Sunrise is supposed to happen in about 20 minutes. Even the exact moment of the sunrise is tracked on my smartphone weather widget. Looking forward to things that way ends up like watching time pass by watching a clock move. Literally I can see the clock at the top of the monitor as the sun rises every morning. Today I’m going to spend a lot of my time coding in Python and reading that “Foundations of Deep Reinforcement Learning” book that showed up. I’m not completely sold on the model and sample code that is being shared, but maybe it turns out that today really is a day of promise and things get interesting. I started looking around for the three folders that had draft academic papers in them from previous false starts. It might be better to start over and just grab a blank sheet of paper and write down the top 3 research topics that are top of mind to start new research papers. Alternatively, I could spend the day writing down different research topics and build out a list that goes way beyond 3 topics. From that longer list it would be possible to start working that list back down to the very best topic. A list like that could probably help me build out a research trajectory.
Figuring out my academic path forward and defining a solid research trajectory might be a very good way to spend my time today. Instead of writing down research topics it might be better to spend that time writing down testable hypotheses worth exploring. Maybe finding ways to use the scientific method to test a series of research questions would make this a day full of promise. It would be like walking down an intellectual hallway full of doors and trying to pick which one holds the best path forward. Naturally, that would be very dependent on the needs of the moment and that path forward would probably be based on interest and the things at the forefront of my mind. My guess right now is that it would be something to do with the intersection of civil society and the influence of quarantine. That guess is entirely based on my gut feel for things right now before the sun rises on this wonderful day in Denver, Colorado.
Yesterday, I ran a few audio tests of my new Sony ZV-1 camera. It is a relatively new camera that Sony released to the public in May of 2020. My only criticism of the camera at the moment is related to the battery life. Even recording short videos seems to drain the camera battery very quickly. After the first week of owning it I’m strongly considering trying to leave it plugged in and just record without having to worry about the battery as the source of power. Sony engineers did build it with a swappable battery and I’m planning on buying an extra Sony NP-BX1 battery relatively soon. Maybe at some point I’ll write a more comprehensive review of the camera after using it for another week or so to really understand the strengths and weaknesses. One of the tests I did conduct involved reading a weblog post on camera. Reading for an audio recording is a lot easier than reading for video. That really should not be the case. I would have expected both reading for an audio recording and a video recording to be similar. It turned out that they are very different experiences. Maybe self-censorship or some type of hesitation makes the difference. It has to be something related to demands of recording video in one take. Recording audio using Audacity makes it a lot easier to stop and start. Maybe that freedom to pause whenever necessary is the key difference.
