Of My Own Ignorance and Doubting My Abilities to Reduce It
Learning is like washing your clothes. Every week there's a new load - you wish you could do say, +3 loads and thereby free yourself for 2 weeks, but you just can't do that. Likewise with learning, you can't be ahead of it. You can't know what you need to know to make that connection and/or discovery. So I guess, go as broad and as deep as you can. But tens of papers later (within this week or so), I feel not very much enlightened.
My 'week' has included (for my future self or any other Fid students wanting to know how round-about one can be):
- climate change (e.g. McKitrick paper - interesting), sunspots (e.g. wtf, switching magnetic fields of the Sun?), cloud seeding (v. cool)
- Richardson-Lucy deconvolution, Baye's Theorem, Baye's Postulate (all cool, but haven't really looked into when/why Baye's Postulate is valid)
- Markov gating schemes, steady-state kinetics, ligand-receptor binding kinetics/dye-binding kinetics, reaction-diffusion systems
- object-based programming (which actually sounds like Actionscript in Flash and the reusable objects, seem, in theory, to be v. economical - but I'm forever duplicating objects in Flash, when I should just create instances... but maybe I'm just confused)
- 'Does science make God obsolete?' (Templeton series; sort of odd question with loaded connotations/intentions, so just skimmed - heaps of them were cop-outs, even Pinker and Hitchens' were disappointing, but I quite enjoyed Sapolsky,
"So why is belief still relevant? To this I'd offer a very a-scientific answer. It is for the ecstasy...I mean those instances where you're suffused with gratitude for life and experience and the chance to do good, where every neuron is flooded with the momentness of feeling the breeze on its cellular cheek. A scientist... may feel ecstatic about a finding...but science...is not very good at producing ecstasy...(and) there are good arguments to be made for why science shouldn't do ecstasy...By contrast, the potential for ecstasy is deeply intertwined with religiosity...This may seem an unfair tilting of the debate against science...But building your life's explanations around science isn't a profession. It is, at its core, an emotional contract, an agreement to only derive comfort from rationality...The world would not be a better place without ecstasy, but it would be one if there wasn't religion. But don't expect science to fill the hole that would be left behind, or to convince you that there is none."
- ... because as you know, I'm quite inclined to believe there is no hole, or rather the hole is not real even if it is perceived to exist.
- Frequentist vs. Bayesian view on probability (thought it might have been useful, probably a waste of time)
- Binomial distributions/quantised events
- decision theory (again, probably a waste of time)
- differential equations (again, I thought this might help, but maybe not. At least I can do those Bernoulli ones now)
- 'stimulated emission', 'non-linear refractive index media/gain media/Kerr lens modelocking, self-focussing' (new terms I learnt just today... maybe except the first one :S)
On top of those, thinking about my actual experiments (which was actually sort of fun). I sort of don't know what to expect of myself, so I'm getting extremely tired from non-stop trying to understand things, but someone always raises something else I've never met. I'm just sort of annoyed that I don't seem to know anything useful... but I guess I'm just doing very wide helices and hopefully I will converge soon towards an answer or at least coherence...
Hmm... but I just thought of something practical I can do tomorrow.
Of Realities As We Age (Human Nature/Nature)
- fear of abandonment/loneliness as very real as we move away from the protection and unconditional love of our parents and family
- vanity in being desired as a real and very basic mode of motivation
- helplessness and insignificance in the vast world, yet at the same time, immense power and influence that can be exerted by an individual
- others with thoughts like you, but also with thoughts very unlike you and some intricate pattern of such thoughts and tendencies create those that you gravitate towards
- limitless people to meet, yet only a few will really be there
- selfishness as a neutral and expected quality
Lately I've been trying to understand why people apparently become needy for companionship as they age, but I guess from the points noted above, it's really a combination of our moving away from established filial (and other) ties and recognition/allowance of our own vanity/selfishness, so it's like an unmasking of need, not development of.
I don't know if these thoughts are stupid or not. I don't know how it compares with the rest of the population of xy-year olds or if that matters. I don't know if I am actually smart, I just know I want to do better than this. I don't know if I am strange, but I know that when I look at my life, it's nothing like my friends'. But I suppose theirs' are not like each others', either. I guess I want to sort of know that I am leading it in the right way, though I don't know that anyone else can make that judgement but me. Still, it would be interesting to see what the world sees. I suspect a vastly different figure.
