So a friend of mine recently-ish filled out one of those Q/A lists about books on tumblr, and it got me thinking about books I haven’t read, and it got me thinking. Specifically, one of the books mentioned happened to touch on an anomaly in my reading habits, one of the few books that I’ve read out of sequence in a series without going back to read everything. I do believe I read it for a book reading contest in my junior high days (Battle of the Books, I do believe. Came close to winning the school-wide contest a few times, but those last couple rounds were always too tough to break), which meant that I wouldn’t have spared thought to reading an entire trilogy just to get at the last book.

However, this recent touch rekindled my interest in the Abhorsen series (Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen, by Garth Nix), since, well, it sounded like there was a whole lot more character development happening than the last book let on (you mean that warrior was a librarian earlier?). So I grabbed the entire series, sat down, and started reading last night. And well, now it’s tonight, and I’ve ended the last book in the last hour. Not sure if my game is slipping speed*comprehension-wise (yes, I’m multiplying them together), but any reading should help, right?

So thoughts… I’m actually not that tired. Sitting all day and reading doesn’t drain that much energy. Yes, this is what I did all day rather than go to San Fran.

Oh, you mean about the actual books? First, I should say that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has completely ruined fantasy genres for me. Okay, maybe not completely, since the Abhorsen series has a particular sticking point that engaged my mind, but I’m sure can’t read about magical worlds without hearing “I do now claim this territory in the name of SCIENCE!” echo through my head. Particular to the Abhorsen universe is the fact that magic and technology do not mix (not unique by a long shot, but useful as a category). I can’t help but think of a quote from the Clark, who said “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (or something like that). From that perspective, you have one magic, and another, and they oppose each other. Since one is ‘deeper’ than the other, it wins when the two conflict. Simple enough. However, when one can see (or at least outline) all the steps involved in making a grenade, then it’s much less apparent how the tech-magic conflict works. Decomposing all the steps leads to mechanical steps you can undertake anywhere (or else swords couldn’t be smithed in the Old World, for instance), such that it doesn’t make sense that there is any tech-magic conflict.

I know I’m complaining about a fantasy story not making sense. Shush.

So, the plot makes so much more sense now. Nix tries to recap at the beginning of each book, but they really have to be read in sequence, as separate volumes of a large work. Actually, the first book and the last two are fairly decoupled, and the recapitulation from the second could cover for not reading the first (although it would smooth out the story telling to just read everything; sometimes obscure cross-references are made).

Forgive me for skipping through, I’m getting pretty tired.

However, I must say that this might be the first time I’ve consciously noticed character development. I personally think that it’s just due to heightened awareness, and Reading Marathon powers, but I’ll have to burn through a couple more stories before I figure out if I got the hang of it or not.

Anyways, I’m really tired. I’ve been staring at the screen for a few minutes, so I’ll take my leave here.

I’m pretty wiped out, mostly from sitting and staring at a screen for most of the day. That usually isn’t a problem, but my old age is getting to me, gosh darn it, and I can’t just push myself like I used to. Where was I?…

Oh, right, dumping core or something. I have blogger guilt (again) so ya’ll are going to have to put up with my whining and complaining about absolutely nothing.

With that out of the way…

I’ve been loathe to update because nothing has happened. Well, nothing exciting. Reprap stuff is flowing in, and I have a nunchuck to play with once a breakout board gets here, but I’m still overextended and not very happy. My mind didn’t listen to my plea as put out in the end of my last blog post, and now I’m way too comfortable with these surroundings, and I just don’t want to do jack. Now that I think about it, this always happens when I’m on vacation, even though I’m really not this time around. Shoot, I don’t even want to finish this blog post.

Thought: I’m ruining my writing style (formal, informal, w/e) by writing stream-of-consciousness blog posts. However, I’m not going to start editing and revising my blog posts, so I guess even if it is true, it’s moot.

Oh, and apparently going to church makes me… feel guilty. Not in the traditional way, though. I’ve forgotten how inviting church communities can be, and it’s kind of strange since I haven’t really outed myself as an atheist. Oh, hi, I’m going to eat your food and socialize even though my goals are at least orthogonal, and perhaps opposed to yours.

And this sort of mental lethargy I was talking about earlier is also affecting this; I mean, I haven’t gotten thrown out of multiple churches yet. Well, I’ve never been thrown out of a church, so I guess I just lack balls. I mean, shoot! 2 mormon churches in close proximity!

I can’t think.

Blarghkeibat

Oh, and happy 4th of July. Not.

Because it’s the 5th of July now. Ha ha ha

So I’m going to dump core, and whine and complain for a bit. Feel free to ignore, rebut, or burn.

I think I’ve figured out why I can’t do anything: I switch context way too often. What I mean by switching context is switching from one task to another: for instance, going from sleeping to eating, or studying to practicing, or studying to adjusting the volume on my music. Yes, that last one is a context switch: it’s fast, but it still adds overhead. I’ve complained about overhead before: a certain amount of time each day has to be devoted to things like waking up, showering, eating, and all that. And context switching is another source for overhead. Overhead is terrible, because you’re usually too occupied doing things that don’t advance the self, and you can’t focus on something more meaningful. Overhead eats up your time without leaving you anything to show, aside from “hey, I’m still alive!”

So, I’m forcing myself to switch contexts several times a day, aside from the things that one must do to keep alive, by having too many projects open at one time. I’m trying to complete hardware projects (minty preamp, useless machine, pocket oscilloscope, didj hacking, monolith, book scanner, phone glove for a partial list), study physics (Feynman lectures) and math (probability theory and abstract algebra), on top of that I’m trying to do artsy fartsy stuff (on top of writing stuff, actually putting something in the musical section of my blog, and finishing that damn animation), and I have a few software projects jiggling around in the back of my head (mathematical note taking, sane photo management, doing deep integration of twitter and wordpress) as well as a redesign of a completely inane website for an organization that I was once part of.

Whew okay, so I have all these things I want to do, and I want to do them all at once. So that means I’ve been trying to divvy up my day into partitions, and doing different things for each part. But once you consider that switching things takes overhead, then that’s the wrong strategy. If you set a few days, instead of a few hours, you should be able to drop overhead, mental and physical, and get much more out of those few days.

Part of this has to do with not sleeping so much. Part of it also has to do with streamlining my life.

Part of it also has to do with my urges. I’ve said before that I would rather the bio-hackers hurry it up and get to the point that I can re-route my libido to mostly scientific inquiry. Leaving aside that particular urge, I’m also not very happy about the urge to create. No, not that sort of creation: we’ve already disregarded that one. I’m talking about the urge to create works and realize thoughts in objects. You might not feel it, but I do: I want to create. If I don’t create something new, then I’m just taking up space and pushing the universe faster towards an entropic death, and who wants to rush that? Another way of stating it: if you’re not saying anything, than you might as well die, and if you’re not saying anything worthwhile, you might as well say nothing (with speech defined in the broadest sense: by patronizing certain restaurants, you’re saying something about your preferences with your actions).

So it feels like I need to create things, so I flit between different projects with the hope that I push them towards being done. I guess I’m hoping for a breakthrough with the least amount of effort, so that I get that high of finishing something while knowing I have projects in the pipe, because starting things is difficult too, and has it’s own overhead associated with it. But then, it’s not nearly as vicious as switching context several times a day.

In closing: if I could just break the tyranny of creating, or the tyranny of time, then I could be happier. Maybe.

While starting to read through the Feynman Lectures, I thought of this: In Starship Troopers, a certain planet has less competitive wildlife because it happens to be orbiting a star that puts out less mutation-inducing radiation than our own star, with the hidden implication that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” However, a good balance of mutations is evolutionarily beneficial (I think his basic premise is correct: more mutations mean more variation, and hence better fitness), such that life on the planet should evolve less genetic safeguards (assuming a similar biology to us), leading to a similar rate of mutation.

Okay, I’m done sprouting randomly. Ideas like this would normally be up for twitter, but this one was a bit long.

Also, you should check out Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality . URL says it all.

Well, I finally got moved into an actual server. Hopefully I get to stick around!

Edit: Oh, and the site is a LOT snappier, even when it’s in a completely different location.

Sorry about the broad title: I’m going to be talking about a whole lot of things.

First things first, I’m almost done with this iteration of the academic school year! Exciting.

The metal reprap is coming along: it’s coming along at a good clip, but man, if it makes it, it’s gonna be close. I have a week-ish left, while finals are going on. It is going to be interesting: unfortunately, I don’t have any money, and I can’t get belts or extruder parts. So, definitely can’t finish-finish, but I already knew that was going to happen… right?

I noticed, a few weeks ago, just how much the school’s library touch-screen kiosk sucked. So, I decided that I would whip up a new design for it, and it turns out that thinking about how to design for touch-screen interfaces is an interesting exercise. Plus, it’s fun to throw around huge buttons. We’ll see what happens with that: I doubt they can pay me to finish it up, especially since there’s people in place to maintain these sorts of things.

Working on that project, I’ve noticed that my design skills suck. I mean, look at the current design for EZLO: it really, really sucks. Which leads me to my next bit of news: some other guys have come up with a new way to do online-latex, latex-labs. Hell, there’s something called scribtex, too. The difference is, they (latex-labs) are basing their project off google docs, where a google docs style latex editor was one of my project objectives, and they have a much better interface. Hell, they don’t even consider monkeytex, much less EZLO, to be a true competitor. So, I might be done with EZLO: I just don’t have time for it (this last year, I’ve put oh-so-little time into it), and other people are starting to fill in the gaps. I’ve scratched my itch, and it got me through a couple years. So, what’ll I do? I’m not sure at this point in time: latex-labs might need another dev to help out, even if it’s sporadic and not always so-helpful help. Or, maybe I’ll rewrite EZLO, and try harder to offer a competitive alternative. Or, I’ll pull it from the server and let it die, and go work on other things. What to do, what to do…

Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve posted on here: since then, I’ve switched to being a comp eng major, got my financial aid stuff, and am probably going to Columbia. Fun times.

However, it’s the first time that I’ve really felt the weight of the cost of my schooling. For some reason, I’ve never realized just how much $10,000 was worth (much less $20,000, or $30,000). It’s amazing that I consented to go to college with the costs as high as they are: I can understand why I did, but man, it’s just so much money. The cumulative spent could have been good seed money for a startup. I could buy 10 makerbots with $10,000. I could have an impact on billions of people with that much money. Of course, I don’t know how to do it: I just think it’s possible. The point is, I think I have a better handle on how enormous the amount of university tuition feels.

The upside is that I now really understand why scholarships are a good thing: having in mind just how much tuition I have to pay has changed my mindset from “scholarships are cool, but they’re not worth my time” to “why yes, my time is worth a few hundred dollars per hour (if I spend a day on an essay for a $1000 prize)”. It’s a wonder how I’ve gotten through most of college without realizing this.

For something completely different, I’ve cut less than 5 parts in two weeks for the reprap (or, it feels like it). I put together the electronics, only to find that I had some missing parts; after ordering those, I found that I was missing a few more, which I haven’t ordered yet. For some reason, the desoldering braid I have isn’t wicking very well, and I can’t get the wrong trimpots off my board. Then, just today, I burned my extruder board while trying to smd solder a voltage regulator onto the board. Apparently, either coins don’t work at conducting heat, or a thin air space doesn’t insulate very well. Or something else went wrong… at any rate, my life would be considerably simpler with a heatgun. I also need to figure out how to salvage a burnt pcb, but seeing as I also melted a button onto the board, it might be better to desoldering everything and then put it on a new board. No, I really don’t want to source all the components again, although I guess I could use the extra atmega168 I got, then.

Once you add in school, then it’s no wonder that I’m ready to be done… I’ve stopped worrying about whether the reprap will get finished before the end of school, because it won’t be. Now, it’s just a matter of making sure I get as much stuff done before I leave, so that whoever picks it up next year can do it without too much resilience; particularly, an extruder should get stuck together, or something resembling one. That, and obtaining a set of mini-mendel parts is my new reprap goal.

Presentation tomorrow, 2 tests due Monday, project due Tuesday: I guess I’ll go to sleep as soon as this banana bread finishes baking.

Good night, world. Sleep tight.

First, I got into USC’s combined plan program.

Second, I got into Columbia’s combined plan program.

Third, PROFIT!!!!!!! (or extreme dancing)

I’m pretty stoked right about now. I don’t have to go to USC, and I got into Columbia’s combined plan program for computer engineering (rather than the saner choice of electrical engineering).

The only problem is that Columbia has the power to force me to take another programming course, since I haven’t taken a computer science course at UPS (really, optimization and discrete mathematics don’t count). This may or may not interfere with my research at calpoly: I hope it doesn’t, but I’ll need to send a bunch of emails and sort it out.

Well, here’s to things working out.

I got into Cal Poly’s Robotics REU program!

I’ll say it again!

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Damn, I’m happy. Happier than winning the MCM (which is saying something). The MCM took only 4 days out of my life: this is going to put me in California, working with robots, for an entire summer. I’ll say it again.

God DAMN I’m happy.

Now it’s time to finish this lab so I can work on my reprap the rest of the week!

So, I pretty much got a minimal amount of sleep last nightmorning, and not a whole much more the day before that. So, I’m running pretty close to empty, but at least I don’t have anything big and wildly unfinished due tomorrow. Dumping core right now probably isn’t the best idea, but like drunk people, I’ll think it’s a good idea at the time and just go with it.

Man, I still can’t believe that we got finalist in the MCM; it’s strange, because you hope that you do well, but you have to grid yourself for an almost inevitable disappointment. The more hope, the bigger the disappointment, so you try to make sure you don’t hope for anything. Well, this time around my hopes got vindicated; we’ll see how all these open applications hold up. Also, maybe I’ll outline the models we used in the MCM. Hmm.

On a completely different subject, I’ve been solicited by two different honor societies in the last week: one a general honor society, and a physics society. Now, while I’m of the opinion that recent xkcd comics have been falling in quality, I do invoke a particular comic http://xkcd.com/703/ that I happen to agree with, which I might embellish with a more explicit statement: honor societies are useless. Many of them are based on grades, and fail to actually say anything about their members that aren’t apparent from the other activities they engage in. The membership fees are not a problem: societies obviously have overhead costs, which the fees need to cover. Rather, their mere existence is annoying. Note that I haven’t actually been an active member of any honor society (if I have, then I’ve forgotten about it), so I may be very wrong in my rant.

With that out of the way, I’m gonna muse a bit on some thoughts I had on someone else’s thoughts.

It’s interesting how people tend to assume that the future will be similar to the present; it’s not hard to see why. America hasn’t undergone a societal restructuring since, oh, maybe the 1970’s? I would say that we’re due for some upheaval or at the very least some major evolution in our physical spaces, but I’ve developed a bit of an aversion to the phrase, and it’s true that we have no idea when social changes will happen at any time. Cars have been the main mode of transportation for a few decades, and it seems that consumerism has been the dominant viewpoint for about as long. With this in mind, it isn’t too surprising that people tend to assume that the near future will be similar to how the world is right now. Well, I’ll have to look into changing that.