I’m not going to write any new content this week. Rather, I’m going to polish the existing 50 pages so I can send them to my advisor.
Dissertation – Week 7
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More on the Wizard's Rules, and a surprising connection
While looking up information on the aforementioned Wizard’s Rules to see whether my guess of “Confessor”‘s theme was accurate, I stumbled upon an interesting explanation of the First Rule that was apparently given in the book:
“People are stupid, they will believe anything, either because they want it to be true or because they are afraid it is.”
Wizard’s First Rule: Chapter 36, Page #397, US Hard Cover (revealed by Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander).
* Explanation by Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander: “People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.”
(Wikipedia)
It is clear from the explanation that I owe somewhat of an intellectual debt here. The rule itself doesn’t even need explicit mention (we’re all stupid, and all genius is but a lesser form of stupidity), but the explanation is helpful. One of the foundational principles of my “panidealist” philosophy is the inability to fully estimate the objective range of applications of an idea. This is a particular flavor of the last sentence in the explanation (although I strengthen “rarely” to “never”). Although that principle was largely observed from experience (it was practically shoved down my throat whenever I attempted to explain my research on the divisor function and I would have thought of it, Wizard’s Rule or not, because it was simply made so clear to me again and again), this doubtless counts as an additional influence on that aspect of my philosophy. Credit where it’s due; I’ll cite Goodkind in my Treatise 🙂
Keyboard minimalism, taken to its extreme – a review of the DiNovo Edge.
The Logitech DiNovo Edge is a very interesting keyboard.
The first interesting thing about it is the MSRP: $199. For a keyboard. A month ago, I thought “who would be crazy enough to pay $200 for a keyboard?” Well, lower the price to $100 ($150 on Tigerdirect and a $50 mail-in rebate) and apparently I am. It figures that I’d be typing this on one.
Now, the reason I went for it is because I wanted a keyboard I could type comfortably on for hours – after all, I’m spending a good chunk of time writing a very long thesis, and when I’m not doing that, I’m usually typing something else. The keyboard is also supposed to have excellent Bluetooth wireless quality (it does; it hasn’t missed a single keystroke yet) and a very slim profile (again, it does). It’s truly a joy to type on.
Other features include a volume slider that I thought would be cooler than it really is and a trackpad that functions as a fully working mouse (albeit not a very good replacement for one – it’s meant for people who like to couch surf on their “media PCs” and whatnot).
Finally, Logitech’s name also carries it a long way; there are not many companies that can charge this much for a keyboard and get away with it. Logitech users such as myself will generally pay more because of the reputation for quality that the products have established.
However, I am beginning to become wary of Logitech’s keyboards, because along with the reputation for quality, they have a nasty habit of removing essential keys from the keyboards. For example, on this $200 keyboard, there is no numpad. It’s completely absent. Num lock, of course, is gone too, since there is no number pad to lock. SysRq no longer exists, but the only function that key ever served was to generate an interrupt that was handled by the BIOS in case the OS scheduler froze up or something. The home, end, delete, page up, and page down keys are arranged differently, but this is something that veteran Logitech users will be used to already; Logitech loves to rearrange these keys. In total, there are only 84 keys left on this keyboard. Most layouts have around 104.
Possibly aside from the loss of the numpad and the inability to 10-key (although I’ve been using the top row long enough to 10-key it fine regardless), the greatest omission that Logitech may have made is the menu key. It simply isn’t on this keyboard, requiring the use of the far less graceful Shift + F10 shortcut. In its place is an “Fn” key, which (you guessed it) gives you access to a bunch of “media” / “Internet” keys (and four customizable ones above F9-F12).
The right Windows key is also missing, but many other keyboards don’t have this either, so it’s far from unusual.
Finally, a more minor criticism is that the trackpad, though it has a scrolling area, is difficult to scroll. Not really an issue if you use it with a mouse.
Overall, the typing feel alone is enough to justify the price, high as it is, but the lack of a menu key almost breaks the deal (it would except that I mapped that “media center” key with the Windows logo at the top to Shift + F10, essentially making it my new menu key). The keys are low and respond in a similar manner to most laptop keyboards, but don’t suffer from the spacing issues of a laptop keyboard. It actually seems to have increased my typing speed by 10-20 WPM.
So, the pros:
Very nice feel.
Aesthetically pleasing.
Integrated mouse and volume control.
Slim profile.
Excellent wireless connection quality.
Cons:
$200 is WAY TOO MUCH.
The mini adapter that comes with the keyboard is specific to the keyboard; it can’t be used as a general bluetooth adapter.
The numpad and menu key are absent; these were useful.
The trackpad, particularly when scrolling, is difficult to use.
The volume gauge is actually just a fancy pair of “up”/”down” buttons. I was hoping for an actual volume meter.
Only two keys on the keyboard can be customized without having to hit Fn.
Why AI?
I just realized that once we get the whole genetic engineering thing down, we have no real need for AI anymore. We could create natural intelligence just as easily.
In fact, once we get working the source code (DNA) down, biological systems can be made to behave very much like computers.
Man, the world is going to be a wacky place in the future.
Competitions
For someone who hates the very idea of a competition, I’m awfully good at them.
Four ML assignments were competitions. I outright won two, with accuracies of 93% (beating the next best by about 1%) and 96% (beating the next best by a fairly wide margin of about 3%). I came in second for the third, with an accuracy of 93.7%, and somehow managed to get dead last in the fourth (I think I screwed up the report, because my cross-validation accuracy was good) with an accuracy of 49%, for which I lost 10 points from the 80 points extra credit I had already accrued 🙂
Update: I’ve been thinking about competitions in general and have come to the conclusion that, sad as they are, they seem to be the only way to call attention to one’s skills before society. My failure to be competitive has only hurt me in things like applications and getting papers published. Therefore, I’m going to begin entering into a few that I believe I have a good chance of winning… perhaps people will start to take notice after I smack a few people’s results into the ground. It’s the risk they take for insisting upon a competition.
Programming competitions are still out, because (a) I already won one eight years ago and (b) I’m being recognized enough as a programmer without requiring additional competitions.
Sword of Truth – the Rule Unwritten
Warning: this may perhaps contain spoilers.
I’m a fairly big fan of Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, which just concluded with the release of the book “Confessor”. Although at first glance fantasy, the series is actually more of a Objectivist philosophical treatise (at least towards the end) than a collection of fantasy novels. Each book states its theme rather clearly in the form of a “wizard’s rule”, which can sort of be viewed as the “take-home lesson” from the book.
Anyway, the last book threw us all for a loop because the wizard’s rule, and thus the theme, is not given to us. It’s introduced as the “secret of a war wizard’s power”, but the book by that name in the series is discovered to be blank.
After some thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is not only intentional, but that this IS the rule. It’s also how Richard (the protagonist) ultimately triumphs at the end of the book – the antagonists did not understand the rule, but he did, which is why even their moment of triumph was ultimately defeat.
I believe it is this:
Truth is sought internally. Truth handed down is insufficient; truth reasoned out is not. You must come to your own conclusions.
Not only does it fit the nature of the rule itself (nothing written down), but it is also a recurring theme in the book: why the antagonists could not accomplish their objective despite having precise instructions to do so (they didn’t think, they just obeyed) and why Richard and Kahlan’s love could endure (because it was twice discovered independently rather than simply told).
Teaching? Doing?
Sometimes I wonder whether I was meant to be a pedagogue rather than a practitioner. A good part of my talent seems to lie in making ideas accessible, and I do greatly enjoy teaching.
Again, though, I don’t think becoming a professor is a good idea. Not after what I’ve seen of academia.
A grad student, but… not.
Most of the grad. students on facebook groups appear to be working far more hours a week than I am for much longer spans of time than I have been, and yet appear to be making far less progress (some people are in their fourth years, work 60+ hours a week, and haven’t even started their dissertations!)
I generally write about 3 hours per day, four days a week. That’s 12 hours. My class adds another 3, plus 9 for the assignments, so that brings me up to 24. Working on other projects generally takes far less time than the dissertation; perhaps another 5 or 6 hours a week. That makes 30.
And that’s it (unless you count commuting back and forth, which adds 3-12 more hours each week, which is one reason why I try to work remotely and minimize the number of days I need to be in the lab).
I still feel like my life as a graduate student is very much out-of-place. I easily managed to get an MS in one year simply by taking four courses a semester – my undergraduate workload was heavier (but still left me enough free time that I had to wedge three jobs into my week to avoid becoming bored). On the dissertation, it’s only been 6 weeks since I started and I’m already 1/3 of the way through (granted, the easiest third)… and it’s still only the beginning of my second year, when no one else in the department has even come up with a topic!
I’m also the youngest student there by at least five years. This isn’t speculation – there was a meeting where all of the graduate students mentioned their ages.
Some of it is the fellowship. Some of it is motivation: the drive to recover my personal autonomy so I can again pursue great things. Some of it is probably the fact that I follow what I think I’ve shown to be a much more powerful personal philosophy for acquiring knowledge than the one typical students follow (sacrifice breadth and you sacrifice your very creativity – don’t hyperspecialize). That doesn’t account for everything, however – the rest is probably the school.
Dissertation – Week 6
The “10 pages per week” goal I’ve been setting for myself has generally worked up until this point (save for one week, when I simply had too heavy an assignment for machine learning to work on my dissertation), but it’s going to fall apart very soon.
At page 50, I’ve reported all of the experiments we’ve done so far. I’ve even made up a lot of figures and sprinkled them throughout the paper. I am now idle. It’s bad when you think you can fill another page or two just by writing the acknowledgments early. I simply can’t cram anything more into that dissertation until we do more experiments. However, we can’t do more experiments until the next meeting with the CMU people.
If this continues every week, I am going to slip behind my schedule fast, since I’m working on an entirely different timeline than the rest of my group. While I can push myself as hard as I’d like, it’s unfair to my group to force them to move at a breakneck pace because I want to finish quickly; it’s not like they’re slacking off. Anyway, I don’t want such a disparity to occur, so I need to do something. Perhaps taking on more work myself is a good idea, since what I have thus far for my dissertation isn’t particularly challenging or time-consuming, not to mention that the rest of the group would probably be happy to offload more work on my shoulders. Once I finish machine learning, I’m going to have a lot of time as well, as it will essentially start the winter break that never ends 🙂
I’m wondering if I can do some experiments of my own and put them in the paper. It is supposed to be my own original work, after all, and I do have some good ideas which I’m fairly sure are original, having done a fairly extensive background search before and during writing.
Every conference paper I’m writing now (and there are a lot!) has some relevance as well; I can probably find a way to include all of them in my dissertation as experiments without losing the focus on tensors and medical imaging that I’ve established.
I need to polish some things up and then I’ll send a draft to my advisor. Yes, the first draft I’m sending for review is going to be 50 pages long. Hopefully this won’t end up with me rewriting what I expect to be 1/3 of my dissertation 🙂
Explorer – "Cutting Twice" Bug
In Vista, there’s an interesting bug that involves cutting a set of images on thumbnail view, followed by cutting a superset of those images. Explorer will usually freeze or crash the second time.