More was not enough.

I was thinking the other day "You know, I really should start a blog".  Then, slowly, I started to have a vague recollection that in fact, I do have a blog. Or, rather, had a blog. During those frenzied days of thesis writing I had to keep my fingers moving at all times. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I drank fizzy water by the gallon as I typed. I moved my workspace like a nomad, writing as much as I could until that space was "used up" and I had to find a new novel place to set up camp. I burned through my laptop's keyboard (still under warranty, whew!).

I wrote some good stuff, I wrote a lot of bad stuff and apparently wrote a whole lot of stuff I completely forgot about. Back then, more was more. More was what I needed. More words, more outlets, more wheels spinning. And then I was done. I had written, in my committee's opinion, enough.
And so I stopped writing.

Years have gone by and I have recently had to face the fact that when you stop writing, your writing gets weaker. It's no surprise that writing, like any skill, must be practiced to be maintained. But it's still a shock when you think you can still run a loop around the park without stopping to find yourself dry heaving in the bushes a quarter of the way around.

So I am going to take it easy at first.

A lot has changed since I started this blog, including my mindset, and More is More just wasn't doing it for me. I needed a new mantra for this very different post-graduate school phase of my life. In this new realm, there are new rules to be learned. New paths to explore. New lessons to be learned--the hard way, of course.

Lesson #1: Don't drop your toast. 

Reasons I do and do not like winter

Do like:
- Snow
- Mulled wine
- Dogs+ice = funny
- Fireplaces (especially in bars)
- Baked goods

Do not like:
- My feet are cold
- My legs are cold
- My arms are cold
- My hands are cold
- My stomach is cold
- My neck is cold
- My face is cold
- My bones are cold

Is "creeping" creepy?

My day job is research. I love trying to piece together answers to complicated questions. I love it when you find that treasure trove of information that pulls everything together. I can't stand not knowing stuff when there is a way to find the answer. When I am at lab, they call this research. The rest of the time, they call it being nosy.

Yes, I am nosy. But not in the gossipy judgey kind of way, more in the genuinely curious but sometimes overstepping certain unspoken boundaries kind of way. As much as I can be a real misanthrope, I still find people to be the most interesting thing to think about. Why do people do what they do? Why do they feel the way the feel? Why do we find some things interesting? Why do other people find the same things totally boring? Why? Why? Why? I haven't gotten past a three year old's sophistication when it comes to thinking about human behavior.

So the internet is this remarkable resource for every how, what, where and why question in the ether. And man, I can kill a whole day following thread after thread stemming from a single question. Especially when that question is "who is this person?".

And this is where we get into strange territory. It is amazing what people post on the internet about themselves, myself included. It is the most public place possible, and yet because it is so full of everyone's information, I think we get a distorted sense of anonymity. Every time I get into a conversation about privacy on the internet my response is usually something to the effect of "I don't care. I am really boring." I think a lot people probably feel this way. The only problem is, what happens when someone finds you really interesting?
Personally, I am not worried about this.
But I find other people very interesting, and with a couple google searches and a few hours to kill, you can learn someone's life story without having asked that person a single direct question. It's weird, but I find it completely fascinating.

People post personal information ostensibly because they want to share it. But I think the missing piece here is dosage. We want to contribute a chirp to the cacophony, a blip in the continuous stream, a glance of the spotlight. We don't expect that our voice will come through, that the blip will turn into the stream, that the spotlight will hover. But that is when things get interesting. That is when it turns into a story.

So full disclosure, I spent a bit of time today (I'm not going to divulge how much) reading blogs and following tweets on twitter. The young folks call such activity "creeping". I ended up getting wrapped up in a storyline that involved tragic young love, unexpected death, international travel, an odd partnership, tasty sounding recipes and ultimately a marriage proposal which did not take place on bended knee, but rather on twitter itself. Along the way, I felt like I got to know these people, know their sense of humor, empathize with their struggles and even like their pets. And they don't know I know this. They don't know how I feel about them. And personally, I don't want them to. To me, that would be creepy.

The question is, do they care that I know these details of their lives? I am surely not their intended audience, and yet, even some of the most private moments are documented for all to see via social media. And here I sit, eating clementines and drinking seltzer water, feeling weird about how well I feel I know these people that I will never meet.

And it's intense, too. This feeling of intimacy. It's like reading a book with elaborate character development, you get attached. You think of them as real people (I guess technically in this case, they are). Then you have these bizarre situations where, say, you come across a particularly funny comic and you think to yourself--oh! so-n-so would think that's hilarious! It's just like that time that she tried online dating! Oh man, I can't believe she went out with some of those guys. They were totally not her type. She should have listened to her sister-in-law all along.

Lame, right? I know. But there is some sort of strange territory that you encroach on when you read people's accounts of their life stories and you have corroborating evidence that makes the whole experience somehow more real. How are we supposed to treat these non-relationships? Is this a normal component of a modern social life?

Or is it just creepy?

Even better than the real thing OR Robots changing the rules

Yesterday I went into lab just to hear a talk about advances in brain-machine interface research. A lot of times these talks devolve into equations and nuances of algorithms that my brain simply can not handle, but the talk yesterday was surprisingly intuitive and made me think about the future of our relationship with technology in a new way.

First off, I think the work is great.

I saw a movie of a man in his 20's who had been stabbed in the back of his neck with a knife. He was completely paralyzed from the neck down. He had opted to participate in the first phase of trials which involved implanting an array of electrodes in his brain. By recording, encoding and decoding the information from just 100 electrodes, he was able to move a cursor on the screen to check his email. Believe me, if I had been paralyzed for 3 years because someone put a knife in my spine, the first thing I would want to do is check my e-mail. No, really--I am an e-mail addict.
Would I let someone put an electrode array in my brain to do it?
. . . um, maybe.

Admittedly, it was awkward (and probably frustrating) watching the cursor float around the screen, over and under-shooting the target. It reminded me of myself playing those car-racing video games. I am a great driver, but it doesn't translate to R.C. Pro-Am. I get stuck in every single corner and end up driving backwards 75% of the time. But I imagine it had to feel good to have some way of interacting with your environment without using another person. In this way, robots are potential super-helper-buddies.

Second off, I think this work is really terrifying.

I have a particular fascination with robots, and by robots I mean any machine that performs a service for humans. Every day we use money-robots, coffee-robots, music-robots and of course, e-mail robots. I am fascinated by robots because they are incredibly powerful and efficient. They follow rules, and usually these rules are things that us clever humans have made up.

But technology is changing the rules, literally. These new robots learn to make their own rules which makes them ultimately more useful, more powerful and more terrifying. When I say terrifying, I don't mean in that Freddy Kreuger sort of way--more in that extreme vertigo, feet-half-on, feet-half-off a precipice on a windy day sort of way.

To get back to brain-machine interfaces for a moment, the reason why the whole set-up works is because the machine learns the language of the brain. This language can be messy, ambiguous and can change (neurons are fussy, they get loud, they get quiet, they disappear and they reappear without warning). The robot has to be flexible and recognize these changes and relearn what the brain is trying to say--on a very fast timescale. And this is exactly what is happening.

Needless to say, a human listening to the activity of 100 neurons would not have the slightest clue that the brain is saying "right hand corner".

So, robots are learning how we work and are learning how to do things for us without having to be told explicitly what we want. And they are doing it better than we can. This is the part that gets scary--how soon will it be before we have robots that can "telepathically" do our bidding? My mind races at all the scenarios that could be happen--not in the near future--but in the world of the theoretically possible.

Robot! Make that itch on my leg stop!

Robot! Change my facebook status to "hasn't gotten out of bed for 5 days!"

Robot! Remind me of that time I went to the beach, only this time change the memory so that instead of getting stung by a jellyfish, I grabbed on to a dolphin's fin and it whisked me away to a magical island where we did crossword puzzles and ate marzipan all day.

Okay, these examples may only be compelling to me. But just think about all the things in which a command from our brain directly leads to action, whether it's external (like typing) or internal (like remembering). Now, just take away the action part and insert a "Robot!" command. It's incredible. It's possible. It is a miracle for those who have been injured and have lost use of some part of their body, but it may present new challenges for the rest of us.

What is the solution? I have no idea. I believe that knowledge has its own inertia that can be slowed but not stopped by external forces (and external funding). We can't ignore these hypotheticals until they are real, or worse, believe that we can prevent them. Personally, I love this stuff. The fact that we are able to understand our brains at all is a gift that we should use to improve the quality of our collective lives.

I think the only danger lies in knowledge without understanding. We should probably do a little thinking about this stuff before taking the plunge. The "can we" question is always easier to answer than the "should we" question, but I think it's clear that we need answers to both--preferably at the same time.

Asimov had some very good intuition on this early on with his robot laws , but even these rules don't necessarily cover every good-robot-gone-bad scenario.

Looks like we are going to have to make up some new rules.

The bathroom is clean, and so is the kitchen

When I have important and tedious work to do, I get a lot done.
I clean.
I groom.
I look up all those things on the internet that I forgot to look up before--to find that they are inevitably the most important and interesting things in the world.
I do everything, apparently, but work.

So instead of trying harder to buckle down, I am just going to add to the list.
I have always liked the idea of blogging. I read a lot of blogs and appreciate it as new medium still working out its style and form. I want to play.

My other motivation for starting a blog is somewhat more sensible. I find that sometimes in order to write, you just have to start typing. That sounds retarded, I know, but I often find myself in an agonized and paralyzed state trying to find the perfect words in my head before I start. It feels like I have to search my entire mind to find that phrase which will act as a switch to let the rest of the words flow. So in a sense, this blog is just me up-ending my brain and searching for those words which will allow me to continue working on my PhD thesis.
And no, the title of my thesis in not "Advanced methods in time mismanagement and procrastination".

But given what I actually know and am actually good at, it probably should be.