Ideas are the most powerful things in existence. Here are mine.
I figured out why I hate offices: I focus entirely on what I’m doing there, with no personal diversions (save checking my email). Office environments are not built for this sort of thing, so I get flow going, finish my work quickly, and proceed to stare at the walls… for SEVEN HOURS EACH DAY.
At home, I’d finish the work in the same amount of time, then write music, read, program, etc. until I received more work.
I’ve had an interesting musical idea: essentially a musical autobiography, which I’ve referred to as a “lifesong”. Think of it as a really long leitmotif. Such a piece would capture the essence of a composer’s life, would be started as soon as a composer felt capable of undertaking such a project, and would be continuously maintained until the composer either died, in which case it should be concluded by another composer or left alone depending on the circumstances of the death, or the composer anticipated nothing more from life – that is, the composer’s purpose has been fulfilled and the composer has nothing of significance left to complete. It would include annotations detailing the life events that correspond to events in the musical score. It would not be “published” in the tradition sense until the composer’s death, but it could, and indeed should, be made available as it’s being constructed.
Why am I posting this? Because I’m ready to begin writing my own.
Update: Yay, another nonoriginal idea. Reinvention is talent screaming out for background.
I have quite a few problems with this hypothesis. It isn’t that the hypothesis is flawed – quite the contrary, actually: this hypothesis is so obvious that it really doesn’t deserve to be named after two people who, incidentally, were not the first to discover or write about it. Another problem I have is that it’s needlessly specific. It can be summarized in three words as “language influences thought”, when a much more general hypothesis (the one I arrived at as a child and later incorporated into my psychological postulates) is “expression influences thought”. Finally, the hypothesis is needlessly unidirectional: to argue that expression is not a product of thought, formal system that it is, is ludicrous. Therefore, an even stronger statement is “expression and thought influence each other”.
I needed to be born 50 years ago, when the obvious things weren’t all discovered yet. But then, perhaps I would have died in childbirth had that happened.
Like many autoimmune phenomena, allergies develop gradually over time. This is a hypothesis, but one I have very strong suspicions about. Could be an interesting area to research.
I just had the strongest feeling that Google is going to eventually acquire LinkedIn. For once, I can’t explain why. It just seems to fit, somehow…
There’s your first movement!
This is a joke, of course, but listen to enough of his sonatas and this is indeed the pattern Beethoven followed.
I bet that the most prevalent type of lightning in a thunderstorm is a property of the relative charges within the stormclouds themselves, rather than independent phenomena! This would make particular storms more likely to carry cloud-to-ground lightning than others.
My intuition is introverted, but every so often I do manage to pull something from the external environment, rather than my own mind. This is one of those times.
If taking many photos of the same scene, for example, it would be a good idea to compress these photos in terms of each other, using something like differential encoding (though probably more sophisticated; maybe building an LZW dictionary on one file then applying it to all files?). Domain-specific methods could be used as well. The files would necessarily be paired (don’t even think about changing one without altering the other as well), but it would offer significant savings over solely file-by-file compression.
Something like ZIP or TAR+GZIP may already do this. I’ll have to check the specifics of the algorithms employed. Regardless, I think I see a new coding opportunity coming my way.
Edit: Zip does not compress files together, but this approach is more or less exactly what tar+gzip does (including the idea of using a common LZW dictionary).
When asked to show up at the lab three days a week, I quickly noticed a change in my work patterns: after about the first week, I noticed I was “saving” work for the three days in the lab. Prior to this, any time was fair game.
The change was brought about by simple boredom. By being coerced into the lab, I was being withheld from pursuing other creative activities (such as finishing the Treatise on the Objective Reality of Ideas, which is running far behind schedule thanks to my general unavailability). As a result, I had three or four hours of time to focus on solely research work each day (a 7 hour day minus 3 hours for commuting and about a half hour for lunch). However, because I was finishing this work at home, I found myself staring at the walls for hours, exactly as had happened in industry. Since this is something I wish to avoid, I’ve been saving research work for my “lab days”.
It is also ironic that I was asked to be in the lab for the purpose of communication, yet I am frequently the only person there. When my advisor is present, he usually either has no advice to give me (do I really need to be there just to receive pats on the back?) or is too busy to speak with me. This completely negates any communication benefit that may have arisen from being there.
The moral of this story? When time is partitioned into discrete scheduling units and ceases to be a continuum, less work gets done. And a commute time that dominates total work time is the equivalent of thrashing in a virtual memory system: lots of work gets done, but none of it is useful.
Score another point for society for depriving me of my independence and usefulness. At this rate, perhaps I can be stopped from making any meaningful contributions at all!