Just My Imagination

It's 2:30AM, I'm sick and I can't sleep so I'm looking up old music I heard when I was growing up. This one is called "Les Crapauds," or "the Toads." Not the loveliest of topics you'd think, but it's oddly one of the most beautiful songs I know.

A sample translation (part of the last verse):

When the moon plates varnished lacquer on the calm pools of the pale marshland
Then symbolic and melancolic, our slow hymn rises from the lilypads

That doesn't do it justice, though. In French it seems to be possible to be flowery without sounding cheesy.

I am way too young to be nostalgic about this. Oh well. :)

I wish I could remember exactly what my first computer was. This one looks the most familiar.

It can't be, though-- I remember using System 6, but I'm pretty sure the first one I had to myself used System 7.

I was no child hacker. I colored folders and found out how to change their icons and add little comments to their "info." I learned keyboard commands. I explored the file system and ran experiments like figuring out the distinction between "aliases" and "duplicates." I made a floorplan of the house with a drawing program, taking measurements by walking around the house with a 12-inch ruler. I methodically explored every possible "system preference" and changed all the default settings to make it really mine.

I was obsessed with a particular tutorial which ran through very basic tasks such as how to write a document and save it. What I liked was that it drew red circles around the actual menu items to show you exactly where to click. I found it so wonderful that I must have played it about a dozen times--more for entertainment than education.

I tried very hard to find the elusive "Desktop folder" and place it on the Desktop.

My dad sometimes took me to work with him. He introduced me to a web browser. I used it to read blogs about people's pet rabbits, possibly because of my obsession with the book Watership Down. I didn't know what a search engine was so I found things by inventing likely URLs and typing them in. I also looked for origami diagrams to fold--until I stumbled across "Origami Underground," a page apparently destined for fans of the more deviant side of papercrafts. I was thereafter more wary of the internet...and picked up the habit of clearing my browser history.

My first use of the command line was the command "date." After showing me, my dad wandered back to his terminal. I typed it over and over until I got bored. Then I tried to invent my own, but couldn't find anything that didn't return something along the lines of error: command not found. And honestly, I couldn't really see the point. I went back to the bunnies.

My dad brought one of these back from work for us to play with.

The "Apple Newton" sounded like a cookie, but I loved it. I systematically tried every feature. It recognized my handwriting and turned roundish squiggles into perfect circles. I didn't have any "contacts," so my sister and I invented phone numbers and addresses for rooms in the house. We tried to send infrared "messages" out her window and were disappointed to find no receivers. I really, really wanted one, but got a Tamagotchi instead.

Later (when I was 13?), I shared one of these with my sister.


It was my baby, but it was slow, and bits of it kept breaking off. It got to the point where the charger would only make contact when held at a particular angle. Unfazed, I carefully taped it to my desk whenever it needed powering and shrieked at anyone who disturbed the arrangement by, say, breathing too loudly.

So. You can mix teabags in a single drink: earl grey and peppermint with honey is delicious (I like how that sentence implies this was in question). I want to try that chili tea with something else, it's too licorice-y as is. The site I linked to uses Flash so I couldn't link directly, but the keywords are "feisty," "exotic," and "spicy." Cute.

LaTeX is lovely. I think I'll practice on my linear algebra homework, although by the time the program downloads I will probably have lost interest. 58%...hmm.

It's been a fun week, actually. I think it's partly because I've spent it flitting from topic to topic. I'm now reading Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick. I love the concept of self-similarity at every level; it's beautiful, and I like thinking of the universe as being that clever. (I mean that last word in a sense that doesn't denote intentionality, can it do that? Hey, my use of "it" as the subject just now was doing the same thing). Self-similarity is also very GEB-ish. My stance on determinism has finally been revised; I shall have to get around to posting that soon (now that I've said that, I totally won't).

What else have I done recently that constituted this flitting? "Gotten excited about" would be a better term that "done." I got my first issue of Make in the mail, which led me to browse their website and discover the very cool material that can be made by melting eight layers of plastic grocery bags together with an iron. I tried it with my straightening hair iron and a Target bag, and it works remarkably well, though I'd need a regular iron for larger pieces. I think I may have to invest in a cheap iron, because despite the fact that there's very little risk to the iron--you cover the bag with parchment paper so the plastic won't stick--I suspect it's a bad idea for me to borrow one. See, most people are careful with their things and don't take them apart on a whim or use them for unintended purposes, but I currently have a box full of the miscellaneous severed limbs of previously functioning flashlights, musical greeting cards and tiny motorized fans.

I picked up my guitar again yesterday, and asked Marie to send me the music we used to play (South American folk music of some kind, to be extraordinarily vague). I remembered just a little of one of them, but am still incapable of tuning. I believe I got curious about trying it again because of a music theory 101 lesson my future music teacher roomie gave me a few nights ago. I can't remember how we got on the topic, but she explained some of how the major and minor scales work. It's like math with an artistic application and requiring serious specialized technical skill to execute. (Ha! I think Erika must laugh every time she talks about her major and I respond by going off on one of my tangents about the complexity of neural networks that could process such sensory input or some other such silliness. I've tried to explain to a few people that analyzing life is my way of living it. Sure, but I also know full well I'm missing out on something. It's like I deliberately set out to make nothing unknown by overconceptualization, reductionism, or simply dismissal. I do take myself way too seriously!) Anyway, my fingers do feel good back on those strings, so I guess we'll see.

So: LaTeX. Chaos. Plastics. Guitar. See? Flitting! And there's more: robots for kids, kickboxing, t-shirts for WCS (and recruiting people as the new outreach person), electric skateboards, practicing writing. It's not that I did that much of them, but that I got super excited about each one and spent a few hours obsessed on each. It would be interesting if this was actually an effective way of learning for me... Doubtless I'm just too relaxed because school hasn't quite gotten intense yet. And I need to get some real work done at the lab. I did some today, but got a bit distracted by vi fun. Text box selection (try visual mode + ctrl-v) is very nifty. There I go again.

And my download's done, so I'll see all you nonexistent readers later. :)

Whoa, Google's taken over something else. I'd protest, but it has auto-save now. :) And at least it'll be harder to lose my password.

I completely forgot I was working on this. One post per semester, I suppose it works! I'm a junior now and thrilled to get to take upper division classes. Algorithms is really neat, Networking seems a well-chosen elective so far and the SCI advisors committee, or whoever they are, even let me into a grad class this time.

Software Engineering, on the other hand, is not my thing. First time I think I've had a great teacher for a subject I genuinely find boring. Why? It seems all about following strict methodical rules in a corporate environment. I like inventing processes as I go. Writing out the same spelling words repeatedly in elementary school, I'd start writing them backwards and from the middle just for a change. But it may be the key to my problem with getting lost in conceptual "levels." As much as I've said I think using a reductionist approach, I really switch very quickly back and forth from a birds-eye view to what the worm sees, and everywhere in between. I get so confused writing essays because I can't look at how a sentence fits into the whole without seeing the whole and then noticing how it fits into the sentence. Code has fewer possible layers of meaning, that helps. Unless you could find a meta-compiler that has a semantic interpretation for entire programs...but computers don't work like brains (goto: next few paragraphs, I just got ahead of myself). Anyway, I think that class might be good for me so I'm going to try and keep an open mind. Also, "agile" methods--alternate ideas for efficiency, like programming in pairs-- are actually pretty interesting.

Anyway, I finished GEB (well, most of it). My new find is On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. It was published in 2004 so I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it--until an ex-roommate was reading it for a objectivist discussion group meeting and recommended it. Some roaming around the internet unearthed skepticism and opinions that Hawkins is abrasive, full of himself, and too sure of his theory.

Well, he might be wrong, but I found the book extremely well-written and very interesting. Notably to me on the well-written thing, he explained the concept behind feed-forward neural nets in two sentences. I remember struggling with my write-up for the parallel neural net code I wrote in MPI last semester, and it's not trivial to explain things so clearly. And his ideas make a lot of sense. He explains that the brain sees all incoming sensory data as the same thing: they're all just patterns, which is exactly what my friend Anh Vu and I got to in a recent discussion on consciousness. He goes on to suggest that these patterns in space and time are also treated in the same way. The brain has one algorithm for learning sequences of patterns, and it applies it to all patterns it receives in a hierarchy. This also seems very intuitive. I've always thought of concepts as a higher-level view of smaller constructs, which can themselves be made into other concepts. And Hofstadter (Firefox, I love you for knowing how to spell that) lists most eloquently cascades of that kind of example: speaking ant colonies, tiny copies of the word 'reductionism' making up 'holism,' and even neurons that form thoughts (I should look up that last one specifically, he was looking for something specific there but I can't remember what).

In progress: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I believe in coincidence but am grateful for serendipity. I ran into this in the visual literacy (why??) collection while shelving at the library and fell in love at first page. The thesis, tantalizingly alluded to in the introduction: that consciousness is the product of "strange loops" that create self-awareness in a way that is analogous (here's the cool part) to the images of M.C. Escher. Aha. That's why it was in vis lit. And I think I've just detected a theme in my interests. Visual understanding?
Speaking of which, this is fantastic: Visual Complexity

This:

Date
6/09/2006
PHP code generates OSC messages for Max via Drupal using Javascript and Ajax in HTML. Shit.

...was the last draft I had saved before I got, well, distracted and forgot about all this. I have since decided I rather dislike web programming. Oh well. On to other things, I suppose.

In any case, hello. Here I go again?

Projects currently in progress:
Make a drupal website for my dad's colleague. Figure out how to get an acidfree gallery working with lightbox, get jstools working (on the expandable menus in particular, because waiting for the page to refresh is damn irritating). Figure out multilingual support, for that and the la Mouff' site.
Read how-to make modules, read through one and understand it thoroughly. Then, work on flexinode and make it work with sliders (save slider location by converting to numbers and saving as hidden text). Get the sliders (2-D also) working with OSC via drupal (how the hell am I going to do this??)
Download Java OSC library and figure out how OSC works.
Make flexinode patches.
...*sigh* I think I need a cup of tea.

...from my dad's bookshelf today, and read about a page of the first chapter. The book was called A Basis for Theoretical Computer Science (will cite properly in a bit) and the chapter was about set theory. The first example showed how to do a division and remainder problem. I got it in about a minute by looking at the flowchart-if the divisor is greater than the number, output 0 as the quotient and the number as the remainder, if not, add one to the variable with the value 0 and subtract the divisor from the number, then test again. Yes, that would draw a collective "duh" from the computer scientists of the world. But here's why it was awesome.
I'm about 11 and we're in a hotel room. My mother is talking to a friend of hers and I'm half-listening. At one point, her friend comments that the problem with the way basic math is taught in schools is that they teach multiplication as repeated addition, but not division as repeated subtraction. I don't understand this at all, but store it somewhere as an "unanswered question biding its time."
I'm about 14 and my C++ teacher shows us the code for division (/) and modulo (%). It vaguely bothers me that I can't get any more basic than that.
So in the space of about 30 seconds of looking at a bunch of boxes with arrows, all those unanswered questions just CLICK! and I put the book back, smiling.
That's why I love this stuff.

...and last unoriginal title, hopefully.
My personal journal has happily progressed to the point where it seems to be past the years of teenage angst and is ready to start becoming a productive narrative about the pursuit of fun and interesting things and finding a niche in the world. And it's going online!
It's going to take me a little while to get to the point where I want to link people to it, of course. I had an epiphany today though-the vague impressions and half-thoughts in my head, while they give me an impression of inexpressible complexity and depth, mean nothing whatsoever until crystallized and concrete and SAID. Imperfect as this world is, and as little time as we all have to live in it, the things we actually do and experience are all we are going to get. So this is me beginning to be. Wish me luck.