Update on the usefulness of the blog

I've been writing this blog for three weeks now, and it's time to reflect a little on what the impact is so far.

First of all, so far it seems the blog does have a positive effect. I find it easier to be structured, among other things. However, this might be due to some other underlying fact. For instance, maybe the blog was conceived during a boost in motivation, which in turn also effected how I structured myself and so on. Hard to tell as of now.

Second of all, so far it's been not too hard to write one blog post per day. I ideally have no quality demands, and those posts which turn out to have a bit of quality to them, I label with the 'Quality' label anyway.

I do expect this to change, though. First of all, there will be holidays etc., during which it might be hard to actually publish something. Second of all, initially it's easy to find things to write about because you haven't written anything yet, so everything is up for grabs. I recently wrote about dancing, for instance. I don't have much more to say about that now, and might not for a while, so that source is tapped for the time being. If enough of these sources get tapped, it might get hard to find stuff to write about.

I also find that it does take a non-negligible amount of time to write a blog post, even with no quality standards. As of now, I spend at least half an hour per blog post (that doesn't just contain an update on how the blog is structured). Maybe it will turn out that half an hour each day is too much.

Third of all, I am generally not very satisfied with how I write on this blog. I know I can write much better, but I find myself just typing the words I need to state my point and not much more because I have work to do. Hopefully this will improve, but probably not unless I cut back on other work or update less often.

However, I know I need a regular schedule for this blog. I am thinking of at least only update during weekdays, taking breaks during the weekends. This would enable me to write posts during the weekend or at least edit posts that I made earlier if I have spare time. Which I probably don't.

I am excited to see how useful this blog will be for self improvement in the long term. At the very least, it should function as a kind of technical diary where I can write down what I have learned that day. However, if I don't have enough time to formulate what I have learned in a good way, I'm unsure of the utility of the blog.

We shall see. As of now, I will cut back to updating only on weekdays.

Presentations

Yesterday I held a presentation for a community of hobby enthusiasts in my field.

Writing presentations can be quite enlightening, since you ideally should know what you're talking about. Granted, I think it's easier to talk to non-specialists because then you can get away with more handwaving, but sometimes, when you want to explain stuff in the most basic way possible, it requires you to think things through - what's really going on in this process I'm trying to describe? How can it be explained in plain words?

There are some of things I loathe when it comes to listening to a presentation:

• Slides containing walls of text

Like this

• When the slides are exact copies of the speaker's manuscript
• When the speaker provides too little background. I would rather hear things one time too many than one time too little.

I therefore try to heed these problematic points when I make presentations, and I work by the following guidelines:

• I view slides not as the main conveyors of information, but rather as a tool to complement what I say. What I say is the most important thing in a presentation - not what's on the slides.
• I try to illustrate my points with pictures when possible - it's much easier to grasp and you don't have to read while the presenter is talking
• When I have to resort to text, I try to keep it as short and simple as possible. The slides provide cues for what I will say, but they're only cues, not manuscripts.
• I try (time permitting) to provide as much background as the listeners need to understand what I'm talking about.

The last point of course requires you to know your audience. My audience yesterday was quite varied in terms of background - some understand math, some don't. I wanted to explain a little bit how we analyse data in my field, which required me to explain Fourier decomposition and power spectrum analysis to the audience. I didn't quite succeed, even if I did it as basic as I could. However, the more math-savvy parts of the audience grasped what I said. So it would have been a choice between just dropping my goal of explaining what we do, and having a section of the talk being unintelligible. My choice was the latter even if I didn't know that's what I chose.

As for choosing the style of your slides: sometimes I think certain slide styles can look cool, but elaborate slide designs can sometimes take focus away from what you're saying. I use the Latex beamer class with just a very clean setup for my presentations.

Context in grading

This is another grading-related post, but it's also about context, which is one of my favourite terms.

I believe context is extremely important. Understanding context is what keeps humans from being machines. I think at least eighty percent of interpersonal conflict comes from disregarding or misunderstanding the context. Probably I will say something on this later.

But this post will be on context when grading. I don't have that much to say on the topic, but I needed to point out that when you grade exams, the ultimate goal is to assess whether the student has grasped the curriculum or not.

A person who is bureaucratic by nature (i.e. has a tendency to ignore context) will simply look at whether the student has written down the correct answer (in the natural sciences, that is). If it's not on the paper, it is irrelevant for the grading process.

And by doing so, the bureaucrat has failed to accomplish the goal of grading - namely to assess the student's grasp of the curriculum.

That is because what is written is not the only source of information available to the grader. Being a human, the grader also has access to the context of what is written.

As an example: If a student, during an explanation of some kind, uses the wrong word for a key term, the bureaucrat will automatically see that as an error. Don't get me wrong - it might be an error, but only insofar as it demonstrates a lack of understanding by the student. How to we ascertain this? By examining the context. If a student otherwise clearly shows what he/she is talking about, demonstrating an excellent command of the subject matter, then this error in wording shouldn't be taken as a symptom of lack of understanding, but simply as a symptom of momentary forgetfulness. However, if, along with this error, the student writes an explanation which shows that he/she has just been memorizing the curriculum, not really understanding what is going on, the error can be taken as a symptom of lack of understanding. In other words, the context determines whether this error should be penalized or not!

More on context later.

Dancing

I dance. It's a partner dance, and it is a source of great joy. I can heartily recommend learning to dance, especially a partner dance.

Someone once described dancing as 'illustrating the music'. This I find to be a beautiful and accurate description. Listening to the music, trying to anticipate what's coming, and then doing something that you think fits to that, is a lot of fun.

There is also the joy of finding a 'connection' with your partner. Sometimes, when you dance, something 'clicks' and you and your partner are able to read each other, complementing each other's moves. This is close to being a transcendental experience. It's as if you're drawing something on paper with another person, and you both know what you're going to draw, so the lead draws the main structure, and the follow embellishes the structure, turning it into something beautiful.

This experience does, though, require some skill, both for the follow and the lead. I think there are two types of skill required: Motoric skill (being able to control your body) and creative skill. I will embellish on the latter below.

When you first start dancing, you learn 'turns', which are moves or short 'dance modules', if you like, that you can string together while dancing. Learning turns is vital, especially if you're a lead. However, one can easily get into the mindset that 'in order to become a good dancer, I have to learn a lot of turns'. This is incorrect - or rather, it is correct, but not for the reason you think.

Some of their rules can be bent. Others... can be broken.

Learning turns is an important means to another end, it's not an end in itself. The true end in dancing is to be able to illustrate the music in exactly the way you want yourself. Turns can help you on the way to that goal, but eventually, if you insist on only doing 'turns' that you have learned before, they will constrain your dancing. At some point, you will find yourself in the situation where you know that you want to illustrate the music in a specific way, but you find that you don't know the turn to do that. And that is the point at which you must start to break free from the turns. You must take what you know, based on doing turns, and turning that into creative music-illustration.

 The above is probably true of all creative endeavors - you learn the ropes, but in order to be truly creative you have to understand that the ropes are structures that eventually will constrain you.

Healthy eating

Staying in shape can be tough when you're a desk-worker like me. I try to regularly exercise three times a week, and since anecdotal evidence suggests that you can't outrun your fork , I also try to eat healthy. 

Which means I won't be able to do this anymore.

I have no zen tips for accomplishing that. But once you start to actually see the contours of those abdominal muscles you thought were dissolved in fatty acids, you start to understand what Kate Moss meant when she said "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels". Not trying to condone anorexia here, obviously. I am currently in no danger of having that condition.

Another thing that has been important for me to keep in mind is that being hungry for an evening isn't dangerous. Going to sleep hungry isn't going to kill you. And usually you're not really hungry either, it's mostly just being half-full and/or bored.

A third important thing for me is not to fail miserably once I fail. As Jillian Michaels said: "Think of your weight loss journey as a car. If you were driving along and got a flat tire, would you slash the other 3 tires and call it a complete loss? No. You would fix that one tire and keep going."

There is one way of thinking within the fitness world that I simply find to be impractical, and that is the thought that you should eat often and eat small meals. The reason I have a problem with this is that it's thinking about food that makes me want to eat. The less I have to think about food during one day, the less I feel the need to eat. Thus, I limit my meals to three a day, and once I have finished one of them, I know that I won't be eating again for a while. And usually my stomach then tells me when it's time again.

Motivational quotes get a lot of heat from the irony generation. But I find them to be useful - they're like someone jerking your shoulder when you're about to fall asleep. Maybe I'll do a compilation of my favorites one day, for the pleasure of all my imaginary readers.

Assigning grades

In my series of extremely interesting grading-related posts, I want to raise a question about the assignment of grades.

Namely, how on earth are you supposed to assign grades? The ideal, at least in my institution, is that the grade distribution should be Gaussian after removing the fail grades. So far, there are three "schemes" I can think of:

• Giving grades based on some "objective" scale - i.e., if students get ninety percent or more correct on their exam, they get an A, a B if it's between eighty and ninety, and so on.
• Total relative adjustment of the scale: The top ten percent of the students gets an A, the next twenty percent gets a B, and so on.
• A "hybrid" solution. You find natural cutoff points that are not too far away from the "objective" scale so that the number of people who get an A and so on are approximately correctly distributed.

The first option is the most ideal one. It is also the one most likely to give rubbish results, the reason being that there is no such thing as an objective scale. First of all, an exam is in itself a random sample of questions based on the curriculum (at least in the natural sciences), not a complete assessment of the knowledge of the student. Second of all, what the teacher thinks the students should know is not what the students actually know. Sometimes a question is harder to answer than the teacher thought. To think that an objective scale like that can actually exist is naive. Finally, unless the teacher is actually the perfect intellect, the resulting distribution won't be Gaussian. I will concur, though, that in the case of social sciences and the humanities, where the exam's score isn't as easy to determine in terms of right/wrong answers, this scheme might be preferred. Also, in low-attendance courses, it might also be possible to actually take the time to give a well-founded total percentage instead of just averaging over the percentages per question.

The second one is the most appealing to me, at least when the number of students taking the course is large, which is when you would expect something like a Gaussian distribution anyway. The main criticism against this scheme is that the grades become relative, so that an A one year is different from an A the next year. I posit that this is a problem with all of the above schemes. The "objective" scheme will be subject to variation because the teacher is not God, and because you typically don't give the same exam year after year. There is a point at which the second scheme will give larger variations than the objective scheme, but as long as the number of students are high, the total relative adjustment scheme will be more robust than the objective scheme.

The third option I think is an ok compromise if you feel uneasy about the total adjustment scheme. I dislike it because of its non-automated nature - i.e. even once you have assigned a percentage to an exam, you still have to make subjective judgements. Also, it seems to me this method is prone to even more arbitraryness than either of the two previous ones.

It is worth to note that most grading systems explain grades in terms of level of understanding - i.e., an A means that "the student has an excellent command of the subject" etc. In these terms, the objective scheme is the preferred one - there should be no a posteriori tinkering with the results based on the distributions! However - it's impossible to a priori know where to draw the line. If you say that an A should be ninety percent correct or more, then you might end up with no students getting an A because your standards were too high. You might say "well, that's too bad for the students - we cannot lower the bar just because the students do badly." But the point is that you don't know whether you're lowering the bar, because the concept of an ideal 'objective' test is flawed from the outset! If you base your grades on the actual empirical distribution, there still will be incentive for students to do well, because only the best ten percent of them will get an 'A'.

Ideally, then, one should change the whole meaning of the grading system. Instead of saying that grades reflect some kind of absolute skill level (which is a flawed concept anyway, unless you spend extreme amounts of time or unless the number of students is low), the grades should simply reflect which percentile you ended up in. I.e. an 'A' should just mean that the student was among the top ten percent of the class, and so on.

I'm not sure yet what we'll end up using for these exams, although we have used the third approach before. If I have the time, I will write some code to do some statistics on the results of this one to see if there are interesting patterns to be found.

Grading as concentration practice

Grading exams is, as I have mentioned before, a mind-numbingly boring task. I am of the belief, though, that doing boring stuff can be good for you from time to time, especially if you use it for the right purposes.

I, for instance, have a slight problem concentrating on the task at hand. I'm surely not alone in this, even if I sometimes get the feeling that everyone else is much better at focusing than I am. My brain offers virtually zero resistance when being hijacked by the urge to check some social medium for updates. I need to teach my brain self-defense.

So far I haven't been very structured about it. I just learned about the Pomodoro technique, which I might try if I'm unable to hack this on my own.

But as of now, I am trying to hack this problem on my own - so I decided to use the grading process, in which I was stuck anyway, as a means to this end.

The first couple of days grading I didn't do this, and it basically degenerated to the point where after each exam I graded I would watch a YouTube video. Since every exam took about ten minutes to grade once I got up to speed, this made for a very attention-decifit-enhancing technique.

After that, though, I started setting limits, as in "no YouTube or social media before lunchtime, and do constant grading until then". Yes, I told myself to grade for two-three hours straight with no breaks. I think for a task which requires no creative input such as this, this is defensible (you don't need a break to mull over what you're currently doing) and it promotes concentration for extended periods of time, which currently is my major weak spot when it comes to productivity. And another thing - many programmers talk about being in "the zone". I cannot understand how you can get in the zone with only 25 minutes (as per the Pomodoro technique) available at a time?

So how did the concentration practice go? I would very often slip, though I did notice an increased resistance from my brain when the impulse to check on social media came. However, the slips lasted shorter than usual, and I did find myself forcing my brain to accept that there would be no break after this exam, just another exam to grade. I was basically telling my brain to shut up and suck it up, because it would get no external stimuli, no rewards until the time was up.

You little scumbag! I got your name! I got your ass! You will not laugh! You will not cry!

All in all, I found it a good exercise. I imagine now that I am better at focusing. I have taken no breaks, for example, during the writing of this blog post. I found the method of mentally allocating time for a task a good thing, and I will try to combine this with another zen-like technique which I'll write about later.

Hopefully, this has been an important step in making my brain less addicted to outer stimuli, which I think is the basic problem I have. God willing, I'll be able to keep this up!

Grading: What is this I don't even

Grading can occasionally be a profound glimpse into the human psyche under pressure.

For instance, some people, when they don't know an answer to a question, they will try to bullshit their way to an answer. This is much easier to pull off with an oral exam. For a written exam.. not so much.

And the thing is, doing this might actually be harmful, for two reasons:

• It might ruin the overall impression of your exam - i.e. if you give a bullshit answer early on, the grader might be slightly predisposed to look less favorably upon the rest of your answers
• It might reveal your ignorance, thus actually giving you a lower grade than you would have gotten if you had just shut up.

Now, the first item above is arguably a problem - what you answer in one part of your exam shouldn't be held against you at another part. However, I think it's inevitable as long as there are humans grading.

The second item above, I'm not so sure is a problem. If some writes a satisfactory answer to a question - containing the bare minimum of what is required, not demonstrating superior understanding but still answering correctly, I might give eighty percent (say) for that question, simply because I must assume that the person knows what they are talking about. However, if that person feels like they haven't given a fulfilling answer, and then starts throwing in stuff they think might be true, then I'm getting a definitive confirmation that this person indeed doesn't know what they are talking about - thus I might actually lower the grade. To me, this makes sense - it's a kind of "innocent until proven guilty". Others take a more liberal stance, saying that as long as the right answer has been written down, it doesn't matter what else is also written.

It is of course important exactly what kind of bullshit has been written - if it's simply information that has no relevance to the question, such as demonstrating your knowledge about the human genome when asked about that of a pig, then I agree that you shouldn't be penalized - you're keeping the bullshit away from the breadbin. However, when the bullshit starts encroaching on the perfectly fine sandwich that is your basic answer, that sandwich, too, will start to smell.

Grading

The last week I've been grading exams for a college-level introductory course to my field for non-scientists. I'm a TA for this course, and so we also have to step up when the time for grading comes.

The grading process is very boring. After doing it for extended periods of time, my mind has been noticeably numbed. However, while grading one starts to notice a couple of things, and those can be interesting.. if you're in that kind of mood.

For instance, how are you supposed to grade an exam? That of course depends on what type it is. This particular exam consisted of fifteen questions, and being an exam on a science course, the answers to the questions were relatively well-defined. However, being a qualitative science exam, there were still a bit of leeway.

Even so, after grading around twenty exams, you start to notice patterns, and you stop reading the answers as carefully as you did in the beginning. Got the formula right? Check. Drew this graph correctly? Check. Included that particular process in the explanation? Oops, missed that one. That's a couple of points off.

How grading makes me feel

When grading previous exams in the same course, I have tried to set up a checklist for each question, and then going through the checklist, giving points for each point contained in the answer. However there are a couple of problems with this approach.

First of all, even though there is a solution provided by the main teacher, the main teacher doesn't really know what his students know, especially for such a low-level course. Therefore, trying to build a checklist based on the solution provided by the teacher will prove to be a bad match when facing actual exams, in the sense that you will typically emphasize stuff that noone knows, or you will emphasize stuff that everyone gets right.

This is why you need a training set. You need to look at a number of exams, going through the answers and identifying which parts separate the wheat from the chaff. And then, ideally, you should go through the same set again, this time using your checklist to actually grade those exams.

That's.. not going to happen. At least not for me. I used to simultaneously grade and build up my checklist, meaning that the first ten-twenty exams probably were a bit off. However! We are two people grading the same exams, so as long as the other person starts at some other point than me, this approach is still pretty sound.

The second problem with the checklist approach is that the checklist doesn't convey enough information. Sometimes, you read an exam and you just know that this person has an excellent command of the material. And sometimes you read an exam and you realize this person has simply memorized the material, not really understanding what's going on. However, the checklist doesn't really differentiate between them, unless you put in some kind of checkpoint that says "Deep understanding: two points".

This could work, and I did something like that the last time I graded. However, this time around, I tried not using a checklist, rather trying to give a more "holistic" number of points for each question. That is, I tried to identify to what degree the person had understood what was going on.

This doesn't always work, since many questions are simply of the "regurgitate what you have learned" type. In those cases i would follow something like a mental checklist still. But some questions require more understanding, and in those cases I felt like this approach was better. Surely, this approach means that someone who answered the exact same thing might end up with a different percentage for that particular question, but since a) the exam is made up of fifteen questions, b) we are two graders and c) you get a discreticized letter grade anyway, I don't think this is a crucial problem.

This post is already pretty long.. I think I will split this grading experience into several posts.

Sailing

Today I went sailing with some friends. I was originally going to do grading, but being invited for sailing is such a rare occurrence (it has never happened before) that I joined.

I enjoyed it a lot. It's a small sailboat, less than 20 feet, with no more room than necessary for the five of us. I mainly stood close to the bow while we were sailing, and I didn't do much in terms of raising and lowering the sails etc., since it was my first time.

I can really recommend sailing if you ever get the opportunity, especially on a small boat like this. It's a good way to learn what the wind does to the boat and sails, and it is interesting to see how you strategically have to move the sails in order to take advantage of the wind. I was also surprised at how straight into the wind it is possible to sail and still make good speed.

It did make me feel a little bit like I would have enjoyed to be an actual sailor on an old large sailing ship, like a frigate. However, I think there is a slight difference in sailing for four hours like we did and sailing for four months like real sailors did. I didn't get scurvy once, for instance.

But that's probably because I brought one of these.

And now it feels like everything is undulating.

Being productive

In my last post, I used the word "productive" as if it's a good thing to be exactly that.

Before I continue, I should clarify what exactly I mean by productive. I think my definition is slightly broader than your average Wall Streeter, but narrower than your average hippie. I mean it not simply as "Earning money", "Creating value", etc., but not simply as "Expanding your mind", neither. Actually, I am going to use those examples as my definition: It's neither of those, but somewhere in the middle. Something like "Working towards one's life goals". Or something.

Anyway. I think it's a Good Thing to be productive. Others, especially in the particular area of the world in which I happen to live, are not so sure. Here, the importance of relaxing and not overworking yourself is stressed. "Noone who is about to die looks back at their lives and wish they had worked more", it is said.

Well, no, probably not. But why on earth should that be the reference point? The time you spend in being in "About to die" mode is probably very small compared to most other modes you're going through. Of course when you're about to die you don't wish you had worked more. You're a sentimental being at that point . You fail to recognize how important working was at earlier stages. How it was working that put food on your table. How working hard earlier in life made you m ore qualified for better and higher life-quality jobs. How working hard at anything makes you a more complete human being. Let me rephrase that idiotic saying: "Noone who is about to enter the job market looks back at their lives and wish they had worked less". And that is a way more important reference point in your life. It basically determines how the rest of your life is going to be.

An early case of workaholism.

The issue I have with the anti-productivity-notion that we have in some parts of the world (which I imagine to be the parts where it's not really necessary to work hard in order to survive) is that those of us who don't agree tend to be a bit stigmatized. A "Workaholic" can indeed be a legitimate term, but when someone uses the word "workaholic" to mean someone who works ten hours a day instead of eight... I get slightly aggravated. Especially if some of that work is at home with loved ones.

Personally, I work a lot because I enjoy it. I enjoy learning and I enjoy developing as a human being. Whenever I just watch random TV shows, I feel like Franklin and Edison are looking down at me with disdain. I can appreciate that many people feel like their spouse/friend/family member's work takes focus away from them, which I under certain circumstances can agree is not a Good Thing. However, if you complain that your partner won't rot his/her brain away watching TV with you every night, then I don't think I agree. Read a book together. Learn to dance. Anything other than being UNproductive. It's what I fear most.

Degrees of procrastination

The other day, I was supposed to start grading papers but ended up spending the whole evening watching YouTube videos from some TV show.

Procrastination is familiar to everyone, so I'm not going to talk much about what it is and to what degree that particular phenomenon is annoying me personally. I am more interested in combatting it.

That is, if it is possible to combat it. Is it possible to avoid procrastinating when you have a dreary task you have to do before you can do something you really want?

If it is possible, I think doing so is going to require a mix of several techniques. One technique that I think could be handy, but haven't really tried yet, is procrastinating
to a lesser degree.

For instance - as mentioned above, I was supposed to be grading papers but got stuck watching all the videos I could find from the particular TV show I found interesting that afternoon. Whether I found the TV show interesting in itself or whether it got more interesting because of the drearyness of the task that I was supposed to do, I don't know.

Big on inventing - not so big on procrastinating.

But what I realized was that there were so many things I could rather have been doing in that time - things that were less dreary than what I was really supposed to be doing, while still way more productive than watching YouTube videos. For instance, I could have done some Scheme programming to learn that better, or I could have written blog posts, or working on that music playlist manager I have been thinking about, etc. That would have been a good compromise between my desire to procrastinate the exam grading and my need/desire to develop as a human being.

So why didn't I? Because of the nature of procrastinating. I didn't set out with the goal of watching YouTube all afternoon. In the beginning, I just felt like watching a couple of videos. After watching a couple of videos, I just wanted to finish watching the videos from that particular show. Of course I didn't research whether that was actually feasible to do within a reasonable amount of time, which it of course wasn't. I ended up watching videos until bedtime.

The point of the above: I don't know until after it has happened that I have been procrastinating. So it's all well and good in retrospect to say that I could have done something else that would have been more productive, but I was already going to do something else - I was going to do the actual task at hand. It just... didn't happen.

Which leads to the conclusion that procrastination can't be fought. At least with this technique. At least with this technique alone. But maybe, by combining this 'lesser evils' concept with other methods, it actually can be possible to do something about it? This is something I will try to explore, and I also think this blog will make it easier to do so.

In retrospect, this post... I don't know. It's bad. Everything above has been sa id already, my someone, somewhere. Probably by a lot of people, a lot of places. But that's to be expected with this sort of blog, I guess. I just hope my posts improve.

Reviewing papers

Recently I had the pleasure of reviewing a paper. You might think I am being sarcastic, but I actually found the process very interesting.

For one, it is actually a bit terrifying to think that you are responsible for he quality of this particular bit of scientific progress. The Impostor syndrome is as valid here as in any place, and I couldn't help but feel like a fraud when I received the review request. (I'm not saying that the only reason I don't feel worthy of reviewing a paper is because of the Impostor syndrome - it's also very likely that I am partially incompetent).

However, once those initial doubts receded, it was quite engrossing to review the paper. I found myself really trying to understand what the author was saying in every sentence, and it was almost as if i had written the paper myself.

Eventually, the doubts made their reentry, because I couldn't find that many faults with the paper. There were no big guffaws that I could pounce on (at least that I noticed). This leads to one of two conclusions: Either the author did a good job and had covered all eventualities, or I suck as a scientist.

Which of the two conclusions is the right one is not something I can with only one data point. My brain did its best to rationalize, though - the author is quite famous in my field so he probably has a lot of experience. Also, I did manage to find some points that could be clearer or that should have had less hand-waving and more calculations.

All in all, the reviewing experience was a positive one, even if it stole precious hours out of my work week. I honestly wish I could spend more time reading papers as thoroughly as I did this one, but alas..

Music makes me less productive and does not stimulate creativity

I enjoy music (wow, REALLY?? How profound and unique!) (Shut up.), and I am divided temporally over whether it's a good idea to listen to music a lot.

One the one hand, it's supposed to have all these nice effects on your brain (although while I'm writing this and researching my statements, they're not as well documented as I thought).

On the other hand, I find that when I listen to music, it becomes harder to get anything else done. I have a certain number of "Programming" tracks on my computer that I believe will have minimal disruptive effect on my work flow (being mostly instrumental tracks), but even listening to only such tracks I believe makes me less effective than I would without music.

This is related to a problem that I really want to get rid of - not being able to focus properly on the task at hand. This issue deserves a blog post on its own, but in short, I really need to build better focus discipline. And I don't think listening to music is helping with that. Rather, it is making me addicted to constantly needing stimuli that is stronger than what the task at hand is able to provide. Right now, for instance, as I wrote the last sentence, I took a break to check on some social medium. It's a terrible situation, and I must get out of it.

And it's not only while working - whenever I'm travelling, for instance, I have had the habit of bringing my music player so as to avoid the drearyness of doing nothing. I am actually slightly afraid of not having anything to do (other than entertain myself).

I think it's vital for me to accustom my brain to the notion of not getting stimuli at all times, and that if it wants stimuli, it had better make it up by itself.

Beethoven - did not constantly listen to music on his MP3 player

Doing this to your brain, however, is hard work. It yearns for input. Withdrawal happens. And somehow, it eventually manages to come up with some reason why listening to music at every idle moment actually is good for you, after all.

However, this time I must try to fight it. This blog post shall be a testament to my determination. I will try to stimulate brain activity by not listening to music, instead letting the mind wander to wherever it wants and explore that realm.

This is not to say I won't ever listen to music. I probably still will on a daily basis. But I will try not to fool myself into believing that the best way to stimulate my brain is to listen to music, and I will try to avoid music whenever I need to focus, to work, or whenever I have time wherein the only possible activity is to think. Thinking is a good thing!

New standard label

In writing yesterday, I found myself wanting another label, because sometimes a
post is neither useful nor thoughtful but it doesn't quite qualify as brain sputter either. The post I wrote yesterday was a progress report, I would say, on learning Lisp. And so, I think a useful label will be exactly this: "Progress Report".

To be implemented retroactively and proactively.

Learning Scheme

I am currently in the process of learning Lisp, more specifically the Scheme dialect of it. I was in doubt over whether to start with Scheme, Common Lisp or Clojure, but eventually I found a random internet comment essentially saying "rather than spending a lot of time figuring that out, you should just start". So I chose Scheme because I also have an ambition to read SICP at some point.

I have heard a lot of good things about the Lisp family and how it can change your perspective on programming if you're coming from an OO/procedural background. So far I haven't had the motivation to spend time on something that only seems tangentially relevant to numerical programming, but I find myself more willing to prioritize learning new programming-related stuff of whichever type presently.

As I'm writing this post, I am also researching whether what I'm writing is actually true. I was about to write that lazy evaluation was one of the ways in which Scheme could shine in some numerical applications (iterative schemes etc.). However, now I see that Scheme also does eager evaluation. So as of now, there is nothing that suggests to me that the Lisp family will be of use in a way that Fortran or C cannot do better, numerically speaking.

Wait a minute! Now I see that Scheme indeed supports lazy evaluation, just not as thoroughly as Haskell... much to learn here!

Learning Scheme definitely is making me think. At first I was mostly thinking "this is just a really illegible way of writing a program" but it's starting to grow on me. Now I am working on learning about continuations, which is a hard concept to grasp, and I don't fully understand its implications yet. Hopefully, soon I will, and it seems like this is one of those concepts that can be mind-expanding. For example, the yield statement in Python seems to be closely related to the continuation concept.

There will probably be more on this later. I thought this should be a 'useful' post with a 'quantity' tag.. but now reading through I cannot see how this post is useful for anyone but myself. Brain Sputter it is!

EDIT: This last comment prompted a post about the need for another label. Thus, the label for this shall be "Progress Report"!

Board game session review: Eclipse

The other day I was invited to a game of Eclipse, a board game about galactic conquest. I thought I might as well do a review of the impressions I got from the session.

This is the first time I've played Eclipse. It was reminiscent of Twilight Imperium in the basic premise - you're playing as a human or alien race and the goal is to ... win. You win by earning lots of victory points, which can be gained in several ways. You have to balance resources and research new technologies in order to stay ahead of your competitors, annnd... the board consists of hexagons.

The similarities end there, and the specific game mechanics is what sets this game apart from Twilight Imperium. Eclipse is turn-based and does not have the "roles" that TI has (the roles system is the same as in Puerto Rico, if you've played that). In Eclipse, all players have access to the same actions. But taking an action requires resources, so in a given round the players may take various numbers of turns, based on how many resources they have. Maintaining control over various star systems also requires resources, so the more systems you control the less turns you can take - unless those systems also provide you with more resources. The hexagons aren't in place as the game begins - well, some are, but most of them you add as you explore. And you cannot necessarily move from one hex to an adjacent one - there must be a connecting wormhole. Since you're allowed to place the hex in the orientation you want, this allows for strategic placement of the hexes - if you're defensive you can close all entries to your own part of the galaxies (except there's always a way through the galaxy center) or if you're aggressive you can create shortcuts to the weakling nextdoors.

Each turn, you can build, upgrade or move your ships, research technologies, reshuffle your resources or explore new systems. At the end of the round (when everyone have taken all of their turns) combat is resolved and resources replenished.

You can play as the mysterious and tech-savvy Hydran Progress...

 I played as a human race (here is a peculiarity, by the way, which I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind: there are very many human races, all of which have the same racial boni). I was situated between two alien races who were both quite aggressive, while the humans are more balanced. So initially I chose to explore and turtle, leaving only a couple of ways into my territory. I ended up not having to fight once throughout the whole game.

I wasn't really going for a turtling strategy per se, and my exploration was rather aggressive initially. At a pivotal point though, the neighbor who had the easiest way into my territory offered an alliance. This was when he was about to move into his other neighbor's territory, so he didn't want a war on two fronts. I should not have accepted, but not having a very strong military myself, I did. He could easily have turned around and charged me instead, offering the same deal to the other neighbor.

In the end, the lack of fights turned out to be a major show-stopper for my part. You gain victory points from participating, and these victory points are an important part of your complete portfolio, the other two parts being technology victory points and territory victory points. I ended up having victory points from only two out of three of those parts.

I beat one other player, who just committed hara-kiri early on (if he had pulled off what he tried to do he could easily have won, but he lost a crucial battle and thus ended up being dead). All the other players lasted until the end and had plenty of victory points from all three sources.

...or you can play as the extremely interesting Terran Alliance. No really, they're fun once you get to know them.

So what is my impression of the game?

I am not a big fan of this kind of games in general - you know, the kind where resource management and tactics are important, and where it's every man for himself. For some reason, I don't get much joy out of it, just a lot of competitiveness and adrenaline. I prefer more casual games where the outcome is less up to you. However, I must say this is one of the better games of this kind I have played. I liked it better than TI, because it feels almost like the same game but it plays twice as fast. I do wish the diplomatic part of Eclipse would have been deeper than it currently is. Other than that, this game ranks close to the top (of resource management games, of course - there are many board games I would rather play than Eclipse) as of now.

This was just one session, though, and one data point has no significance. I have also just played TI once so the comparison between them is equally invalid. In fact, all I have written above has no error bars whatsoever, so it is useless for any practical purposes.

Why programming?

I do consider myself a programmer. I have little formal education but I know how to write programs in various languages and I now have a plan to read SICP (I just have to learn some Scheme first).

Much of this blog will probably and hopefully be about my learning experiences as a programmer. There are some areas of which I think I have a pretty decent command (numerical programming, simulations, object oriented and procedural programming), but there are several areas in which I would especially like to improve:

-Algorithm analysis (knowing which algorithm to use where, complexity analysis etc.)
-Understanding what the deal is with functional programming.
-A higher low-level understanding of computers, in order to understand bottlenecks. Maybe I'll have to learn assembly at some point.
-Networking and communication programming, of which I have very little experience.
-I want more experience with open source projects. Reading other people's code, using git more effectively and actually contributing to code that is being used by others are all experiences that I think will help me improve a lot.

This all means that a lot of my programming posts will be very basic to a lot of people, and I will try to mark those with the "Quantity" label described in my last post (in addition to the "Useful" label).

And regarding the wish to contribute to open source projects - if there is anyone reading this who knows about a project that needs help, please let me know!

Scheduling

In order to make this blog more of a tool for self development, I will now initially try to write one post a day. I am certain this will mean a lot of irrelevant posts, but I also think it's a necessary evil in order for this blog to be true to the goals stated in the "Why the blog?" post - especially the goals of "learning stuff" and "to practice writing". If I commit to writing a post a day, the idea is that this will both stimulate creativity and make me better at learning stuff, because one of the major sources of posts will probably be stuff that I'm working on and trying to learn - and I really do believe I will learn better once I write down what I have learnt.

However, this all means that a lot of my posts are going to be filler material. For instance, the above is the reason I am writing a separate post on scheduling instead of rolling all of this information into one post. I therefore plan to introduce another stratum of labels, in addition to the "Fundamental", "Useful", "Thoughtful", and "Brain Sputter" labels introduced in my last post. In addition to this layer, the new label layer will contain the two layers "Quantity" and "Quality".

Now, reading this post you understand what I mean by "Quantity" and "Quality" - it's clear from the context. However, a reader reading (duh) some other post on this blog, seeing the "Quality" label, without knowing the context, might assume that I am a class A narcissist ("Wow.. Saying that your own posts are 'Quality' posts.. who in the blazes do you think you are?") . This is unfortunate, because although I am a narcissist, I do not think I qualify for the A class designation, and higher-ranked narcissists might actually take offense. I am still going to risk this, because the thought is that the "Quantity" and "Quality" labels will be right next to each other if things work the way I believe them to, and so, as the number of "Quantity" posts goes steadily upwards while the number of "Quality" posts remains at a quite low number, people will understand the context and even laugh and snicker when they see it. That's how I imagine it, anyway.

As I said, this new label stratum will be added to the previous one. So a "Brain Sputter" post could still be a "Quality" post if it is some excellent brain sputter. I do think there will be some correlation between the "Brain Sputter" and "Quantity" labels, though, and I might do some analyses on this after a while. Also, "Fundamental" posts will not have this new stratum. They're just info about the layout etc. of the blog, and I don't want to classify them as quality or quantity posts.

I mentioned context above - this will not be the first time I have something to
say on context. I think lack of context is the source of several of the major problems of this world. But more on that later.

P.S. As far as I know, there's no way to choose to see posts that are marked with two specific labels. In other words, you can't choose to see all "Useful" "Quality" posts. If not, I want to try to look into if and how it can be done. If it can be done already, please let me know!

Labels

Since this blog will be about pretty much anything I can think of (as of now, at least), it's important to establish a labelling structure so that navigating is easy. I'm thinking of having four categories that describe the 'context' of the post: "Fundamental", "Useful", "Thoughtful" and "Brain Sputter".

The "Fundamental" category will only be used for the posts that relate to the setup and thoughts behind the blog itself, such as this one.

The "Useful" category will be posts that I believe somehow have technical or scientific utility for someone, somewhere.

The "Thoughtful" category will be reserved for more philosophical posts.

The "Brain Sputter" category will be all the other stuff that I want to write about when I cannot muster the resources to write in any of the other category, or when I want to write about an experience etc. that I found interesting but that will only be for entertainment purposes.

I will use other labels as well for special interest groups, but these will hopefully divide the blog neatly into useful categories.

EDIT, from the future: YOU NEED ANOTHER LABEL! Namely, "Progress Report". For the posts that are neither useful nor thoughtful, but are too focused to be brain sputter.

Why the name?

As I pondered a name for this blog, I was of course trying to find something catchy that would also describe something essential about the blog, or about myself (since the blog might and probably will change character over time (well, so will probably I (this whole parenthesis has been rendered relatively useless))).

And as I wondered about this, my thoughts went back to when I first became a Christian, which indeed was one of the Big Changes of my life, and the event which probably influenced my subsequent life in a greater way than any other event.

And I was trying to think of something related to that event - a catchphrase that could sum up what happened. And I thought of the feeling of seeing everything in a new perspective, and how it was impossible to see things in the way I used to, even if I tried. This phenomenon has several names, I believe, but one of them is "gestalt shift", and it was illustrated by Wittgenstein with the "duckrabbit" figure.

You can see both a duck and a rabbit in the picture, but you cannot see both at the exact same time (though you might be able to shift between them pretty quickly). In other words - the brain must interpret the sensual input in one way at a time.

It is not clear how or whether this simple example can be extrapolated to what happens when you have a life-changing event. But they have this in common: You can see the picture, big or small, in one way or another, but not both at the same time.

The difference between this example and my conversion is that I find it impossible to shift back. I cannot remember or understand how or what I thought about life before, just as I couldn't understand how Christians viewed the world before I became one myself.

My conversion was a sudden gestalt shift - it happened over the course of a week or so. But gestalt shifts can have varying lengths, of course. The way I think about science now that I am a Ph.D. student is very different from the way I thought as an undergrad. I also imagine having children is a huge gestalt shift, though I haven't experienced it first-hand. All of a sudden, your life revolves around someone else than yourself (though ideally, Christians should have experienced this feeling already...).

Anyway - I found "Gestalt Shift" to be a pretty catchy term and at the same time descriptive of my own history. So even if the character of this blog or my own character changes, the concept of a gestalt shift will always have a place in my life. And that's how the blog was named. The added bonus is that it could also refer to how the readers of this blog would be shifted gestaltically from reading it. Of course, one would have to be a megalomaniac to write a blog and expect it to have such an impact.

P.S. And of course, the account written above is only more or less true, chronologically speaking. In fact, the gestalt shift has been a fascinating concept to me for a long time, and when I created the blog I didn't ponder its name - I immediately knew what it was going to be. But the account above makes for better reading.

Why the blog?

At this point in my life, for various reasons (an attempt of an exhaustive list shall be made below), I want to maintain a blog. No doubt there are countless other blogs out there, and for the time being this isn't an attempt to add anything to that. Rather, the current goals are:

-To get a creative outlet
-To keep my inner Narcissus under control
-To learn stuff (because once I'm being held accountable for what I write, I have to actually make an effort to base what I write on facts).
-To practice writing

The last point is the reason I wrote "..for the time being" and "current goals" above. If I do get better at writing from this enterprise, and at the same time get better at writing stuff that others find interesting, then all the better for everyone. We'll see how it goes.