Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Month: July 2021

  • Illusively succinct

    Focusing today on the topic at hand seems to be illusive. My thoughts are wandering from thing to thing without really locking into anything specific. It seemed like a good idea to turn up the music this morning and really try to lean into the practice of daily writing to start and organize the day. We will see where things go today, but at the moment things seem to just be stacking up a little bit instead of progressing forward. Maybe a bit of organizing things into the possible and things that might need to marinate a little bit longer will help clear things up this morning. Earlier this month I started to refocus on the notion of working on academic papers and really focusing my energy and efforts into that enterprise. The topic that I have spent the most time researching is the rise of open source MLOps enterprises on GitHub. Formalizing that into a research paper would be pretty easy to achieve. It might be a 10 to 12 page effort or it could end up being a much longer project if the right amount of literature review is included. 

    Getting going on that is going to be about picking the right right template and setting out to complete a final product. Alternatively, I’m thinking about becoming a reviewer at a few journals to give back to the academic community in a way beyond just writing articles. Later today I’m going to pick a few academic journals that I like reading and start that process of becoming a reviewer. Ok, I stopped writing and started working on that this morning.

  • Considering a bit

    Today might end up being a little bit more tactical than strategic to be sure. At the moment, the only thing that comes to mind during this writing session is my new breakfast and lunch meal plan. Yesterday was the first day of my switch from Soylent to Huel as a meal replacement method. I bought bags of banana, strawberry, and chocolate flavored Huel meal replacement products. So far I have only tried the banana one and it was passable. They are made with pea protein which seems interesting. Based on what the package says I should be able to eat it for breakfast for 17 straight days to get a sense of how the product works out for me in my daily routine. Outside of that change, moving to give up on soda again is a renewed focus. Giving up on soda is really just a function of not buying any soda and brewing green tea instead. That is an easy life change to make and it seemed to be a pretty solid one. 

    Whoa, I got really focused on that last paragraph. I had to take a little detour and watch the “Ghostbusters: Afterlife Official Trailer 2” trailer that was just released. I have to admit it would have probably been better as a 10 part series vs. a Thanksgiving weekend movie release. For better or worse these extensions (derivations) of previously produced work tend to be better suited for a slightly longer form storytelling experience. A few deep breaths and some focus on engaging in a pure stream of consciousness style writing might help push things forward. Sometimes when you clear your mind with a few deep breaths and focus on the present that zero space begins to exist and things don’t move forward or backward for that matter. In those moments before action occurs a lot of different things could happen. Having enough time to really think deeply about things and review the nature of things as they move forward is all a part of the adventure.

  • Papers for the sake of papers

    More papers are getting published than any human could possibly read. Those publications are getting stacked up across many different fields and in the case of machine learning the sheer volume of content is staggering. You could try to only focus on a specific journal or two, but some of the most cutting edge research barely goes into the journal system anymore. A lot of it is just sort of pushed out online and those cutting edge researchers are on to the next project. It feels like a vicious cycle of papers for the sake of papers. My efforts to communicate and share my thoughts are generally focused on the medium I’m using and having some reason to share it with people. Within that framework of the necessity to communicate something is hopefully a better line in the sand for what should end up in a paper. We may hit an inflection point where only the top researchers in a field are able to pull together references and share content in a way that is widely read and dispersed. It would be a method of gatekeeping by sustained successful communication, but this could create a type of bubble around a top set of researchers and it could very well obscure the future edge of technology. 

    This is a topic that I’m really concerned about obviously. I have spent a good portion of my morning thinking about the future of academic research and the fragile current nature of the broader academy of academic thought. Intergenerational equity within the academy is about the effective storage and sharing of knowledge across the shoulders of giants as the intersection of technology and modernity occurs. Solutions to that quandary are probably beyond any single weblog post or thinking session. It will take a collective action within the academy to rebalance the means of communication toward something new. Somebody within a major field will need to hold some type of conference, lead a nationwide chautauqua, or create an institute to begin that process. Ultimately the system of introducing knowledge in any academic discipline involves lectures where a profession reduces a mountain of content into a presentable set of mapped coursework. That process sometimes ends up in books being published and other times a few of those textbooks become the standard across a discipline. Even the best ones either evolve over time or are replaced by the next set. That is a natural part of communicating the essence of an ever growing mountain of knowledge. 

    I keep thinking that maybe every discipline will end up with a sort of encyclopedia of knowledge for that core area of exploration. Just like people built out giant tomes of knowledge to share content when print was the primary medium of communication, some type of modern encyclopedia for a field could provide a foundation for begging to understand a vast accumulation of knowledge within a field. You have to have some way of opening the door to people wanting to learn about the content, but most of them cannot start at the end of the stream of knowledge by reading the latest work by the foremost experts in the field. They need some type of foundational knowledge to be able to understand and consider that work at the bleeding edge of what is possible. In some of the sciences reading the mathematics presented on the page alone requires a certain amount of knowledge before it could be comprehended. My abilities in mathematics are decent, but occasionally when reading a machine learning paper the mathematics on a page are daunting and take me a bit to try to figure out exactly what the researcher is trying to communicate to me as long strings of math are not annotated and commented like code to help people along the way of reading them from start to finish.

  • Oh those monitors and such

    Earlier today I spent some time looking at computer monitors again. It seems to be a cycle that happens a couple of times a year. This time around I’m waiting for the Dell UltraSharp 40 inch curved monitor model U4021QW to naturally reduce in price. That seems to happen on a roughly 2 year cycle as new models arrive. My office setup currently includes two Dell UltraSharp monitors of slightly different sizes. It took me a little bit of time to get used to having the 38 inch and 36 inch monitors sitting right by each other. Key to coming to grips with that size disparity was making sure the bottom edge of both monitors was aligned to the same height. Most of the time when I switch from looking at one monitor to the other I look toward the bottom of the screen and aligning it that way makes the discrepancy less troublesome. Sure that is not a major concern, but it really does tend to get on my nerves from time to time. When I’m not using two different computers I can switch over my primary Dark Base Pro 900 housed computer to run both monitors and that is a rather immersive experience. Most of the time I just use the monitor with two different pieces of content split down the middle of the screen vertically.

    My intention when I sat down today to write was to produce a solid page of prose. It does not appear that is going to happen. I just locked in and produced that one paragraph about computer monitors. Sometimes at the start of the day I can end up writing some very stilted and tactical prose instead of getting into the deeper end of philosophy and strategy. 

  • Thinking about research schedules

    Some of my thoughts have drifted toward the productivity that having due dates from classes provided me over the years. Maybe I need to start thinking about turning the cycle of writing a paper into a scheduled thing like a class. A few different examples exist related to creating timelines for writing a research paper. Waiting for the paper to organically develop is not really working at the moment. It may very well be time to start working toward a new writing plan that involves a research schedule just like starting a class and working toward turning in a research paper at the end. I’m going to start working toward an August 16, 2021 start date for a planned cycle of research. 

    I sort of started my effort by going out to consider literature reviews:
    http://www.raulpacheco.org/resources/literature-reviews/

  • Editing videos and writing content

    Yesterday morning, I spent some time working on the next edition of “The Lindahl Letter” and editing some videos. One of them is already up and live on YouTube comparing the two webcams I’m testing out right now the Logitech BRIO and the Dell UltraSharp 4K. Testing out technology is always a fun and exciting thing to do and testing out webcam technology has been fun over the years. The latest webcams are really very good and the sensors are getting better and better. 

    Every day for the last few weeks I have had my Fitbit Sense wake me up before 0530 hours. It turns out that I greatly prefer the subtle shake of the Fitbit vs. the jarring madness of any alarm clock sound or tone. A lot of different things have needed my focused attention in the morning and it has not translated to direct keyboard time writing things for the weblog. That is ok and a lot of the things that end up getting produced, written, modified, or coded won’t ever be a part of the weblog. Not all content is created to be placed in my functional journal if that is even a good name for the storage place of my random musings. Getting into a good rhythm where things are being created every day is the important piece of the puzzle. 

    Traffic comes and goes from the weblog. People visit every day, but fewer and fewer of them have commented over the years. I’m either not writing controversial or interesting things or the verification process has trimmed out all of the unwanted or unnecessary comments. I’m not sure why that bubbled up to the forefront of my thoughts at the moment. It sure showed up and took over my consideration for a few moments. 

    This computer is running the developer preview of Windows 11 Pro and I installed a new video editor the other day called OpenShot. After dropping some video into the editor and working with it to make a video to upload to YouTube I started the video creation process and it was taking forever and all the fans on my computer case started to be as noisy as they get on the Dark Base Pro 900 from the company, “be quiet!”. Anyway, that happened in part due to the fact that the video was rendering using the CPU vs. the GPU. It has been a long time since a video has been rendered in this household with a CPU powering that action. You can imagine that I was super surprised that this could happen with any type of modern software.

  • Thinking about weblog names

    Instead of naming my weblog the “Functional Journal” it would probably be called “Documented Journey” and it might be more interesting. Actually, it would probably be exactly the same, but the name that was chosen over 20 years ago might be different. Things change and people grow and develop over time. It would be sort of boring if the journey was always exactly the same on a daily or yearly basis. Right now the only real formatting I’m doing with the weblog posts is making sure the paragraphs stay separated and I have been trying to add 3 tags to each post so that my “My Very Random Tag Cloud” widget can drop the randomness part and just be a normal tag cloud. Based on my website usage and reports it is pretty clear that nobody uses the tag cloud in any meaningful way. It is just something that I like to see on the widget bar of the weblog. Within that visual representation it just gives me an idea of what topics have been covered a bunch and that is about the only outcome of making sure that each post has three tags added to it before publication. 

    Naming a weblog used to have a ton of meaning back in the day as that is how the rolling links referenced it on other weblogs and how people that just used static links shared the writers they really enjoyed to read. Right now I do not really link to any other writers on my weblog. It is an island of personal thought that just documents the journey, but it does not do that in a very comprehensive or complete way. Maybe that has to do with how the process of daily journaling comes in and out of focus for me in unpredictable ways. I don’t really sit down and catch up from the last writing session creating some type of continuity. Each writing session is really its own stand along journey into the moment and thoughts of the present. It could very well be that is how it will continue to occur or maybe some growth and development will occur after reflecting on my writing practices. 

    This weekend is going to have to be spent working out the updates to a presentation that needs to be delivered next Friday morning. Overall the content just needs a little bit of a refresh and I need to make sure that my delivery is going to be smooth and full of solid details. My extemporaneous delivery of it right now would probably be good enough, but it would not be great. That leaves some room to strive for improvement in the next few days.