I spent the better part of the last couple days refurbishing an old labtop to hand down to my brother. What have you done this week?
Exploring and defining the terms 'creativity' and 'originality' before testing whether they could be applied to current computer systems that seek to embody those behaviour and characteristics. Then extrapolating my research and doing a bit of philosophising to speculate on what the future of this area might look like.
What's your podcast? The Podcast I support, The Geek Generation, just released our 239th episode. Link to post about episode 239 -
Hey MC and laddin, we have a Hubski podcast, check it out: Feel free to post your podcasts to Hubski as original content is welcomed and when it's good content, it is celebrated here.
Woah, I did not know the site had a podcast. I'll put it on my to-do list. Thanks for sharing!!
Podcasters unite! I released the first episode of my first podcast ever on Monday. It was pretty nerve wracking, and I can't imagine doing 239 episodes. I'll check yours out. Edit: lettersfromn.com; still finalizing the website
High Five Always refreshing to see some good ol' friends. Nice job!
I finally launched my new website. I've been a web developer for lots of years and my website was just essentially a placeholder, but with work going on, there is always something more important to work on than your own site. I finally have something that looks more professional.
Sure! Here it is deakibalint.hu I still have some plans for it, but even now it's way better than what it was.
The week before this past one I decided to finally see a psychiatrist for an evaluation. I'd suspected for a long time that I've had ADHD (the "inattentive" variety) since childhood. I'm old enough that it wasn't something schools or parents knew about when I was a kid, and it was only in the last 10 years or so that I'd read up on it and realized that a lot of the symptoms matched my experience. Still, self-diagnosis based on reading lists of symptoms can be a quick path to hypochondria, so I knew I needed an actual professional opinion. After a couple hours of evaluation ranging from looking at the teachers' comments on my old elementary-school report cards to talking about my work habits and personal life, the doctor confirmed my suspicions. We talked about treatment options and decided to start off with a combination of a fairly mild medicine (Concerta) and some therapy. To my delight, since I'd expressed an interest in science, she brought out some diagrams of neurons and synapses and explained to me exactly what neuroscientists think may be happening in ADHD and what the medicine would do to address the problem. I took the medicine for the first time on Saturday morning of last weekend. I wasn't really sure what to expect; the doctor had warned me that people have a range of reactions, from "no effect" to "nearly unbearable irritability and insomnia." A couple hours after downing the pill, I felt a little wired, like I'd had a few cups of coffee, but it passed shortly thereafter. I decided to take a whack at my inbox, which as usual had hundreds of messages I'd read but had put off dealing with. By Saturday evening, my inbox was empty and my calendar had two long-overdue doctor's appointments and a few get-togethers with friends I hadn't seen in a while. On Monday, I finished the work task that I'd been diddling with in fits and starts the previous Thursday and Friday. On Tuesday, I finished the major task the team had put on my plate for the week. By Friday, I had taken two more fairly substantial tasks off a teammate's plate and finished both of them. For someone with a nearly half-century-long history of chronic procrastination and distractibility, actually getting done what I intend to do every day for a solid week is a rare experience. Not unprecedented -- I've had weeklong "in the zone" periods in the past, but they've been far between and impossible to predict. The prospect that with proper medical treatment they may become the rule rather than the exception is exciting to me, though of course it's going to take time to see if this past week was just a fluke. It also makes me regret not doing this a couple decades ago.
This is absolutely incredible and I hope someone who may also be in a similar situation is able to be inspired by your action. I wish you many more power weeks of productivity and that things remain under your control!
Work has been pretty frustrating for the last couple of weeks, mostly as I don't feel I've accomplished much there. So, my main accomplishment this week was to jog more than 2 miles in one go for the first time -- I've been following the Couch-to-5K program and building up from a baseline where jogging for more than 90 seconds at once was difficult.
Sorry to hear that works been so frustrating lately but I'm glad you have found an outlet of sorts. Way to go on your accomplishment so far and I hope you're jogging continues to improve. I enjoy running and definitely need to start running more myself.
Over the last few weeks, jogging really has become a great outlet and has moved from something that I did because I knew I had to (in an attempt to keep/become fit) to something that I actively look forward to and enjoy. If you're thinking about it, go for it!
Awesome! Once my legs recover from soreness and the heat dies down a bit, I'll be back in my running shoes.
Got my first milling machine to start my own prototyping shop.
Cool! Are you an engineer of sorts? Or a hobbyist?
A little bit of both. I'm a service engineer for a CNC machine company but I'm studying industrial robotic design.
I finished writing a first draft of a play I've been working on for some time. Now to revise and rewrite endlessly
Woah! Cool! We got a playwrite in the house! Good luck and maybe I'll see it one day!
Woah! Sick! As a senior Microbiology major, I hope to get into something like that in the next year or so. Preferably biotech, but I'm not picky. As for computers, I'm a quick learner but I am in no means an expert. I'm just really good at following directions and asking for help. Hopefully someone else can answer this.
Gone on a trip across the country (Australia), and have started reading again and gotten somewhat more serious about my photography. Sounds little but they feel like important steps.
That all sounds really great and an awesome way to transition into some new and awesome habits!
I have a single level of sound change applied to a proto-language, and I should have a second by the end of the week. Exciting times.
That sounds really cool but I'm not quite sure what that all means, hahaha!
You're doing linguistics? I'm a linguistics major too, we just finished historical ling this semester. What languages are you looking at?
I only had a cognitive linguistics unit in first year, and it mostly focused on child aquisition, but goddamn was it interesting. What are you doing for your phD?
I study how people process multiword expressions! My undergrad thesis was on whether people represent multiword expressions holistically or whether they are only built up compositionally during processing. My data suggested that people store highly frequent multiword expressions as holistic units. Now I'm looking at a couple of related aspects, like whether the frequency of a multiword expression influences how people process the individual words inside it. For my dissertation though, I think I'm leaning towards doing some more mechanistic stuff, like how do people establish representations of multiword expressions in the first place? How do we know which information will be useful and which information to discard? etc.
Whoah, whoah. You've made some assumptions of me. I'm kinda a language hobbyist, I've never studied it. I made a bare-bones phonology and a set of words for a proto-language and I'm putting sound changes to it and fucking around with it to see where it all ends up. No linguistics major buddies (at least not for a long while yet), sorry. EDIT: Basically I conlang for fun. That sums it up.
Aw damn :/ That's still really really cool though, sounds like you're building a language?
My plan right now is to get a nice big pretty language-family chain going after all these sound changes, then maybe filling them out with... pretty much anything beyond the very surface. I want to finish looking up and figuring out sound change first.
Could be worth looking a little a morphology, and creating some basic morphemes as well
Managed to get three different crafts on Mun in KSP. First one was a lander, nothing complex. Second one was a low-altitude comms satellite (no idea if I actually need it, but eh it's there). Third one was a... 'survey satellite'. Any by satellite I mean a 50t monstrosity that probably has enough power cells to function past the heat death of the universe and that took a launch vehicle so heavy and powerful that the whole set exploded the launchpad. (Still struggling with SSTO craft though)
How did you get good at this game? I find it pretty hard to land crafts on the Mun without heavy use of the assistance technologies.
I mostly have a knack for physics and engineering. And a bit of patience (that's the number one thing I see people crash for: they want to go down faster, but that implies having more dV to shed off - more than their engines can put off in the distance they are at now). But if you have none of those, there's three words that will get you there: willpower, practice, and training. (Mostly training yourself to be patient - my record touchdown, from orbit, is seven minutes from a 20k orbit). Also, what do you mean assistance technologies? Mechjeb? If SAS, you'd have to be a lunatic to try and land without SAS.
Sick! Did you happen to do a recording of your gameplay? I'd love to see that.
No, but I'm considering starting a youtube KSP channel now. Every time I mention KSP feats (or take screenshots of things that should not fly but still do), people want videos. So fuck it, I'm going to record everything now.
Sweet! Be sure to get my attention when you do! I'd love to watch.
This past weekend Caligula Dance Party recorded our EP, which is in the mixing stages now. My latest paper will also be the highlight of the inside cover of an upcoming issue of Chemical Communications. I got a birthday present for someone which is AWESOME (shhhh). I ate TWO hotdogs today.
Sounds like you've got a full plate! Way to go!
changed my Paypal to Canada, Finally paid a friend back - probably the most important thing I've done this week.
I don't feel as though I was a good friend about it. I was tardy paying it back for reasons that I don't think are good enough - though mostly valid. I don't know how they feel about it, and they never asked me for the money (and it wasn't a huge amount, but enough), but I ate at me that I owed. If you're out there, friend, I'm sorry I was so late.
If you really feel badly about it, then add a gesture to your payment. A card, a six pack of their favorite beer perhaps or even some interest.
You shouldn't worry about it! By just paying him back, you've proved yourself a far better friend than a good deal of people. I mean, I, right now, owe like two of my friends money, and have for quite some time. So I guess you're better than me, at least. :)
I got promoted in Starcraft 2! I'm taking a bit of a brain break before I start my PhD in August. I bum around all fucking day. It's glorious.
Statistics. I just finished my master's in biostatistics, but I didn't want to stop before PhD because, unlike most fields, a PhD is very desirable in industry outside of academia.
Very cool. I'll admit I'm not a fan of statistics but I appreciate the work and need for them. Good luck!
Thanks, and thanks for not giving me the usual response! Most people have a reaction somewhere between disgust and pity when I tell them my field. I absolutely love it though. It's creative, mentally taxing, and open-ended like pure mathematics as well as more immediately useful.
You're welcome. I did learn a lot when I studied it in undergrad for math requirements and I found that it was more useful than I thought. It's just not for me. I hope you get a glorious break before things start up again.