The cat itself

Hilarious article from the April Fools edition of the Tech, the undergrad newspaper.

Last week was the end of a somewhat long period of writing: two months in which I almost didn’t do any new research. The last thing I had to do was preparing the final version for the ACC’09 papers.

I start with the easy one, as opposed to the difficult one. First thing in the morning I read the paper again. I don’t like it. If I were to write it again, I’d write it in a completely different way. I read the reviews, and it seems that the reviewers liked it more than I like it now. The interesting thing is that I realize this is a case of cognitive dissonance, because when I read the reviews for the first time a couple of months ago, I had the impression they were particularly harsh. Instead they are quite reasonable and helpful.

I blame it on the typical emotional roller-coaster for research, which is conveniently summarized below:

The emotional roller-coaster for engineering papers

• T₀, idea: this is so cool!
• T₀ + 1 month, implementation: wait, it’s not that cool!
• T₀ + 2 months, writing: yeah, it’s cool enough!
• T₀ + 3 months, deadline: enough with this stuff!
• T₀ + 3 months + 1, the day after the deadline: my best paper ever!
• T₀ + 6 months, reading the reviews: nobody understands me!
• T₀ + 8 months, preparing the final version: this paper sucks, let me rewrite it from scratch!
• T₀ + 10 months, conference presentation: how can I fake excitement for an idea I had 1 year ago?
• T₀ + 1 year, considering writing a journal version: I don’t have time for this old stuff, let’s do something new!
• T₀ + 2 years, casually opening the PDF: that’s really cool! did I write that?!

This is specific to engineering, as science and math have very different psychology. Hopefully I will be doing a bit of biology in the near future, and so I’ll be able to report the differences. For sure, it will not take just 3 months from the idea to the writing.

Tuesday, March 10: Today’s diversion from work was the ME 72 competition at the Millikan pond. Undergraduates built these tele-operated amphibious robots whose task is recovering ping-pong balls from the water.

The competition is not particularly exciting but, as usual, there are camera crews from the local TV stations; Caltech’s PR people are good at hyping this kind of events.

Joel Burdick was commenting the event — I’ve been told, multiple times, that he has a sexy voice.

Of course, some professors are so busy that they have to watch the competition and read a paper at the same time:

Monday, March 9: I open my TODO list. I close the TODO list. I have dozens of starred messages in my inbox I should answer. I skillfully manage to not start working until 3:40pm, and then I run out of excuses. As a last resort, I check the email and see Christof Koch’s reminder about Alan Wallace’s seminar, starting in 10 minutes.

He is the very first ordained Buddhist monk that I see with a business suit:

In Japan, I was struck by the contrast between a Buddhist monk and the salarymen in a train station (click for video):

Well, clothes don’t make the man, which in Italian we translate as: l’abito non fa il monaco, the robe doesn’t make the monk.

The premise of his presentation is that the study of the mind is currently in the same state as physics was before Galileo invented the scientific method. Psychology is to a rigorous study of the mind very much like what alchemy was to chemistry. What Buddhism can offer are the techniques for rigorous introspection in one’s mind. Self-introspection might be a rigorous endeavor, if there is a way to make objective this intrinsically subjective experience.

At this point, I recall the anecdote of the young Newton puncturing his own eyes with a needle to study the diffraction of light (source: Neal Stephenson, probably in Quicksilver, so it might be slightly apocryphal). The novel Newton must find a way to put needles inside in his mind’s eye.

The presentation is interesting overall, but by the end he starts talking about “luminosity” and other similar metaphysical notions, so I pack up my stuff and leave, happy to have avoided another hour of work.

Sunday: Today I learn on Wikipedia that the International Women Day is actually of soviet inspiration. Is this the reason it is ignored in the US? Wikipedia says that it is celebrated in all the nations of the ex Soviet bloc, plus Italy and Greece.

Anyway, two different women tell me that it’s a stupid thing to celebrate, so I abstain from any reference.

Saturday: I’m in post-deadline-stress disorder due to the CDC deadline that was on Friday. I’m semi-conscious for most of the day. While I clean the house, I find lying around 13 drafts of the paper. I resist the temptation to read the last one again because I know I will find typos.

There is more than one person complaining that they have news about me only through this blog, which is never updated. What they mean is that I need to talk to them more often, but instead I’ll take the complaint literally and update the blog more often, which to me seems more efficient. I’ll write a little bit about daily life in Caltech, which in the end is really not that glamorous (and not as interesting as Japan was).

So in September I had my Roman Holiday. Brief photo essay follows.

Thanks to the jet-lag, for the first time, I saw the dawn in Rome:

I spent my few days (re)reading my Dylan Dog and Rat Man collections:

and playing my piano:

and generally messing up my room, that, having been cleaned daily for months without being used, had reached negative levels of entropy:

By the way, with a strange twists of events, I discovered that while I was busy converting the department to espresso, my parents had converted to American coffee (note on the left):

Roma! the perfect occasion to test my new camera (Sony A300). I found out that I need a larger macro lens:

and I need a longer zoom:

Then I headed to Nice, France for IROS. The conference was okay, with a good program, but the rooms were too small, especially for the bigger sessions.

During 5 days of conference, there’s plenty of time to go around the city. So I saw the sea,

I breathed the old-Europe air,

and visited the museums:

The most inspiring moment I had was in front of this citation of John Cage:

“the situation being desperate, everything is now possible” which will be added to my list of inspirational mantra.

And then, 26 hours of travel later, I was suddenly back in sunny California, wondering where my baggage was instead.

After the end of a productive summer, for which I offer the following evidence:

and exactly after one year that I’m here, I’m going back home for a week.

The week after that, I’ll be at IROS.

And then I’ll get back and be ready to start the new academic year, with strange ideas about courses to take.

On Tuesday I experienced my first California earthquake. After the first wave I thought: Oh, a cute little earthquake! Then I realized that a bigger wave would be coming. And it did: it was like being in the wooden house of the second pig, while the wolf huffed and puffed from outside.

The magnitude was 5.4 and the epicenter was very close to here:

I also discovered that Richter was a Caltech professor, and Caltech monitors earthquakes for all California (altough they don’t use the Richter magnitude scale anymore, but something called the moment magnitude scale). In the hours after the quake, there were lots of media trucks around:

The Caltech monitoring system sent me an email containing a wave file (?). Maybe they thought that a female voice helps in tranquilizing people.

I also received this email from the administration:

Caltech had no injuries. We had some chemical spills that required temporary evacuation in at least one building. We had minor damage, including broken water pipes in Noyes and in the Cogen plant. Four elevators went temporarily off line. The campus responded as you would have hoped. Everyone did their part – from the daycare center to the environmental health and safety group, facilities, computing and telecommunications, to individuals in all the buildings and labs, and to HR for the notice to be thoughtful of those employees whose homes were closer to the epicenter.

I assume that it was by coincidence that, at the time of the earthquake, the Caltech Trustees were being given a tour of the Seismological Lab. I am told that they were impressed. Public Relations and the Seismo Lab must have been busy. I counted 10 media trucks parked outside as I left campus last night.

Best demo ever!