[starbucks, here i come]

So I let my mocha sit on my desk untouched for hours, only to later find that its contents had partially settled to the bottom in such a way as to form a gradient of flavor that's progressively revealed as the drink is consumed. And I thought, hey, this might just be marketable. I mean seriously, who wouldn't want a hot beverage that changes flavor as they drink it! Dark chocolate to mint? Raspberry to orange? This is going to be HUGE.

28.12.05 - 0 comment(s)  

 

[as i wait for a progress bar]

hurray for incoherent ramblings.

there's something uniquely satisfying and hypnotic about mindlessly processing insanely large amounts of data, where small strategic changes repeated thousands of time over have such enormous amplified effects. and there's something about stepping back and looking at huge masses as a whole, the squint-your-eyes blurry image of some unimaginable number of tiny particles comprising one single entity, stuff like crowds doing the wave, population studies, brains, beehives, ant colonies, and computer-generated orc armies in lotr. and of course the classic case of everyday bird flocking; a flock is like a new animal of its own, with different behavioral patterns, and that seems to exist and respond to some new environment on a whole other imaginary level, as if it had no connection at all to the birds actually making it up. it's those connections that i find so interesting. just how exactly does a bird's individual behavior end up translating into that monstrous living creature of a flock? what are the birds thinking? how do they interact? can we ignore the birds and study the flock as a being of its own? or more importantly, can we not only study, but consider it one? i prefer to think yes, we can and should, as long as we look from the right perspective. everything has some frame of reference; it's just a matter of picking the one that best suits your needs. so i find myself once again in a dark room sitting at the computer watching thousands of tiny words scroll by in thirteen sorted columns, my eyes not quite focused on the screen but rather on some imaginary distance a little beyond it. the letters are slightly blurred but it doesn't matter because i'm not really even looking at them, just the general shapes outlining words and sentences. after a while it's just like reading, but much faster and much less of a conscious thing. try to imagine what the world would look like if you had eyes on the back of your head. you probably wouldn't have to decide which direction to look, it would just... be there. i don't think it would even feel like two separate sets of vision, you'd see and process it all at once. that's kind of what this is like. what i've got here is one large pool of similar data that's unpredictably broken into various datatypes. it's all the same type of information, but formatted in different styles and described in different ways. i'm watching for patterns among the differences and trying to come up with ways of best getting it all into one uniform structure. since there's so much to go through it would be suicide to try to do it by hand, so what i'm doing instead is selectively subjecting the data to small "rules" that, after being applied thousands of times, end up causing pretty huge changes to the data as a whole. the trick is planning ahead and figuring out what simple rules will have the desired outcomes, and not making too many mistakes (think butterfly effect) because it does take a while for the computer to process everything once i've told it what to do. it's weird and nerdy, but it's fun.

16.12.05 - 0 comment(s)  

 

[stall, fall, skip a beat]

I walked into the classroom this morning to take my MAT124 final, the one that determines 25% of my grade, only to find that the room was completely EMPTY, devoid of all signs of life.

Panic mode. Did I miss it?

I MISSED MY FINAL!??

No, silly me. It's tomorrow.

14.12.05 - 0 comment(s)  

fragments:

[timeless] ["what appears to be a growing trend"] [Provocation? By the fanciful lie of a vagrant foo... [I fill my house with antiques;] [as a corkscrew] [come what may] [FoV] [2113:itdwlod] [z-axis @ 75 Hz] [input]