Cerulean Cordillera

Archive for January, 2011

I am currently writing this blog post using a program that I have found called Dragon NaturallySpeaking. This program is pretty cool, what it does is that it basically turns my speech into text that appears on the page. If I get good at using this program. Then I should be able to enter text into a computer much faster than typing. I currently type at about 100 WPM. The average human talking speed is about 150-160 WPM. Of course the problem is that since I am so used to typing. I cannot form thoughts and organize them in such a clean way when operating at talking speed. this is also the reason why I am not very articulate when talking in real life.

This is an idea that I am going to try out. The idea is that if I do all my typing on a computer using this program. Then I would also be at the same time training myself to be more articulate in my talking. Already right now since I am using this program to type, I am stumbling over and making a lot of mistakes and having to correct them. The exercise feels difficult already, it feels as if there’s some sort of limiter to my thinking and I cannot think as freely as I usually could if I do not talk at the same time.

Nevertheless, I am very impressed at how accurate this program is. Just about everything I say is recorded with pretty much 100% accuracy. Of course sometimes the program stumbles a bit, but most of the time the trouble I have seems to be my own inability to articulate and say the meanings that I want to say. Still when the program messes up, I try to correct it. I’ll probably miss some of these mistakes at times, so be prepared for some very strange typos in my blog posts.

That will be it for now, we’ll see how this goes.

Prior to the break, I had no trouble waking up early enough to actually have breakfast. I would routinely wake up at 8AM, sometimes 9AM. When I wake up, I would feel very refreshed too, ready to hit the gym within half an hour. But these days, waking up early is more difficult, and it takes forever to start feeling alert. If I try to be alert, more often than not I would get a headache. The reason is pretty clear – I don’t go to sleep early enough anymore. I used to sleep by midnight, but now I sleep routinely around 2AM.

It’s time to reclaim my mornings!

One awesome idea about how to do this comes from this post, and it was how I did it last time. In a nutshell: I sleep whenever I feel like it, but set the alarm at when I want to wake up (e.g. 8AM), and make sure I get up. So suppose I go to sleep at 2AM and wake up at 8AM. The next day I would want to go to sleep earlier since I had so little sleep the previous night. Earlier sleep means getting up at 8AM would be easier. If this continues for a few days, the sleep cycle would settle at the alarm time.

The hard part, of course, is to make sure I get up. Last time I did it using willpower alone. There are some other techniques, so maybe I’ll try something different this time.

Man… I wish sleep is as predictable and controllable as recharging a cell phone’s battery. Or, it would be awesome if sleep is so efficient that even 8 hours is way too long. Actually, there are people who functions perfectly on 5-6 hours of sleep a day, and people say it’s simply because their sleep is more efficient. I wonder how to achieve that… Maybe better fitness or something? Worrying about sleep is such a hassle, it would be nice to fix it once and for all and never have to worry about it anymore.

Just downloaded a Viigo app for my phone to make it easier to stay updated to some blogs. So far it seems that Viigo doesn’t show old posts, so I’m making a new post here to test out that theory.

I’ve never noticed before, but taking mostly engineering classes sorta trains your brain into thinking only in terms of problems and solutions. As in, what kind of problems are there, which ones need to be solved, and what techniques we can use and how we can solve those problems. Even the background classes, like Electricity and Magnetism, were designed to drill into you “these are the phenomenons you should know and these are the equations you should remember in order to solve the problems you encounter.”

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In this case, if most of your intellectual growth came from an engineering education, everything looks like a problem to design solutions for. Looking at the tree branches swaying in the wind, for instance, makes me think of data structures, on what branches and nodes to store what information and how we can get one place to another quickly. When I force myself to make more natural associations, I think of the wind passing by the branches like how fluid bodies behave, and in turn wonder whether this phenomenon can be exploited in some sort of way.

This gets especially bad when it comes to handling relationships. Often, when people complain about their lives, they’re not looking for any solutions, because they’re perfectly capable at coming up with their own. Instead, they’re just looking for an outlet to let out their frustrations, someone to listen so they can feel understood. But sometimes this engineering thought pattern would immediately trigger the moment someone presents a problem, and even when I am aware and know that I should not let those thoughts come out, already a part of the brain is occupied with processing and doing away those thoughts when they can be used in more constructive ways, like paying attention and actually listening.

What separates engineering from general science is the difference between solving problems and satisfying general curiosity. Scientists are only curious, they want to learn and find out. There is no end goal, and if there is learning, then it is good. Ideally, their minds would wander freely and they would learn whatever it is that they find interesting. It’s basically satisfying a natural urge to just learn more things and be entertained by cool thoughts. In contrast, engineering is usually about an initiative, an end goal to achieve, and sometimes even though the goal seems like something you would want happen, the actual steps involved are really things you have no interest in. So you’re forced to plough through things you don’t like while keeping faith that it will all pay off in the end. But this is not guaranteed either, especially if you were vague about the relationship between the goal and yourself in the first place.

If I play the violin, science is like playing whatever I want, however I want to. Engineering is like honing my techniques repeatedly through exercises in the hope of mastering some pieces I was tackling. If I try to make myself into a better person, science is like just look at myself, try different things, and see what happens. Engineering is like designing specific practices (e.g. a specific plan to replace a bad habit) and follow through while recording progress towards the end goal. If I were to blog, science is like just writing anything I want on my blog whenever inspiration hits, while engineering is more like planning and designing the blog to fit a particular audience and generate a particular revenue figure.

It’s basically being carefree versus being serious. Of course, this isn’t to say that science as a discipline is carefree. A “discipline” by definition cannot be total freedom, and since the field is a human system, I’m sure there are a lot of limitations and inefficiencies that limits what is acceptable. But this does make me think of another very confusing question:

Look at all the life advice out there, a lot of it is engineering advice. You see this in most self help books or “how to” websites. But these advice make me imagine that the best person would be this highly disciplined, overly serious person who is 100% focused on the goal, overcoming any adversity that comes his way, getting past great disappointment and grief, and continues going, never giving up.

But then, there is such a thing as trying too hard. And when you’re trying too hard, you actually make backwards progress, usually because you burn out due to human limitations, or because trying too hard is very socially unattractive, so it sets you back if your goal is anything social-related. In any case, it’s not good to be overly serious. Heck, it seems that the optimum would be to be both serious and not serious at the same time. Now all I have to say to that is… WTF?

And here, an engineered approach just doens’t work because you can’t be serious about achieving the state of not serious. I guess there needs to be some balance, and that balance point is very difficult to find.

Before midnight of New Year’s Day, I finished my first ever annual review. This is something that Chris Guillebeau suggested at The Art of Non-Conformity. It’s basically a document that is both a comprehensive review of the past year and an initial plan of direction for the coming year. In it, I’ve given myself a number of goals to achieve for the year 2011. One of them was to maintain a random thoughts blog throughout the year.

I’ve been thinking about doing something like this.

A few weeks ago, I went through some of my old stuff, and they included the blogs I’ve had back in high school, including my old msn space. Reading some of those old entries made me realize how much I’ve changed over the past few years. Back then, I was immature, embarrassing, and didn’t know about anything, but I was daring, and my mind was free to write down anything I would think of. I was not afraid to freely explore and wander any kind of thought connection, no matter how stupid and juvenile they were, and somewhere within those stupid and juvenile thoughts I could still see beauty, because I was honest.

Now, I come to my blog, and I can’t think of anything to write. My mind has become rigid, and I feel my imagination and creativity waning. I’ve become much too safe with my thoughts, thinking only good, normal, everyday thoughts that anyone could have, being locked in those thoughts. As I look at my old blogs, I feel envious of my former self for being able to have those thoughts, and being able to express them on paper in such a clumsy way and yet so elegantly.

As a person, I used to be much more spontaneous and flexible, I could be incredibly emo at times and yet positive at other times, and I would say that life is worth living because all these rollercoaster ups and downs make things interesting. I wasn’t afraid to do anything, because I didn’t know what it means to be afraid. But now I find only two things that define how I live. The first is to keep myself safe, and the second is to systematically undergo conscious self development. How boring and predictable a life that leads!

I remember blogging used to be a place where I simply release my thoughts and have them pour onto the paper. It used to be a very good release. I was thinking that perhaps it would have some effect on my life if I start doing that again. At the very least, it would break down barriers and allow me to be honest. So I guess from now on, this blog will be a personal blog, a place for me to sometimes rant about everyday problems or talk endlessly about insignificant details. Anything can go here, if I feel like writing and posting.