Ceaseless Student

There are some mistakes that are easy to get past, but what happens when one makes a mistake that violates a principle that they consider important?

Sometimes, an action is unforgivable. If the another person makes this kind of mistake, it is possible to either let it sit or to be merciful and forgive the person. But this can’t be easily done for oneself. If you forgive the unforgivable in yourself, it feels like you are changing your principles. It doesn’t feel like mercy, it feels like failure. So how do you get past a mistake that matters?

The only answer I’ve been able to come up with is time. Just let it sit. It fades in memory. It becomes less important.

Maybe there’s some rational way to say something like “I’ve acted 10 billion times and only 6 of these times were unforgivable mistakes, so this is a reasonable proportion.” But my mind cannot work that way. For me, unforgivable is not forgivable. The interesting thing, from reading what I wrote above, is that I seem to think that the person who did something unforgivable can be forgiven, but the action itself cannot. That makes sense.

Any thoughts?

Some of you might have noticed a period starting two weekends ago and going through about last Tuesday where I was substantially quieter than usual. I was trying a bit of an experiment to see if I could be both quiet and passive as opposed to loud and borderline aggressive. It was hard, but also quite eye-opening.

I started on a Friday evening and pretty much just failed. I would just be frustrated for a while as I actively tried anything in order not to talk and then I’d eventually let my guard down for a second (usually because my willpower was being drained at incredible speeds) and I’d be back at full volume imposing my views on as many people as humanly possible. Not great. Also, I got sweet headaches from the failed effort of trying to be quiet.

This would be that pattern for a few days. Eventually, with a great deal of self-programming (mostly by a hybrid meditation/self-hypnosis thing I’ve had going since high school) and force of will, my volume decreased. I started listening to what others had to say. Mostly, I tended to agree with what loud-Boris would’ve had to say on the subject, but I simply didn’t say it. Sometimes, I found myself noticing that there was more thought behind some of the things others said than I would normally see (as they would’ve been interrupted before it became evident). I found myself enjoying being quiet sometimes. It started being classified as a default state. I met a friend’s girlfriend and was introduced as “This is Boris. He used to be loud, but… uhmmm… now he’s not… anyways, he’s a good kid.” Another friend told me that my default volume was not only lower than my old volume, but actually lower than the average person’s default volume. I was feeling pretty proud.

In addition to the volume thing, I was also doing the passive thing. This meant lots of things. For example, I had to wait at the dinner table until someone left in order to leave instead of causing an exodus myself. Something I found rather amusing was that many groups had very solidified roles for people. Any group that relied on me to start conversations had incredibly funny awkward silences. To the point where one group spent most of a conversation talking about how they wished the other loud person in the group was there so that they’d have something to talk about. It was hilarious. Oh. And frustrating. Did I mention that? Anyways, this went on for a while and I was debating keeping it. Ultimately, the goal was to reach a state where both my volume and my level of assertiveness were things I could dynamically modify. But until then, I’d need a default. I was actually considering making it quietness. I wasn’t going to do passive, but I though I might go for assertive and quiet.

But then I decided to go back to a loud default. Why, you ask? Well, I seem to be unable to separate out the assertion from the volume easily. I started being really unhappy with myself when I’d occasionally decide to say something and then never say it because I wouldn’t interrupt anyone. By the time a hole in the conversation popped up… well - it just wasn’t relevant anymore. So I’m back to old, loud Boris.

*sigh*

Maybe I’ll try separating out assertiveness and volume again sometime soon. It seems like a prerequisite for the end goal of having full, real-time control of both of these variables independently.

———————
On an entirely different note, I’ve had a headache since I got home. I think it’s because of a lack of pressure. It’s kind of hilarious really.

So I ended up dredging up a couple of old pals today. In the past, I’ve learned a couple of forms of shorthand (Speed-Writing and Teeline) and I’d read about (and tried) a variety of memory systems. These have all been entertaining for a while and then been left by the roadside, but it has not been a waste.

I still remember Teeline just fine and occasionally use it to jot things that I’d rather not have others read or simply because I don’t have room in a margin to write things out longhand. I’m certainly not faster at Teeline than normal writing anymore. (pdf of the Teeline system)

The Major System (wiki) is an infinitely generalizable peg memory system. The idea is that you link whatever you want to remember with a particular image that represents an index. The neat thing about this system is that each digit is represented by a consonant sound. For example, a 1 is a d or t sound. So my index for 1 is ‘toe’ and my index for 11 is ‘dead.’ If I want remember a list of scientific discoveries, for example (Times top ten list), where #1 is a method for making skin cells behave like embryonic stem cells - I could picture some skin from a toe being scraped off and grown into various organs.

Now here’s my favorite part. Teeline uses only consonants. The Major system makes everything a consonant. I think they like each other. It certainly helps add an additional few elements of memory (I can remember writing out and seeing the Teeline symbol). More importantly, it got me excited. Time to relearn both. Maybe this time I’ll stick with the major system. It is conceptually incredibly powerful. If anyone wants to practice either at Olin, let me know.

Hey all. I’ve been reading some Confucian writings and I thought I’d share some thoughts I found particularly interesting. I do suggest reading them. Stopping and thinking about these can be quite rewarding.

• Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles.
• Have no friends not equal to yourself.
• When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.
• The accomplished scholar is not a utensil.
• To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage.
• The mind of the superior man (Chun-Tsze) is conversant with righteousness; the mind of the mean man is conversant with gain.
• Chi Wan thought thrice, and then acted. When the Master was informed of it, he said, “Twice may do.”

I think I’ve caught a glimpse of what that must feel like. Here’s the first page or so of my report b/c it’s just text. Feel free to check out the whole thing here.

The birth of a control system

As I start to type up this lab, I continually glance back at my levitating object in wonder. I also glance up at the whiteboard and think that math is truly beautiful. I think my controller can best be explained by a story.

I was attempting to figure out a way to get the step response of the original system. It was not going terribly well. I could add a step, but I couldn’t see anything at all through the noise from the system moving just a little at equilibrium (I’m currently thinking that a levitated object is not the best way to get the starting point that I then disturb with a step). Anyhow, I tried to stabilize the system by using a plastic rod to hold things together at the set point. That got rid of the high-amplitude, low-frequency noise, but high-frequency was still killing me. So I tried just adding a low-pass filter so that I might be able to see the step response better despite the noise. There was sadly too much noise. At this point I started poking around for a bit and one of the things I tried was changing the system to open-loop for a bit. I then took a look at the signal coming from the hall effect sensor. Importantly, I did this by touching the output of the hall-effect sensor to the place where my probe was at the time (after the low-pass filter). Then things moved and I was confused (I hadn’t meant to change anything by probing the sensor’s output). In my attempt to figure out what was going on, I inserted the sensor output into the row with the probe and (I guess out of habit?) went to set up the levitated object. It stayed. It stayed for a long, long time. And it had learned damping. It was incredible. I drew up the circuit on the board. I did math. It makes sense. It’s absolutely incredible. I love math. I should still do that step response and system characterization thing, but I’ll write up the math for why this works and include a block diagram first. So my design process was rather lacking, but I did figure everything out and fully understand it post facto. I was planning on doing the same thing with active elements, but this is actually more elegant. I’m glad I happened upon it.

First a neat tidbit. OpenCourseWare is neat. If you’re an Olin student who likes complaining about not getting intro circuits taught to you, try just listening to the videos for MIT’s 6.002 while you do other things.

— Something a bit less about learning —

I’m a very layered person. I have a pragmatic side, an idealistic side, an ideal side and a true belief side. Pretty much all of my views on these are irresistibly opposing (eg pragmatic capitalist vs. idealistic socialist). It’s kind of great. Often it’s just annoying. I rarely dip farther than my idealistic side, because it just doesn’t come up - if it does, I’m just likely to get depressed. Things I recently learned (although I’d suspected the second one):

• As it turns out, I’m actually sensitive to attacks on stuff deeper than my idealistic side.
• Also, evidently my beliefs are such that I can seriously disturb people by simply mentioning them.

Sometimes I wonder.

We’re doing problems like this one that I typed up for my portfolio (a deliverable for the IS). This one’s actually a super-early one; some of the newer ones are more intersting IMO. Click through if you’d like the example problem to be large enough to read. Oh yeah - the small caps are kinda vocabulary terms. They’re estimation techniques that we got from a text and that I define elsewhere in my IS portfolio. I’m going to assume you guys can figure it out, but I’ll be happy to define them if comments make it clear that I am unclear.

So I started the semester with 22 credits.

Then I dropped intermediate differential equations and swapped in Sci-Fi instead.

Then I asked for permission to overload to 24 credits so I could add a class that was still in the works - Analog Filters.

Then I was not really digging on Advanced Digital Systems… so I dropped that. I figured this would leave me with 20 credits. And SigSys NINJAing and, uhmmm, life. So I dropped that.

But now it looks like Analog Filters isn’t going to happen. So I’ll be back down to 18 credits. Which I find quite humorous.

I’m OK with all of this though - after all I’m doing my OSS. I have an arbitrary amount of (enjoyable) work to do whenever I please. Awesome.

Also. The new Smash Bros is coming out in March - bring it.

I’m doing my OSS is the history of analog circuit design. So I’ve been studying the history of translinear circuits and the history of log-domain filters to date. Until this week, it was all just reading, but I just put up an article on Wikipedia that I really, really like. I was originally just planning to add or expand the history section of the circuit classes I studied (which I’ll do for, say, op-amps), but as it turns out, translinear circuits and log-domain filters don’t have articles yet. Or didn’t. Now, translinear circuits have a sweet article and the one for log-domain filters is likely to be coming to a free encyclopedia near you.

In short. My OSS feels much more real now that I’ve done something. It feels extra real b/c it looks like a pro wiki article what with citations left and right etc.

So this is is some correspondence after nobody in the Advanced Digital Systems class turned in their second lab on time. Our teacher offered help; I responded by suggesting that maybe the issue was really motivation and not technical stuff so much (although that issue also exists).

What motivates you to work in classes?

(Names are hidden b/c I don’t like floating people’s names on the internet - most readers know who’s who ).

======================================================

Hi Boris,

I appreciate the honesty of your answer. What motivates
you in other classes?

-###

======================================================

Hey ###,

Hmmmm… I’m not sure I have a direct answer, but I’ll just say things that seem relevant instead.

I’ll start with a disclaimer. I /do/ work. I even enjoy independent work and big projects. I’m doing my OSS right now, I’m in my second Independent Study, I’ve done research for a couple of profs (although motivation actually /did/ kill one of those).

—————–
On class types:
—————–

One type of class is just problems. You do them you’re done with them - great. This is a common set-up for math classes etc.

A more open-ended type is based around a big project. These tend to need self-motivation. I’m not really sure where it comes from, but I know I did a lot of research for my VLSI class starting months before anything was due because I thought it was absolutely awesome. That all being said, the end-game of actually making a chip was less than stellar for me (although I did finish) and Olin has yet to get a working chip back from this class (3 years). POE also has a similar feel to it and some groups take to it great while other groups flounder for a long time before getting things started. I’m not sure if this is relevant, but both of these classes do small labs at the beginning and then have one /huge/ project compared to ADS’ large project every two weeks.

Then there’s the type where things are very straightforward and linear. These can be arbitrarily hard, but there’s always a clear problem that needs solving next (###’s circuits class or last year’s Communications class with ### are good examples of this).

—————–
Back to ADS:
—————–

Now, ADS is mostly open-ended. I feel it could do with more of a path. Or, alternatively, more guidance. The class effectively asks students to reach a goal. In two weeks. Students have about a decade and a half’s worth of practice procrastinating - this one is easy. Time goes by and the problem starts to seem intractable. Where does one start? Well. I know I have to do this tristate thing. I know I have to simulate the mouse. I know I have to read the PS/2 spec. So I don’t do much at all instead. Yeah. I don’t actually have a solution.

ADS labs are 2 weeks long - they are huge. They require /lots/ of debugging - in fact, debugging is likely the brunt part of the work. In short: they’re big, they’re frustrating, they have no clear starting point, and the work itself is mostly uninteresting (debugging). The carrot is great (it actually works and does something) but the path makes it look like it’s not worth it.

So. If I had to guess. I really enjoy analog more than digital - that could be part of the motivation. There’s also a class dynamic aspect of it where the entire class dreads the labs. So it could be the topic or the social structure. Here’s one more thought. The projects are large, but I don’t feel that I own them. They feel impersonal and difficult and that makes it hard to justify (as compared to big project classes where you design and implement your own idea).

Sorry I went on for so long,

-Boris