Not With a Bang

whimper...

In the future, my posts will (hopefully) be better thought out and not just random ramblings because i have to. i'm still going to try to post frequently, but i'm not going to force it. Thank you for your patience.

Reading List Meme

i'm not normally high on memes. This one, though, piqued my interest (found here). So here you are, a random list of books (compiled by who knows who) showing which ones i have read or started. Sadly, the ones i have read are a very small subset. i don't currently have any on my reading list because i tend to keep a very short reading list. i'm open to your input though: which of the books am i absolutely missing out on? Here are the rules.

Bold those you’ve read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your To Be Read list.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
• Crime and Punishment
• Catch-22
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion
• Life of Pi: A Novel
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
• Madame Bovary
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• A Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov (currently reading for a second time)
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveller’s Wife
• The Iliad
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations
• American Gods
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged
• Reading Lolita in Tehran
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
• The Canterbury Tales
• The Historian
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Brave New World
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dracula
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible
• 1984
• Angels & Demons
• The Inferno
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• To the Lighthouse
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Dune*
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
• Angela’s Ashes
• The God of Small Things
• A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• The Catcher in the Rye
• On the Road
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Hobbit*
• In Cold Blood
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield
• The Three Musketeers

Triptych Challenge

Triptych is a word from the greek words for three and fold. In normal usage, it means a work of art that is divided into three parts. i, however, am going to subvert the word for my own usage. My triptych challenge will be a game for you with the following rules: i will give you three themes. Your challenge is to come up with some work of art (book, song, video game, ...) that incorporates different subsets of those themes.

For example, if i give you Ocean, Music and Death, you might come up with Mr. Holland's Opus (music, not ocean or death), Crime and Punishment (death, not ocean or music), The Red Violin (music and death, not ocean), and Titanic (ocean, death and music).

The challenge is to come up with one example for every subset (A, B, C, AB, AC, BC, ABC, and, for good measure, none). One point for each subset. Bonus points would be given for completing all subsets as well as for constraining your answers to one genre (different amounts for different genres - could be movies (broad) or 19th century Russian novels (narrow)). i don't know that i'll actually give out points, but if i did, that's how i would score it - well, that and points via whim.

So here is your first set of themes: Royalty, Food and Sleep. Good luck! i'll post a comment later with what i come up with.

It's hard to come up with themes that are diverse enough to not overlap too much (so it's hard to find one without the other, like ocean and whale) but not so diverse (or narrow) that it's impossible to find anything that really has all of them, like aliens, dolphins, and rain (except for something like Douglas Adams' books).

Recall

i'm sure you've noticed that you recall some things much easier than others. At least i do. Maybe you recall everything perfectly. If so, remind me never to play Trivial Pursuit with you. If you're like me, though, you depend on some combination of association and indexing for most of your recall needs.

Most of us are familiar with free association games. If you are asked to say the first word that pops into your mind when hearing the word red, you might say apple. i might think fire truck. Someone else might respond with 650 nm (if you ever play this game with Techers, be prepared for some really random associations). Even better is playing non-sequitur, where you have to say a word that is not related to the word just said by someone else. It's actually very hard to keep up, especially if you're trying to be fast, and reveals the power associations have in our brains.

<grossGeneralization apologiesTo="Dan" >Our brains are made up of billions of neurons, each with many connections to other neurons via synapses. When a neuron is activated, it communicates its activation to its synaptically connected neurons, which may or may not activate them as well. The more a certain activation pathway is used, the more likely that it will be activated in the future.</grossGeneralization> i like to think that association works the same way, but on a larger scale (i think that makes it homologous, but i'm not absolutely sure. Maybe analagous is a better term?). On this scale, your brain is made up of a bunch of different words or concepts, with connections of varying strength to other words or concepts. So when you hear the word house, you might think of a door and see an image of your own house, which reminds you of other houses you have lived in, and so on down rabbit trails and off on tangents. i think that tangents, then, could be explained as particularly strong associations down which you are easily led (or just enjoy following). Some humor, as well, could be defined as finding somewhat obscure associations and raising our awareness of them. As with neurons, these connections between words/concepts grow stronger the more we use them together and weaken over time if not used.

Personally, i find that i do free association very well, particularly in the context of multiple choice questions. It's a big part of the reason i do well on standardized tests (honestly not that great of a skill - i don't have standardized tests at work, and Gavin didn't come with one either). Over time and repeated practice, i have learned to 'trust my gut' when faced with a question that i might not know a lot about. As long as i have run across the information asked for, it is possible that i will lean towards the correct answer. This is by no means infallible, but i tend to do better than random, even when i don't really know anything about the subject. i just have these faint associations calling out, "Pick me!" The more information given, the better we tend to do (in general), because we have a greater number of possible paths to light up the correct answer (as long as our initial associations are good - it's easy to pick up bad associations). That isn't always true, though, because sometimes the information might be given in order to lead us off the mark. Framing a question differently can often lead to different answers. A Pavlovian response is also the product of a strong association that may not be based in any rational method. When i hear a fire alarm, i think doughnuts. i can feel the tangents pulling me all over the place. Must. Stay. On. Track.

Indexing is a much less commonly used idiom for memory recall. It might not really be used at all, but i'm going to manipulate the term until it means what i say it means. When i say indexing, i think of databases (there goes that association thing again). One of the most common ways to speed up the response time of a database is to use indexes. <grossGeneralization apologiesTo="DBAs, anyone who actually reads this" >When a database table is created, it doesn't know how you want to search it. For example, i can create a table called Friends, and it has fields for first_name, last_name, and coolness (no, i don't rate my friends like this, it's a much more complex algorithm). When i want to find all friends with a coolness greater than 5, the database has to go through each record in the table to compile my list. Alternatively, i can tell the database to index the coolness field. The database will then keep a separate structure of the coolness values, along with which rows they relate to. It gets a bit complex in implementation, but the basic idea is that searching that separate structure is much faster than searching the entire table. </grossGeneralization>

i think that our brains index as well. As an example, think of the rooms in your house. You likely can come up with a comprehensive list fairly quickly. Yes, there is association going on here. Maybe it's all association under the hood. But when coming up with lists, some constraints make it easier than others. It's easy to think of boy names that begin with B - Brian, Bill, Bob, Bart, ... But try to come up with a list of boy names where R is the second letter (admittedly a smaller pool) - Arthur, Brian (by looking at my previous list), and i quickly degenerate into trying random sets of syllables (Dray... Draw... Drew - that's a name!). i can feel my brain stuttering. i can't constrain my search set well, so it feels like i need to examine each name out of all boy names to see if the second letter is R. i simply don't index names by second letter. i suppose you could say i don't have strong second-letter associations, but i find it slightly easier to think about it as indexes. i think a lot of memorization falls under the indexed category - the strongly associated set. Presidents of the USA. Noble gases. Elementary particles.

So, let's outline some different questions that apply to association and indexing to different degrees:

Free Association:
Question: Name 5 words you associate with green
Difficulty: easy

• Grass
• Oscar the Grouch
• Go (traffic signal)
• Felt
• Gavin's Bumbo

A lot of variation here

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Constrained Free Association:
Question: Name 5 blue things from college
Difficulty: medium

• Blue Books
• Tommy
• Merzbacher
• Jackson
• The paper around those white erasers

Easier once i came up with a theme (textbooks - basically turning it partially into an index)

---

Non-Sequitur:
Question: Name 5 things that aren't associated with movies
Difficulty: medium-hard (mental thrashing)

• Computer monitors
• Sudoku
• Log cabins
• Leap frog
• Gardening

It's hard to come up with things that aren't associated in some way. i'm not satisfied with the list i came up with, and i ended up not using a lot of the ideas that i did think of. It's so easy to come up with association paths ( sudoku -> crosswords -> didn't they make a movie about crossword aficianados? If not, then -> scrabble, and i know they made a movie about big scrabble tournaments).

---

Simple Indexing:
Question: Name 5 authors in your bookcase
Difficulty: easy

• Isaac Asimov
• Orson Scott Card
• David Eddings
• Frank Herbert
• JRR Tolkien

For this one, i almost look through my shelves to make the list. i know more or less where the particular authors are located, and it's basically an exercise in 'looking' at the shelves in my mind.

---

Bad Indexing:
Question: Name 5 book titles that include the word Free
Difficulty: hard-impossible

• ?
• ?
• ?
• ?
• ?

i am pretty much terrible at this sort of thing. Doesn't work for me at all.

Defeat

So i've been trying to do this whole NaBloPoMo thing without mentioning it, but i am, as of now, admitting defeat in that particular endeavor. Things have just been too busy lately, with preparations for a trip and holiday events. You can view this post as the result of a brain washed clean. Have you ever done a cleansing fast, where you only, say, drink juice for a week along with a few other things to clean out your system? i feel kind of like that - there's nothing left anymore. Sorry. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Thankfully, you only have to endure a few more days of this. i don't think i'll be doing it (NaBloPoMo) again.

Trip

In a week, Michelle and i will be taking our first major trip with Gavin. We're flying across the country to Georgia to see her parents, with a trip up to Tennessee (driving) to visit her grandparents. i'll also be traveling to Virginia for some training for work. So we're combining work with vacation and flying long distances in a plane with driving long distances in a truck. i'm sure it will be an adventure. Hopefully we'll all stay sane.

The trip to Virginia will mark the first time i've really been away from Gavin for more than just the work day. i am not looking forward to that part, especially because Gavin has been developing so rapidly, changing daily. i know that he'll be different in those few days. Hopefully he won't develop too much - i'm kind of selfish about that, i suppose.

Photo Organization, Revisited

We recently purchased Photoshop Elements in order to be able to do some more advanced editing to our photos. It happens to come with a photo organizer, so i thought i'd try it out. So, the last couple times i downloaded photos from our camera, i used it rather than Picasa. i took Adam's suggestion and started keeping the photos in folders by year, month, and day taken. i'm trying out the Edits subfolder as well, but it's kind of hard, as Elements automatically saves any (quick) changes you do to the same folder with an _edited-x added.

Anyways, i'm glad to say that it has been working out pretty well. i like the organizer in Elements better than Picasa's because it allows me to visually see my tags and drag them onto sets of photos. It is much quicker than manually tagging every photo (maybe there's a better way in Picasa, but i don't know it). i can also get the tags to automatically show up on Flickr when i upload them, so that's a plus as well. Picasa makes it easier to do simple edits to your photos (like lightening, color temperature, straightening, ...), but i'm pretty sure that i'll learn how to do them properly in Photoshop, and i'll have better control that way.

One other drawback to the Photoshop organizer was that it ran a little slow. That, however, was taken care of by a recent (today) RAM upgrade: 1 to 3 GB. It amazes me how quickly prices drop on computer components, especially memory. i would definitely recommend, if your computer seems a bit slow, to first make sure you have enough RAM. That is the easiest way to speed up your computer. Remember, though, that your computer can't address more than about 3.5 GB, unless you're running a 64-bit OS (this useless bit of trivia brought to you by the fact that i read random technical blogs).