in case comfort level at risk, escape to room + lock door

as usual, I welcome this political season with yawns of indifference. I seek out someone who intends to vote in a fashion directly opposing my own, such that our ballots would cancel each other and we can both save ourselves the trouble of having to go to the polls. amid the rumble of pundits, rhetoric, op-ed columnists who can barely contain their sense of self-importance and shout over one another on primetime, individualism being kicked in the gut merely as a consequence of standing packt tight with others in an arena all staring lobotomy-like at one person who speaks, cheering at the pause cue, heated arguments sprinkled with smiles of The Grinch variety, pointed finger accusations back to preschool with he said she said; at the core of all this there's a tablespoon of tulip nectar. it's generally applicable to everyday exchanges among the public and in friend circles, but is most obvious near election time. when a speaker expresses an opinion which opposes the opinion of the listener, the listener has three choices in terms of their perception of the speaker: they may overlook the disagreement as inconsequential, decide that their view of the speaker has been negatively impacted, or change their own opinion to align with the speaker. I would guess that the first option is least popular among listeners. it's sobering how successful the nazi party was with the last option.

stop lookin at me

the first three letters of a license plate I saw the other day were EYB, which led me to think immediately of eyeball and has made me temporarily/mildly interested in shorthand. the incident was doubly amusing because the trio of letters corresponded to the organ I was using to read them. I'd like to develop my own shorthand at some point. it wouldn't consist of an archive of usable letter combinations or be intended to come off as a code readable by few. instead, I'd come up with a few rules such that the shorthand equivalent of any word could be determined just by their application. for instance, for 2 syllable compound words, rule 4: the shorthand consists only of the letters necessary to form the sound of the first syllable plus the first letter of the second syllable. so bedtime = bedt. rule 5: the letters used to form the sound of the first syllable must be sourced from the letters used in the first syllable of the original word. this is why EYB isn't IB. rule 6: the shorthand equivalent doesn't distinguish between singular and plural, so that EYB could represent eyeball or eyeballs.

ieee kindergarten

ieee is the institute of electrical and electronics engineers. they're responsible for developing a number of standards, such as the 802.11g wireless standard which you may have seen before. there are a number of different societies within the ieee, most of which publish at least a couple monthlies or quarterlies with titles like 'IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology'. having read some of these publications over the last 1.5 years, I've been struck by the surprisingly straightforward nature of many of the topics written about. this is not to say that electrical engineering is undeserving of its reputation as being difficult. to be sure, I understand at most a mere 25% of what these articles are talking about. but it's this most basic 25% that comes across as being akin to things one might encounter in elementary school or younger. there's nothing profound about the most fundamental concepts that take center stage in these articles. I've sampled some below to illustrate: OFDM is orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. it's easy to get overwhelmed with the multitude of abbreviations, but soon you discover they have a knack for inventive algorithm naming. this image compares two methods of reconstituting a signal after transmission...I think. basically just add up the entries in each column and the result should be the same. it's how you get to that result which differs, and in the article they've argued that OFDM has advantages over TDM. it just seems like something a teacher might ask a class of 5 year olds. "we want to end up with the same signal that we started with. how can we do it?" right, onto the next one. here's a picture of a signal traveling from a transmitter to a receiver or vice-versa. AoD = angle of departure, AoA = angle of arrival, and AS is the angular spread. these parameters are important in modeling/simulating signals propagating through multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. "MIMO is used to increase dramatically throughput over single antenna systems." how profound! so I guess damascene metallization is a process for fabricating integrated circuits (ICs). it reminds me of playing with wooden blocks in preschool. this one shows the types of damage an IC wafer can sustain during processing. it makes intuitive sense based on the amount of physics knowledge a person acquires just by being alive for about 10 years. this one compares 3 different processes for IC fabrication. developing efficient IC fabrication techniques is big business. the abstract from this article states "the transmission reach of signals in optical transmission systems is limited. to go beyond these transparent reach limits, signal regeneration is necessary to re-amplify, reshape, and retime the optical signals." so here's an illustration of a little network. the numbered circles are nodes, I'm not sure what that means. I believe the bold lines represent physical connections. in (b) node 1 is "opaque" as an indication that it can now regenerate the original signal. this means that nodes 0 and 3 are connected through node 1 and nodes 2 and 3 are similarly connected, hence the dotted lines. one-hop transparent reach is assumed which means, beginning at a given node, the signal can't go through more than one node when considering which nodes the starting node is connected to. when node 2 is opaque as well, each node is "connected" to all the others. HNF = hub node first and is an efficiency algorithm which determines the minimum number and required placement of opaque nodes in order to ensure connectivity between nodes. great. these last two are from an article about segmentation and classification of images. they scan thousands of images onto a computer and run software to categorize them. LDA is linear discriminant method. I don't know where the A comes from. LDA is a training and classification method. "LDA attempts to find directions w that maximize variance among the means of different classes (between-class scatter) and at the same time minimize the variance within each class (within-class scatter)." this results in images classified as being within the class 'water' looking very similar to each other and very different from images classified as being within the class 'mountain'. it doesn't bother me that when I read these articles I'm reminded of being a child full of wonder about the world. at first it surprised me. now I think it's cool.

pacman-like avoidance of breathing streams

when considering how small a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum visible light constitutes, it's difficult not to feel cheated. I would like to additionally see ultraviolet and infrared. technology could give me this ability now, but I'd much rather it manifest itself naturally through evolution, though it's hard to imagine why such evolutionary developments would occur. this frustration raises another point: is this insatiable desire for more a human characteristic or merely cultural? the existence of monks would have me believe the latter. still, I wonder why instead of mourning my narrow range of visible wavelength I can't be grateful for having the sense of sight in the first place. sometimes I'll imagine I can see the carbon dioxide trails of people around me. I avoid the exhalations of most people. I put people I see through a number of offensive and subjective filters: fat, stupid, ugly. if anyone near me fails all three I hold my breath and take measures to avoid their exhalations, as theirs is the worst quality carbon dioxide. I want pure air. living in this town, I define pure air as air which doesn't have a detectable scent, is visibly clear, and has no nearby source of pollution, be it automotive, industrial, or unsavory human.

all else being equal

here's something obvious that nonetheless deserves to be written. a person's reaction to stimulus (a comment, a picture, etc.) depends in part on their mood. this is illustrated below in words with the help of a language invented especially for this purpose, so that the reader is limited in their opinion of what is said in the example. clock reports 10:00:00 a.m. two test subjects sitting on a bed in a room. girl A is contemplative. girl B is angry. girl A says to girl B "ekklw rjsi bxwkjjjk." girl B leans back flat on the bed, sighing. clock reports 10:00:05 a.m. time is reversed. clock reports 10:00:00 a.m. two test subjects sitting on a bed in a room. girl A is contemplative. girl B is sad. girl A says to girl B "ekklw rjsi bxwkjjjk" with same pacing, inflections and in same tone as before. girl B cracks a smile.

who's this with you?

person M's opinion of person N is influenced by the company person N keeps. this contributes to the notion that person N could be embarrassed as a consequence of what the person(s) in their company is/are doing, and hence phrases of the nature "don't embarrass me!" I don't like this notion that part of how I'm judged depends on how others around me act. I would like to think that I wouldn't be embarrassed if the people I showed up to a party with were stupid jerks, but I'm not sure I wouldn't be. the asterisk exception is when the company you're in makes you a victim of slander, in which case being embarrassed as well as angry etc. is only logical. to believe that a person's opinion of another could be based solely on their own actions and not on the behavior of those around them is naive. it couldn't happen, and, despite my reservations, the way opinions are actually molded may be better than the way longed for in the naive belief.