Soon I shall depart from this world of blogs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7-IiinEnK0 If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear, does it make a sound?
What did I do today...hrrrmmmm.. Let me try and remember. I tried to fix some problems with the version of my code that allows for sequential body files. I ate a big lunch, as usual...I read 180 pages of http://www.amazon.com/The-Longevity-Project-Discoveries-Eight-Decade/dp/B00AZ8AX6S this and skimmed the rest. Basically the book revolves around a study started back before ww2 that followed a bunch (well over 10,000) of white kids who scored high on iq tests over the the course of their lives. The study came to several surprising conclusions (which might only apply if you were born in 1920): kids do worse when they start school/first grade early, but not when they skip grades divorce will kill your life expectancy, but only if you're a dude. But if you're a neurotic dude don't worry you'll get on fine. happy people will live shorter lives (perhaps since bad things come as more of a shock to them) "conscientiousness" was the personality trait most correlated with a long lifespan. Not sure what that is? Me neither. Reading the book it sounded like a mix of stubbornness/persistence/empathy/self awareness.
Today I realized that the stuff I sent to one of the other grad students in the group, Max, to work with was actually full of bugs. Well, actually I realized that on Sunday after he sent me an email. But I spent today fixing them. And reading articles on hacker news, ars technica, and financial stuff of course.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8ZNnOklfzM
Guess what. Today I made some more changes to the script. Also worked on some regex stuff on the website and I'm looking at implementing an email confirmation doodad that will reject robots that try and sign up accounts and do bad things.
To test or not to test? Aside from the possibility of actually testing the changes I just made, all I have left to do today is brush up the documentation a little bit.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63yNlHv5qhA
paracosm- a detailed imaginary world created inside one's mind. This fantasy world may involve humans, animals, and things that exist in reality; or it may also contain entities that are entirely imaginary, alien, and otherwordly. Commonly having its own geography, history, and language, the experience of such a paracosm is often developed during childhood and continues over a long period of time: months or even years. -wikipedia The youtube video of the day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNcs3mf1uTU
Talked to Jackson again today, he proposed a couple more changes to the script. I learned that electrical engineer's switch the usage of variable names in spherical coordinates from the way I've seen tought in many of my math classes. Also finished Thus Spoke Zarathustra last night. A paraphrased passage that stuck with me: "God knows hell too, that is God's love of man"
Learned something today. Python is a strongly and dynamically typed language. What this means as I understand it is that python variables do not have to be declared as a particular type (that would be static typing) but the contents of the variables do not undergo implicit type conversions. I ran into this issue today when trying to pass a variable holding a string to math.radians(). It complained that the value wasn't a float, which confused me since I thought python was weakly typed. Also here's a science/ethics rap from youtube, pretty nice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_wYX96L4Vo
First day back from Atlanta. On the flight back I managed to set up most of what I needed to finish implementing a system where the user only writes script variables into two separate input files instead of the script itself. One of the variable input files is generated by a matlab script, and the other is a hand adjusted text file in the form of a python list. All according to specs provided me by my mentor. Assigning thresholds to clips took pretty much all the free time I had in Atlanta, mostly since everytime I made a change I had to propagate it by hand to like 5 separate files... In other news, I'm almost finished with Thus Spake Zarathustra. Think I might move on to an english translation of the quaran or the bhagavidad gita next. Maybe. I think most muslims would complain about not reading the quaran in arabic, so I'm not sure if that would even give me rep points. But I always need something philosphically oriented around for whenever the mood strikes anyway.
Today I'm in Atlanta with the rest of the ICERT crew. Made some changes to how my script handles thresholding: now it's assigned to clips...if you ever use paraview you'll know what I'm talking about. It's free to download by the way, along with austin man actually...so hypothetically you could "follow along" if you're particularly masochistic... Atlanta is pretty nice. Kind of humid but whatever. The hotel is fancy to. Too fancy for my tastes actually, though I do like some of the architecture.
Zach is a nerd from Fort Worth, Texas. In his free time, he does hobby web development and reads. He's currently reading the English translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and A Deepness in the Sky.