ThePanda

So I realize I haven’t written in a while, really it’s because I am busy, doing “research”. The quotes are up there because what I am doing now feels nothing like my “idealized” image of research, but is pretty fun nevertheless, and most people go ooh when I try and explain what I am doing, even though most don’t care to go into too much depth, and hence never realize some of the utter oldness of what I am doing. But then in someways I am trying to build on this guys work (more about said guy later, I have been trying to read one of his books, and hence have comments about him), and so far a lot of my work simply involves better implementing what he has or has tried to implement. Currently, as I write this, I am mildly entertained by thoughts of learning algorithms, and highly irritated by the fact that I have absolutely no idea why this isn’t working the way it’s supposed to work. Wait correction, it does work like it’s supposed to work, just in an extremely exact way, and in a world of inexactness, we need it to work more inexactly. To put that into context I want it to work with data which umm is imperfect, and I wish it did that more correctly than it does now. Research however is nice in other ways, for one I really don’t have fixed hours (umm I am not being paid, that might be a contributing factor), so it’s nice, I get to think or do whatever, whenever I want, and ya, that is sort of nice, though post the Newport trip I took like 2 weeks ago, I really haven’t used this too much, and umm seeing as I have ended up in front of a computer, in the CIT for extended period of times on both Saturday and Sunday, I guess it doesn’t really make that much of a difference. But then again this place is air conditioned, unlike my apartment and the outside in general, and while it doesn’t matter today, it was 90 (fahrenheit, that is 32 for all the saner metric using folks out there ), and umm that really is quite hot without an air conditioner or a fan (says me, and yes I do come from Delhi).

So yes about Newport, I went to Newport, the weekend before the last one, and that was kind of fun, I got to take the cliff walk (being improperly dressed for the beach, I didn’t quite go to the beach, though it is open), and stare, or rather gawk at all the 100 million dollar mansions, which I realized I could not enter due to a lack of sufficient funds, well it’s like 15 bucks to enter one of those darn houses, but it was nice, I got to see the houses which featured in my architecture class (the buildings of the American Gilded age), got to walk upwards of 5 miles in the heat, almost dehydrating myself (didn’t quite carry water with me, was stupid, didn’t realize big mansions don’t necessarily have grocery stores around the corner), got to see the starting point of the America’s Cup races, some really cool boats (hmm me thinks me needs to get one of ‘em boats), and umm generally take a whirlwind tour of Newport, while feeling very conscious of the fact that I was probably the only person playing tourist at Newport without a group of any sort. Hmm well it was Brown’s fault in someways…

I am sure thanks to extensive Slashdot coverage, most people have read about IBM’s project for growing artificial neocortical columns, and seeing as that is somehow related to what I am doing (umm no wait, not related, it’s like 10000000000x more complex, and perhaps more impressive, I just like to think it’s somewhat similar), and umm because it’s IBM, and Apple just dumped them, and I am not happy about Apple dumping them, I say it sounds kind of cool. Oh yeah I also realize I never mentioned anything about Apple going Intel, well I am over it, but I still don’t like it, I like my G4s, and I like G5s, and I am not quite sure what’s the entire deal with going back to 32 bits, like I know 64 bits don’t mean much for most people, but like even in terms of bragging power, the darn Athlon 64 lying next to me and the Powermac G5 behind, seems to have more that umm the proposed Mactels, or perhaps they’ll use x86-64, or perhaps this is just a joke.

Many years ago (I don’t remember when, I remember it being generally 2000ish, or before, could be wrong), when the human genome project appeared to be reaching its Celera induced, shot-gunned end, with Time, Nature and everyone else reporting on the painful period of compromises between Venter and Watson, I remember reading all these tales of how Watson could act like this extremely arrogant guy. Then earlier last year, after Crick’s demise, I was trying to hammer together an eulogy to Crick for a friend of my father’s and again I came across all this nice junk about Watson. So as a part of my research, I was asked to read this rather weird book by guy named George Hawkins, famous for founding PalmOne and Handspring, and then going into neuroscience, and surprisingly his book has comments from Watson amongst other people (hmm, I am not quite sure that’s surprising, I know Crick went into something of brain science, don’t quite know about Watson), and so with some trepidation (there were other reasons too), I begin reading this book, and surprise, he sounds exactly like what I imagined (and seemed to inferred from the few Watson authored things I have read) Watson does, and I find that freakish, and umm I am not a big fan of that kind of writing, mostly because it makes me feel uneasy. Umm well more than that makes me uneasy about Hawkins, and well I didn’t really like his student/collaborators code, which is sort of weird. Until earlier this year, I never really commented my code, something about being hardcore, remembering what I am writing, and then I got really used to commenting my code, down to the level that I feel really really bad reading uncommented code. I guess this is a good thing™ in general, but umm ya, sort of weird.

Anyhooo, lunch time…

Ze Panda