hazybluedot

I've been reading I am a Strange Loop by Doug Hofstadter for the past few weeks. It's a book that explores the notion of "I", "self-awareness", "consciousness", the "soul", etc. Hofstadter draws analogies between feedback systems and specifically to an interesting feedback loop discovered by Kurt Gödel that pops out of a rigorous mathematical theory called Principia Mathematica. I'm already getting a tad off track because my desire is not to discuss the book right now as I am not done with it, but rather explore some thoughts that a particular section spawned. I haven't even finished this section but I wanted to get these thoughts down before I did so that they were not biased by what may be to come. Hofstadter is describing the notion of intertwined souls, in the sense that when two people share the same hopes and desires and a large number of experiences from similar perspectives then the content that makes up their selfness overlaps and is intertwined. A Manifestation of this phenomenon might be couples finishing each other's sentences, but there are others more difficult to describe that I won't repeat here. It is also a way to explain how a consciousness might live on in the brain of another individual. If hopes, dreams and desires are shared than if one person dies their essence can still be carried on by the other in their actions to influence the world in a similar way that the deceased would have. This idea resonated with me and it isn't the first time I had thought of it or even seen references to this idea in literature (but the other instances the literature was sci-fi, e.g. the Ender's Game series). It dawned on me that this entwinement of souls could be an emergent property of biological and social evolution that has been taking place for tens of thousands of years. I believe it is fairly undisputed that biological (i.e. sexual) attraction came about as a means to propagate genes and increase the chances of survival of the species. I think it is also safe to say that that mechanism has certainly worked wonders as we now populate nearly every piece of land on this planet and have done a great deal to shape the planet (for better or for worse) in a way to cater to our specific needs and desires. Crucial for this level of control over our environment are the roles of culture and society. At some point long the way the importance of sexual attraction and desire for offspring was downplayed by the emergent desire to form personal bonds to one another, bonds that have since evolved themselves and that we now loosely call "love". Indeed, our species would not be in the place it is today if we simply reproduced and moved on. Necessary for our advancement was some kind of social stability. This entwinement of souls provided that. By sharing our individual hopes and dreams with our families and friends we create a kind of personal safety net that not only protects against unforeseen circumstances (the untimely death of a spouse or close friend) but in the inevitable end of every individual life. It has this effect because of the desire of remaining souls to carry on the memories and believes of the ones lost. A lost friend or spouse may result in those remaining to influence the world in a way that the deceased would have wanted to. Hofstadter speculates that the continuation of these memories and actions may even be used to say that a little piece of the consciousness of the deceased continues to live on.

Perhaps what we call "love" is this mixing of souls and our desire for it comes about from the evolution of our evolutionary process shifting from purely biological pressures to social pressures. To put it in terms of biological evolution people who form lasting, loving relationships and pass that notion on to their offspring tend to reproduce more than those who do not form lasting relationships and pass their values and hopes on to their children.

I'm still not sure that I wrote what I intended to write or am accurately conveying what I'm thinking, but it's already later than I planned to stay up so I'm just going to post this and perhaps add a follow-up and clarification tomorrow.

Many times I feel like I'm not very good at expressing my thoughts with words and that usually keeps me from writing things here. This case is no different except that people (mom) tell me I need to write down my thoughts because the inauguration of Barak Obama as the 44th president of the United States of America is an important event that I (kind of experienced) and will want to look back on this in the future. I don't disagree at all, but I still am unsure of just how to record my experience in words.

It was cold. That part was easy. Let me back up a bit. Driving to D.C. the day before I can't say that I was especially excited or anxious. This wasn't something I was looking forward to in the same way that I might look forward to a taco (or 5) after swimming. It was something that I felt I needed to go to because if I didn't I would regret not going. I felt that it was important to be at least in a little way, a part of history. I wasn't sure what to expect. I wasn't sure what I would take away from the experience but I wasn't really worried about that. I wanted to experience the moment (the real, actual moment, not the cheesy newsicized and capitalized "The Moment" that CNN tried to shove down our throats every 5 minutes).

Due to some late night activities the evening previous (it was the 19th of January after all, what was I supposed to do?) I did not get up in time on the 20th to rush out the door at 7am and meet up with Matt like we had planned. Instead I decided to take a more relaxed approach and get up at my own pace. I ended up leaving Steven's apartment around 10:30 and took the metro one stop to Arlington National Cemetery. Getting off the train at that stop is where "the moment" started for me. Actually, I take that back. It started on the train the day before when I witnessed complete strangers start up happy conversations about an Obama pin on a jacket. People that normally would just keep their mouth shut on their train ride were smiling, animated and socially engaging. Obama as president is more than just a guy running the country. In many people's minds he is so much more; he is a symbol of what this country could be if we set aside our differences and use our vast amount of resources and knowledge for constructive purposes to restore us to a respected place in the world. More than that, he is a symbol of the end of an era that many people are more than happy is now behind us. An era of secrecy and attacks on personal liberties, one of irresponsible spending and irresponsible tax cuts. The traits that thrust our country to the forefront of the world stage in the past: science, innovation, diplomacy (ok, maybe not that last one so much, but it should have) were put on the back burner to make room for stubborn ideology, faith based initiatives and a hubristic approach to foreign policy. The collective excitement that Obama induced in his supporters was due not only to his fresh set of promised policies and new ideas he would bring to the White House, but also the ideas and policies he would be ending.

The first twangy bit of emotion hit me while I was walking across the memorial bridge. Walking from Virginia to the District, bracing against the bitter cold and stiff breeze, along with hundreds of other people, and knowing that all these people were here for the same reason as me, that it was likely we shared similar values and hopes and ideas of what this country *could* become, was quite the experience. I know not everyone reading this shares my views about Obama, or even about the direction that our country should take, but no one can deny the power of hope that Obama has instilled in the millions of people that traveled from all parts of the country to be on the national mall that day. No one can deny also the power of seeing 2 million people, all with the same hopes and dreams, congregated on a patch of dried, dormant grass, bundled in hats and cloves and scarfs, all getting along in very, very close quarters.

I had a choice, as I walked onto the mall. There were rows of jumbotrons set up down the length of the mall. I entered at the far end, near the Lincoln memorial. The crowds here were fairly sparse, there was plenty of room to get a good, close view of the screen. The downside was the Washington monument, and slight hill that it is on, completely blocked any view of the distant capital. This wouldn't do. I came to experience the moment, and I knew that to fully take part in the moment I need to have line of sight path between me, and the steps of the capital building. I made my way up the mall and into the crowed swarming at the base of the Washington monument. I was a bit further from a screen than I could have been further back, but the straight line path to the dome of the capital made all the difference. I could have tried to move up to the next closest swarm but at that point I didn't want to risk trying to find a good spot and missing the beginning of the ceremony so I stayed put.

I heard the same speeches that I would have seen on TV in the comfort of a warm living room. Actually, the wind made understanding the words of the speeches more difficult than had I been in the comfort of a warm living room, but that didn't matter. It didn't matter to any of the other hundreds of thousands of people in my swarm (last I heard the total estimate of people on the mall was around 2 million, but they were broken up into several clusters around each row of screens). The anticipation was thick. Every glimpse of any member of the Obama family on the screen elicited claps and cheers from my neighbors. Glimpses of any member of the then current, soon to be former, administration elicited groans, boos, or good humored jokes from my neighbors. At one point, during the announcement of previous presidents as they entered, and before the announcement of the then current one, a father turned to his infant daughter strapped to his back and said "in just a few minutes you're going to learn how to boo!" I wasn't the only one in earshot who chuckled.

During the swearing in ceremony not one of the 2 million people standing shoulder to shoulder to one another said a word. At least it seemed that way to me, it was the quietest I could have imagined that many people could be. At the end there was cheering, there was clapping, there was crying. As people started politely making their way to the outside of the swarm I saw many happy faces sprinkled with the dried salty remnants of tears.

The ending of the ceremony did not even feel like an ending. In some respects it was a bit disconcerting. The important part was over, people started filing away, and I then noticed that my hands were numb and my feet sore and I desperately wanted to get out of the wind. There was no real sense of ending to the event, though there was one part of the ceremony that did feel like a very welcomed ending to everyone in the crowd. I hadn't stayed in front of the screen to witness George W. Bush stepping into his helicopter, but I and everyone else did see if fly overhead, in the direction of Texas. People turned their heads skyward for a few seconds, smiled and waved and then brought their attention back to what they were going to do for lunch.

Perhaps the reason that this ceremony did not feel like an ending is that really, it was a beginning.

really (really) needs a new hoodie.

I wonder if now that I can post to LJ from the iPod touch if I will update more often? Probably not too much since it's kinds slow to type. The interface and form factor is better suited to micro-blooging. So expect more twitted updates :)

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

I really like libraries. The concept and the physical entities themselves. There is something awe-inspiring about walking through shelfs holding thousands of books, most of which you will probably never read. It is also somewhat overwhelming if you're trying to find something to read but not sure what. I wish there was a better way to browse and preview books, like how on iTunes you can watch movie previews before renting (I have spent way too much time watching movie previews, and have you noticed how all movie previous are so ridiculously silly and cheesy, regardless of the quality of the film being previewed?) I spent today searching for a new book to read. I don't really care what genre, but I focused my searches on sci-fi because it was easy to search for yet broad. I did some google searches and found a few lists of recommended sci-fi, then searched for availability at the campus library (unfortunately the town library is closed today). Only a few of the books/series I searched for are at the campus library, and of those one or two were actually available. I settled for a book called "Gateway" by Frederik Pohl. It was written in 1977 and got some good reviews. Sometimes the more "classic" sci-fi annoys me if they try to be technicall because they more often than not miss the mark and date themselves pretty horribly with references to advanced computers and machines that still use the likes of analog magnetic data storage. Not that I'm expecting anything like that, it was just a random thought. Another random thought related to that is that Isac Asimov writes in such a way that doesn't fall into those potholes, which is good.

Anyway, I'm getting a bit off topic. I originally was going to focus on the broader concept of libraries, books and reading. I do think that eBooks and eBook readers are the future of books for better or worse. I really like the idea of having a single device that can hold hundreds of books and has access to a hundred thousand more (and climbing) like Amazon's Kindle. However, I think possibly the best thing about "traditional" books is the ability to lend or give one to a friend to share some great story that you just read. It would be great if eReaders could implement some kind of peer-to-peer lending scheme like you can do with real books but unfortunately I don't think Amazon has any motivation to do something like that as they are mostly interested in book sales.

I also don't like the idea of missing out on the experience of visiting an actual brick and mortar library. Yes, it is far more convenient to simply search for, purchase and read a book on a small electronic device in the comfort of your own home, or wherever you might happen to be, but there is something to be said for walking through stacks of books, breathing in that old book smell, searching for that call number you scribbled down onto a scrap of paper. Perhaps, in a way, this experience can be maintained in the eBook world with the ever advancing and more popular virtual reality programs. Second Life comes to mind as probably the most well known. I haven't logged on in a while but from what I remember it did a fairly decent job of creating an immersive environment given the limitations of computer hardware. Skip ahead 10 years or so when 3D graphics cards are spitting out photo quality renderings at 30+ frames per second and 3D displays or goggles and haptic gloves are as ubiquitous as the optical mouse is now and one can certainly imagine browsing a virtual library complete with picking random books off the shelve to flip through and checking out any hot academic type guys browsing the same stacks. It might still be missing the old book smell unless someone comes up with a good way of generating odors electronically.

Isn't it interesting how all of a sudden you can start to see a random stranger seemingly all over the place? I guess in this particular incident it isn't ALL over the place, but it felt like it. A few weeks ago I got on the Smart Way bus for my weekend jaunt to Colorado. A curly haired guy got on the bus a few minutes after me and I noticed he had a University of Colorado shirt on and wondered if he was going to Colorado as well. At the airport he ended up being next to me in the check-in line and at some point the counter person verbally confirmed that I was going to Denver. When curly haired guy heard that he ask which route I was taking. I replied "through O'Hare" and he said something to the effect that that was the way he was going after the airline switched his flight for some reason. I probably could have been more sociable and continued the conversation and made a new friend, but I was in kind of a not-really-motivated mode and so left the conversation at that. Of course I noticed him on each of the flights to Denver and also ended up sitting across from him at the gate waiting for our connection at O'Hare. He made a friend there while I just pretend to not be listening in on their conversation. Each time I saw him I felt slightly guilty for not continuing a friendly conversation when I had the chance, at this point it just felt awkward to.

So anyway, as luck would have it, he was on both of my return flights to Roanoke, the Smart Way bus back to campus and then we both rushed over to Burrus to catch the Hethwood bus. He high tailed it to that bus because it left I think 10 minutes after Smart Way arrived at Squires. I felt slightly superior for being more experiences with such things and only walked at a brisk pace, confident I'd make the bus on time. The whole bus ride (all 10 minutes of it) I kept thinking what an awkward coincidence it would be if he ended up getting off at the same stop as me and living next door or something. No luck with that, he stayed on when I got off at the Haymarket square stop. Anyway, I spent the 30 second walk to my front door feeling stupid/awkward/antisocial for never making any small talk but assured myself it didn't matter at this point because I'd never see him again.

Well, naturally that wasn't the case or I wouldn't be writing this post. I decided to spend the afternoon/evening downtown after being in the house all weekend feeling slightly sick and my first stop was the library to look for a good book to read (didn't end up finding one). Well, as I was walking in, here comes curly haired dude walking out and we kind of made that awkward eye contact that's like yeah, we recognize each other but don't know each other well enough to even say "hi" . Le Sigh. I wish I was more gregarious and friendly.

Belgium is a very beautiful country, and we all agreed, friendlier than France when it comes to interacting with random people on the street. We started in Brugge, which lived up to its expectations for charm and beauty. Carl was informed of a good Hostel near the center city which turned out to be very decent indeed. The dormitory style rooms slept 15 people and I think there were 3 rooms on our floor that shared a very small bathroom with a single toilet (a sink was out in the common area). It wasn't that much of a problem though, I guess for the most part everyone was on different poop schedules. There was one shower room for the place which was basic but go the job done.

We did the important things to do in Brugge: climed the 366 steps of the belfry tower and then ate frieteken with all sorts of fun and tasty sauces in The Markt, walked along the canals, visited the old windmills and chilled out in one of the pleasant and quiet parks. At the end of the day (by now it was Friday) we headed back to the train station where Curtis started his journey back to Amiens so as to make his flight back to the states Saturday morning and Carl and I headed up to Oostende. Since a lot happened in the 3 days I was in the Oostende area I will start a new post.

Where to begin? Maybe the beginning, but that might make for a long post if I try and put all the events of the last 13 days or so into one. My trip got off too a late start with a canceled flight out of D.C. But, when United gives you lemons, make lemonade, right? So I spent a day in D.C. and got to visit Stephen (who's parents graciously let me stay the night) and Emily, who's birthday it was, as I discovered after the fact. So, a day late to Paris, but I also was switched to a direct flight from D.C. which was nice.

I arrived in CDG a little bit early (well, early for the new, day late flight anyway), found my bag with no trouble (even though it had been been bumping around in the system since I left Roanoke the day before and had a flight change) and then found Carl who was nice enough to take an early train to meet me so I didn't get lost in the middle of France.

Amiens is a nice city, it has a population of around 160,000, so maybe about 3 times larger than Blacksburg or Amherst. Rather than go one by one through every little event I will just summarize: we ate lots of bread and cheese, went to Paris for the weekend where we visited the Eiffel Tower, some famous street and a famous arch thing which were nice, as far as streets and arches go, and the Louver. That place is huge and would probably take a couple days alone to just see everything they have there. We saw the important things, like some greek pots and famous statues, and of course, the Mona Lisa. Apparently, everyone who sees it says that it is smaller than they expected, and in this case, I will agree with everyone. Personally, I think it is overhyped, I mean, it's just a painting of some woman smiling. Don't get me wrong, it's nice and all, and I think Leonardo Dica--- I mean DiVinci, did a fine job, but when all is said and done, it's still just a painting of some woman smiling. Apparently not everyone is as cynical as me though because there was a constant crowd around the painting, everyone taking flash photography even though there were many signs posted (not to mention it is just common since, but unfortunately people are selfish little creatures and think only of their own selfs) prohibiting flash photography. I did take a photo too (without the flash, naturally), just to show that I was there.

So that was Paris, after a couple days of recoup in Amiens we went off to Lille, where it rained when we were outside and cleared up when we were inside. We just walked around and came across a rather nice cafe were I got a salad and a crêpe and our server called me a fat cow, which sounds much nicer when said in French.

That is it for France, off to Belgium, which I think deserves a separate post, just for organizational sake.

On Saturday I joined a group of grad students to do some volunteer work down at Miracle Farm in Floyd. It is a beautiful little and Bed & Breakfast run by a couple dedicated to organic growing and sustainability. The experience was truly enlightening and inspirational, it certainly reaffirmed my feeling that one way or another I will end up doing something similarly sustainable and back-to-naturey. If I can manage to incorporate my ECE and EE background, all the better.

Ed and Karen were exceptionally welcoming and friendly hosts, I guess to a degree you would expect that, being that they ran a B&B, but it seemed even more than that, immediately after introductions they treated us as if we were long-time friends. We all learned a lot (and yet still just a small fraction of what there is to learn) about running an organic, sustainable farm. The projects our group worked on ranged from moving fallen trees that would be used for fencing or building posts (black locust trees have especially hard, rot resistant wood that can be used untreated as fence posts and last for 30 years), to separating worms from compost in the worm bin, harvesting the wild lambsquarter (which was then made a delicious part of our potluck lunch) to preparing garden plots for planting. Throughout the day we learned about double digging and no-dig gardening techniques as well as general aspects of permaulture.

Suffice it to say, I had a great time and hope to make it a regular event.

Oh man, it's been such a long time. The thing is there have been so many times over the past (how many months has it been) that I've thought "I should really post something tonight" and I (clearly) never did. I've been busy lately, some good busy, some annoying busy. It feels like I have been fussing with the hardware and software related to the towed array project for EVER now. It seriously has been... 8, maybe 9 months since really diving into this project. Since then I've designed and assembled version 1 and spent too many hours in the lab and at the lake testing it and trying to convince it to work well. It managed to work just well enough to not be a failure and prove that the design itself was sound, just needed some finesse. Of course, all along the course of the plans and development of version 2 I was reminded not to spend too much time building a really great towed array because in the end it didn't count for much. While, strictly speaking that may be true, I still feel that investing some extra time will be worth it when it finally comes to start doing field work this this thing. It is amazing the difference between working with a sensor that is marginal at best and one that just works every time you take it out to the lake. Now, we're not there yet, but we're getting close. It's been a frustrating journey though. As usual it took me longer than I'd planned to finish the preliminary board design. Even though the over all structure was very similar to version 1 enough parts changed that it made since to start with a blank slate rather than modify the old schematic (and honestly, making revisions to a routed board it OrCad is hell, I don't understand why that piece of software is actually in use by real people). Anyway, after getting those boards back it took a week or so to get parts assembled on to them to test. Initially things looked good, the power regulation circuits were nice and steady (a big step forward from version 1). We didn't expect to have much problem with the firmware since the core processors and data structure were identical to version 1. Never under estimate the influence of gremlins. For reasons beyond our comprehension the data protocol we had been using with version 1 to transfer data from the analog board to the host would not work with the new hardware. We didn't come to this right away of course. We spend days, weeks I think, trying to make it work and we always seemed close. A few of the mystery bugs turned out to be known issues with the new version of the PIC we were using on the host side (apparently the SPI slave select line is ignored when DMA is used, go figure) even after creating work around we still couldn't get consistent data transmission. In the end we decided the best thing to do was to rewrite the data protocol on the analog side. This wasn't terribly difficult but along with it came it's own fair share of snags and setbacks. Finally, after about a month after getting the boards in the data protocol was figured out and we had the array interfaced to the GUI displaying data in real time. But alas, only one channel was working well (and in its defense, it was working REALLY well). After futzing with things for another few days I finally discovered that a few of the signal input traces were shorted to ground. It was a problem in the board design, not enough clearance around the drill holes where the MMCX jacks sat. Well, there were a few other odds and ends I wanted to fix on the board anyway, so on to revision 2.1. Last weekend I read up a bunch on high impedance circuits and learned a few things that could explain some of the problems we were experiencing with the channels that weren't working but also weren't shorted to anything. Between then and this morning I made modifications to the board design to both fix the signal grounding issue and employ a few layout techniques that should help protect the high impedance inputs from things like leakage current and ground reference voltage differences. With that order finally off I have a few days of piece and quiet were all I need to do is figure out what to do to be ready for my prelims Dr. Stilwell thinks I should be taking next Fall. That and prepare for the Real Analysis exam which will be cumulative, closed book, timed. I am kind of hoping that since I'm taking the class pass/fail Professor Kay take it upon herself to decide I don't need to take the final, but I'm not holding my breath. Actually, as frustrating and time intensive as that class was/is, I think I got a lot out of it. Most recently we have been going over a topic that might (and I emphasize *might* ) prove useful in the research I'm (supposed to be) doing, (if I weren't kept busy building sensors all the time) in multi-vehicle cooperative behavior. I still don't know enough about it to decide if it is even applicable or not, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Anyway, I'm sorry if that was more of a synopsis of the towed array, but really, that's all my life has been since my last post (ok, some other stuff happened, I went up to MA for Becky's wedding, I... no, that's it). France in June! It seems so not far away, I hope I can get to a good place with the towed array that I don't feel stressed out about it while I'm of exploring France and Belgium. Guess we'll see.