random report

random thoughts after a trip home:

politics:I had the idea that you can view different political philosophies by how they respond to (or acknowledge) a certain axiom, that the state is effectively the ultimate master of all people, that any individual is subject in all ways to the power of the government. Fascists acknowledge the axiom and embrace it, they treat the state as a parent and the people as children, and they endeavor to make the state worthy of this status and authority. Anarchists, while they also acknowledge the axiom, view it as the reason that there can be no state, why the state has to be overthrown and dismantled and prevented from recurring. Anarchists will say that people should be their own masters (or not even that), and that no one should ever make himself master of any other. Socialists are the third group that acknowledge the axiom, but they seek to make the state somehow equivalent with the people - through democratic means - so that while it is still true, it becomes unconcerning, since now the people are their own masters, through the mechanism of the state. American libertarians - and the model American political philosophy that is given lip service but not much actual credit - believe that the state has the potential, which has usually been fulfilled, to take on the role of master of all its subjects, but that it can be contained and controlled like a pack animal. I think that Americans in fact, in their popular political system, actually take on aspects simultaneously of socialism and fascism, believing that the state is a function of democracy at the same time that it is - and I think this is a contradiction with the first property - a benevolent external force that requires respect and adoration. The American left and right both take this attitude, but toward different aspects, although in my systematization they are mostly deluded into thinking that they are model Americans, i.e. libertarians. I guess I am closer to a libertarian than anything else, though if there is some label that applies to a half social anarchist half american libertarian, it would mostly cover me (I like NASA and public healthcare and the NIH).

headache: A really irritating headache on Friday, which I think was partly provoked by jumping jacks in the afternoon and magnified by beer in the evening. Two aspirin either did nothing to help or kept it from getting much worse. Not sure this was a migraine, but I think it was. I could feel it mostly above my right eye, and could actually touch it at the supraorbital foramen. By this I mean that by pressing on this spot, I could modulate the main locus of pain; this is a common sort of property of my headaches. This is just one specific branch of the trigeminal nerve, and except for some slight twinge of pain in my right maxilla, I couldn't find any other specific locus. So, I don't know if this qualifies as 'migraine', or if it's actually some sort of ophthalmic nerve neuritis, but just by scanning a google search of 'migraine and trigeminal nerve', you can see that there is thought to be a strong link between migraine pain and over-excitatory dysfunction of neurons in the trigeminal nucleus, so...

Also, had a nice conversation with my aunt about migraine. So along with my mother and her, she says that my grandmother also had headaches, but not my grandfather, so that must be where it comes from.

work/writing: I realized that the project I'm currently working on would be good to divide into two papers: one on the broader aspects of blur adaptation and the connection to contrast adaptation (which I hope to have data on by the end of this week), and the other on the absence of phase-blur adaptation. The latter might make a good PLoS-1 paper.

endojan

it's the end of january, so why not throw in another entry?

i revamped my priority ranking system yesterday, surprisingly quickly, in the form of a matlab script (the spreadsheet had gotten too complicated, as tasks were completed and added and modified..). right away it showed me that i should do one small job that i had been putting off for months, and so i did it.

it's kind of sad how by forcing structure on my life in such a simple way - write a computer program to sort out a list of the things i have to do - it immediately becomes undeniable that i have to do something. without this little trick, i am apparently lost in a haze, unable to see what is right in front of me. i suspect it is because i am hiding things from myself, and i still do not understand why.

also, tuesday afternoon, i was smacked with an idea and sat down and wrote a story. i satisfied a secret desire today by sending it in to the Nature Futures series. of course, i'm sure a hundred people do this every day, but i couldn't think of a reason not to attempt it - and i decided not to go through a dozen rounds of revising the story, showing it to friends, etc. etc., just because it's so nice not to have to do that for once. anyways, when it's rejected, i'll put it here so we can have it all to ourselves, won't that be nice?

enough. it's time for february.

TKD CSD

So, 4 days ago I dreamed of seeing a scintillating scotoma, and then became vaguely paranoid of how inconvenient it would be to have one on Sunday morning before my black belt test; then, today, after I'm home from the test and from grocery shopping, I for some reason start a conversation with j* about how migraines can be associated with relaxation after stress, and tell her the story of VanValkenburgh's Vacation; and this afternoon, coming in with the groceries, i get distracted for a little while by a foveal afterimage, probably from the sun glinting off a car windshield - but maybe it was something else. Yesterday, or a couple of days ago, I was distracted for maybe a minute by the noisiness of my visual field, having momentarily noticed how snowy everything looked. I think that was Friday...

So finally, about 9pm tonight, in the kitchen about to explain to j* why my shoulder hurts (because I briefly dislocated it by swinging my arm wildly at an odd angle towards an 18-year old), I realize that my foveal vision feels scotoma-like (if there is a word for 'feels like a scotoma', I don't know what it is. Specific feels, like 'rough', or 'bright', or 'salty', have specific, ancient, singular morphemes attached to them, so it's hard to invent a new word for a new feeling, or for one that is rare or obscure enough that it hasn't been named). I pick up a knife and start trying to use the sharp tip, at arm's length, to find a blind spot, but can't find it; the start is always odd, since I think the scotoma is very small and maybe discontinuous, and maybe even not binocular. For whatever reason, I can tell that it's there, but it's often hard to find. Then, as I've mentioned many times here, it seems to disappear; then it reappears.

This one was right field; headache is very slight, I felt it start midway through the aura, as a little jolt of pain, then disappeared. I have to shake my head to feel it; possibly would be a little worse if I hadn't taken an ibuprofen soon after the scotoma was after, though I took it for my shoulder...

So I got another recording with scotmap, which I think is good, but all my code from last summer is written implicitly for a left-field scotoma, and my code is complicated and uncommented, so it will take me a little while to straighten it out and make another good animation to post up here. I do have the data transformed and fitted to the wave model I came up with, and the result is very similar to the last measurement: exactly 3mm/min, starting a few millimeters on the V2 side of the inferior V1/V2 border, 10 or so millimeters from the foveal confluence. This is consistent with my feeling that there is a scotoma, and yet being unable to see it directly; the scotoma begins in V2.

There's something weird at the end, a bunch of data at a much smaller eccentricity; this may be an error, I don't think it's the 'rough spot' that I have mentioned before. Will work it out this week.

Meanwhile, here's a general migraine data plot, relating my estimates of headache intensity on a 10-point scale (notice what a fortunate migraineur I am) to the time elapsed since the previous headache. Most of these ratings are retrospective, based on these journal entries. I see a relationship: more frequent means more intense. The outlier at zero is the night in China last month, where there was no headache at all, which I attributed to the simultaneous alcohol intake with the aura.


In other news, I have failed to make progress this weekend on E*'s presentation.

Also, saw a nice show at the BSO last night: Hindemith, Liszt, and Prokofiev.

year

briefly, because we don't want to dwell on this:

what did we accomplish last year? what did we intend to accomplish?

1a. submitted a fellowship proposal, which was rejected
1b. submitted an R01 proposal, which will be reviewed in 2 weeks (and likely rejected)
3a. submitted 2.5 papers, one published (so we are not zero for 2012), one more accepted, one heavily revised (if all goes well, should be 3+ for 2013)
3b. wrote the classification spectrum paper that is in a holding pattern
4a. completed a binocular rivalry experiment that will make a paper someday, and learned to model binocular rivalry
4b. started a new and improved blur adaptation experiment that is interesting
4c. created a model of my visual cortex that can be fit to my migraine auras
5. wrote a lot in HAZ public journal
6. applied for my first real job
7. learned 14/15 of the bach inventions (9 or 10 of which i didn't already know)
8. trained for my black belt in tkd (testing soon) without getting seriously hurt
9. settled on some new ways of organizing my work (subversion, dropbox, zotero etc etc)

what for this year?
1. find a new job
2a. finally publish the blur adapt paper
2b. submit/publish the classification spectrum paper
2c. write and submit the rivalry paper (short and model-free)
2d. present the new adaptation work and write a paper
3a. learn at least half of the bach sinfonias
3b. learn to sing and play piano at the same time
4a. continue with the journal entries, get back to work-related, less of the self-stuff
4b. start writing journal entries in chinese with some regularity
5a. do the computational experiment in the R01 proposal, funded or not
5b. find somebody to collaborate with on something... hm...
5c. plan some new experiments beyond the proposal stuff