(caveat: I only started this logging about a month ago, so there aren’t as many data points as I’d like. However, there is enough to see some interesting trends emerging).

Day of Week

First, here is the spread of activity over day-of-week for my machine at home. I found this surprising! I’d expected my weekend hacking projects to show a significant weekend effect, but I did not notice the Thursday slump. It’s interesting when data shows us stuff about ourselves that we didn’t realize. I have no idea what causes the Tuesday mini-spike.

Next, I have activity per hour-of-day, broken up by weekends-only and weekdays-only (because my behavior differs significantly between these two sets).

Weekends

Both charts clearly show my average sleeping times. Weekends show a bump of morning hacking and evening hacking, with less computer time than I’d have expected in the middle of the day.

Weekdays

I love the evening just-got-home-from-work-and-finished-with-dinner spike for the weekdays, followed by evidence of late-night hacking (probably too late for my own good).

Where to go from here

I wonder if the unexpected Tuesday spike and 6pm-weekday spikes are legitimate phenomena or artifacts due to data sparsity. It will be interesting to check back in with this data in a few more months to see how it smooths out. (Ugh, daylight savings time is going to mess with this a bit =/ ).

Also, this only measures one aspect of my activity in a day–stuff typed at the command line, which is mostly programming-related. I would love to plot other information alongside it (emails sent, lines of code written, instant messages sent, songs played, GPS-based movement). I’m tracking much of this already. I’ll need a good way of visualizing all of these signals together, as the graph is going to get a bit crowded. Maybe I’ll pick up that Tufte book again…

(And, speaking of visualization, I think a heatmap of activity per hour of the week would be interesting as well… Google Spreadsheets doesn’t do those, though, so while I have the data I couldn’t whip one up easily tonight).

Lastly, what’s the purpose of this all? What do I want to accomplish from this analysis? They’re nice-looking graphs, for sure. And honestly there is a bit of narcissistic pleasure in self-discovery. And I suppose it’s good to realize things like the mid-week slump (exhaustion from work? external calendar factors?) are happening.

But I’m eventually hoping for something less passive than just observation. Later I look forward to using this data to change myself. I can imagine later setting goals (in bed by a certain hour, up by a certain hour, no coding on day-x vs more coding on day-y) and letting the statistics show my progress towards those goals.

Aside from being beautiful, they’re amazing glimpses into visual processing into the human brain. Impressionism is, at its core, lossy compression, right?

(To digress a bit, I look at Impressionism as a reaction against photography, which says to itself “Look, this camera can capture direct reality far better than I ever could. So what is my role as a painter and artist, now? My brush can never get the colors quite right, the perspective and angle quite perfect. Where is my niche, that I am not obsolete?”.

So, impressionism says “my rough strokes can capture the spirit of reality better than the overt literal capture of a camera & lens”.)

So, impressionism is lossy compression, like a too-small .jpg (or, perhaps more accurately, one of those 8-bit tribute albums. It throws away information while still attempting to retain the overall picture. But the information it chooses to throw out seems to imply a wonderful exploitation of the human visual perception system.

Sporadic dashes of green become ship masts, stacatto jabs of orange the sun, vague blotches of purple become the fog. But not, not overtly.

(Classic computer vision & object recognition approaches would certainly work quite poorly on paintings like these. I’d be halfway curious to try to design a system that could do it well).

I wonder what it was like for the first folks exploring this technique. Especially because, standing so close to the canvas, it’s easy to see the literal but hard to get the gestalt.

A bullet-point braindump:

• As background, remember that short story in Godel Escher Bach, where the ant-eater communicated with the colony of ants (not the ants themselves, but the colony), and ate certain individual ants as a way to shape the colony into something that’s more intelligently connected?
• It’s a cliche’d remark that groups of humans begin to resemble organisms in their own right. Corporations seek after the good of the corporation rather than the good of any of its individuals. Cultures grow, intermingle, reproduce spawning new cultures. OK, so these macro-groups of humans are animals, that’s for sure. But are they self-aware Conscious? Would we recognize it if they were?
• It’s interesting when a group of people who’ve been meeting for a while realize that they are in fact behaving as a group, and in turn have a group identity. Is this awareness of group identity the same as self-awareness in the group? (answer: I don’t think so, this is something different).
• To extend the brain metaphor, imagine humans to be the neurons in a larger collective brain. Urgh, the speed of signal transition along axon-dendrite gap is horribly slow. What effect does this slowness have? Also, humans are damn intelligent signal processors compared to neurons. What effect would our individual intelligences have on the larger structure?
• Would such a self-aware “organism” think thoughts that are entirely separate and entirely transcendent above the thoughts of its constituents?
• Scale? Seems to be the general belief that intelligence is the emergent result of massive amounts of highly, highly interconnected neurons. How many people do you need in a group before it can be considered an organism? A self-aware organism? Is the interconnectedness of humans even on a large enough order of magnitude to support a functionally processing organism? What are such an organism’s inputs, outputs? Would human sub-organizations specialize into computational functional tools, similar to how neurons in the brain are specialized into groups like the PFC, the amygdala, etc?
• I imagine an extraterrestrial coming to the earth, and conversing with society as opposed to individuals. That would be an interesting story. But not the kind of sci-fi that would entertain a puny human mind, though, that’s for sure.

Hmm, I’ll have to think more about this… so many premature thoughts… And most of them the result of only 4 hours of sleep for the last couple days. My apologies, dear anonymous reader, for the unpolished words, the undeveloped concepts, the flaws. “Time past and time future / Allow but a little consciousness.”

[1] (In any case, I love Ben Goertzel‘s take on the situation, which, to paraphrase: “When the time comes, and you’re actually arguing with the computer whether it is self-aware or not, then the point is already moot, isn’t it?”)

My attention is a scarce resource, and different ideas, media, schools of thought, compete for it. (This is what makes multidisciplinarity hard).

It makes me think twice about metaphors for learning that compare research and knowledge acquisition to foraging for food. What if, instead of likening ourselves to the predators and farmers, we liken ourselves to the prey and the farmed.

There’s plenty of discussion of memes as pseudo-genetic entities (evolving, reproducing, self-transmitting)… but underlying this is the idea that we are the medium of transmission, we are the host to the virus.

It certainly puts a new spin on the way I look at sites like All Consuming.

I don’t like this metaphor of being consumed, it feels too passive and fatalistic to me. But maybe it’s true.

• my mother-in-law just took a trip to Yunnan, China to take photos. I’ve posted some of them in this flickr set
• went on ISI’s bi-annual AI retreat a few weekends ago. a few interesting things that I may fill out later:

• SIMILE (project aiming towards “inter-operability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services”. distributed semantic web, like a delicious of metadata sets/organizational structures).
• Craig’s group, researching mashups of mashups
• my first taste of lisp programming (gives (me (of-type (headache big))). (or something like that)

The implementation was neat, but I can’t help but dream of what this could be like. Imagine a map of the world (perhaps OLED, mounted on your wall), with regional coloring based on density of news events in that area. You’d need a few hacks to make things look nice (normalization for standard-level-of-news per area (different areas of the world have different minimum levels of media coverage) … smoothing so that local news-concentration influences regional news-concentration). And a gradient would do a lot more for visualization than these discrete news-event-bubbles (but I realize that the google maps api limits you to location bubble markers, and remixers are limitted to the tools at hand).

I love to see non-art becoming art. To this day, one of my favorite random conversations was with Tom and danah at a conference a year or so ago, where we discussed a fellow information addict who had covered all the walls of his house with bookshelfs full of books. Information, knowledge became art–and it evolved so both organically and unobtrusively.

Talk of a “hidden AI agenda” just cracks me up–it feels like scaremongering, of some lumbering, lovecraftian, inhuman intelligence, artificial intelligence.

When questioned on whether a renaissance of the general paranoia about omnipotent and malign computers was underway now, Levick admitted that such concerns were more abundant, but insisted that Google’s core philosophy of “Don’t be evil” guides all its actions.

“I think that goes back to the concept that these technologies can actually be empowering and good for the world if the companies implementing them are good,” he said. “Could some of these technologies be used for bad purposes? Yes. But will they by us? No.”

Hehe. As someone who works with AI every day, and who knows the prenatal state of natural language processing and so-called “strong AI”, it cracks me up to see public fears of “omnipotent and malign computers”.

Sigh.

Everything about a book says “I value this”. An author will invest more time/effort writing a book than a magazine article or a newspaper column. Books are made of better materials, expected to be kept around the house for years and passed on to the grandkids eventaully. Likewise I pay more for a book. While books might be about current events, the majority are meant to be more timeless. I am less tolerant of typographic/layout errors in books than in other media.

Magazines are a midpoint between books and newspapers. They’re printed on material that will last a relatively long while–but no one keeps them around for more than a couple months. I expect good, artistic layout from magazines. With a few exceptions, they’re printed to be consumed, enjoyed once or twice, and discarded. They are relatively timely.

Newspapers? The only reason I keep a typical newspaper for more than a day is because I forget to throw it out. They are the timeliest of information, so much that they’re up-to-date and out-of-date very quickly. The production cycle of newspapers versus books is an interesting contrast seen in this light.

Of course, all this is yesterday’s news. What really has me thinking about things is what the web is doing to all this. Long web page or little blog post, wikipedia or mefi entry… All the traditional factors that we use to gauge value are being remapped. Advertisements are in the long as well as the short. Likewise constraints are being tweaked. We throw out newspapers because they’re of little use–but would we keep magazines around if we had all the space in the world? How do we choose what to keep and what to discard in this new world? Media: the long, medium, and short can all blur and co-exist. Bandwidth is so cheap there’s no difference in production cost.

More thoughts on this when I’m less sleepy.

The article doesn’t address this point specifically, but i think a manhattan-project like thing that this article recommends is the only way that we’re ever going to get a cure for the common cold.

In the existing System, there’s just no economic motivation for a cold or flu cure-all–the existing medicine industry is too entrenched in providing maskers-of-symptoms, cures for specialized diseases, etc, that they’d never want to give up a revenue source for something like a panacaea.