There’s something that’s been bothering me lately, something that came to me in an epiphany while driving home from break. I’ve realized that there is a certain lack of closure in quite a few aspects of my life. And if not closure, definition. I guess it’s the inevitability of actually living—you can’t finish every chapter you start, and as you go along, you write in loose ends and sometimes conveniently forget to write them in. It makes for great story writing, always giving yourself possibilities to expand, but in life, it’s just serves to complicate things. I’m sure [name removed] will have something to say about not being able to escape your past, and of course, you can’t really, but you can try to make it something you can live with, and that’s what I’m going to have to do. As Joe Lewis has said in my Facebook, “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”

Closure in my past is essential to truly moving forward, and I think I need to close some past pages, and finish writing some more in the present. I don’t presume to be able to live perfectly, but I do have this great need to to be at peace with the way things are, and these “loose ends” create ever-present tensions that are never fully addressed. Often, I’m so used to it that I forget, until something happens—something causes it to be brought up again, and then I realize how much it has been an unacknowledged weight on my chest. Other times, it’s on my mind so much that it literally dominates my thought, hindering anything else I need to be doing. Bad conflicts can result from these, and I think it’s time to address the important ones sincerely. Still, I’ve come to realize recently that some Pandora’s boxes are better left untouched… and peace better found between God and I.

TO BE UPDATED SOON: Rohit’s Birthday Events!

And, since I got bored, I did this test again:

It IS break again, and I have so much crap that I need to do. It wouldn’t be fall break without a visit to NU, another NU-UIUC Football game, and yet ANOTHER loss for the Fighting Illini. Something just doesn’t work with our school’s football team: always winning for at least 10 minutes, then faltering, and continuing to falter till the end. With that ending, the bagel in my stomach did not sit well.

This is while we were winning 17-16

After the 27-17 loss…

Oh sure, it was definitely worth going to though. I find it hard to actually care too much about football outside the school-related setting, but something about it being OUR team makes is seem worth caring about. But that’s just me, I’ve never really been a sports buff. If you haven’t gone to a college football game, make it a priority.

Unfortunately, it looks like the rest of this break will have to be less-interesting. There’s a pile of crap that needs to be worked on. I need to make a list, or else I’ll never get it all done. I might as well make some longer term goals as well.

Short term (for break):

• Finish input entities, simulate operation for 385 project. Send to Jason and work on other problems (By Wednesday)
• Read books and work on ethics research essay (worth an entire 40% of our grade).
• Catch the hell up in CS 225. Finish MP (if one is released)
• Learn PHP , make rudimentary uh… program?
• Dive into .net! I didn’t get Visual Studio .NET for nothing!
• Play around with Matlab
• Reinstall 3ds max. Watching that Kiwi video gave me new inspiration!
• Sunday: CCMC. I think I need to.

Mid term (for the year):

• Keep up and get back on top of classes. (Rodeo time!!!)
• Learn two more tie-tying methods. Thanks to EWah for the Double Winsor. Best one yet!
• Work on a simple animation for 3ds max. Render and place on Youtube .
• Gain 15 lbs and get Amephistophelian that funky hat!

Oh, and speaking of hats… I’ve been playing around with new styles, thanks to Capt. Kirk Junior. What do you think?

Long term (for the rest of college) :

• Achieve greatness!
• Win at least ONE of each: A writing, art, and business competition.
• Further the cause of medical neuroscience.
• Get published, dammit! Novel or article, I don’t care!
• More as they come to my head.

Uh, I think that’s enough for now…

Also, regarding the Kiwi animation, there seems to have been a few people that didn’t understand the meaning. Well, look around fools–that animation was deceptively simple in its message.

Yep. Till next time!

By the way, this is a great book, with many insights into why we are who we are.

…she does not think the happiness of a fulfilling life an be won without a realistic willingness to make the effort and pay the costs required. For example, you have to be willing to make a relationship work. What many of her clients want instead, she thinks, is an ideal relationship in which they will be loved completely without having to do anything in return. “This is the person who is going to be there to talk to, to go somewhere with them, or, you know, a person who’s just going to be there and is going to understand them. Most people don’t want to have to tell you how they feel. They want you to divine that. That would be perfection. Someone who would understand them so thoroughly that they would never have to say a word and just always be there for them and who would just make them feel really secure and really, oh not alone.” What people need to accept is that it is ther responsibility to communicate what they need and what they feel, and to realize that they cnnot expect someone else magically to make them happy. “People want to be made happy, instead of making themselves happy.”

More in this book!

So. This year has been rather busy–surprising since I’m only taking 12-hours. This week especially has been a hellish time: exams, papers, projects; it seems that my four classes have plotted this revenge for my slacking… (having missed 50+ classes so far, the first time I actually lost track!). Mleh. Still, things chug along; I’ve finally started making some more progress on the real-world front:

I’ve had a couple of interviews so far, one with Apple, which I unfortunately did not do so well (not knowing how to use a Mac didn’t help), and another with Cummins, a big diesel engine company. The latter was more promising, and it’s the first time I realized how flexible my resume was. Flexible… and unspecialized; this is my third year, I feel like I should have some more areas of expertise, but no matter. Lately I’ve felt that I was barely inching along, knowing what I needed to know to (barely) do the class work, a far cry from the glorious freshman year days. But on Monday, I realized I do have a few areas where I’m already quite informed. I talked with a professor (doing neuroscience / EE work) a couple days ago, with the hopes of possibly getting back into research. It was the freshest conversation I had in a while. His research interests coincided with mine, and I found that I *actually* know what he’s talking about, and even had a few suggestions of my own! Not to sound so upbeat (I don’t know if he’ll have room in his lab), but it’s always a nice feeling to know you have something that few others have; it’s an asset, whether it’s an interest or skill. In any case, hopefully I’ll be able to put my past to use, and network some more within the EE/Neuroscience departments here.

Beyond that, I’ve been having some conflicting thoughts about the future as of late; especially since going to this talk at the ACM Conference. I wondered when I’d be able to get back into neuroscience on the ECE track, and it looks like I’m finally there. If there has been any single driving force in my career interests, this is the closest thing to it; neuromorphic computers; computers that mimic the brain in the way it learns. This might sound a bit silly, but I got into the idea of human-computer interface while watching Exosquad as a 7 year old. Exosquad, in case you didn’t know, was Saturday morning sci-fi cartoon with “mech-like” space suits that connected to its pilot by a spinal implant, which, in the cartoon, allowed the pilot to control the system by thought alone. Of course, it wasn’t the first time something like this was seen on TV, but it’s what got me into that whole, human-neural connection stuff.

I found substance in it all as I studied more in the years to come… jumping (way) ahead… I mean, we already have dishes of rat neurons controlling F-22s, why not apply the same principles to hardware abstractions? With over a billion transistors (and growing rapidly) in the latest Itanium processor, performance gains aren’t holding true to Moore’s law. So, this guy here proposes that we apply the brain’s system for learning to developing future chips. We only have 20 thousand or so genes to encode everything of our existence, and nearly a trillion neurons, and a thousand times as many neural connections; obviously it can’t all be stored in those genes. The genes just provide the starting point: which cells differentiate into neurons, where they go, and maybe some basic connections. The rest of it all; the dividing and reconnecting, is <i>all</i> done on the order of the tissues themselves. How they all connect with the correct inputs and outputs of the human body is beyond me. But the one researcher is begininning to unravel that mystery. He has found that the simple “learning” done by neurons themselves (long-term potentiation, etc…) provides scalable results all the way up to the organism level. Pretty incredible stuff. So, pretty much you give the necessary methods for “learning”, and the rest is done for you. So yeah, I’d love to work at this guy’s lab for grad school…

But that’s Stanford for ya.

As for me… I’m just getting started. And I CAN’T wait to get out of here!

Yeah yeah, so this quiz doesn’t say much about computer savviness, I mean, come on… who would really rather be Linus than Bill? At the top of the Microsoft Empire, even the smallest rebel would have more power. Anyway, so yeah, biased libertarians… *cough*SHANEAL*cough*…