K 3 3 G

A mountain of paper, a sea of ink

Posted on June 15th, 2007 by ephemere.
Categories: ink & paper.

(cross-posted from the Read Or Die Weblog)

Two hours or so ago, while trying to draw, I somehow came up with the idea of reading some books for inspiration. I remembered that I hadn’t read my copy of C.S. Lewis’s Narrative Verse yet, so I thought that I would just grab the book, read a few pages, and return to my drawing with renewed energy.

Then again, I hadn’t considered the state of my bookshelves.

I think it’s a common problem for readers: you buy and buy and read and read until you run out of shelves — and then any space not occupied by a household appliance, piece of furniture, or person is commandeered by crazy book piles. In my case, I have three bookshelves, and most of the shelves have double rows of books. Trying to get one of the “hidden” books often results in the whole front row crashing down on the unfortunate person. My room often resembles a disaster area, except instead of rubble I have books and the occasional stray page.

Once I tried to organize my books. It took me the better part of a day, but the sense of satisfaction lasted for weeks. The ordered arrangement didn’t.

So as I looked for my book I navigated shelves of physics textbooks jostling against high fantasy and apologetics, Christian devotionals rubbing shoulders with science fiction anthologies, books about cats and drug addiction and Japanese history; tragedies and comic book anthologies and cookbooks and computer magazines; and, just to confuse me, my old notebooks (empty of coherent notes) and sketchpads (which contain more equations than drawings). I dived into piles upon piles of hardcovers and paperbacks. Then I moved on to the books stacked on the floor, inside my cabinets, and in the space under my desk and computer table.

One and a half hours later I found Narrative Verse in my brother’s room, where it lay under two Calvin and Hobbes collections, the illustrated Stardust, vol.1 of the School Rumble manga, A Game of Thrones, Ateneo’s standard Theology textbook, Mathematical Physics, and Asterix at the Olympic Games. And a bedroll. I don’t know when my brother started lumping sleeping gear and books together, but I guess he’s just trying to make the most out of the available space. I’m just glad he isn’t piling his shoes on top of my books. Messy bookshelves are one thing, muddy covers are another.

Sometimes I feel that I should take better care of my books; should make sure, at least, that I know where things are instead of having vague combinations of Title-Author-Location floating around in my head. A lot of bibliophiles may think that I don’t treat books with respect and should stick to maltreating photocopied versions. But I do try. I certainly love my books and hunt the missing ones down with persistence, if not efficiency. I just can’t guarantee they’ll be the kind of copies secondhand bookstores will want to buy.

I don’t let books stay on their shelves too long. I believe in re-reading good books, in taking them around with you and sneaking a few pages in between classes or while standing in line, in slipping them into backpacks and handbags so you can share them with friends you happen to meet, in going to sleep with your head pillowed on Arfken and then waking up because the Belgariad is giving you backache. We have our own ways of loving for books. Mine is to live with them.

0 comments.

Daytime observations

Posted on March 30th, 2007 by ephemere.
Categories: science/math, anecdotes.

(title inspired by Taylor & Wheeler’s Parable of the Surveyors, Spacetime Physics; crossposted from Miamor)

(title inspired by Taylor & Wheeler’s Parable of the Surveyors, Spacetime Physics)

Imagine a room of students waiting for an exam to start. They talk in hushed tones about concepts and equations none of them really understand, reciting formulae like mantras. The room is cold with excess air conditioning and barely stifled dread.

The proctor — a graduate student — walks in carrying the exam papers and questionnaire sheets. He doesn’t look at the students; instead he goes to the blackboard and begins writing.

It’s standard procedure to write the starting time, the finish time, and the duration on the board, but this is ridiculous.

My first reaction was: “There’s something wrong here. That’s not a well-defined sequence and its limits don’t make sense. And the integral is really ugly. I don’t even think you can do that.”

And then I paused and thought, “No, really, there’s something wrong here; he shouldn’t be doing that.”

It wasn’t just the math that was off; it was his writing it in the first place. I found it terribly arrogant; sure, intimidate the undergraduates (most of whom have only limited knowledge of derivatives, much less sequences and limits) with unnecessarily arcane symbols. Be inconsiderate and obnoxious and rub it into their faces that they are worth so much less than you are.

Showing off is self-destructive because, of course, intellectual humility is always, always fundamental. You should never lose sight of that, never flaunt what you know — if you do so, you’re just displaying your ignorance (of the fact that there’s so much more you don’t know, for one thing). Once you get to the point where you feel you can start showing off your mastery of your field, you hit a wall and learn less and less every day. Or worse — lose everything you have.

The proctor collected our answer sheets ten minutes early. I didn’t bother correcting him; he didn’t look amenable to corrections anyway.

–

So this semester is over and I have one summer and two semesters left before I graduate. I’m starting to find some sort of grounding in economics: interesting problems, situations I’d like to explore. It’s like being given a whole new playground in which to wreak havoc…! There’s much to be said about being different; as an economics major who can read (and understand, and work on) physics papers, I straddle two worlds.

And there are so many things to learn!

–

In other news:

This made my day. It’s a formula that… graphs itself!

0 comments.

Web services for likhain.net

Posted on February 22nd, 2007 by ephemere.
Categories: admin, tech.

I’m still in the middle of tweaking settings and fixing how the default page looks, but I thought I’d let you guys know: I’ve enabled Google Apps for likhain.net.

Start page URL is http://partnerpage.google.com/likhain.net. You can also use http://start.likhain.net.

Please feel free to sign up for an account. I’m planning to use likhain.net Gmail myself.

3 comments.

Linkage: WeffRiddles

Posted on February 16th, 2007 by ephemere.
Categories: games.

If you like mind games and enjoy dissecting pictures and text, you might want to try this. It’s an HTML-based puzzle game: the answer to the puzzle takes you to the next one. Very, very, very addictive.

http://www.weffriddles.com

(I’m currently stuck on a fake level. Heh.)

12 comments.

The Girl’s Guide to Gamers (1/?)

Posted on February 14th, 2007 by ephemere.
Categories: opinions, games, ideas.

Valentine’s day special!

Heh, not really. This piece has been on my mind for quite a while now, especially since (a) I’m both a girl and a gamer; and (b) I’m involved with a gamer. Truth be told, if one were to trust gamer lore, gamer girl + gamer guy = ideal combination, but we all know that’s just wishful thinking.

Thus, this series (? hopefully I manage to follow through with it!). I’m starting it in a very informal way, but may turn it into an article or something more readable someday. Bear in mind that a lot of things here apply to geeks in general, not just gamers, and can be generalized to… well, just about anyone, whether you’re a gamer or a girl or just something starting with g. Just pick and choose whatever you feel applies.

(more…)

2 comments.

Post-penultimatum

Posted on February 10th, 2007 by ephemere.
Categories: admin.

Having decided to close Stranje, I’m also going to focus on the few projects I have left — K33G being one of them. I’m looking at a semi-upgrade theme- and plugin-wise, and also at a series of upcoming posts I may or may not turn into articles:

- girls and gamers
- geekhood
- a look at what intelligence does or does not mean, based on my own experience

Also I’ll be turning likhain.net into a sort of portal to creative projects involving anything from geeky blogs to experiments in art, dabbling in typography, and condensations of classic speeches and major philosophical texts. If anyone wants to be hosted (you get your own FTP login, SQL, etc etc) or help out with the main site, please let me know.

2 comments.

Legendary notebooks in not-so-legendary hands

Posted on December 12th, 2006 by ephemere.
Categories: ink & paper, art & music.

The one bright spot* in my life right now: I have new Moleskines! They arrived yesterday afternoon.

*Okay, maybe it’s not the only one– fine, it’s not the only one. But allow me a little exaggeration. For artistic effect, you understand.

Though I do most of my writing on my laptop (I call her Fel, short for Felinity) I still do quite a bit of creative scribbling on paper. My reasons have less to do with the quality of writing and more to do with my vanity: I like looking at sheets of paper covered with my handwriting. It’s influenced by calligraphy, so it looks very scripty and romantic on the page; I have been told several times by fellow students and professors alike that my handwriting is better suited for declarations of undying love than for equations and lab recordings.

Because I like writing by hand so much, I have a lot of notebooks. Ideally each notebook has its own purpose: the hardbound ones are for writing, the spiral-bound ones for physics and note-taking, the logbooks for problem-solving. That doesn’t work in real life, though, since I end up using my “creative” notebooks for scratch and random equations and I don’t use my “in-class lecture” notebooks at all. The sole exception to this haphazard notebook abuse is my Moleskine, because I respect it so much I don’t let the slightest hint of crazy science touch it. After all, who wouldn’t be impressed by this:

Moleskine is the legendary notebook, used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin. (from the Moleskine history)

The paper is beautiful, too. Truth be told G has been talking about her Moleskine for as long as I’ve known her, six years or more. I didn’t exactly pay attention — a notebook is a notebook is a notebook — until my cousin brought me a Moleskine from Singapore a few months ago. It was love at first sight.

And now! My little Moleskine Cahier (hereafter known as Xai, pronounced “kai” and alternatively spelled as “chai”) has been joined by two large notebooks**: a Classic Plain notebook (Xhel) and a Classic Sketch notebook (Sai). Xhel will be the repository of my scribbles and draft sketches, while I’ll be doing a lot of experimentation with Sai, ink, watercolor pencils, and pastels. So happy.

**I was actually hoping a freebie 2007 organizer would be included in the package. Sssshhh. I’m going to try ordering again in a week or so.

Xhel is the one bound by green and Sai the periwinkle one. Both were ordered from Moleskine PH and were delivered promptly (as in “next business day” promptly) in a lot of protective packaging — it was evident that Moleskine PH wanted the notebooks to be in perfect condition when they arrived. I’ll post writing and art from my Moleskines in ephy from time to time. If I’m not mistaken, several of us have Moleskines too, so it might be interesting to post excerpts from our Moleskines every so often.

Ah, and I have a question for the writer-types: how do you do your writing? Do you write by hand and then type the completed chunks? Is everything completely computer-based? What about your outlines — do you write them on paper (or type them in your text editor of choice) or just keep them in your head? I’d love to read about your approaches to the process of writing.

12 comments.

The nonconformist’s plaything

Posted on December 1st, 2006 by ephemere.
Categories: science/math, ideas.

Hello, sorry for the silence! I’ve been semi-away from the ‘net these past few days, since I had to do a thesis-related presentation last Wednesday and spent the days before that with my nose buried in papers. Slacker though I am, I wouldn’t have needed to cram quite as much as I have if not for the fact that I decided to change thesis topics just last week.

Yes. I’m not the most reasonable of people.

It was worth it, though; from a thesis problem that (to me) wouldn’t go very far, I’m now studying a very interesting combination of statistical mechanics and game theory. My thesis problem is concerned with something known as the minority game. Just to clarify, game theory does not have anything to do with MMORPGs or RTSs or things that go boom. It deals with the patterns and strategies involved in certain situations where your reward depends on not only your choice but also everyone else’s decisions.

The minority game is the mathematical formulation of the El Farol bar problem, which deals with the dilemma of anti-social people who want to drink alone… No, just kidding. This is how it goes. Let’s pretend that there’s a certain bar that you, along with a lot of other people, go to exclusively (meaning you don’t go to any other bars). Every night, you have the choice between going to the bar (action +1) or staying at home (-1).

However, you, being a strange type of person who goes to a bar to drink and not to pick up hot bois or chikzorz, don’t want to go to the bar if it’s too crowded. If given the choice between going to a crowded bar and staying at home, you’d rather stay at home. In other words, you want to be in the minority: if few people go to the bar you want to be one of them (since the bar won’t be crowded), and if few people stay at home you’d rather stay at home as well as to avoid the pack of sheep crowding the bar. This is why the game is called the minority game — the minority wins.

Also, let’s assume that everyone else thinks like you (what? no really, let’s pretend… stay with me here). Nobody wants to go to a crowded bar, but nobody has any idea how many people are going to the bar on a certain night anyway. So how can you decide what decision-making strategy to follow? Also, what does the bar attendance for each night look like? Are there winners and losers, or does everyone more or less make as many bad decisions as good ones?

And that’s where statistical mechanics methods come in. My thesis problem involves the solution of a set of rather intimidating equations that I don’t quite understand as of the moment, but anyway…

Minority games, though they’re a class of very simple models, have a lot of applications. You can use them to analyze traffic (should I take the shortcut route or the normal route?), lines (like at the grocery or bank or — gasp — the horrifying enrollment queues at my university), and financial markets (buy or sell?). Also, you can modify minority games to add a lot of other choices, as long as you stick to the rule that the minority always wins. They’re very useful in disciplines like economics and social science.

…Though, of course, if I were given a choice on something to do during a Friday night I’d pick something like stargazing or going to an amusement park or playing my current game obsession. My professor actually kept interrupting me while I was presenting this–

“Why don’t you like crowded bars, anyway?” he said. “Who goes to bars to drink? You go to bars to pick up people, right? Hmm, or… you can just bring your date home. That’d probably be just as fun, if you live alone.”

Really now. You should’ve heard what he had to say about the prisoner’s dilemma.

4 comments.

Groupmeme 1: One book that…

Posted on November 27th, 2006 by ephemere.
Categories: opinions, ink & paper.

Encouraged by inkstone’s post regarding books, I thought it would be nice to do this again (some of you may have seen this and answered it already, but it’s a nice meme so… ;p). Post your answers in the comments. You don’t have to answer with just one book.

One book that changed your life:

One book that made you laugh:

One book you have read more than once:

One book you would want on a desert island:

One book that made you cry:

One book you wish had been written:

One book you wish had never been written:

One book you are currently reading:

One book you have been meaning to read:

Some links to previous booklist posts: Strange Joys 1, 2, 3. Please add yours~

4 comments.

Swimming in paper

Posted on November 26th, 2006 by ephemere.
Categories: ink & paper.

Here there be booklists! Do post your own — either in the comments, or if you prefer, a separate Keegy post. Books reside permanently among my fascinations and loves, and every so often I get the urge to write an ode (or a blog post, or a list compilation) about books. Please note that spoilers may follow, in case you don’t like that kind of thing.

Books recently read (excluding, of course, academic textbooks)
• Malcolm Gladwell, Blink. From the author of The Tipping Point, which talked about the memetic spread of ideas, comes a book that attempts to spark another revolution of perspectives– this time in what we think about the way we think. While the anecdotes were interesting, I thought it was much less substantial than The Tipping Point; maybe because I came away with nothing new after reading it. But then again, I’ve always been the kind of person who can make decisions in seconds, so the theory of snap judgements wasn’t that surprising.
• Christopher Paolini, Eragon. Borrowed this from the Jake, and he was right — it was fun. Nothing really unexpected happened and I don’t think it’s groundbreaking fantasy, but I enjoyed reading it, which is more than I can say for a lot of fantasy titles out there. The writing is good, though the fact that this is the author’s first novel is painfully apparent at times. I’m looking forward to watching the movie. I think I’ll enjoy it. If you want uncomplicated fantasy that carries you away from the mundane and soars with you on dragon’s wings, this is a good choice.
• James Gleick, Genius. A Feynman biography. Gleick has written about science before, and his familiarity with the subject shows in how he writes about the research that made Feynman one of the century’s greatest physicists. He didn’t gloss over Feynman’s less-than-exemplary habits, as most biographers are wont to, and is painfully honest without being maudlin when dealing with some difficult episodes in Feynman’s life. This doesn’t have the humor of other Feynman-centered books — Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and its cousins are much funnier — but it’s a very instructive read for the student of physics or just about anyone interested in science (or scientists!).
• Ursula le Guin, Tehanu. This is the last of the Earthsea cycle books I read, so by the time I picked it up I already had a general idea of the storyline. Reading it was… an experience. Though le Guin has her faults — sometimes she tends to lose the thread of the narrative, or at least hide it away while she explores a certain idea — I still find her prose beautiful and graceful. Among the books in the Earthsea cycle, Tehanu is probably the one that focused most on the characters as human beings with emotions, pasts, and phobias. It made Ged more real to me since I saw him not as a mage (okay, ex-mage) but instead as a person who was making a rather difficult transition in life. Ah, and the scene at the end — the one at the cliff-side — took my breath away.

Books to read
• Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker. I’ll be honest. I don’t like Dawkins and I didn’t like The Selfish Gene. I have the feeling I won’t like this book either. But whether I like it or not, Dawkins was a major influence on the way scientists — and other intellectuals, and even the general public — interpreted scientific data vis-a-vis philosophical questions on existence and meaning and why we are here and… well… the purpose of life, I guess. Rather than hear other people parroting Dawkins I’ve decided to read him myself. His prose is clear and coherent, at least.
• Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I’m not exactly sure what this is about, but… Godel! Escher! And Bach! How could anyone resist? (Though, um, I still don’t like Bach as much as I like other composers.)
• Ibsen’s Selected Plays. I’ve read this before, but I like reading Ibsen’s plays every so often. They make me feel human.

I don’t have a lot of books to read. Hmm. I should look for a good fantasy series to start reading soon, since I think I’ll be sick of scientific stuff by the time I finish my to-read list. Or maybe something light and funny? You can never have too much silly humor in your booklist. Unless, you know, you have to take things seriously.

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