Inky Doodles

Posted by Danny on Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 7:56 pm

After two years of flaccidly trying to get a poetry group together (and now that I’m daily trying to figure out what to spend my hour-long writing sessions on), I’ve decided to work through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled by myself.  But, the exercises don’t start for a while, and I’m bloody-mindedly reading it from the beginning (for the fourth time), so I got twitchy.  I did a couple of mad doodles, starting with this.

Stand, deliver up thy blows,
Weak in heart and long in nose,
Cyrano, before the sun:
Silhouetted, underdone.

I have no idea what it means.  If I’m very lucky, some scholar will devote her dissertation to excavating my genius while I’m still alive, and my curiosity will eventually be satisfied.  For now, I’ll assume it’s nonsense.

I like the metre, though.  It’s called (or was taught to me as) “chant metre,” but can be thought of as trochaic tetrameter with its terminating toes lopped off.  A trochee (“troh-key”) is a metrical foot comprised of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable: “Tum-tee.”  Tetrametre means “four measures,” so trochaic tetrameter goes

Tum-tee Tum-tee Tum-tee Tum-tee

Aren’t you happy now you’re reading?
“No,” you say, “my eyes are bleeding!”

To make this into chant metre, you drop the last -tee of the last Tum-tee.

Tum-tee Tum-tee Tum-tee Tum
(Tribal rhythms, beating drums)

or,

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

and

Something wicked this way comes.

This is a great metre to doodle in when you’re (I’m) impatient because every finished line seems to be self-contained, satisfying, and shouting.

(Even if you use enjambment
In your verse, it stays quite plangent.)

So, after my inscrutable triumph over French drama, I turned my incisive word-munching apparatus to the ink I was using in my pen at the time.

Diamine Majestic Blue:
Deeper, far, than should be true,
Thus, betrayed by pigments shed
Shines an opalescent red.

(In retrospect the ink uses dyes, not pigments, but it’s true that it’s so saturated it’ll leave a shiny red film wherever you write.)  This got me thinking that I’ve finally found a way to repay the ink review community on Fountain Pen Network for all the productive hours from which they’ve shielded me over the years.  My next ink was also a Diamine: my current favourite and “signature colour.”  (OooOOooh.)

Malty, velvet, Chocolate Brown
Rides my tines to rich renown
(Quickly I discharge on sheaf
What I’d liefer guzzle down).

Later, I noticed how cool it is that “chocolate” accommodates the metre it’s plunked into, especially if the preceding words hint at how many syllables I expect the reader to spend on it.

Malty, velvet, Choc’late Brown

To test this, I tried to translate the doodle into a metre with feet that have three syllables.  I guess this is a sort of “chant metre” with dactyls, but I don’t know if there’s a name for it.[1]  Or, if there’s a name for words that display this sort of flexibility in terms of syllable-count.

Tum-tee-tee Tum-tee-tee Tum-tee-tee Tum

Sensual, succulent, Chocolate Brown
Rideth my tines unto wealth and renown
(Fly my converter!  Swift paper, now wick
Ink I might soon sooner lick than lay down).

Anyway, if you like Stephen Fry, check out The Ode Less Travelled.  It should make you enjoy poetry, which is an incredible accomplishment on Fry’s part (and a worthy goal for your neurons, if I say so myself).

Unwonted Productivity

Posted by Danny on Friday, February 10, 2012 at 9:17 pm

(This post starts with lots of tedious, whining context.  If you’d like to skip to the good stuff, please click here.)

Since fourth-year of my undergrad, my academic life has been a losing struggle for productivity.  Procrastination no longer tested the edge of my due-dates, but the patience of my professors.  By the first couple of years at OISE, I actually got fatalistic about it, and felt often as if I was watching my own self-destruction from a safe distance with idle, morbid fascination.  Sometimes, I could muster misery; often I dallied with shame and self-loathing (publically, even, to the grief and probable boredom of friends and family).  My rationalizations for the consistently missed deadlines, and the undeniable fact that my peers were marching past me academically and socially, were always based in some sort of reality but they became increasingly byzantine and hollow.  I incorporated my sense of futility into my identity and wondered that I had ever respected myself.  It’s likely that I was clinically depressed, but consistently, I didn’t face it.

My desperation to be done with my thesis eventually grew strong enough to break through my apathy, and I started actively working on strategies to get work done.  Brian and I had some productivity dates around the time I was working at Indigo, the semi-successful engine of which was simulated peer pressure (since neither of us would ever have dreamed of chewing the other out for flakiness).  Scheduling and proximity were a problem, though, and made these meetings inconsistent.  When I moved up north after Gideon got his job in La Loche, the distance was an issue and meetings eventually stopped altogether.  There’ve been less distractions up here, and I’d become marginally more productive than I was in Toronto, but progress remained agonizing.

Over the last five days, I have (tentatively, but optimistically) turned myself around.  As with anything like this, consistency is more important than initial, favourable results, and therefore the bubbly remains on ice.  But, I’m chronicling how it happened here so that

1. If I lose my way, I can come back here and try to reboot;
2. If it turns out that this changed my life, I’ve got a record of my personality on the cusp, when I was happy and hopeful, but before I got all arrogant and preachy;
3. Maybe a variant of this approach can eventually be useful to someone else.

What I’m trying came out of a few places.  First, Byron mentioned during New Year’s that he’d had a lot of luck with doing daily schedules—having something to tell him what he should be doing at any given time (including when he was allowed to not be doing anything in particular) helped motivate him to work on his programming project after work, instead of immediately vegging out.  I had resisted this sort of technique in the past, figuring that while I tended to get lots done working to someone else’s timetable, I’d inevitably rationalize out of following one I’d imposed on myself (on grounds of arbitrariness and lack of consequences, etc.).

Next, I’d read a piece on Life Hacker about the motivational power of keeping track of streaks—basically, if you accomplish what you want to become a regular task a few times in a row, your knowledge of the fact accrues a kind of momentum: it becomes more and more of a shame to break the streak as it gets longer and longer, making counterproductive impulses less appealing.  This is something I’d definitely noticed independently over the last year when I started eating carefully and (again, with Gid’s help) exercising regularly.  The crucial thing, here, is to keep your streak constantly in mind—Life Hacker recommends a full-year calendar in an obvious place, marked off after each success so that your accomplishments will be repeatedly reinforced at a glance.

Consistency seems to promote habits and eventually dispositions.  Byron said that his regular schedule-writing became less important as he replaced the habit of getting home and vegging with the habit of getting home, programming for an hour, and then vegging.  This plugged neatly into Shawn Achor’s TED Talk, which Joel sent me five days ago: active habits could be intentionally engineered, as Byron demonstrated (and as I’ve been pleased to find, myself)—so too, argues Achor (with encouraging evidence), can mental habits, or dispositions.  Something about all of this pushed me to build the following daily checklist immediately after watch the TED, but (crucially) also to see it as an experiment in self-modification, rather than an arbitrary, self-imposed strategy I could self-destruct by failing.

It started with this table:

I incorporated into the Disposition-Hacker elements I was most interested in from Achor’s concluding list (about 11:00 in the video), and then, for fun, added a few things I’ve regularly wished I was doing with my life but couldn’t do because I was procrastinating school work with stuff I didn’t even want to do (obsessive videogaming and mainlining episodes of 30 Rock, it turns out): reading for pleasure had become a wretched escapism, and I haven’t been patient enough to sit and just listen to music for years.  These were habits I wanted to develop, and putting them in the list meant I’d need to schedule them, which meant, presumably, I’d get to do them without feeling guilty.  And writing.  Being good at writing, and writing enough to empty ink bottles, had been the core of my identity when I’d been at my very happiest—second- and third- year undergrad—but my desire to do it at all has been awfully low for a long time.  My vocabulary has withered and my self-confidence is as doot with respect to what I produce when I do write (sporadic blog posts are, at least a little bit, a consequence of that).  I miss the rush of obsessive poem-writing and the pride of sharing my creative stuff (foisting, even—who cares?  It was awesome!).  If I’m actively shaping my habits to reflect an ideal identity, I’ma fucking write, yeah.

(And, I figured, in case this actually works, I’ll chuck flossing in there too.)

Here’s a sample of my schedule, written without fancy, geegaw-festooned applications, in Wordpad and stored in my main Dropbox folder, at Byron’s recommendation.

When I lose myself in video games (at least lately), it starts with me thinking, “Well, I’m not doing anything right now.  Of the things I could be doing, [game on the go] would be easy to do.  And when I’m done doing that, it won’t be an option anymore, so then I’ll probably pick something more important and valuable to do.  It’s three in the morning.”  Always knowing what I wanted myself to be doing at any given time, and having the information at my fingertips, has been a very effective way of avoiding that mindset.  When I recognized this, I started listing projects and ideas in the same document in case, faced with the vagueness of “writing” or “thesis,” I get the urge to mull over my options again while doing something more immediately comforting and appealing.  (I copy the projects to each new schedule and then delete the entries I’ve accomplished, which helps me prime topics for Achor’s journaling recommendation.)

I’m tracking my streaks in the excel chart, and my “best streak” for each item to help motivate me if I lose a streak and get sad.  Also, initially out of interest and increasingly out of compulsive data collection, I’ve been recording the amount of time I spend on each habit.  At the moment, I’ve been doing much more than my allotted requirements for a number of them (this may also even benefit from the streak phenomenon—who knows?).  Concordantly, I’ve decided that keeping rigidly to my schedule is less important than keeping to the daily goals: if I’m on a roll with my thesis, I won’t force myself to break for lunch (and, when I’m back in Toronto with social obligations, I can still reasonably hold myself to the minimum requirements of list).

Again, I’ll see how this goes.  But, for now at least, it’s pretty great to be productive and happy.

Memory Dump into Log File

Posted by Danny on Sunday, October 16, 2011 at 9:07 pm

A large fly that was buzzing around the room in which I’ve been doing my reading suddenly fell down and landed on the couch across from me with an audible thud.  Here’s my brain:

• That was a weird noise; was that the fly?
• It was!  Must’ve been massive to make that noise.
• If it’s dead, it won’t distract me anymore; I wonder what happened to it.
• Oh no—it’s injured, poor thing.  One of its wings is bent up and it’s trying to straighten it out but it can’t.
• I should kill it.  It’s a broken machine that can’t be repaired.
• It’s wandering around trying to fix its wing—I wonder if it perceives pain in the way I do, or maybe if the confusion I ascribe to its movements is because it’s stuck in a self-repair loop with a component that won’t cooperate and behave the way the entire machine is programmed to.  Is it capable of confusion or shock in any sense that I’d recognize, or is this all anthropomorphization?
• There must be someone who could fix that wing for it.  There’s probably not much call for reconstructive chitinous wing surgery in veterinary practice, but there are specialists in all kinds of insects, anatomy, flight mechanics, microsurgery; has anyone ever, in the history of the world, tried to repair the broken wing of a living fly?
• I wonder how long it’ll live like this.  Will it starve before it’s eaten?  This is the first insect I’ve seen inside the cottage since I got up here; it’ll probably starve.  I should kill it.
• I can’t kill it.  I’m a coward in the face of my considered morality.
• Where’s it gone?  It’s been crawling around on the couch for more than five minutes; maybe it’s between the cushion and the armrest.  I hope nobody finds it dead later—it’s a big fly.
• Huh: there it is, and it’s fixed itself.  Oh, it’s a little beetle!
• Shit, I hope it’s not a cockroach.

(Edit:  It was an assassin bug!)

Free Brainy Lectures for Everyone!

Posted by Danny on Friday, July 15, 2011 at 11:46 am

Thanks to the goofy interests of our usual attendants (and not, though the allegation would be fair, due to the name of the event), subject matter at Evenings for Brains tends regularly towards neuroscience and psychology in general.  As a result, I was acquainted with V. S. Ramachandran’s TED Talk, and was subsequently chuffed all over to learn that he had produced an extended version of his presentation in the form of a five-part lecture series for the BBC.

The Reith Lectures are named for John Reith, the inaugural controller-general of the BBC, and exemplify the corporation’s now (tragically) quaint and paternal-sounding charter to “inform, educate, and entertain.”  They resemble our Massey Lectures (or rather, the other way around), and might be positioned as TED Talks for folks with long attention spans.

When I first stumbled on the Reith lectures a few years ago, I asked around with various British radio buffs whether any attempt had been made by the filesharing and archival  communities to collect and release the series online, as I’ve seen done with the Goon Show.  I was told that it was a good idea, and that some of the more famous or recent lectures were in “circulation,” but that the body was vast and there was more missing than was accessible.  Particularly with old BBC archival material, this had a ring of doom about it: in the company’s (later, corporation’s) early history, it was notoriously in the habit of recording new programs over old reels.  I found my Ramachandran lectures, which were recent, and a single fragment of Bertrand Russell’s series, which was famous, and consigned the rest to a teary oblivion shared by the early seasons of the Goons, the pilot of Clue (until recently!), and some Doctor Who episodes which I wasn’t particularly broken up over.

It was enough of a jolt of good news to get me blogging again, therefore, when I learned from the ever-fecund Open Culture website that the BBC had made the entire series available for free as an international podcast!

Please, please try some of this stuff.  There are names in the list of lecturers you’re bound to know, or topics you already care about.  If you’re nuts like me, listen from beginning to end and witness the evolution of western social conventions and intellectual fashions—Uncle Bert often makes my heart sing, but his positivism is shocking and foreign, even to my idealistic, naïve self.  If nothing else, try the first Ramachandran lecture (or the TED, linked above), and see if you don’t want more.  I so wish the CBC was cool enough to do this with the Masseys; they sell the lectures on CD instead (at the time of writing, anyway—maybe they could maybe be shamed into opening up a bit by the Venerable Beeb).  As it stands, the Massey lectures are a bit more populous in the wild than the Reiths were, so folks with the right inclinations and skills will do what they will.

One other thing I’d like to tell you about, O Absent Readership, is another swell bit of totally legal, openly accessible brainy goodness served up by Stanford University and brought to my attention again by Open Culture.  Robert Sapolsky is a neurobiologist and primatologist, famous for his book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, has been featured by TED, The Teaching Company, and Big Ideas, and has recently had his open course on Human Behavioural Biology broadcast to the world, OCW-style.

Sapolsky’s name was familiar from the Teaching Company catalogue, but I hadn’t seen him teach until I watched the clip featured on Open Culture.  Their pitch is my pitch: try a few minutes of the first lecture—if you’re hooked, the whole course is available to you.  (The ability, from home, for free, to see a professor teach and to say, “gosh, I wish I was in his class,” and then to be able to watch ALL the lectures in that class, is like paradise.  It’s transmission-based learning, but it’s still so, so tasty.)

What’s most valuable about this series, for me, is that Sapolsky provides a fairly thorough overview of the various lenses for viewing human behaviour scientifically, but is ever at pains (or, takes sadistic pleasure) to tear down the confident edifices of various modes of thought.  He uses the metaphor of being trapped within one of many “buckets” when trying to explain human behaviour: evolutionists, molecular geneticists, and ethologist care about different things and countenance different kinds of evidence when explaining phenomena they would all equally recognize.  Exploring the conflict between the different buckets, as Sapolsky does here, breaks down the apparent monolith of scientific accord and offers a more accurate picture of this particular way of understanding the world.  For this I have great affection.

My approach to the lectures has been to download them from YouTube using FlashGot (free!), rip the audio data from them with AOA Audio Extractor (free!), and then listen to them on my iPod while commuting (fun!).  For the buckets with which I’m familiar, this has worked pretty well, and I try to watch the lectures covering stranger topics, like neurology.  It’s been awfully rewarding and compelling for me; I hope some of you find this useful, too.

Podcast Highlights, Part I

Posted by Danny on Monday, April 25, 2011 at 6:28 pm

(I usually write these posts by hand before putting them up, which means, I think, somewhat less horrible prosody that may otherwise happen, but also, that I can be side-tracked and my posts are either lost or terribly delayed.  And, because I don’t date the writing in my notebooks, I have no idea how long ago this was intended to go out.  The timestamp is a guess—I actually posted this on May 31, 2011.  Appy-polly-logies, absent reader base.)

Both of the projects planned for Exploring Our World at Youth Group have come to nought: attendance is too spotty and folks are too tired coming straight from school to generate a consistent sort of participation.  We got one good petition-planning meeting in, with fun, Mark-Thomas-style discussion, but our political machinations petered out; as has been the practice in the past, it’s been just me bringing in neat things, so the Web of Awesome has similarly failed.  Alas.

But!  While there’s been sadness there, I have discovered a few exciting things that have occupied much of my time and may pleasantly occupy yours.

Read more »