basically not linked to anything. well, i'm linked to the facebook profile, but apparently i don't have any stalkers.
today i got reviews back on a paper submitted more than 3 months ago. not terrible - the editor seems to like it, and one reviewer seems fine with it, and the other reviewer was ambivalent. but they all hate my writing. yes. dense, detailed, opaque, confusing. i keep.. getting.. those.. comments. why? this time, i'm going to blame it on the process. this paper took 2 years and a dozen versions to get assembled and submitted. the main result was scooped, so i came up with some more peripheral material and tried to integrate it, while at the same time trying to please my boss by going along with his terminology suggestions. well, i think the peripheral stuff is going to get cut, at least mostly, and i'm going to go for standard wording. i tried to write for commoners, and it didn't work. the strain was showing. so i'm going to go back to writing for myself, which is what i did in the currently almost-done paper that's about to be sent to the same journal.
okay, that was that whine. next, i talk with a colleague today, t*, and he shows me what he's working on, and mentions that his paper is out on his previous project, and i'm so jealous. not so much jealous of him, as i am hateful of myself. i feel like i've done everything wrong. every single thing. wrong.
then, to top that off, i collect a half hour's worth of data - which is more than it sounds like - on this new experiment i've been slowly, gradually, painstakingly working towards getting started. the basic form of the data, the form i had been looking at in the pilot experiment, looked just fine. then i thought i'd take a shot at the planned analysis, correlation between recording data and video statistics - nothing. flat lines. garbage. i really hope i did something wrong, or that i'm really not thinking about the computations in the right way, otherwise, it's really back to the drawing board. this should have worked.
so, day of self-hate and frustration complete. whine whine whine. who are you, what are you doing here?
but now, for more than a week, i'm just whining into it. whine whine whine. i'm getting sick of myself, and here i have myself, whining into a recording. and i'm keeping score. and i actually look at the web stats to see if anyone visits, even though i am basically not linked to anything. well, i'm linked to the facebook profile, but apparently i don't have any stalkers.
today i got reviews back on a paper submitted more than 3 months ago. not terrible - the editor seems to like it, and one reviewer seems fine with it, and the other reviewer was ambivalent. but they all hate my writing. yes. dense, detailed, opaque, confusing. i keep.. getting.. those.. comments. why? this time, i'm going to blame it on the process. this paper took 2 years and a dozen versions to get assembled and submitted. the main result was scooped, so i came up with some more peripheral material and tried to integrate it, while at the same time trying to please my boss by going along with his terminology suggestions. well, i think the peripheral stuff is going to get cut, at least mostly, and i'm going to go for standard wording. i tried to write for commoners, and it didn't work. the strain was showing. so i'm going to go back to writing for myself, which is what i did in the currently almost-done paper that's about to be sent to the same journal.
okay, that was that whine. next, i talk with a colleague today, t*, and he shows me what he's working on, and mentions that his paper is out on his previous project, and i'm so jealous. not so much jealous of him, as i am hateful of myself. i feel like i've done everything wrong. every single thing. wrong.
then, to top that off, i collect a half hour's worth of data - which is more than it sounds like - on this new experiment i've been slowly, gradually, painstakingly working towards getting started. the basic form of the data, the form i had been looking at in the pilot experiment, looked just fine. then i thought i'd take a shot at the planned analysis, correlation between recording data and video statistics - nothing. flat lines. garbage. i really hope i did something wrong, or that i'm really not thinking about the computations in the right way, otherwise, it's really back to the drawing board. this should have worked.
so, day of self-hate and frustration complete. whine whine whine. who are you, what are you doing here?
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