So now I know where my gallbladder is, as well as my spleen, tonsills and tonsillary lymph nodes. This sort of knowledge turned out to be woefully difficult to instill into my brain in physiology class, but the threat of pain and suffering related to these organs (real or imagined) has greatly eased the learning process for these usually pretty banal facts. One could imagine that med students will someday be given precisely-targetted pain inducing drugs to give them a feel for their subject matter. (For the record, my gallbladder and spleen are both fine, but at various points I had been quite convinced otherwise.)

For that matter, the past week, for much of which various bits of my neck were swollen and inordinately painful, has demonstrated some useful properties of sickness. Any diet plan would be immeasurably strengthened by the simple addition of a severe sore throat; food quickly becomes unappealing when everything tastes primarily like pain. For that matter, I stopped bothering to swallow coffee on Wednesday, and (aside from sleeping for most of that day, into the next morning) I haven't had any noticable ill effects.

But I'm getting better, though! Considering I supposedly have mono, things seem to be going pretty well; the only notable symptom, that sore throat, seems to be calming down. Hopefully that will be the end of that particular sick >_>.

So, after not talking to Joe, my project supervisor, about my senior project all term, my talk with him to show him what I've done this term so he can give me a grade took about half an hour. But, given how the program worked out, that may be for the best; as it is, he sounded pretty positive about my work. He didn't even particularly mind that I hadn't built the robot yet, it seemed.

The problems I had with my project were all things that would have been cleared up the first day if I was doing this project under the instruction of someone with some experience in AI. Basically I don't actually understand neural networks as well as I thought I did, and they're somewhat more finicky than I had thought. I did get simple networks to "learn" in simple ways, but not as reliably, quickly, or robustly as I would like for a robot brain. Given all of that, and lack of a known comp sci professor, it seems more than a bit uncertain whether or not it will be worth bothering with this project again next fall.

On the plus side, Joe says that I'm the only student at Bennington currently who legitimately understands C. So, despite everything, I've gained some sort of skill from this mess.

Before Kelly arrives and I forget about them, some thoughts;

The fun of physics is all about a good pen.  Revealing the elegant fundamental principles of material energy is rewarding in other ways also, of course, but the fun of it is in the pen.  Writing anything with a good, satisfying pen is okay, but writing out the complex progression of mathematical derivations with such a pen is somehow infinitely more sublime.  The matter-of-fact penstrokes following dictums of necessity reaching down to the very core of the physical world, the curve and blot of the ink evincing the whole of the hand's dexterity, the resultant page of symbolic proofs which- if done well- is machine-like in its perfection yet unmistakably human.  A wizard inscribing mystic sigils with giant-feather quill pens would hardly have more writing-satisfaction.

I've labored long and hard this term to be more open and talkative, but I'm not sure if anyone has noticed.  It works sometimes, but it is hardly a consistent thing, and recently- partially due to sickness, with the resultant sore throat and lack of energy- I've probably been as bad as at start of term.  I mean, even at my baseline level, I consider that I say what needs to be said as loudly as it deserves to be said, but this leaves me as a softspoken introvert, which is not altogether satisfactory.  It takes energy to jump out into the perennial game of back-and-forth spontaneous free-association of which most conversation is made.  Some people have gobs of this energy, have it shooting out their pores and orifices in shimmering gouts of charisma, but its not something which comes naturally to me, it seems.  And yet, with full knowledge of how banal and silly it is, I really want to do it.  Argh.

The natural cycle of the Earth has come again to its favored epoch, and as ancient energies burst forth from the land, the collective psychic sub-stratum of the collegiate population shifts to reflect the coming of this new radiance; the silent voice of a thousand sub-conscious minds rises in sublime song, welcoming the unfolding vibrancy of summer, and I find it awfully difficult to focus on finals.

Senior project stuff has been disappointing.  My robot still exists in potentia only, its components scattered unknowably across the world waiting to be called together by my actually purchasing them.  This, in turn, awaits either my receiving the student works fund money I supposedly earned, which may very well not happen (perpetuating a pattern of the school not giving me money that it should), or my parent's credit card number, but they're out of the country right now.  Meanwhile, neural networks turn out to be finicky things, and difficult to tell if they're working or not, but given that no one else here understands them in any respect I could basically turn in a tic-tac-toe game and tell them its complete.

Telemetry class continues to soak expensive electronics and burst weather balloons.  Physics is a difficult class but is astoundingly polite about it; there hasn't been a quiz in weeks that wasn't postponed several times because people were behind, and few enough homework assignments which weren't the same.  Also, Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism rock my socks, and *then* they go relativistic.  Dude.

The problem about programming is that, while programmatical acts can be as impressive as feats of art or sport, no one will ever see or understand said acts.  To whit, when I produce a clever mental pirouette such as this:

module->brains[layer].neurons[n].axon[i].output = &(module->brains[(module->brains[layer].type)].neurons[(rand() % (module->brains[(module->brains[layer].type)].pop))]);

...People will either have no idea what it means or will tell me its bad style.  Bah.

EDIT:  I should probably have made sure it was correct before I went on LJ bragging about it, shouldn't I.

Fixed.

I think I have reached the point where for each of my fears and anxieties, there is an equal and opposite fear or anxiety.  Which means that, in total, I can act with courage and rationality, but am still a nervous wreck.

People here either have facebook or are Sasha, so you've gotten that bit already.

Meanwhile, my senior project has sat collecting digital dust since about two weeks ago, so I can hardly remember what I've written so far.  Meanwhile meanwhile, I'm past due for a Telemetry reading assignment and it was pure luck that my physics homework was pushed back on the same day I didn't do it.  And meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile, it turns out that I have to give the proposal presentation for my senior project, but no one felt it necessary to inform me of when this is supposed to happen.

Also, I am very sleepy but can't take a nap yet.

EDIT:  Actually, facebook apparently doesn't think status changes are worth putting on the news feed nowadays.  Perhaps they're afraid it would dilute the purity of the "What futzibob are you?" quiz result deluge.

Indulging in the human urge for self-analysis.

You know, I complain about how boring I and my life are being at this point, but its not because I think non-college life would be better.  Lots of people are like, "shit, I've got to get out of this place pronto and have a REAL life" and I'm like, "wtf, so instead of living in a place full of pretty young people, doing interesting fun stuff, you want to rush out and live in some city full of faceless Average Americans, working as an entry-level wage-slave for some manifestation of The Man?"  We have it good, folks.

Which is a large part of why it gets me, really, because here I am just about a term and a half away from graduating and I'm still not really in the swing of it.  (Or at least, not swinging it much currently- past years were somewhat more swingful, before so many fun people graduated.)  If I graduate college and look back at three and a half years of being bored and uninteresting, like I graduated highschool and looked back at four years of being bored and uninteresting, I will be a sad boy indeed.

Life after graduation (in the "having a" sense) is still largely a matter of faith, held up only by shaky evidence from seance-like conversations with friends on the other side and necromantic mutterings of clubs and parties.  If I can barely scrape a social life together in a place where everyone is about my age, all live within a few hundred yards and congregate for various necessary reasons regularly, its difficult to see how it will work in a place where interesting people are dispersed across miles and largely unconnected.

One of the reasons I'm planning to go to graduate school.

Speaking of the black art of communion with spirits from beyond the mortarboards; I'm going to be in the Boston area this week, so if you Quinn-folk or others in that region are free we should hang out.

With the amount that certain non-updaters have been updating, I feel kinda silly for not having updated my own journal in like a month,  So here goes.

Term is going along smoothly at least in a work sense, which at Bennington feels like I must be cheating.  I have been accused of slacking, but I maintain that if this is so it is institutionally-mandated slacking; half of my work this term is supposed to be my senior project, yet even getting that to the stage where I can sit down and do work for feels like trying to pull an elephant through a keyhole.  Dickenson doesn't consider it to technically be a senior project, the Barn has just recently been informed of its formal existence, and Joe can't be bothered to talk to me once a week about the stuff I'm supposed to do.  Blaaaaaaaaargh!  And up to this point I had entirely avoided the Bennington beureaucratic potholes!

On the subject of robots, however- this may not be as interesting to you non-Singulatarians, but I may have found the reason why I'm doing what I do here; blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/robotscientist.html#more and http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/newtonai.html#more.  Automated science is the key to the continued exponential advance of technology!  Science finally has the potential to go beyond the human limit!  Both experiments are in this month's Science magazine, and I may be checking the library every day until they get their copy.

More mundane news; Went to Rollerama last night, and surprisingly they had skates that fit me, and astonishingly I could actually skate.  I only fell over once!  And I only ran into people twice!  And that was in, like, two hours.  It makes me contemplate getting skates for general getting around, or even, perhaps, those daring wheel-weapons known as rollerblades.  Also it was fun to see people dressed up; in general I don't think I'm a huge fan of the relevant era, but certain aspects of the fashion are cute (why are exposed midriffs no longer in style?  Whyyyyy?)  Also also, the VAPA fire alarm sounds like the frikikin' starship Enterprise.  I took off my skates and ran for the bridge.

Kelly is still in Japan.  My primary social life can fit on a single couch.  Spring teases, but its still usually too cold to actually be comfortable.  Something should be done about these things.

Leave it to Bennington to make building a robot even more complicated than it already is.  Science students are required to do a senior project-y type thing; great.  I'm doing biology and computer science, and want to make something that will look good to grad schools, and there happens to be an artifical-life-like methodology of AI which came about in the last couple decades which is interesting and amenable to undergraduate-level projects- awesome!  But then it gets fishy. 

First came the unexpected, if not totally surprising, revelation that Joe Holt's contract wasn't being renewed, so he's gone next term, when this project would be halfway done; they're not hiring a new comp sci professor, so this effectively annihilates the Bennington computing curriculum, statements from the Barn notwithstanding.  This college really has no one else qualified to teach anything computer related.  As far as my general curriculum is concerned its okay- its been a long time since Joe taught me anything relevant and new directly, and I can do the liberal arts thing for my last Bennington term and be fine.  But if I'm doing a project which consists of a computer program- as I'm essentially required to do- its sort of important to have someone on campus who can read said program, if only for administrative and grading purposes.  I'm really not asking for much here!

It also turns out that senior projects need two professor sponsors (okay), both in the discipline of the project- but, wait, the only professor in Dickenson who is even willing to claim he knows what I'm doing is Joe.  So I've got about half a sponsor.  And, given some new framework for senior projects, my project won't formally start until next term (this term it will simply be a tutorial)- so, no sponsor.

Science faculty have said that they're considering this issue!  It would be nice if they went and got someone from outside the college who knew this stuff to somehow oversee my project, it seems more likely that they'll convince themselves that someone's vague familiarity with COBOL qualifies them to evaluate work in EAI and call it done.

As I've said before, I would have an easier time here if Bennington's science department wasn't living in the 1950s.  As it stands, with the removal of Joe, the Bennington science department can be fully accounted for by two purposes; the pre-med program and environmental activist training.  So I guess science isn't among the liberal arts anymore, huh?

Bad things:  The Quinns were in New Hampshire, so I couldn't see them today before I leave for Bennington.  Went out to Alston to check out some clothing stores I'd heard of and neither one carried men's clothing (or at least not worth speaking of), and then waited for the bus for an hour (even though it should have still been going past every fifteen minutes, when I started waiting, by my reading of the schedule.)  Backed my car into a tree, breaking the glass off of one of the brake-lights.

Good things:  Bought a bunch of things in Cambridge, including a webcam, manga, and a bunch of that fancy spicy ramen.  Saw my twin little half-siblings for a bit, who are on the verge of learning how to walk.  Heading up to Bennington tomorrow.

GAAAAH bored.  The start of term can hardly arrive fast enough.  Two months of being stuck out in the rural suburbs with a minimal social life is just about enough to make me reconsider the value of life.  It makes me wonder how I managed four years of it in high school.

Also, I've got to make my sleeping habits more sane.  Its gotten to the point where I would regularly go to sleep at four in the morning and wake up at two in the afternoon!  Last night I tried to start gently pushing myself towards something more decent, going to bed at two-thirty and intending to wake up at noon, but then the alarm didn't go off and I wound up sleeping until four.  WTF?

Those of you who are in Massachusetts; we should hang out before I go up to B'ton!  Those of you who are still Bennington students;  we should hang out after I get to B'ton!  Those of you who are space aliens:  Gaggle spat bork, gog!

If anyone who sees my posts and lives in the area hasn't already seen it, it would be fun to go see a movie with people.  Its supposed to be really good, and is showing in 3D.

That Neil Guyman fellow is constantly coming up with cool stuff. :D

Am I the only one who saw the Google valentine's logo for a split second out of the side of their eye and was creeped out by it?  The blood red color, the incongruous, smeared "XO"- ...perhaps its just my state of mind.

In other news, went to Cambridge for absolutely no reason!  The bookstore I was trying to go to was closed by the time I got there, Garment District had nothing worth buying even at half price, and (I should have expected) the library was closed for President's Day weekend.  Couldn't even have dinner out because I'd be the only one eating alone in the entire city.

I did indulge my erstwhile habit and got a grande white mocha a la Starbucks.  It was freakin' ginormous!  Have they been getting bigger, or has my coffee-drinking shrunk?

Went to to a presentation by a Cambridge artificial life group today; the topic was collective construction algorithms, which is interesting if you know what it means.  I wound up sitting at a table with a MassArt digital arts professor and a shy guy who alluded to doing things like structural biology and quantum chemistry, or something along those lines.  Afterwards I got home and realized I hadn't done any reading for independent study- erk.

I think I posted about the same thing last FWT, but; I had half a dozen ideas for projects to do and things to try while I'm home, and now FWT is half over and I haven't started any of them!  My guitar is still unstrung, I haven't drawn or written anything of substance, nor looked at a line of code since term ended.  I'm not exactly overworking myself with my independent study, either, so theres really no excuse.  Blargh.

Being a Dutiful Son Day. Woke up early this morning to go with my mom to an eye appointment of hers in Boston which would leave her myopic for the rest of the day, in order to navigate her through the newfangled subway system and drive her home. Then my dad calls, lost in a town he's worked in for probably decades, and I mapquest him back onto route 2. And then I shovel sludge off the walk, in the freezing sludging rain, 'cos who else would do it.

Apologies to the Allston crew, but I'm missing their game night. Its nasty outside right now.

As many of you know or have surmised, Kelly is out in Nihon-land now.  Sadness!  However, the silver lining is that I now have lots more free time than I used to.  Such possibilities- perhaps I'll actually be motivated to do substantial work for my independent study!  Perhaps I'll play one of those computer games I've been meaning to play since I got them Christmas before last!  Perhaps I'll get off my lazy butt and do one of the many projects I've been planning since goodness-knows-when!  Somehow, I'll keep myself busy, out in this bland rural wasteland.

Speaking of independent study, public libraries are surprisingly worthless for a highschool graduate.  They really do seem like they're largely an extension of the public school system, and their resources reflect this (there are exceptions, such as the Boston library, and perhaps also the Cambridge library (when its not actually located in a public school.))  Went down to the Concord library to see if I could access some of the e-book-y things that, for some reason, I couldn't get to from my own computer; turns out that, despite being on the internet, they can only be accessed from the specific library that owns them, which is far away.  I could access JSTOR from there, though (the only listed online science resource not aimed at gradeschoolers) and discovered that JSTOR is an amazingly comprehensive resource covering a broad range of topics, from which the topics that I am actually studying have been omitted with great precision.  Seriously, computer science?  Cognitive science?  They're kinda important.  I'd choose them over "Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers" or the "Cambridge Opera Journal," if you're pressed for space.

Also, more interesting things!  Kelly showed me a neat, trendily-obscure band the other day, the Guggenheim Grotto; they're labelled as folk, but half of their songs are alternative rock or pop-ish rather than folk, and even their folk is good folk (as opposed to, well, folk.)  Also, by random chance, during a half-minute or so I happened to be listening to WERS, I heard that they're actually coming to Cambridge on thursday (in the iffily named "Lizard Lounge," at seven or so.)  Anyone want to come see this with me?

Repo! is like Rocky Horror, except with goth instead of gay!  Much dark sexiness and ever-so-slightly-tacky horror.

Also interesting to hear callbacks which are still in the embryonic stage, before the entire audience knows them by rote.  If someone wants to hatch schemes to get down from Bennington in April to see the shadow cast performance, I'd be up for it.

Its been awhile since I posted here, hasn't it? Periodically I go to LJ to write an entry and then stop and think "wait, but nothings happened!" And before you mention, writing about how nothing is happening sounds too typical. I mean, may as while post emo poetry or somecrap.

Well, actually, I have been posting a fair amount in recent days, but its been on my independent study log account (Joe suggested it) aifwt .  Check it out, if you want to read rants and speculation about random AI and AL articles.  But seriously, thats worse than MOTD. :D

Uhh... Other geekiness:  I've been watching a bit of Doctor Who recently, so that I can carry on conversations with Kelly.  Now, since I'm a guy, I think the sexiest thing on the show is, by a considerable margin, the Sonic Screwdriver *.  I mean, seriously- the fancy gadget that the tech-savvy hero (or hero-enabling sidekick, or redshirt) whips out to make technology do what they want- or just about anything else- is always pretty sexy, but the doctor's screwdriver is particularly fine.  So, the scientist, geek, and wannabe-adventurer that I am, I was up late last night trying to figure out some possible device that could, at least to some extent, replicate the power and sheer versatility (and, ideally, awesomeness) of said device; best I came up with was a combination USP (ultrashort pulse) laser and a saser (which is sort of like a laser, but with sound), both of high enough power to do damage and with some sort of microrobotic computer control to do intricate things like targeting just the right part of a lock to jam it.  Pretty intense for a handheld (particularly considering that present-day USP lasers are tabletop-sized devices and room-temperature sasers are weak), and would probably eat the crap out of batteries.

* Yah, yah, I know what you're thinking; but while the TARDIS is awesome it loses something in the sexy department for having an interior that looks like an alien stomach.   ...Eh?  Oh.   No, no, neither Rose nor Donna are anything like my type, why do you ask?

Thanksgiving break is actually well-timed this year. My productivity has been plummeting enough as it is, I may as well have the excuse of being home to be lazy. I spent much of this evening drawing up a detailed schematic of a weapon (a grappling gun) for my Dungeons and Dragons group, which will hopefully meet sometime this weekend.

Speaking of such things, I also intend to spend a bunch of time in Cambridgo-Boston while I'm in Massachusetts, to refill my supplies of city, which have been running low in the long month-plus I've been at Bennington (and almost all on-campus, now I think about it.) Any denizens of this locale who read this should give me a holler so we can hang out, if that would interest you.