Binding Problem

I am still evolving, as I read all this NCC stuff, but in testing myself and my thinking, I find that I produce something very similar to what I have produced several times in the past year or so (also under the Vision tag):

My view has been that the phenomenal visual scene can be likened to a stack of qualia or phenomenal properties, all simultaneously experienced or bound together in such a way that it is often difficult to see the bound parts as distinct from one another, although they are distinguishable in principle. The root of this stack is the set of phenomenal properties that I believe are most often identified with ‘qualia’, i.e. properties that have scalar magnitudes or intensities. Brightness and darkness, color, contrast, and then at a slightly higher order, orientation, scale, direction, speed. These are familiar as physical objects of study either in the psychophysical field of spatial vision, or as determinants of sensitivity in the neurophysiology of the first few synapses of the initial retinocortical pathway for visual encoding. But they are not the only phenomenal properties of visual scenes, and in fact they are not the properties of scenes that we spend the most of our ordinary visual time analyzing. Instead, we spend most of our visual effort attending to more fuzzily inferred properties of the scene: identities, utilities, depths, valences, affordances. These are the properties of a scene that are immediately apparent to us, but they are the ones that require the most inference: the shape and meaning of a word; not so much its contrast or color, which we can easily adapt to and forget, although they remain in our phenomenal consciousness. I am reminded what Foucault said regarding the multiple layers of a calligram: “As a sign, the letter permits us to fix words; as line, it lets us give shape to things.” All these things are simultaneously present and part of the seen scene, but we tend to attend selectively to certain levels.

I think it is clear from this conception of the phenomenal scene that indicating the presence of phenomenal properties, i.e. that something is present in consciousness, requires the presence of the higher level inferences, but not necessarily of the lower level ‘root’. I can daydream or close my eyes and continue to experience visual phenomena, although they are indistinct and insubstantial, and I can tell you about what I experienced, and then we can argue over whether or not visual imagery constitute visual phenomena. However, if all I have is the spatial scene, but I am unable to make any inferences about it, then I cannot report anything about it – reporting presumes context, or cause, or object, and these all require higher level inferences. Or rather, perhaps I could report, but my reports would be nearly meaningless, not least because objective meaning is tied to subjective meaning, which is what we have removed in this example. My reports would, at best, maybe with some minimal inferences, allow me to transmit information about the perceptual magnitude of local, ‘low-level’ features. I would then be performing in a psychophysics experiment, and you would probably be using signal detection theory to interpret my responses. Norma Graham noted the strange convenience of this situation more than 20 years ago, when she noted, “It is (or we can hope it is) as if the simplicity of the experimental situation has made all the higher level stages practically transparent.”

[last Monday, the 13th,  I woke up with a great headache that lasted more than 48 hours. left side on the first day, right side on the second. nothing else particularly interesting.]

notes after midnight on May 17, 2013

When I was about 12, I could go outside some afternoons, in my backyard, and see giant helicopters flying across the sky, with what looked like trucks and tanks suspended below on long cables, in long processions, one giant helicopter after another. That would have been nineteen-ninety, ninety-one, the Gulf War. Just now, on my last night in this house, to which my family moved in winter of nineteen eighty-five, when I wasn't yet six years old, I went out to the car to get the computer that I'm now writing on, and I hear a roar, a helicopter, coming from the southeast. I stand and wait to see it, and can't find it, as it's getting so loud that I can feel the vibrations. I'm confused at the conflict between what I hear and what I don't see, just a sky of stars, and then I see it, an enormous shadow, a blank space against the stars, flanked by dim lights, and the sound I hear finds its match.

Now I lay on the floor of the living room, what we called the room where my mother's pianos sat for more than 25 years, which is now empty but for little piles of human junk here and there. I'm sleeping here just for the strangeness of it, and because I figure if I sleep in my old bedroom, a smaller space as the boy who painted cats might advise me, I will get a cave cricket in the mouth. Usually a room looks larger when you clear it out, but the piano room looks smaller without the pianos. The true nature of the house is revealed in this room, a set of almost ramshackle wooden boxes, this room the boxiest of all of them.

I get to hear the crickets and frogs outside, and the constant truck of I-40. I mentioned the stars. And I get to spend one last night in this string of boxes in the countryside, set in an undrainable swamp, in the Harpeth hills. Only yesterday did I get that cliched phrase - you have these hills or those hills, hills is an appendage for a pleasant or obscure prependage. But this place is in the hills, and it was flooded by the Harpeth only 3 years ago, so I think it deserves the name.

I'm not sure what to make of all of it. I never quite understood my surroundings when I lived here, I only saw what was just at my nose and never questioned it or looked further, though I thought I did. Now I think I know how to see further, but coming back here and wandering around, I feel the old ignorance surface, and it's a strange feeling of simultaneously knowing where I am and never having known, and really only knowing that I'll probably never be back.

may may may

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

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

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

midnight aura

Olive the Cat wakes me up every morning sometime between 2 and 5, and I go put food in her bowl. This morning, at 2:30, I'm awakened by her scratching at the baseboard, and as I wake up I think I see fortification spectrum... turns out I'm about halfway through an aura. Left visual field, about 15 minutes in (noting for reference that the pain is on the right side, supraorbital nerve). I debated turning on the computer so I could record the remainder, but I think it was too far along to be worthwhile. The spectrum extended from fovea straight left, then arced downward. I watched it for a while - I'm still impressed at how straight it is at that point, I wonder if the CSD wave somehow gets caught up in the base of the calcarine sulcus.

The scotoma seemed very small, even when the wave was well into the periphery the blind region didn't seem thicker than the scintillations. The scintillations were very clear, whereas usually I don't see them very clearly - maybe because I was dark adapted the whole time, or my brain was in a sleepytime state, or maybe it was just a random thing. I did notice that closing my eyes, even though it didn't change the apparent luminance of the scene very much, made the phosphenes completely disappear for several seconds, and they would fade back into view only weakly, slowly. I couldn't go back to sleep for ~45 minutes. Ears were almost ringing, headache started. Minor, 5/10.

Yesterday, and maybe Thursday, several times, I noticed flashes, spots, in my periphery, and thought, 'something is up'. Yesterday afternoon, I'm sitting at my computer, reading text near the lower bezel, and I feel I see a phosphene or blind spot just below fixation, where the aura usually starts - it lasts ~10 seconds and disappears. Maybe that represented a false start? The cortex is weakly susceptible, and maybe there are false starts, and then it kicks off - or doesn't. Also, after the syncope episode, I've started to wonder if the tinnitus I get now and then is, at least sometimes, an aura - I had an episode yesterday.

I was dreaming about something as I woke up, and it seemed relevant somehow, but of course I've completely forgotten it now.

feeling very aggravated today, not going to say why. i want a new job. i said too much already.

intermittent intense photophobia the last couple of days, and much of today a strange buzzing distant feeling - could be that aggravation, but i'm voting prodrome. see what happens in the next few days.

ugh. is this even worth posting? i wrote a poem on patriot's day about the marathon bombing, but i'm not going to show it to you. it was four stanzas, four lines each, with a loose rhyme scheme as follows: xxxA, xxxB, ccxA xxxB. that's all you're getting.

i feel like my mind is a dismantled car engine, pieces scattered across the floor. is that how it seems to other people? my mind, i mean, is that how it seems to them, when they perceive it? what am i saying, when do others have an opportunity to perceive my mind? ugh. a dismantled engine scattered across the floor in a locked room, and the lights are too bright.

syncope

quick note:

went for the mri tonight; radiologist said everything looks ok, but wait to see what the neurologist says; and i can come get a copy of the pictures next week. mri was interesting, hypnotic, staring at a blank plastic surface inches from your face, keeping absolutely still, listening and feeling these musical, super loud rhythms coming from the machine.

interesting in a different way was what happened first: the nurse tried to put a contrast agent into my blood through a vein in my arm; she failed on the first time, sticking the needle into the vein and through the other side; the second time, she hit a nerve, and i went into vasovagal syncope.

everything started to tingle, my field of view started to fade, i broke into a sweat, i felt nauseated, and then

then, everything was black, and i didn't know anything or sense anything - yet i had some sort of minimal awareness. i had a vague feeling of waking up from a deep sleep in a place i didn't know. i remember feelings that i associate in some way with sunlight, trees, and mountains. i felt confused.

then, i started to feel my body - i was in a chair, but i couldn't move. why am i in a chair? where am i?

then i started to hear a shuffling sound, loud and abrasive, felt my body being rifled back and forth - the confusion was growing.

then my vision came back - when i asked her later, the nurse said my eyes were open all along, deviated down and leftward - and only then i remembered i was in the MRI clinic. at first i thought, when did i go to sleep? i wasn't sleepy.., and then i realized that i must have passed out. everything started to come back.

the nurse was calling for the doctor and others to come, and struggling to put a blood pressure meter on my arm. the sounds were all muffled for about 30 seconds or so, as though i had earplugs in. at the same time, there was intense tinnitus.

after a few minutes i felt normal again. the shuffling noise, i think, was blood rushing back into my ears, and maybe also the agitated movements of the nurse. i was soaked with sweat. they gave me a can of juice and an oxygen tube in my nose. i didn't notice anything interesting about the oxygen. i talked with the amused radiology resident, Amad, and we decided not to do the 'GAT', the contrast, unless the scan turned up something worrying, which it didn't.

this was the first time i've ever passed out, but i often get woozy from needles, getting blood drawn etc, and i stopped giving blood in college because each time the wooziness got worse - the last time i couldn't walk out of the clinic, had to lie down for 20 minutes. point is, this wasn't important, just weird.

so, the quick note is: order of losing consciousness - all at once. order of regaining consciousness - awareness of self, body, hearing, and vision. glad i've been reading those tononi papers - i would estimate my phi went something like this:

physics and psychophysics

reading papers on "information integration theory" lately. up to this most recent one - barrett and seth, PLoS-CB 2011 - i had an okay grasp on the math, but now i'm considering skimming. the first author of this paper is a theoretical physicist by training, so i don't feel too bad that i can't quite take it. feeling a little bad led me to this train of thought:

in my field of psychophysics we use mathematics to describe human behaviors, with those behaviors driven by simple physical stimuli. some psychophysical models can be rather complicated, but the more complicated they get, the less realistic they get, because so to speak they inevitably start biting off more than they can chew. for example, channel theory is a bunch of mathematical objects, but they have to be fit to particular contexts. even a simple psychophysical rule or law involves constants that vary from person to person, from apparatus to apparatus.

no one in psychophysics should fool themselves into thinking that they can someday come down to a simultaneously correct and meaningful mathematical theory of whatever phenomenon they are studying, because every phenomenon is an artificially isolated part of a much more complicated whole, and the ways that the circumstances of the phenomenon can be varied are nearly infinite. but thankfully, no one in psychophysics does, i think, fool themselves this far; we recognize that mathematics is a good tool for getting a handle on what we are studying, at the same time that what we are studying is clearly variable in ways that we can only hope not to approximate too poorly. for us, mathematics is an operational description of what we're studying.

in physics, on the other hand, they have things down to the level where you will hear physicists talk about mathematical objects and physical phenomena as more-or-less the same thing. quarks and bosons, gravity and magnetic fields, are things that are only really understood through mathematics. my knowledge of physics mostly comes from reading feynman and hawking, and watching random lectures (and once having been a physics undergrad, briefly), so it's not like i have anything like an up-close viewpoint of the physicist's perspective, but i think this viewpoint is plainly very popular. john wheeler talked about the root of all reality being information, which is only a mathematical construction as far as the human mind is concerned - obviously he felt the isomorphism was close enough to make this sort of claim.

apparently, for physicists to achieve this nearly perfect mathematical description of physical reality, the mathematics had to get pretty complicated. so, when you read a paper by a physicist on a topic that you feel like you should have a good handle on - you're a psychologist, the topic is consciousness - you have quite a bit of difficulty in parsing his descriptions, even though you realize that he's not talking about anything approaching the sophistication of string theory or QED.

so.. i'll go back and give it another 20 minutes, maybe make it another half-page. also, tomorrow night i'm having an MRI of my neck, to check for dissections in my carotid arteries. fun fun fun.

(only now did i realize that this topic would have been perfect for a new dialogue.. maybe i will recast it?)

visual cortex is weird

Migraine weirdness:
1. The weekend after the AF, neck was constantly sore in a weird way. No sign of headache. Soreness disappeared yesterday (Monday).
2. Monday saw waves of photophobia, but it never lasted more than twenty minutes or so, or it was low-level enough that I could adapt to it, and wouldn't notice until the ambient light changed.
3. Today, a bit of photophobia and a faint headache, slightly nauseated. Am I just hyper-sensitive? Also, this morning when I awoke, saw the m-scaled lattice that I've mentioned before; it flashes on for just a few hundred milliseconds, and fades as the morning-light bedroom scene comes into view. I would say it looks most like Form Constant III as described by Bressloff et al (no I am not on any drugs, though Bressloff prefers to refer to drug-induced hallucinations):

(This image is from Bressloff et al's 2002 Neural Computation paper. Note the coincidental opposite symmetry between this kind of m-scaled 'spiral' pattern and the ancestor map in the previous post, which can be seen as another kind of spiral lattice - something like what you'd get if you plotted a flat lattice in the visual field and looked it it in cortical space.)

Also, to reiterate an observation I made in the AF post, in light of reading all this stuff about integrated information and consciousness over the past few days: migraine scotoma are invisible, unlike the disturbingly visible grayness I saw when my left retina stopped working. The normal explanation for the invisibility of cortical scotoma is that it is "filled in", which I've always felt was fishy.. I know it's well-studied, and now I'll have to read about it.

My feeling is that there is no filling in, at least not in the way it's usually talked about, but rather that the scotoma is a scotoma in visual space period - if you don't see the space, you don't see any blankness, and you see the scene continue directly from one side to the other, not knowing any better. Maybe it's hard to justify this intuition, but I think it's similar to noting (as hemianopia patients do) that beyond the edges of the visual field, there's not an expanse of nothingness, but rather no expanse at all. If there is no expanse, there is no edge, so you get the strange condition of not being able to see the boundaries of your own visual field, because the boundary would have to be defined as between two expanses. With a proper mapping between visual direction and field location, you can be properly aware of the geometry of the visible field, without any need for it to be bounded. (Put another way, topologically, the space behind my head is equivalent to a hole in the visual field - if I can't perceive that space as being bounded by the same boundary as the visible field, why should I be able to see the boundaries, and the invisible expanse, of a cortical scotoma?)

ancestral geography

 

I've not been working on this too much, but I took a couple of hours yesterday to fill in another space in my records, and then I got the idea to make the figure you see here. The tree plot is a map of all my known ancestors, with their distances from the center scaled to their birth years, relative to my birth year of 1979. Red lines are women, blue lines are men. The rings are labeled as to year.

The colored backgrounds indicate - by correspondence with the geographical map on the right - where these people were born, or at least where they spent their early lives. Where they combined to produce the next generation tells you, more or less, where they wound up.

The dominant region is clearly West Tennessee, whence hailed my mother's mother's people and my father's father's people, going back to before the Civil War (the double ring). My mother and many of her father's people came from Southeast Tennessee, part of the crimson. My father's mother's father came from Michigan, just across the border from the source of most of his family in northern Indiana, indicated by the magenta.

There's a lot of northern South Carolina, in the region of Spartanburg and, just across the border in southern North Carolina in Mecklenburg county, indicated by the yellow. A branch of my mother's mother's family had come through Kentucky, the light green.

Middle Tennessee, the olive green, has generated a number of us, including a part of my mother's father's family (the ill-fated Lewis Morgan and his mother Nancy Sewell, who must have been in the first generation born in Nashville), and my father and myself at the center.

If you follow this further out (I stopped 6 generations back, at the four-greats grandparents level), everyone that I know of is in Virginia (you can see those touches of orange in the periphery), South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, or Ireland. It is amazing what you can learn from the internet!

amaurosis fugax

Yesterday, about 5 o'clock, sitting at my desk. Go to stretch, arms behind me, pulling on my shoulder, started to greyout (I don't know a better term for this - whatever you call the visual consequence of ocular hypotension) just a bit - which is normal for me when I stretch after having sat still for too long - and instead of resolving the greyout continues. My field of view starts to fade in blotches, but I can still see - I realize that it's just in one eye. I close one, then the other, and now I know that the view from my left eye is fading.

I jump up and run to Eli's office, and by this time, my left eye view is almost completely blank, except for a space around the fovea, maybe 5° wide and 2° high. This makes sense - the foveal blood supply comes from the choroid, not the apparently blocked ophthalmic artery. The blankness is plainly visible as a flat gray. This is different from the scotoma of the migraine aura, which is as visible as the space behind my head. The boundary between the visible center and the blankness is shimmering, flickering, like the smoldering edge of slowly burning paper. Eli gets his ophthalmoscope to try and see what's happening, and the superior field starts to fade back into view.

It's then stable for about a minute, the inferior field is blank gray, and there's a smoldering horizontal boundary between the superior and inferior fields. I see some strange parafoveal phosphenes, like super-high contrast arcs. Eli is shining a light in my eye, and I'm shocked to realize that this bright light is totally failing to punch through the grayness. I wave my hand in the scotoma and though I can't see it, I feel like I can sense the motion.

The inferior nasal field returns, very subtly, so that I just realize it's back without noticing much about how it returns. It's patchy but quick - then the inferior temporal field returns. After this point, I can't find any other blind areas; everything has returned. In fact, I can't find any obvious differences between the two eyes, though at this time Eli is urging me to go to the ER to get examined. My heart is pounding and my head is starting to hurt. For the next 10-15 minutes, as I'm on my way to the hospital, I can see my pulse with the left eye, but then no more, and everything is back to normal.

Eli gets me in to see someone at MEEI, and I'm examined by an ophthalmology resident. The doctor pronounces this a case of ocular migraine, which as far as I understand means "we don't know, but everything looks ok".

Typical Wednesday afternoon. Hey, April is here!

**edit @ 16:21**

While I don't like the 'migraine' label, I guess I can't deny that there might be something to it. It is unknown what the proximal cause of a migraine is, though it's definitely associated with cortical spreading depression in the brain, the physiological correlate of a migraine aura; the current consensus seems to be that the CSD produces substances that inflame tissues in the brain, which then is perceived as pain, and which fits with the experience of headache beginning partway through the aura.

But what causes the CSD? One sure way to cause it is to deprive an area of cortex of blood - stroke causes CSD even in areas of cortex that still have blood supply but happen to be nearby the ischemic areas. So it could be that the aura/CSD is caused by a very local, transient ischemia. The ischemia can't be very large or long-lived because there don't tend to be other symptoms accompanying the well-described auras.

I would be happy if I could confirm that this episode is somehow related to the migraines, i.e. that I experienced a spasm of the ophthalmic artery of the same sort that I usually experience on a much smaller scale, and deeper in my brain, immediately preceding a migraine aura. I also do not feel much affection for this experience, in contrast to the fascinating auras - I hope this does not happen repeatedly, because I don't think it can be good for the retina to periodically starve it of oxygen.

boiling

1. Standing by the stove the other night, waiting for a kettle of water to boil - as it does, starting from the near-silent rattle through the increasing racket, and the whistle starting, and all the other noises that accompany that moment, I had the distinct feeling that I was hearing the big chromatic crescendo at the end of Prokofiev's great D-minor Toccata, one of my favorite piano pieces. It's not that I was fooled - this was not an auditory deja trompé, but something similar - but I've never felt a piece of familiar music so strongly evoked by some random physical event. It was definitely primed by having listened to that piece something like 10 times in the past week. Now whenever I hear that piece, when it gets to the silence at the end before the crescendo, I will think of a boiling kettle.

2. Horrible problems with the paper I've been working on and hoping to have submitted in a matter of days. A big part of the paper - the way that I interpret the data, basically - is a set of relatively simple contrast perception models which I run through the experiment as tests of different hypotheses. I had calibrated these to a set of human thresholds, which I was never quite comfortable with for various reasons, but that's the way I had done it; as a final touch to a figure, I decide to go and generate thresholds estimates for the 'best' model, to plot against the human data, just to show how similar they are, and when I go to do this, the model starts giving me imaginary numbers, which is bad.

By the time I figured out what was wrong - it wasn't really a problem, I was just not using my code properly - I had decided that calibrating the model to the thresholds for my humans was probably a bad idea, because the way I measured the human thresholds was kind of weird, and I could be sure of simulating these properly, so I should just use some standard thresholds. Why not? Nobody is going to argue with a standard CSF. So I plug a standard in and - and I'm going to note here that every time I do something with this model, I have to go and recompute the simulations, which takes hours - and it all goes haywire. The model that 'works', and that's consistent with all these nice facts that I've lined up and made a nice case out of, still works, but depending on how I implement the change in sensitivity, the alternatives either perform horribly - which you'd think is okay, but really doesn't look plausible, just makes it look like I haven't given them a fair chance - or they come out reasonably similar to the favored model.

So, I have to be fair, at the same time that I don't want everything to fall apart. I am certain that things work the way I think they do, and I'm prepared to be wrong, but if I'm wrong then I don't understand how I'm wrong. And building evidence either way progresses in these multi-hour steps in between which I'm sitting here with a stomach ache because I'm afraid that I'm going to wind up with evidence that my experiment isn't actually that good at discriminating these different models.

The problem seems to be in the low-frequency filters; the lowest frequency filter is basically four points in the Fourier domain, and it happens to take up a disproportionately huge amount of image contrast, so the 'not working' models tend to be uniformly low-pass in the simulation, which I know is not fair, because it's all because of that low frequency channel. So I figured that, since these are 'sustained' stimuli, I would be justified in just taking out the lowest few channels and leaving the top 5 or 6 band-pass channels - one thing here being that I'm not willing to go back and redesign everything to the point where we have low-frequency DC-sensitive channels. But then when I just have the mid-to-high frequency channels, the three models are too similar, which I don't like either, and which I know is just because I'm now allowing the low s.f. to get through. And I also know that this version, even though it has the 'standard' CSF, doesn't really because the lowest channels are shut off. So I turned them back on and changed the gain to the CSF, which I realized I had wrong the first time because....

Anyways, you see what I'm doing - changing more than one thing at a time, and making mistakes because I'm rushing it. This just prolongs everything, because every change, or every attempt to figure out what the effects of a change are, and every mistake, takes many hours to evaluate.

Anyways, high irritation and anxiety.

streamline

double post!? see if i can finish this in 9 minutes.

i finally brought home a hard drive adaptor from the lab so i could copy old files - random stuff - from my mb-dead-old thinkpad. so then i waste an hour or so looking through old text files mostly, going back almost to the start of graduate school (7 years!).

i have older files from older drives, and the further back they go, the more i hate myself; or, the more i hope and pray that i've gotten better. i always write a lot - before i ramped up this dumb journal, i wrote a lot in text or word files that then got thrown in a folder somewhere, so i have piles of examples of my bad writing. not all of it is that bad, really - i like to read myself, i know. some of it is awful, and some of it is embarrassing for showing how wrong i was about something, or naive; and sometimes its revealing because i see that i've been fixated on one issue or another for so many years.

i get done with this and go to have a look at the perceived contrast paper, which i keep saying is almost done, and i realize something: i can save it. i can make it better. i mean, i already think it's a cool paper, but i also have a feeling that no one will be able to read it. but having just waded through a stack of old forgotten pages, and looking at a new stack, i now know what i have to do:

get rid of the complicated figures - three of them, four panels each - and replace with one simple figure with 2 panels. no more of those heatmaps. just plot the function peaks. then, all the model stuff goes to an appendix. anyone who cares already knows all that stuff, or they're the type that likes appendices, so just shunt the calculations off to after the end of the paper. those two steps will hugely streamline the paper, should improve it greatly, make it much more readable. are you brave enough? just when you thought you were done, and you just want to finish it, will you go the extra mile? of course you will!

***QUICKLY***

00:00, no double post!

update march '13

nothing in particular to write about here, just an update on current events:

work
1. blur adapt paper is back in review; i want this one to be over.
2. classification spectrum paper nearing completion; i really like this one.
other work in progress (paper with SM et al, they seem receptive to my suggestions).
3. still need to discuss new experiment with CPT, putting that off; boss suggests writing up a paper on it to figure out which data needs replication the most.
4. started low-level talks with potential collaborators on the migraine-mapping stuff.
5. haven't applied for new jobs yet, NECO seems unlikely to respond.

other
6. reading a new book, "history of tennessee" by James Phelan, written in the 1880's (it's not tacitus, but it's free). he has a habit, sometimes interesting sometimes irritating, of making close analogies between seemingly asymmetric historical events, usually tennessee vs. england, and is fixated on 'anglo saxons'. interesting going at any rate--
7. on piano, mainly trying to master chopin's "minute waltz" over the past few weeks, if i can play it straight through in 2.5 minutes i'll be happy; also on music, greatly enjoying a 2 year old album of french electropop; the songs 'civilization' and 'ohio' are great background when your daydreaming about the colonization of america.
8. this paper on a rogue study using a research botnet to scan pretty much the entire internet is one of the most interesting things i've seen in a while. there's an awesome .gif figure in there, basically showing the earth's rotation in the average number of pingable public IP addresses plotted across the globe.
9. way too much time wasted on reddit, which i only just discovered lucky for me, and playing MH2.
10. i have a horrible, horrible urge to write a longer historical narrative centered around the life of Gideon Morgan. trying my best to resist...

A week later, and I'm still revising that previous post and investigating the identities of various great great etc grandparents. I'm not sure why, but I could guess; but I won't here.

Anyways, in reading about all these Morgans and Boatmans and so on, I've been experiencing a very entertaining picture of the American colonization of Tennessee. As far as I can tell, all of my ancestors around the time of the Civil War and in the preceding generation were in Tennessee or in the border regions with Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. So, I am - and I guess I had never really thought of this - as much of a Tennesseean as a person can possibly be, if you qualify 'Tennessee' as the American colonial state, and not as the prior nations of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and others.

'Colonial state' isn't what you normally hear as a description of a state like Tennessee. 'Pioneer' is usually the term, and certainly that's a good term for the people who were at the very forefront of the colonization, but colonization is absolutely the right word for the phenomenon. And in thinking about it this way, I can't help but understand it through the lens of what I had most recently been reading about: Rome.

Comparisons between Rome and the USA are passe, I know. But that's because the comparisons are usually negative, about degeneration and decadence, but like Matthew White says, that's kind of a recent thing. Earlier Americans were better able to see the parallels between what they were doing and with what the Romans had done in the days of the Republic: enlarging the republic through colonization.

So, I've had in my head the past few days a little comparison and contrast between the two phenomena. The simultaneous similarities and differences are most interesting.

1. The Romans had a single 'home' city. From there, they defeated surrounding tribes and set up new towns on the foundations of the defeated ones, and Romans went out and populated these places, building new cities in the image of Rome; so, Roman culture and language spread across Europe, but it was always tied back to Rome. With the Americans, it was different: there was a string of home cities along the Atlantic coast, from Boston down to Savannah. From these, colonists went west and defeated the local tribes and set up new towns on the foundations of old ones.

2. The initial phase of the Roman Republic, where the Italic and Etruscan tribes were conquered one-by-one, and where the Republic could kinda-sorta be identified with cisalpine Italy, could easily be likened to the pre-Revolutionary American colonial period, where the 13 colonies were consolidated east of the Appalachian mountains. The gradual transition between the Republican and Imperial periods - basically during the 9900's - was also a transition between Rome-as-Italy and Rome-as-Mediterranea. Similar, but much faster, was the transition between pre- and post-revolutionary America; no longer bound by British restrictions to the Eastern Province, the American colonization of the rest of the continent began, and so you have the Continental USA.

3. We're just at the end of that phase now, something like the Nervan dynasty of the 112th century. The borders are more-or-less set, the colonies are all established and mature, and everything is Roman/American within those bounds. But then, there's the third interesting contrast, and a more disturbing one: Roman colonies often, or probably usually, included a mostly indigenous population; Gauls and Belgians and Iberians and Germans and etc. There were enough Romans to make it so that everyone wound up speaking Roman in the end, but the Romans weren't genocidal and didn't practice ethnic cleansing as a rule. Americans, though... our colonies were established almost entirely by the white colonists and their black slaves. The native tribes - the American equivalents of Germans, Belgians, and Gauls were Mohawks, Apache, and Cherokee - had little impact on the colonies; they were absorbed on the fringes at first, and in the end they were exiled and excluded. Like I said up above, most of my ancestors arrived in Tennessee in the first generation or two of colonization, before the ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee and Chickasaw had happened, and while there was clearly a lot of mutual tolerance and intermarriage between the different societies, I don't think I have more than a percent or two of native ancestry. Their effect on the colonies was marginal, and then they were exiled.

I don't think the difference is that Romans were tolerant and Americans weren't. Romans were nasty people in a lot of ways. I think there were two important differences: First, there was a constant and inexhaustible supply of American colonists, coming in from England, Ireland, and elsewhere, whereas the Romans were limited by the numbers they already had in Rome and other big cities. So the Americans had a big positive multiplier to their numbers. Second, and this is more of a guess, there was a negative multiplier on the native Americans because of the century or so of plague that had destroyed their population and set their society in an inordinate degree of chaos; in contrast, the European tribes the Romans contended with hadn't been subjected to any terrible disasters or setbacks, they were just a little behind on the same curve as the Romans. With these two imbalances, the native Americans were overwhelmed too quickly, and so there wasn't time for the two groups to really learn to live together and combine. When differences arose, it was too easy for the whites just to force the Indians to leave, or as was the case earlier on, to exterminate them.

The Romans never could have forced all the Gauls out of France, just to end all the conflicts and yearly revolts and rebellions. The Roman military was strong enough to keep the Gauls from ever winning, but there were too many Gauls to drive out in a death march to Germany, and there wouldn't have been enough Romans to replace them anyways. The scenario just didn't make sense for the Romans, but it did for the Americans. Genocide was a viable alternative on the frontier. And so we have America, and Tennessee, and Me. Humanity is a difficult thing.