32 posts from May 2009

Of explorations

We had our first successful solo exploration trip. I've located a nearby abandoned hospital and we finally got the chance to practice our ninja-stealth. Turns out, there was another group from our ue branch at the site; the advanced folks exploring themselves and they asked us to join them. That was actually pretty good cause we were sneaking around being scared of making noise and turns out that site is not noise-sensitive. To our credit, we heard them first and could have avoided them entirely. There was another group shooting off paintballs and we saw other photogs but pretty sure they didn't see us.


The place is a mess; grafitti everywhere. Every wall's been tagged and it totally destroys the atmosphere. Such a shame places like these get destroyed. Unlike a few other places we've seen, this one is just an empty building; nothing inside. Its weird how empty the place is. Severe burn damage in places and floor/ceiling collapses. We got onto the roof for a nice view. The place kind of reminded me of Pripyat; all the building facades are gaping empty. I took pictures, will post here later.

The thing that most impressed me is how nonchalant everyone is about this place. Like, its totally not out of place to expect a derecreipt abandoned hospital complex in the middle of a park. I keep thinking that place is some kind of zone-of-exclusion; where standard rules of society don't exactly apply, but nope, things are still the same. We were sneaking around, not daring to speak lest someone or something finds us, and everyone else we saw there was making all kinds of noise and basically not doing anything special.

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Of computer adventures

Spent the day repairing computers for volunteerings. Volunteerism should be punished and in my case it was; I was dead tired. The idea is that people donate their end-of-life pc's to us and we install a new os, add memory and ship it somewhere in the 3rd world, where they get put in libraries or schools. At least that's the idea. 

Last time I went I hated it. I was trying to find other people my age with my interests and instead found a bunch of really old bored geezers. This time, same thing except they were more clueless than me so I ended up taking charge. Prime example of the blind leading the blind but there it is.


Learned about installing windows 98 and flashing the bios. Realized if the whole being a software engineer pissant doesn't work out, I can always be a system administrator/it support tech. I'm pretty good at working with my hands and I enjoy it. 

Going to go now restart the dead like me viewing. Did I already share my recently-gained insight into it? Whatever, I'll share it again, its so good! Basically I realized I don't want to be any of these characters in the shows; I just like pretending to be like them; in the sense that every little gesture they make carries grave importance and meaning. Its very heavily nuanced and we, the audience watch with rapt attention. That's what I want; feeling like what I do is worth watching. Daily life is just unbearably dull and its nice to pretend that your life is important enough to watch.

Was reading an advice column recently and a girl with multiple personality disorder wrote in asking if she should get help; she feels like she's sharing her head with 4-5 other people and most non-vital decisions are made by consensus, with her having the veto. Cary told her to seek counseling. All I could think of was how much I'd pay to have that in my head. She has an audience with her wherever she goes. Does that sound conceited of me? I don't care. She's never alone. There's always that. Why would anyone ever want to get treated for that? Why would you choose to be alone?

Spent some time researching this on wikipedia. Seems like you get associative disorders through some kind of deep trauma that you haven't acknowledged. It didn't say anything about any shortcuts to getting it. 

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Of late movies

Just came back from a midnight showing of Evil Dead 2. Its even better than I remembered. Such a great experience seeing it a theatre with a whole bunch of other freaks. Also, slightly drunk from the bottle of shnapps.


Overall, good nght!

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Of sleep

Im falling asleep here; can't seem to concentrate on this. I'd not write anything at all but I've promised to myself to write something each and every day. So I write this, saying I'm too tired to write anything.

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Of no news

I've nothing to report today cause it is late and I'm sleepy.

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Of bad news

I don't know how I've missed this but it looks like Jon&Kate +8 are getting a divorce? I don't read the tabloids and this didn't come up in any of my filters online so I had to rely on my parents, who in turn learned this from O'Reilly. 


I actually called this a few years ago. I like to make up pretend scenarios for shows or make a new premise for them. The one I came up with for J&K+8 is that they're getting a divorce and the show is a chronicle of how the kids are traumatized by it. Turns out I'm pretty close to the truth.

This is actually teddible though. I happen to like J&K+8; its endearing and I like watching all those kids run around. I was never around too many children and its interesting to see how they develop and start to have their own personalities/interests. Its like they all started out the same but then the smallest differences cause them to develop all their own personalities that are wildly different from each other. Also, Kate is super-bossy and I like how she picks on Jon all the time and how she picks on the children and then sometimes has to pretend that she was just playing around. 

Turns out they're all rah-rah jesus or whatnot, but as long as they don't talk about it I don't mind. Its hypocritical of them to be all super-christ and then get a divorce. I hope they dont. But if they do, I'd like to see what happens with the kids. 

On the one hand, its silly to feel bad about a family that has multiple 'helpers' and nannies and has their bills paid for by cable tv. Especially when I'm sure there are other families just as large and way poor without any video cameras or money. At least they'll have enough money to put all their 8 kids through years of therapy. What happens to kids of parents who can't afford/don't care for that?

On the other hand, they're the only family I know that has kids. This situation bears careful following.

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Of inferrences and new endings

Our brain is a giant, amazingly awesome Inference Engine. Most people might not realize this, but its true. Amongst other things, we posses one of the best classifier engines in existence. In particular, we're awesome at motion detection, colour-detection, line detection and depth perception. In addition to categorization. What this all means is that if we look at a tree, we can say that it's a tree with a very high degree of confidence. Try writing a computer program that takes as input some kind of image and says whether the image is of a tree or not. Skipping over the semantic meanings of what constitutes a tree, a small child will be able to do this. A computer will not. At least, not with a high degree of accuracy.


Motion detection is crucial and built into our evolutionary history. We must be able to detect motion and tell whether its a threat to us. In fact, this circuit (to borrow a term from the airforce, Friend or Foe identitifaction) is so important, it bypasses a lot of the normal brain circuitry; you see a rapid movement out of the corner of your eye and you jump; you don't think about it. That's the motion-detection response. It bypasses the classifier part of our brain; we jump before we have time to see what it was that made us jump, and only then do we see what it was. This is an evolutionary adaptation; that couple of milliseconds are pretty important if you're being hunted.

The classifier part is the analyzing of what we're seeing and putting it in a category: things that are green, things that are big, things in the background, things with leaves; gives us a 'tree' bin. If you played the game 20-questions, you know exactly what a classifier does; its a collection of attributes that describe a class of things/ideas that we care about. Its a space-saving mechanism. I guess even the brain has limited storage capacity. The way it saves space is that it bins similar things together by making associations. For example, what's the difference between a maple and a pine tree? There are leaves on a maple tree and spikes on a pine. To memorize that, you don't store the similar data more than once: you don't say that a maple tree is green and a pine tree is green. You say a tree is green so anything under the category 'tree' will be green. You only store the differences in a bin; only what differentiates a maple tree from any other type of tree. Then when you want to categorize what you're looking at, you figure out its some kind of tree, and only then figure out the difference between a generic tree and what you're looking at now.

The Inference engine actually does a lot more; mainly make predictions and inferences. In fact a lot of higher order processing is devoted to this task of making predictions and trying to tease out patterns. The simplest is learning when it will soon rain: sky gets dark, air is humid, etc. Anything that might be useful to us, the Inference Engine tries to integrate and learn. Predicting the weather was used as an example but that is information that might directly affect our lives; if we don't find cover we'll get wet and possibly sick. 

This is actually what I wanted to talk about. Because of how its built, its always looking for patterns. Even when they don't exist the Inference Engine will attempt to link them. The classic example is the inkblot test; a whole bunch of cards with random blobs of black ink on it. A normally functioning Inference Engine will try to run the image through the association/classifier logic and should come up with something. It can't do chaos/randomness; it breaks. Because of the way its been trained up (long story, another post), the Inference Engine does not have bins where it puts random noise images and it has to classify/categorize everything. And so it classifies the image as falling into whichever bin is the closest. This is why we see all sorts of random crap in these cards; birds, trees, people. That's just our Inference Engines failing. 

Sometimes though, the Inference Engine is overstimulated. For whatever reason, it happens, genetic defect, predisposition, improper neuronal wiring, who knows. It can break in 2 ways. One is seeing no patterns whatsoever, or not enough of them. This results in a person being withdrawn and rather vegetative. The other extreme is where the Inference Engine starts firing off associations that do not exist, according to the consensus reality of most of the population. Here you have the schizophrenics and the crazies; the folks who think god is talking to them through the newspapers or their tv. They see something seemingly non-related and their overstimulated Inference Engine makes a connection to something else entirely. Their problem is one of too many false classifications.

The reason I was thinking about these things is how I recognize myself looking for subliminal patterns in things, for no reason at all. For example, I kept things  come in pairs today; 2 bugs crossing the road one after the other, 2 dead millipedes, etc. It was a deja vu sensation. A regular person will say ok, that's kind of weird but it doesn't mean anything whereas a person with a malfunctioning Inference Engine will think himself in The Matrix.

If anyone's at all interested in this, there are many very accessible books about the neuro-computing models and how the brain processes data. This is the type of stuff that'll blow you brain, not literally off course!

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Of blahs

I took a trip to see the new Terminator movie and now I'm pretty tired. Blah!

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Of anecdotal work days

This a long-awaited entry wherein I detail how ridiculous my job is.


On Thursday, my bosses finally got around to wanting status from me. I've been sitting around doing nothing for the past oh, I dont know, month or so. I've no work to do, so I do nothing very quietly. 

What do you tell you bosses you do exactly, when they don't want to hear the truth? In something out of a Hasek novel, I've decide to write a paper on how I would do my work, if I had any. Purely in a hypothetical. Cause the work, it is non-existent. I manage to write a 6page paper about this. Single-spaced and with footnotes. 

I fully expect to get yelled at. In fact, I get told I'm doing a great job and they particularly like my attention to detail. What details? I've not done anything. No matter, I'm on a contract and am told to continue doing whatever it is I'm doing (which is nothing).

My job is now reduced to writing papers about how I would do my job if I could do it. Is this not one big joke? 

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3day weekend

Hooray!

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