abehmiel.net

One Operator

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I've always had a fascination with graphing calculators and the mathematical menagerie of functions. There was something gratifying about watching a function get plotted in space, calculating and plotting its derivatives, imagining a curve rotated around some arbitrary axis. Give me a screen and a function and I'll watch it draw itself over and over again. It was a fixation in both classes and at parties (I was not fun at parties, but I guess that depends on who was throwing them).

Anyway, a paper like this one was always going to get me. Odrzywołek, All elementary functions from a single operator, proves something extremely fucking cool and highly absurd: one binary operator,

eml(a, b) = e^a − ln b,

together with the constant 1, generates every elementary function. The exponential, the logarithm and the identity come for free, but polynomials, other binary operators, inversion, the whole trigonometric family too, all of it falls out of nesting that one operator over the constant one. Once I put together what the paper was actually saying, I found it both absolutely brilliant and completely obvious. You should read it, it's great.

And because the elementary functions include addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponentiation, you get Taylor series from that, and subsequently, a lot more than just elementary functions. You get a lot of weird shit too, and a ton of it is expressible with relatively simple eml chains.

In early June, when subscribers had unfettered access to Claude Fable 5 on the max plan, I got it to one-shot a background visualization of the eml operator for this site. When the result appeared on the screen in front of me, I was transfixed. Eventually I had some time, and coded up a studio to play with the operator myself, feeding it 1 and x the way the paper does.

The background you are looking at is that machine. It grows random expression trees from the grammar S → 1 | x | eml(S, S), evaluates them over the complex plane, and sweeps each curve across a phosphor oscilloscope — the real part in green, the imaginary part in blue. About one curve in three is a real construction from the paper, a known, labeled function bubbling out of the noise.

But I wanted to be able to drive it. So natually, I made a studio: build your own traces by piping operators onto x, splitting nodes into branches, or loading a verified construction and tweaking it (though some functions that we would consider quite elementary like sin(x) or cos(x) have an enormous number of eml tokens). When your hand-built tree happens to equal a known function, the scope says so.

Open the One Operator studio →

How to use it: when the tool opens, you see the function y = x being plotted. You can load one of about 20 functions from the "LOAD" menu and watch them trace. On the bottom left hand side you will see a tree diagram composed of green circles (the eml operator), green ones, and blue x's. the eml operator creates a split in the graph, and 1 and x are terminal leaves. You can use the "TREE" tools to modify a certain node that you can select with the mouse, or use the "PIPE" tools to apply a function like exp, ln, 1/z, -z, z², or e-z, where z is the function expressed in the diagram already. Thus, you can build new functions out of more primitive ones expressed. You can also clear the oscilloscope traces or retrace the current function with the two "SCOPE" tools. The green trace is the real part, the blue line is the imaginary part, and a HUD in the top right informs the user of axis scale, the number of tokens and depth, if the function has an elementary name, and if the imaginary trace is identically zero or not.

I keep coming back to the idea that lurking beneath the surface of all the expressions we use in mathematics, when reframed in eml-syntax, hide a school of leviathans roaming around the space of functions. They were always there. The eml operator didn't put them in the water but it sure as hell turned the lights on. That's the thing about making something purely for yourself and poking at it: the detritus of a playful hypothesis, the offcuts of an afternoon spent watching curves draw themselves, turn out to conceal real structure that was under everything the whole time. It just took a human mind to think about it once (but once is enough).

It's not exactly the same thing, but I remember clearly the first time I plotted The Weierstrass Function when I was in graduate school. I listened to a lot of Big Black in that era of my life. It fit perfectly.

StreetQuest and Strava

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I'm building an iOS app called StreetQuest and I want to publish this page on my blog to declare intent for use of the Strava API. No surprises, folks.

I want StreetQuest to help runners track which streets they've completed in their city. It scores GPS traces against local street data and shows street-by-street progress over time. It's inspired by CityStrides but the incentives are different. It's going to have RPG battle elements and an experience system to improve your roster.

For people who record runs on a Garmin watch or another device that syncs to Strava, StreetQuest can connect to Strava and import the user's own activities. That import is used only to bring the activity into StreetQuest so it can be processed against street coverage data.

StreetQuest only needs read access to the user's own Strava activities. It does not post workouts back to Strava, edit Strava data, or use Strava for anything social.

This page exists mainly as a public reference for the Strava application configuration while the project is still in progress.

On Bounce House

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I've been creating DIY music for a long time, since I was in high school. The technology has changed a lot, from first recording music on tapes and the rare .mp3 file with Sonar Mellowship and Carl Consumer and the Red White and Blue Torpedos to gaining experience with Logic Pro with Holistic Wellness. As a non-professional, DIY music maker and mixing/mastering amateur, I've had to do a lot of reckoning with quality of a finished product and the essence of punk rock. "Welp, that's the recording we paid $0 for", to "Yeah, so what, it sounds like shit, that's rad!" to "Actually, I've made it sound purposefully bad and flat and noisy on purpose." There's a lot of sonic latitude here and some of my favorite recordings on earth have some wildass sonic metrology to them.

This past February (2026), I decided to do the RPM challenge again. I have done it before, mostly with my graduate-school-era "Nanopunk" solo band _11:34. There's a lot of great things about the challenge, which is to create 10 songs or 35 minutes of original music, start to finish, in the month of February. You have to mix and master it yourself, as well as create the design for your album cover. This had been a mainstay of my life in 2008-2012 while living in Albany, NY, and I've convinced some of my friends to do it alongside me (or help me with my own project) too. Possibly the best thing about this challenge is that if you finish it, you have something real, tactile, and forever. It might be rushed and suboptimal-sounding on airpods, but it is yours. THe other thing is that it forces you to have some grit. If you don't know how to do something and you're under a time crunch, there's a real force pushing you to figure it out via google or talking to someone, or abandoning it, and those decisions don't have the luxury of time.

What I had planned to do this year was something I had wanted to do for quite some time: to make a punk album with lyrics entirely in Yiddish. To spoil the ending a bit, life happened, I realized I would rather have this record be actually fucking good instead of rushed, and so I DNF'd the challenge, but I had 10 robust songs with lyrics and instrumentation all recorded by the 28th, including scratch vocals on 8 songs and finished vocals on about 4 (by the way, I was doing a lot of screaming and I had not built enough recovery time into my schedule). Along the way, I used Claude Code to set up an osascript batch bouncer for Logic to bounce all my tracks in a folder (mp3 and wav), free of human intervention. This is most certainly a "work" task rather than a "gym" task I don't get anything out of it, it's just clicking buttons over and over and not making any mistakes. There are accessibility tools to automate this, since having to manually bounce umpteen songs is annoying and I'd rather be playing/tweaking my music and plugins or improving my mixes. Improving mixes is a progressive task for a hobbyist. It always involves listening to songs over and over again and tweaking until it sounds just right. There's no true substitute for the ear. Or is there?

Just kidding, there really isn't. But still, part of me wondered whether I could accelerate the process; watching loudness metering in Logic Pro while staring at goniometers sure dials you in to a lot of sonic character. But one of the better tests I've found through my experience as a DIY producer was a simple one: listen to the track at medium-high volume in a car stereo inbetween other songs that you are "aiming for" as a sound reference. In most of my mixes and masters since 2012, I've chosen "Map Ref 41°N 93°W"" by Wire (from 154) or "Alan" by Self Defense Family as references in a DAW, but on the car stereo it can kind of be whatever you want. The fact that I was making an album of 10 songs meant that I had room to play around a little.

I live in Midtown Manhattan and don't have a car. But my partner Kimia and I were planning to rent one the last week of February so that I could drop her and some folks off in the catskills for a bachelorette party and then travel up to Albany to see my Aunt for a couple days. Kimia ended up getting sick with a horrendous cough, but I still went, and had some time on the way up to Albany to listen to my new project "like the DIY pros do".

However, on the car stereo, it sounded terrible. Passable for stripped-down DIY glitchy synthy aggresive punk in airpods and studio headphones, next to everything else my mixes were bogus. I knew they weren't mastered yet, but I could tell that, among many other things: my low-frequency roll off was too aggressive and applied to far too many tracks, the compression on the guitars was too high, especially the leads; everything was getting squashed, there was too much "sparkle" on some of the synths and definitely the vocals, the de-esser wasn't strong enough, I had noticed a guitar track that sounded out of tune. After listening to the album and some intermixed reference tracks, I had decided to put on Fountains of Wayne, as one of the bachelorette-party-goers had a friend with an interesting theory that FoW was political music for the dreary lives of middle managers commuting to New York from Jersey. I had not approached that band's work with that particular theoretical angle, not in the slightest, so I was interested to engage with it. But still something deeper lingered: I could not in good conscience release this Yiddish punk album if it sounded this bad. I needed more tools.

After I settled into my Aunt's house in Albany for the night, I had to know if there was a command line tool that would speedrun through a directory of .wav files- but it didn't seem so. Maybe I didn't look hard enough. That would be embarassing. Oh well. I cracked open Claude Code and fired up superpowers. I defined the spec, nitpicked the implementation plan, and several iterations later, I was happy with the result. I'm not sure how I estimated how much usage it required, but my guess would be ~35% of a 5x Max plan weekly limit, with about 3 maxed-out sessions that weekend and a little more when I got back home. Greasing the wheels of course was that I was using Tailscale, an S-tier product in every measure, to connect my laptop back to the mac studio at my desk via ssh.

What I came up with was Bounce House. Simply put, this is a python-based audio analysis tool that tells you what's wrong with your mix and offers some suggestions on what to do about it. Even on the first iteration I was duly impressed, and I kept adding more metrics and capabilities like plumbing the result to JSON files, adding explanations of various metrics, having a mix vs master setting, and so on. Bounce House is very opinionated, this is for certain, and I tried to strike a balance between "industry standard" and "this is just acoustics and physics, bro". On release, it measures 26 metrics across 5 analysis modules. It's considerably faster than playing the track end-to-end, plus, you get a report for each song computing its averages. I originally thought about making it in Rust, but some of the library support just wasn't quite there yet. I'm open to an eventual re-write once it is.

At its core, Bounce House is a pipeline, much like many other data pipelines I've created for work: here, we load a .wav file, run it through a stack of analyzers, apply rules, check for patterns, and spit out a report. Each analyzer is its own module. Loudness does EBU R128 via pyloudnorm (that's the ITU-R BS.1770 standard, the same one Spotify and Apple Music use to normalize a track), spectrum uses librosa to decompose your mix into seven frequency bands from sub-bass to brilliance, stereo does mid/side decomposition and phase correlation (really important for mono compatibility- if your mix falls apart on a single Bluetooth speaker, this is what catches it) perceptual estimates of brightness and warmth, and tuning checks if your concert A is actually 440 Hz. The analyzers are stateless in that they take audio in, return a dict of metrics, and don't care about each other. That's exactly what it's designed to do. It means you can run just bh loudness mix.wav if that's all you need, or let bh analyze run the full stack of tools.

The part I'm most proud of is the diagnostic engine. Individual metrics are useful and having a readout of them is quite nice, but mixing problems are rarely one-dimensional: a "muddy mix" isn't just a low spectral centroid, it's a low centroid plus high warmth plus low-mid energy buildup (CC offered this in an explanation but I had to look it up, and sure enough, it's pretty right-on). So Bounce House has nine diagnostic patterns that combine evidence across modules using soft-AND logic: a pattern fires when enough of its conditions match, not all of them. This means a single borderline metric won't trigger a false alarm, but when two or three things point in the same direction, you get a named diagnosis ("Over-Compressed," "Mono Incompatible," "Streaming-Unfriendly") with specific advice on what to fix. The rules and patterns are data objects and not code, so if you wanted to add a new diagnostic, it's adding a dict entry instead of writing a new function (well... within some limits).

Bounce House takes about 3 minutes to run on a directory containing ~35 minutes of .wav files. Here's a sample of what the output looks like for a single track:

<details class="sample-output"> <summary>Sample output (click to expand)</summary>

════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
  BOUNCE HOUSE — Master Analysis Report
  /Users/Abe/Music/Bounces/RPM2026-demos/Scrollin Around.wav
  (44100 Hz, stereo, 3:39)
════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════

── Loudness & Dynamics ────────────────────────────────────
  Integrated LUFS        -13.6  PASS
  Loudness Range         +1.8  FAIL
  Sample Peak            -0.1
  True Peak              -0.1  FAIL
  RMS Level              -17.2
  Crest Factor           +17.1  PASS
  PLR                    +13.5  PASS

── Spectral Balance ───────────────────────────────────────
  Centroid               2,459.3 Hz
  Bandwidth              2,638.6 Hz
  Rolloff (85%)          4,425.9 Hz
  Flatness               0.0022

  sub-bass                   32.3 dB
  bass                       29.4 dB
  low-mid                    23.3 dB
  mid                        18.5 dB
  upper-mid                  15.7 dB
  presence                    9.4 dB
  brilliance                 -8.1 dB

── Stereo & Phase ─────────────────────────────────────────
  Phase Correlation      0.5344  PASS
  Mid RMS                -18.3
  Side RMS               -23.5
  M/S Ratio              +5.2
  Stereo Width           0.3554
  Balance                +0.4  PASS
  Min Block Corr         -0.1881  WARN

  Frequency-dependent correlation:
    sub-bass           +0.978
    low-mid            +0.727
    mid                +0.354
    upper-mid          +0.130
    air                +0.083

── Perceptual Quality ─────────────────────────────────────
  Brightness             0.0394
  Warmth                 0.1584

── Tuning & Pitch ─────────────────────────────────────────
  Tuning Deviation       +3.0 cents  PASS
  Concert Pitch          440.8 Hz
  Closest Standard       A=441
  Pitch Drift (std)      +4.0 cents
  Pitch Drift (range)    +27.0 cents  FAIL
  Pitch Trend            +1.0 cents
  Chroma Sharpness       0.0940  FAIL

── Suggestions ────────────────────────────────────────────
  FAIL  True peak is -0.1 dBTP — risk of inter-sample peaks
        on codec conversion, add a limiter ceiling at -1.0 dBTP
  FAIL  Loudness range is 1.8 LU — extreme dynamics, review
        compressor/limiter settings
  FAIL  Pitch stability: 27.0 cents range — significant drift,
        re-record or apply pitch correction
  FAIL  Chroma definition: 0.09 — very diffuse pitch content,
        check intonation
  WARN  Minimum block correlation is -0.188 — some sections
        have near-zero or negative correlation

── Mix Diagnostics ────────────────────────────────────────
  WARN  Muddy Mix — Low-mid buildup causing muddy mix
        Cut 2-4 dB in the 200-500 Hz range. Check for
        overlapping bass, guitar body, and vocal chest
        resonance. Use a high-pass filter on non-bass
        instruments to remove unnecessary low-mid energy.
  WARN  Detuned Mix — Possible tuning issues — pitch
        instability or non-standard tuning
        Check instrument tuning against a reference. If
        pitch drifts over time, re-record or apply pitch
        correction. If the concert pitch is intentionally
        non-440, this warning can be ignored.
  FAIL  Streaming-Unfriendly Master — Master too hot for
        streaming platforms
        Spotify normalizes to -14 LUFS, Apple Music to -16 LUFS.
        Your track will be turned down, and the aggressive
        limiting will be audible. Consider mastering to
        -9 to -12 LUFS with a -1.0 dBTP ceiling. The
        quieter version will actually sound better after
        platform normalization because it retains more dynamics.

</details>

I think some real go-forwards here would be the ability to differentiate between song sections (verse - chorus - etc) and create sub-analyses for those, I'm not 100% sure I trust the pitch drift here until I do some more experiments with it, and I wonder the extent to which vocals modifies these properties. It might be worth trying it with and without vocals to observe the difference. Also, I'm not really singing, I'm yelping and/or screaming, which makes aggressive genres more challenging to parse. If this all sounds interesting to you, try it out and tell me what you think!

I'm probably going to continue using this and workshopping it a little more as I finish my lil' Yiddish punk project. I'm excited about trying to figure out how it fits into my mixing and mastering workflow especially as I get closer to the finish line. I still havent corrected my EQ from these demo tracks yet, I still need to hire a translator (for spot checks) and an illustrator to finish the project's polish, and I still need to figure out the meter of a couple songs left to sing and then actually do them. Recording in an NYC apartment is ass. Maybe I'll just spring for recording studio time.

A savvy reader might know where to find the demos for this project, but I'm not ready to share it out quite yet. Rest assured I'll have quite a bit to say about it when I release it.

Welcome

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is the first blog post on my newly-migrated site. Long-form writing, project deep-dives, and technical notes will appear here.

I'm really proud of how this turned out and now I'm self-hosting my site. Lots to talk about but right now I'm happy just to have moved away from wordpress to this new astro + github-pages + cloudflare setup.

The visual language of the site was inspired by Aleks Allen (Svetim) at https://studiolo.svetim.fm/ . The site was developed via pair-programming with claude code over about a week.

PROMPT CRITICAL Series

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I'm happy to announce the release of a new EP: First You're Tickling the Dragon's Tail, Next You're Eating Its Ass, the second installment in what I'm now formally calling the PROMPT CRITICAL series.

This project extends themes I first explored in 2017 with What Time Does the Shock Arrive at the Top of the Pipe? That EP drew on Dr. Robert Brownlee's accounts of post-Manhattan Project research, and the original song "Melt Glass" explored matter fused during nuclear detonations.

For this release, I recomposed two existing songs — "Underground" by El Guapo and "Kinky Afro" by Happy Mondays — alongside an original composition addressing nuclear accidents and criticality events. Since 2017, the "demon core" and Louis Slotin's "Tickling the Dragon's Tail" experiments have become internet phenomena through YouTube and TikTok coverage, which motivated putting this collection together during the winter Omicron surge in New York.

I intend to continue the PROMPT CRITICAL series. I'm quite proud of this one.

The artwork was generated using OpenAI's CLIP model.

UW Madison Guest Lecture

Sat, 10 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

My good friend and former Sonar Mellowship bandmate Dr. David Ehrlich asked me if I'd contribute to the neuroscience class he was teaching at UW Madison entitled, "Music and the Brain." The topic was creativity, improvisation, and algorithmic generation of music.

It made for some fascinating research, and I learned a lot about both the history and cutting-edge of algorithmic music generation. In addition, I helped him create a project for the class, who were not expected to have any programming background, by adapting a colab notebook by Aurélien Geron. The project revolved around listening to Bach chorales and generating new ones with a CNN-LSTM artificial neural network, and then performing an experiment by asking friends and contacts to see if they can tell which Bach chorales were genuine and which were generated.

The whole endeavor really drilled into my head exactly how much preparation and forethought is required to create even one-hour college lecture. I had a lot of fun and hope to work on similar collaborative projects.

Lecture video

Lecture slides

Colab notebook project

Piles of Rags to Love and Cherish

Tue, 03 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I released an album today that I've worked on for a year and a half, off-and-on.

Anthopogenic Methane Considered More Harmful; Total Methane Budget Considered More Manageable

Wed, 19 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I'm beaming with pride today. My brother, Benjamin, published his first first-authored peer-reviewed journal article in Nature. It's gotten a lot of feature articles already in the mainstream press and has huge implications for climate change policy and fossil fuels; the equivalent of a grand slam at one's first at-bat.

Essentially, my brother's team conducted campaigns in Greenland to measure the amount of radiocarbon (14-C) from 1750 to present time by drilling ice cores. The measurements are extremely difficult; each data point requires melting hundreds of pounds of ice only to collect a small amount of trapped air, which itself contains a truly miniscule amount of CH4, and only a portion of that is the radiocarbon isotope!

Here's a pic of the lab setup. The general process is: freeze out unwanted gases. Burn CO to CO2. Freeze that desired CO2, distill twice & Cryo-focus, then flameseal. CH4 carries on across the lab, to later repeat for this gas! (Credit - Peter Neff)

The research question they were trying to address was essentially, "How much of the methane (a strong contributor to the greenhouse effect) in the atmosphere, comes from anthropogenic sources, i.e., the oil and gas industry, and are our current estimates of natural methane sources correct?" From the Nat Geo article:

Previously, geologic sources like volcanic seeps and gassy mud pots were thought to spit out about 10 percent of the methane that ended up in the atmosphere each year. But new research, published this week in Nature, suggests that natural geologic sources make up a much smaller fraction of the methane in today’s atmosphere. Instead, the researchers say, that methane is most likely attributable to industry. Added up, the results indicate we’ve underestimated the methane impacts of fossil fuel extraction by up to 40 percent.

I'm collecting some news coverage from around the world relating to it:

Reddit r/science thread (linking to The Guardian; at 5th item on the subreddit's front page at time of writing this note)

Congrats, Ben!!!

Pyedgeon news

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Pyedgeon, my first pip package, was recently featured in a Recurse Center Joy of Computing blog post

I did a lot of refactoring and ease-of-use additions to it, and have plans to create some weird side-projects with it + flask + twilio or something.

I've got a lot of ideas recently and I am feeling the need to update this blog more often.

2017 and me

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

2017 was a watershed year for me. Roughly in chronological order, I:

Went to therapy for the first time in 5 years

Got over a case of prostatitis

Got a Nintendo switch, which is dope; Zelda: BoTW is clearly one of the best games ever made

Drifted away from close friends and romantic partners in the Palouse which I feel guilty about

Presented my research on ab-initio Raman spectra of liquid nitrogen at the NNSA-SSAP conference in Naperville, IL

Left physics academia, probably permanently

Bleached my hair white and colored it blue several times

Made one Holistic Wellness EP

Moved away from a partner and two cats in Pullman whom I miss and love very much

Moved in with another partner in Manhattan whom I love very much

Spent a lot of time at the Recurse Center, met very cool folks there and worked on great things that piqued my interest and eventually helped me to transition my career into the tech industry

Joined a fiction book club

Went on NY basic health extended medicaid while I was unemployed and very thankful for the safety net

Ate at no fewer than a dozen vegan spots in New York City

Reconnected with many old friends whom I haven't seen in a long time

Got to see a lot more of my family than I have in 3 years

Was pretty broke, living on savings for half a year, while also helping to support two partners near and far, but it worked out pretty well, all things considered. Found out I'm a really good homemaker

Went to a squirting workshop, which was one of the best ways I've ever spent a Friday night

Learned shibari to an intermediate level

Got hit by a car while riding a citibike, which was shitty, but I didn't break anything so, not that bad in the grand scheme of things

Joined the DSA and started doing some political organizing things around town, mostly in a technology-related realm like algorithmic transparency

Listened to more podcasts than music

Went to Catholic Mass for the first time, in the context of my aunt and uncle renewing their vows for their 40th anniversary

Went to a Jewish Renewal service for the first time, which was actually pretty great and reminded me of Lungfish

Got bitten by the functional programming bug

Met a lot of new dogs

Started going to spas/bathhouses, which I can't believe I haven't done previously

Did major upgrades and interior design work for my apartment on the cheap

Got two most excellent tattoos from a shop around the corner from my folks house which is now probably my favorite shop

Read the Three Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu, which is now my favorite book series I've ever read

Saw the Total Solar eclipse in Lake Cascade, ID, holy shit

Got Moviepass, which is ridiculous

Conducted a ~3 month long job search (and collected some unemployment during it) that ended with a dynamic and interesting role that will develop my career as a data scientist

Did not make a zillion dollars in crypto and that's fine

Got domestic partnership'd for health insurance

Walked a great many walks and got familiar with NYC in a brand new way

Saw several awesome shows in NYC: Wire, Messthetics, Oxbow/SDF, The Make Up/James Chance/Martin Rev, Juana Molina

Did a lot of vegan outreach

Re-joined Facebook, mostly use it to cross-post from Twitter and IG, but feel pretty all right about it

Read more books in a year than I have in a very long time, which I hope to continue

Still straight edge as hell

Realized I need to call people close to me on the phone more often because talking to humans feels good

Realized I should probably write more

Realized I should probably finish some of the fun and thought provoking projects I started so that I can have some interesting things to write about

Areas in which I'd like to explore during my career

Tue, 26 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

When I was entering into graduate school in nanoscale science, I did not have very many clear career goals besides, "I'd like to perform cutting-edge research in computational physics", "I'd like to work on green energy technology", and maybe "I'd like to use my talents to make the world a better place." Perhaps if I had been a little more considerate in some of my education choices and jumped on the AI/machine intelligence bandwagon earlier I would be more established in a career path right now, but hindsight is 20/20.

I don't think such a mentality has really led me astray, however, and I do not have any regrets. My career path, despite in transition, has allowed me access to a lot more parts of the information technology spectrum than just physics and nanoscale science (and simulations thereof). Furthermore, my curiosities are piqued upon consideration and synthesis of the longitudinal aspects of various technologies and how they will impact society. I think communication of science and technology to laypeople and stakeholders is extremely important, and as the information-centered infrastructure of our world becomes more and more complex,

The intent of this post is to establish a framework of current problems that I would like to invest time and energy into in my career, whether they are part of a day job, solo side-projects or collaborative efforts. I almost certainly won't have the time and energy to investigate them all, but as it stands in September 2017, this is a loose list of the things that I think the most often about:

The plight of farmed animals for food; how to create more environmentally friendly and reduced-emissions protein sources that minimize cruelty* in the supply chain (*defined herein as the taking of life, forced confinement and/or loss of agency in animal and humans)
The plight of animal models for toxicology, illness and psychological studies; how to use computational toxicology and other scientific approaches to reduce cruelty inherent in animal model research and potentially make it obsolete
Force multipliers in machine learning for mobilizing collective power, rather than operating hierarchically 'downwards' originating from analysts (see here)
Legislative approaches towards algorithmic transparency
The encoding of emotional information in environment-percept-agent-action models for general artificial intelligence, and how to structure considerations of agents before actions are taken to recursively consider effects on other agents (to reduce suffering of human agents or maximize the number of liberties of other agents that themselves maximize liberties, and so on)
Natural language processing (NLP) approaches to de-escalation of personal crises
How to avert a coming catastrophe in workforce automation: work-centered identities, e.g: truck-drivers still viewing themselves as truck drivers post-automation but without reliable employment, and what that means in the context of culture war, re-training for other jobs, etc.
The use of video games and/or virtual reality as storytelling and educational devices, to share information in a way that allows, for example, students to learn in an optimal manner for their learning styles (with obvious applications to learning-disabled or autism-spectrum individuals)
"Big data" approaches to centrally-planned economies
Blockchain approaches to (decentralized) credit monitoring
The intersection between category theory, decision-making in general AI, cellular automata, and theorem proving (hopefully combined with (5) and hence, a general model that may operate in a falsifiable 'least-suffering' praxis)
Collectively-owned ad-hoc data analytics enterprises
Abolition of prisons and the police force; what would be necessary and how could technology compliment such aims while respecting peoples privacy, agency, and humanity
Mapping and understanding the role of music subculture in codifying a person's beliefs and choices using computational approaches
Understanding product management and business analytics (or, making progress towards general competency in the area)
Staying on the forefront of developments in neural networks, machine/deep learning, data science, data engineering, interactive visualizations and advanced statistical and analytical tools

I'm sure I'll have more to update in the future.

What I did at RC

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

An inexhaustive list of things I've done during my retreat at the Recurse Center: (explanatory links will be added when summary posts are finished)

Worked on the Instacart Market Basket Analysis competition (1577th place at 0.3772453; max score 0.4091449)
Did some introductory exercises with javascript coding and syntax on Freecodecamp
Tried to implement a way to call the pavlok API to shock a user according to vents in a PICO-8 console through a javascript bridge
Wrote three PICO-8 games:
- Quantum trouncer, a (yet unfinished) maze in reciprocal space
- Spaceball, an arkanoid where your paddle is confined to a circle and blocks appear in the middle
- An implementation of the Langton's Ant cellular automata
A twitter bot and Lua script based approach (similar to this one with Twilio) to enable game genie codes in Super Mario Bros. in FCEUX via tweet, using Levenshtein distance and a lookup table
Learned about Visidata, an incredibly powerful tool that I've incorporated into my daily workflow
A lot of boring but necessary progress in SQL skills
A lot of less-boring but extremely welcome progress in vim skills
Paired with Hang Lu Su on a twitter bot for social good :)
Paired on an image
Wrote and presented a 45-minute introductory presentation to machine learning for beginners (slides no longer available)
Forked and modified a twitter-archival script or the purpose of downloading .png screenshot images of a user's entire timeline (not RTs, though), available here
Several days worth of interview practice and basic algorithms and data structures refreshers -- lots of hackerrank
Workshops on testing- what it is and how to use (mostly Python) libaries like Hypothesis and pytest.
Refucktoring! This was a really fun exercise where a group of people took running code and made it worse by obfuscating things while still ensuring that tests pass. Here's my version of a Lua script that translates between integers and Roman numerals
A little bit of reinforcement learning with FCEUX using the setup described here
Refactored my pyedgeon code, and created an instagram bot based on it (really, in present form, a python script that can post via terminal)
Worked on some data science take-home interview questions and compiled a repo for my answers
Facilitated feelings check-in for the second 6-week span of my batch
Clicked through several ipython notebooks about adversarial machine learning (cleverhans library)
Made a very simple django website using the djangogirls docs
Did a lot of studying statistics
Did a few extremely basic Haskell and Elm tutorials; didn't really get it
Used TileMill to create a map of projected sea level rise in NYC over the next century (but never published it)
Re-hashed my resume and created a jobs profile on the RC website
Wrote Web Scrapers to obtain large numbers of press releases to help one of Paul Gowder's projects: pressreleasepoint, cbs news, fox news
Generally, did a lot of talking to really amazing bright people

What Time Does the Shock Arrive at the Top of the Pipe?

Tue, 02 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

During my first few days of unemployment, I wrote/mixed/mastered a quick 3-song release with 1 original (Melt Glass) and two covers (Mehmet Ali Ağca by Self Defense Family; Savings by Lungfish). It's called "What Time Does the Shock Arrive at the Top of the Pipe?" and is available for free download on the Holistic Wellness bandcamp and right here:

[bandcamp width=350 height=470 album=3424482117 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false]

Re-creating Andrew Franciosa's photo of Kelsea Adams for the album art was really fun. Credit to Sheila Fitzgerald for the photo, artistic direction and aesthetics.

I'm probably not going to begin to have a chance to make more music until late June when I return to the Palouse for my guitar and pedalboard, focusing my energies on Recurse instead.

Periwinkle

Tue, 02 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Sheila used a ~1:1 dilution of the Arctic Fox "Periwinkle" hair dye with conditioner to achieve this effect. I love it! My hair was so dark that it required 3 bleachings to get to a point that it would properly take color, and we didn't read the instructions properly on the 1st bleaching. Anyway, it was their first experience dying someone else's hair and my first time getting it done. I think I'll really like how it grows in, too. We took the pictures in Wawawai landing, on the Snake River. It's one of my favorite places in the area. We've had a really wet spring, and combined with a brushfire late last year, the whole place was greener than I had ever seen it!

Today's my last full day in Pullman- I move to Manhattan tomorrow. Most of the stuff I care about is moving with me in luggage or already shipped back East. I had a pretty successful yard sale the other day at WSU and donated a ton of old clothes. I'm trying to take on more of a minimalist approach to life, and doing not too badly so far, but there's this weird sentimental attachment to inanimate objects and the nostalgia they carry that bugs me.

I'll be back in the Palouse a couple times over the summer: once to move some more stuff and take my guitar and pedalboard back with me, and then again to catch the eclipse in Mid-August after my Recurse batch is over.

Recurse Center Admission!

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Good news, everyone! My admission application to The Recurse Center has been accepted and I will be moving to New York City in early May to attend the Summer I batch from May 22 to August 10th.

I'm really excited for this opportunity and think it's perfect for my career trajectory. I've been dissatisfied with academia and realized a little while ago that I'm probably not cut out for a long-term career in it, and want to sharpen my skills as a programmer instead. The jobs and possible career paths that are most interesting to me have a data software development focus rather than hard science, i. e., getting papers published. I learned software development from a physics perspective rather than a computer science perspective, and working alone, siloed, in most of my research topics and projects has been rather limiting to me in that regard. For example, the first time I've ever pair-programmed was during my RC interview and I'm not aware of any instance of any other person ever using software that I wrote for DFT/MD purposes. In addition to that, the software I've written as a postdoc is property of my PI, who has forbidden me from open-sourcing it. I need a breath of fresh air and to spend time in an environment where I can grow my potential.

Of course, I'll have much more to say about Recurse in the coming months but for now, I'd love to sharpen my large-scale development chops, contribute to some open-source software, start some cool projects in data science and machine learning, do some full stack web development, and try to throw in a little PICO-8 project, too! It's definitely going to be a jam-packed 3 months. But yeah, to summarize: I'm a Recurser! Woohoo!

Langton's Ant in Python

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I started a new repo on github that computes the Langton's Ant cellular automata in python. For more information on Langton's Ant, see its wikipedia page.

Using classes in OOP is relatively unfamiliar to me, since most of the programing I've done in the last several years has been analysis scripts to extract trends and statistics out of DFT simulations. I'm slowly unlearning being a physicist-programmer and trying to learn programming 'the right way.' That being said, I'm still using plain ol' trusty Matplotlib to render the ants and worlds in this code.

The Langton's ant program can use any arbitrary rule set in the form of a string like 'rllr' which determines the ant's turning directive as a function of the present board state. In addition to performing the rules on a flat 2D grid with edges where the CA will stop if the ant falls of an edge, the program can also use a torus or Klein bottle topology. Making gifs is also supported, but rendering them takes a very long time. Below are some ouput .png files. The first is 11000 steps of the 'rl' directive:

Here's 60000 steps of the 'rllr' directive, where this figure helps to demonstrate that a cyclic list of doubled directive characters will produce a high degree of symmetry:

The ant on a Klein bottle is an interesting case. A Klein bottle has a torus boundary condition joining two opposing edges and Möbius boundary conditions joining the remaining two, in which there is a 'twist' in the boundary that maps the top of the world to the bottom. I'd love to investigate the effect of topological closure on ant patterns further; it seems that that area is not well-studied. The ant's behavior at the boundary in the 'rl' rule populates the entire Klein bottle boundary region when it is discovered, like in this gif:

I used this program for my Recurse center interview; the pair programming exercise consisted of adding animation to the program from a less-finished state. I was accepted, and that's a topic for another post ;)

Look Into the Void and See

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

When I made this 9-tile multimedia project a year and a half ago I never linked to it here. I used a tinkered version of Google's Deep Dream to create some meditations on the fullness of space and sound.

https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/lookintothevoidandsee/

Optical Illusion Buttons in Python

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I wrote a short python script to generate optical illusion buttons that can't be read very well unless you tilt the screen or image to a very low angle, almost edge-on, yielding images like this:

If you're doing it right, you should see the phrase, "NPR COOL DAD ROCK."

The code is below, to generate an 18-character-or-less button. There are two things to be aware of: the only two dependencies are PIL and NumPy, and if you're not on a Debian-based Linux system, you may need to adjust a line of code near the top to find the font you want. Try experimenting with parameters and fonts, some definitely work better than others. Narrow fonts tend to look pretty good. I'd love to optimize for speed, but it only takes about 3 or 4 seconds to run on my machine. This should work with either Python 2 or 3 (tested with 3.5). This repo is now hosted on GitHub here.

from PIL import ImageFont
from PIL import Image
from PIL import ImageDraw
from PIL import ImageOps
from numpy import sqrt

illusion_text = "NPR COOL DAD ROCK"
text_color = (0, 0, 0)
background_color = (255, 255, 255)
img_side = 1024

font_path = "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans-ExtraLight.ttf"
charmax = 18
font_size_guess = 7 * (30 - len(illusion_text))
crop_width_x = 12
crop_width_y = 3
num_rotations = 6
darkness_threshold = 108

if len(illusion_text) <= charmax:
    pass
else:
    print('WARNING: Text too long. Exiting.')
    raise SystemExit(0)

img_size = (img_side, img_side)
img_size_text = (img_side, img_side)

raw_img = Image.new("RGB", img_size_text, background_color)
img = Image.new("RGBA", img_size, background_color)
circle_img = Image.new("RGBA", img_size, background_color)
full_image = Image.new("RGBA", img_size, background_color)
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(raw_img)

# step through font sizes to find optimal font for box
for font_trial in range(font_size_guess - 30, font_size_guess + 30):
    possible_font = ImageFont.truetype(font_path, font_trial)
    raw_img = Image.new("RGB", img_size_text, background_color)
    draw = ImageDraw.Draw(raw_img)
    draw.text((crop_width_x, crop_width_y), illusion_text, text_color, font=possible_font)

    # find bounding box of text by inversion
    inverted = ImageOps.invert(raw_img)
    possible_boundingbox = (
        inverted.getbbox()[0] - crop_width_x,
        inverted.getbbox()[1] - crop_width_y,
        inverted.getbbox()[2] + crop_width_x,
        inverted.getbbox()[3] + crop_width_y,
    )
    if possible_boundingbox[2] - possible_boundingbox[0] < img_side - 2 * crop_width_x:
        boundingbox = possible_boundingbox
        font_size = font_trial
    else:
        break

raw_img = Image.new("RGB", img_size_text, background_color)
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(raw_img)
font = ImageFont.truetype(
    "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans-ExtraLight.ttf", font_size
)
draw.text((crop_width_x, crop_width_y), illusion_text, text_color, font=font)
inverted = ImageOps.invert(raw_img)
raw_img = raw_img.crop(boundingbox)
scaled_img = raw_img.resize((img_side, img_side), Image.BICUBIC)
img.paste(scaled_img, (0, 0))

# map points in the square image to points in a circle
# turn light grey and white to alpha channel. Blacken dark grays.
pixdata = img.load()
for y in range(img.size[1]):
    for x in range(img.size[0]):
        if pixdata[x, y] == (255, 255, 255, 255):
            pixdata[x, y] = (255, 255, 255, 0)
        elif pixdata[x, y][1] >= darkness_threshold:
            pixdata[x, y] = (255, 255, 255, 0)
        elif pixdata[x, y][1] <= darkness_threshold:
            pixdata[x, y] = (0, 0, 0, 255)

circle_img.paste(img, (0, 0))

pixdata2 = circle_img.load()
for x in range(img_side):
    Ysize = 2 * sqrt((img_side / 2) ** 2 - (x - (img_side / 2)) ** 2)
    for y in range(img_side):
        Yoffset = int((img_side - Ysize) / 2.)
        Y = Yoffset + int((Ysize / img_side) * y)
        pixdata2[x, Y] = pixdata[x, y]
        if sqrt((x - img_side / 2) ** 2 + (y - img_side / 2) ** 2) >= img_side / 2 - 2:
            pixdata2[x, y] = (255, 255, 255, 0)

for i in range(num_rotations):
    this_circle = circle_img.rotate(i * 180 / num_rotations)
    full_image.paste(this_circle, (0, 0), this_circle)

pixdata = full_image.load()
for y in range(full_image.size[1]):
    for x in range(full_image.size[0]):
        if pixdata[x, y] == (255, 255, 255, 0):
            pixdata[x, y] = (255, 255, 255, 255)

full_image.save(illusion_text + ".png")

Holistic Wellness: Dispatches from the land of Wheat and Divorce

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

A new full-length album by Holistic Wellness is out on bandcamp. I've been working on it in fits and starts since April. Listen and grok, 7 songs of ecstatic bliss and devastating alienation.

[bandcamp width=350 height=470 album=1993138552 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false]

Research Update - May 2016

Fri, 27 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Hey all, I'd like to give a quick research update on things I've been working on in my professional life. I've got two papers published this year. Their abstracts and citations are below.

Third-order elastic constants of diamond determined from experimental data

The pressure derivatives of the second-order elastic constants (SOECs) of diamond were determined by analyzing previous sound velocity measurements under hydrostatic stress [McSkimin and Andreatch, J. Appl. Phys., vol. 43, 1972, pp. 2944]. Our analysis corrects an error in the previously reported results. Using the corrected pressure derivatives, together with published data for the nonlinear elastic response of shock-compressed diamond [Lang and Gupta, Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 106, 2011, pp. 125502], a complete and corrected set of third-order elastic constants (TOECs) is presented that differs significantly from TOECs published previously.

Nonlinear elastic response of strong solids: First-principles calculations of the third-order elastic constants of diamond

Accurate theoretical calculations of the nonlinear elastic response of strong solids (e.g., diamond) constitute a fundamental and important scientific need for understanding the response of such materials and for exploring the potential synthesis and design of novel solids. However, without corresponding experimental data, it is difficult to select between predictions from different theoretical methods. Recently the complete set of third-order elastic constants (TOECs) for diamond was determined experimentally, and the validity of various theoretical approaches to calculate the same may now be assessed. We report on the use of density functional theory (DFT) methods to calculate the six third-order elastic constants of diamond. Two different approaches based on homogeneous deformations were used: (1) an energy-strain fitting approach using a prescribed set of deformations, and (2) a longitudinal stress-strain fitting approach using uniaxial compressive strains along the [100], [110], and [111] directions, together with calculated pressure derivatives of the second-order elastic constants. The latter approach provides a direct comparison to the experimental results. The TOECs calculated using the energy-strain approach differ significantly from the measured TOECs. In contrast, calculations using the longitudinal stress-uniaxial strain approach show good agreement with the measured TOECs and match the experimental values significantly better than the TOECs reported in previous theoretical studies. Our results on diamond have demonstrated that, with proper analysis procedures, first-principles calculations can indeed be used to accurately calculate the TOECs of strong solids.

Watch "Holistic Wellness - I'm Having a Hard Time Getting Excited About Graphene Nowadays - 4/16/2016" on YouTube

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Played at the bayou last Saturday and Sheila Fitzgerald captured a rad video of the last song in my set:

https://youtu.be/wyK2ne-YPvE

Related: I started a new YouTube channel for Holistic Wellness things. I need 100 subscribers for a custom URL, then from there is just a small step to a Maserati collection.

Paeans to Extrema

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Newest 4-song EP, "Paeans to Extrema" is out now on bandcamp!

[bandcamp width=350 height=470 album=1515791498 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false]

The Spotify release is coming soon. Listen/tease/play/refuse/download/bite/regurgitate - I also made it so you can buy the whole Holistic Wellness discography from bandcamp for a 30% reduced price.

Very shortly, I'm going to decide to either to an RPM challenge album or not. Either way, I have a show booked coming up soon so I need to figure out how to play these new jams live. Thanks for checking it out.

Holistic Wellness is on Spotify

Sat, 23 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Word.

I'm Having a Great Deal of Difficulty Processing the Cruelties of our History: https://open.spotify.com/album/53LkIwrHggIx7RD5uzFNRV

Hierophanies for Goblins: https://open.spotify.com/album/1NdgPJUBCtOkRZkgvUMGua

Also on Google play, iTunes, Shazam, Deezer, Tidal, and more. Seek and ye shall find.

Hierophanies for Goblins

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I'm very pleased to announce a new four-song Holistic Wellness EP today, "Hierophanies for Goblins." For those who like hearing the same thing over and over again, and also not. I've been working on this since October and I hope you enjoy it.

Listen/share/buy/beg/borrow/steal/peel/wheel/within/wheel

[bandcamp width=350 height=470 album=1163189406 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false]

Here's a clear sign that I follow Self Defense Family a little TOO closely

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I just realized this now. Compare: This upcoming SDF 7" and the EP I made last month.

I wrote my EP with no knowledge of the Self Defense songs. The lyrical and thematic content of "Alan" is eerily similar to the track titles on my EP and the general feeling of the third song. The cover art of the Holistic Wellness EP is a goddamn barn that caved in between Pullman and Moscow that I used to see on my commute to work every day. What the hell.

More Holistic Wellness offerings are in the works. Hopefully they won't infringe on any IP.

I'm Having a Great Deal of Difficulty Processing the Cruelties of our History

Wed, 23 Sep 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I wrote a new album (well, an EP, really) earlier this month, my first since Tensor Tympani in late 2012. I feel good about having proper music production tools now, and I am in awe of what can be done with Logic Pro X. It's called "I'm Having a Great Deal of Difficulty Processing the Cruelties of our History" and the name of the project is Holistic Wellness. It's definitely one of my favorite releases I've ever made.

I won't say too much about it right now and let you decide that for yourself, besides it's definitely a departure from _11:34 but not too much of one. I've adjusted the melody vs. repetition equation dial way off to one side (that way, it's also perfectly amenable to live performance with a loop station). I felt it merited a new name, and I've already been recording some noise albums with a friend under that moniker, so Holistic Wellness it is, forever trapped in the garbage crevices of bad SEO. There will be many more where this came from, hopefully at the rate of a new EP or so every month. I'm feeling a big creative upswing, and it's dope. Listen/buy/ignore/rejoice/disdain.

[bandcamp width=350 height=470 album=3009059277 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false]

#DeepDream Tests: Parameters and Layers

Thu, 16 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I know this is all coming out about a week after I started seeing some of these parameter and layer tests, but I wanted to make my own, both for easy reference and for more precise targeting of layer articulations in the Google Imagenet library. I modified the original Deepdream script to systematically move through parameter choices and layers. I didn't test all the layers, as some of the lower-level ones just weren't that interesting. Finally, I don't want to host all these pictures here on this post because it would be enormous, so I'm using the gallery-style viewer on Imgur instead. These ran on my Linux Mint 17 laptop on CPU. Memory requirements and avoiding errors relating to floats kept some of my parameter choices confined to a somewhat small range, but hey, I figure most people casually trying Deepdream out might not have GPUs either. I hope this is valuable to someone. Here's the original image for everything that follows. I chose it because it's relatively small at 512p, has some fine detail, a face (and eyes), some blurred areas, some blank space/light gradients, and a small-ish color palette:

In each case, I am varying the value of one parameter and leaving the others that their default values. That is: n_iter = 10; n_octaves = 4; octave_scale = 1.4. Also, each frame beyond the first is zoomed 0.25% towards the center of the image.

Parameters:

Here I step through a series of value increments in each parameter for five different layers, some with simple articulations, some with higher-level ones, to examine the effects of varying those parameters. I feed each output back into the image to be processed, saving each time (and zooming in 0.25%), so that I obtain a series of four increasingly modified images for each layer and each parameter set. I felt this was enough to obtain a general idea of the character of each parameter adjustment.

Number of iterations:

inception_3a_pool_1 inception_3a_pool_3 inception_3a_pool_5 inception_3a_pool_7 inception_3a_pool_9 inception_3a_pool_11 inception_3a_pool_13 inception_3a_pool_15 inception_3a_pool_17 inception_3a_pool_19 inception_3a_pool_21 inception_3a_pool_23

inception_3b_3x3_reduce_1 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_3 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_5 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_7 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_9 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_11 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_13 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_15 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_17 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_19 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_21 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_23

inception_4c_output_1 inception_4c_output_3 inception_4c_output_5 inception_4c_output_7 inception_4c_output_9 inception_4c_output_11 inception_4c_output_13 inception_4c_output_15 inception_4c_output_17 inception_4c_output_19 inception_4c_output_21 inception_4c_output_23

inception_4d_5x5_1 inception_4d_5x5_3 inception_4d_5x5_5 inception_4d_5x5_7 inception_4d_5x5_9 inception_4d_5x5_11 inception_4d_5x5_13 inception_4d_5x5_15 inception_4d_5x5_17 inception_4d_5x5_19 inception_4d_5x5_21 inception_4d_5x5_23

inception_5b_3x3_1 inception_5b_3x3_3 inception_5b_3x3_5 inception_5b_3x3_7 inception_5b_3x3_9 inception_5b_3x3_11 inception_5b_3x3_13 inception_5b_3x3_15 inception_5b_3x3_17 inception_5b_3x3_19 inception_5b_3x3_21 inception_5b_3x3_23

Number of octaves:

inception_3a_pool_1 inception_3a_pool_2 inception_3a_pool_3 inception_3a_pool_4 inception_3a_pool_5 inception_3a_pool_6 inception_3a_pool_7 inception_3a_pool_8

inception_3b_3x3_reduce_1 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_2 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_3 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_4 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_5 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_6 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_7 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_8

inception_4c_output_1 inception_4c_output_2 inception_4c_output_3 inception_4c_output_4 inception_4c_output_5 inception_4c_output_6 inception_4c_output_7 inception_4c_output_8

inception_4d_5x5_1 inception_4d_5x5_2 inception_4d_5x5_3 inception_4d_5x5_4 inception_4d_5x5_5 inception_4d_5x5_6 inception_4d_5x5_7 inception_4d_5x5_8

inception_5b_3x3_1 inception_5b_3x3_2 inception_5b_3x3_3 inception_5b_3x3_4 inception_5b_3x3_5 inception_5b_3x3_6 inception_5b_3x3_7 inception_5b_3x3_8

Octave scale:

inception_3a_pool_1.00 inception_3a_pool_1.13 inception_3a_pool_1.27 inception_3a_pool_1.44 inception_3a_pool_1.62 inception_3a_pool_1.83 inception_3a_pool_2.07 inception_3a_pool_2.33 inception_3a_pool_2.64 inception_3a_pool_2.98

inception_3b_3x3_reduce_1.00 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_1.13 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_1.27 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_1.44 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_1.62 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_1.83 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_2.07 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_2.33 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_2.64 inception_3b_3x3_reduce_2.98

inception_4c_output_1.00 inception_4c_output_1.13 inception_4c_output_1.27 inception_4c_output_1.44 inception_4c_output_1.62 inception_4c_output_1.83 inception_4c_output_2.07 inception_4c_output_2.33 inception_4c_output_2.64 inception_4c_output_2.98

inception_4d_5x5_1.00 inception_4d_5x5_1.13 inception_4d_5x5_1.27 inception_4d_5x5_1.44 inception_4d_5x5_1.62 inception_4d_5x5_1.83 inception_4d_5x5_2.07 inception_4d_5x5_2.33 inception_4d_5x5_2.64 inception_4d_5x5_2.98

inception_5b_3x3_1.00 inception_5b_3x3_1.13 inception_5b_3x3_1.27 inception_5b_3x3_1.44 inception_5b_3x3_1.62 inception_5b_3x3_1.83 inception_5b_3x3_2.07 inception_5b_3x3_2.33 (I got floating point exceptions if I went higher for this one)

Layers:

Here, all three parameters are at their default values; n_iter = 10; n_octaves = 4; octave_scale = 1.4. This time, there are a total of ten images in each feedback loop, since I wanted to get a deeper picture of the dominant articulations that appear in each layer. Of course, I probably miss a lot because the sample image I chose doesn't contain every feature that can be recognized and articulated.

inception_3a_1x1 inception_3a_3x3 inception_3a_3x3_reduce inception_3a_5x5 inception_3a_5x5_reduce inception_3a_output inception_3a_pool inception_3a_pool_proj

inception_3b_1x1 inception_3b_3x3 inception_3b_3x3_reduce inception_3b_5x5 inception_3b_5x5_reduce inception_3b_output inception_3b_pool inception_3b_pool_proj

inception_4a_1x1 inception_4a_3x3 inception_4a_3x3_reduce inception_4a_5x5 inception_4a_5x5_reduce inception_4a_output inception_4a_pool inception_4a_pool_proj

inception_4b_1x1 inception_4b_3x3 inception_4b_3x3_reduce inception_4b_5x5 inception_4b_5x5_reduce inception_4b_output inception_4b_pool inception_4b_pool_proj

inception_4c_1x1 inception_4c_3x3 inception_4c_3x3_reduce inception_4c_5x5 inception_4c_5x5_reduce inception_4c_output inception_4c_pool inception_4c_pool_proj

inception_4d_1x1 inception_4d_3x3 inception_4d_3x3_reduce inception_4d_5x5 inception_4d_5x5_reduce inception_4d_output inception_4d_pool inception_4d_pool_proj

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inception_5a_1x1 inception_5a_3x3 inception_5a_3x3_reduce inception_5a_5x5 inception_5a_5x5_reduce inception_5a_output inception_5a_pool inception_5a_pool_proj

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Conclusions:

So, what have we learned? Well, first of all, creating ~220 Imgur galleries for one blog post brings heavy sadness. But more importantly, we can discern some general trends across the board for parameters and layer characteristics. One way to check this out is to open multiple tabs and scroll across them as the value of a parameter is increased. The number of iterations is the primary controller for the "intensity" of the articulations, but different values for this parameter in the same neighborhood will actually select slightly different features to articulate. For the purposes of creating smooth animations, the value of the number of iterations should probably be kept low, say, to 8 or less. The number of octaves also controls the intensity of articulations, but in a different way, effecting the relative size, depth, and divergence in the colors of the input image. Different values of the number of octaves in the same neighborhood also definitely pick out different features to articulate, and setting a high number for this parameter will strongly increase the color saturation of the resultant images. Finally, the octave scale is another control upon the relative size effect of the features that Deep Dream brings out. Again, a large number for the octave scale seems to have an effect on the color saturation of the resultant images. Lowering the number of iterations and the number of octaves obviously reduces the computational cost.

With regards to layers, it seems that the name of each layer doesn't really help much to describe what's going on, but generally lower-level layers (3a and 3b) tend to articulate geometry-based deformations similar to what one would find in a photoshop filter, medium-level layers tend to articulate different takes on the dogslugs, lizards, pagodas, eyes, and so on, and the high-level layers (5a and 5b) are less-recognizable and harder to describe, but I don't see a lot of the fundamental characteristics of layer 4 presented within.

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps your Deep Dreaming in some way!

I am a bad human for not updating this more often

Sat, 11 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Wow, I'm embarassed. I need to update this more, especially if I'm paying for the domain.

Anyway, for what it's worth, my Ph. D. defense went super well. It was nowhere near as nerve-wracking as I thought it was going to be and my last month in Troy/Albany was spent seeing a lot of family and friends on the East coast and preparing for the move (having an awful time doing last-minute loading of all my stuff into U-boxes, ughh).

The trip out to the Palouse was actually relatively free of bumps. Sheila and I made it through Buffalo about 24 hours before the megastorm hit and did some cool things along the way like going to the Indiana Dunes state Park, the Chicago Diner, The Badlands in South Dakota (along with Wall Drug, the corniest place on Earth), and the buttes in La Crosse, WI, but those were probably our only detours on the way to Moscow, ID. We stayed in Erie, PA, Elgin, IL, Sioux Falls, SD, Sheridan, WY, and Missoula, MT. The weather was kind to us and apart from some ice and major wind in southern Minnesota, and the mountain passes through the Rockies were no problem to get through. Our cat Ben got a urinary block about 10 days before we left town so he had to be fed antibiotics through a dropper, but the cats were pretty chill and well-behaved throughout the trip. We put the back seats down in the car and used a dog crate to hold their litter box. I think that really helped with their anxiety about being in the car for five straight days.

Work is pretty great; I like my job and what I'm researching, although the cluster that I've been using is sorely in need of some heavy maintenance. Without giving too much away before I publish, I'm working on diamond and liquid nitrogen with ab-initio calculations and molecular dynamics simulations. I'm learning a lot and thankfully, my expertise in the methods I learned in grad school is a good, solid foundation that will lead to many interesting projects. I have a collaborator/co-adviser at one of the national labs who is a renowned scientist in this field. The work-life balance is pretty nice so far, but I expect that rather soon it will kick up into a higher gear once I can get more throughput on my calculations and I start publishing. I think that this place has a lot of potential for me as far as where my career is going, and I like that.

Sheila also got a job too, in the wheat lab, working as a technician! We've made a bunch of really cool friends here, and although the towns in the immediate vicinity are pretty small, some interesting things happen from time to time and there's a LOT of outdoorsy stuff that is within a day's (or hour's) driving distance.

I got a double-necked guitar and built up a nice pedalboard for it, and I've done some foundational work in using Google's Deep Dream script (and its dependencies), and I've started a creative kick on some multimedia projects. I'm going to post some results of my deepdream trials here very soon. Also, I've played 3 shows as Holistic Wellness, a solo/collaborative project that is different enough from _11:34 that I'm calling it something new. Maybe at the end of the year I'll invest in some new studio recording equipment after I make a dent in my loans and move to Pullman from Moscow. For a minute I was doing radio at the WSU college station, KZUU but I quit to free up some time and I wasn't in love with the culture there. Spoiled by the awesome WCDB at SUNY Albany, I guess.

I'd like to start updating this weekly, but I'm not making any promises ;)

Honoring Marta's Memory

Thu, 02 Oct 2014 00:00:00 GMT

In 2011, my friends Marta and Dan embarked on a colossal bike tour that spanned the entirety of Asia Minor, from Turkey to Central China to raise awareness about environmental issues like the desertification of the Aral Sea region. I believe they ended up raising over $15,000. Marta moved in with me for the summer of 2012 so that she could work in Albany to save up money for graduate school in Amsterdam for a Neuroscience Ph.D. I received word last night from a friend (that I don't talk to nearly enough) that Marta took her own life a few days ago.

I feel horribly pained by this news. Marta was a bright ray of light that truly cared about the world around her, and I feel an enormous loss.

While she was living with me, she and Dan gave me a massive slideshow of hundreds of pictures they took to document their trip. I have hosted it here:

Bike to China Presentation (file no longer available)

Bike to China Blog (documenting highlights of their journey)

I need to tell my friends that I love them more, and I don't want to wait until receiving news of tragedy to celebrate the lives and accomplishments of my peers let alone talk to them.

Crafting a Personal Brand for Academic Professionals

Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I gave a talk on UAlbany's main campus regarding an overview of personal branding strategies for academic professionals through the UAlbany FFLC (Future Faculty Leadership Council). The talk is focused on the online aspect of personal branding. Please feel free to share the talk with others if you find it useful. I may periodically update its content with time. There is a substantial amount of supporting information and places to go for further reading, provided in footnotes. Follow the link below to get to the Prezi presentation:

Crafting a Personal Brand For Academic Professionals

Second-to-last WCDB show Kratrock Spectacular

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Wow, it has been quite some time since I've updated. I've got a lot of stuff in the works, but for now I wanted to post my penultimate Condensed Matter Order of Magnitude Higher Power Hour show on WCDB, which was one of my favorites.

CMOOMHPH_tue_8_13_2013 (audio file no longer available)

Here's the tracklist:

NEU!	NEUSCHNEE
GRAUZONE	EISBAER
LILIPUT	TSCHIK-MO
KRAFTWERK	KRISTALLO
FEHLFARBEN	HIER UND JETZT
POPUL VUH	AGNUS DEI
CAN	PINCH
KILLING JOKE	VICTORY
DEVO	THAT'S GOOD
THE SKULL DEFEKTS	PEER AMID
AMON DUUL II	SHE CAME THROUGH THE CHIMNEY
FAUST	SO FAR
GRAUZONE	SCHLACHTET!
KRAFTWERK	TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS
NEU!	ISI
FEHLFARBEN	APOKALYPSE
LILIPUT	DO YOU MIND MY DREAM
KILLING JOKE	REQUIEM
KATE BUSH	ALL THE LOVE
CAN	FATHER CANNOT YELL
AMON DUUL II	CERBERUS
GRAUZONE	MARMELADE UND HIMBEEREIS
FEHLFARBEN	DAS ERKLARTS DOCH NICHT
NEU!	SEELAND

I've stopped doing radio for the time being so that I can finish my dissertation. Right now I've finished drafts of 3/6 chapters and on target to defend by November.

Tensor Tympani on Bandcamp!

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

CD release is coming in a few weeks! Until then, enjoy it for free online!

[bandcamp album=2756078275 bgcol=FFFFFF linkcol=4285BB size=grande3]

Communicating your research to colleagues and beyond

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Communicating Your Research to Colleagues and Beyond

(Here's a blog post I wrote for the Future Faculty Leadership Council of UAlbany -- http://uafuturefaculty.blogspot.com)

Being comfortable with communicating your ideas is absolutely essential in your field and frequently important in your private life as well. Over the course of your career, you may be asked to give hundreds of talks to colleagues or laypeople. Usually, the audience you will be speaking to has never heard of you, has never read your papers, is unfamiliar with the terminology or methods of your work, and is woozy from not having enough coffee on that particular day. Therefore, you should plan for this ahead of time and craft a captivating presentation that will leave everyone in the audience eager to read your paper.

Typically, presentations made in professional settings (in 2013) require either the use of Microsoft Powerpoint, its free equivalent, Openoffice Impress, or using a .pdf file (Portable document format). The style and flow of the presentation you create should have synergy with every word that comes out of your mouth. The following tips on giving a good talk are not exhaustive, but should be a good general-purpose guideline as most researchers were never trained in how to give these talks besides 'just doing it'. Additionally, some of these tips can be applied to improve your classroom lecturing skills.

Know your audience

Communicating your research to a professional conference, a colloquium in your department, at a meeting within your own group, and to grant reviewers all require a different approach. While you are preparing for your talk, ask yourself who you are presenting to, as this will affect the focus of your presentation. If you are giving a talk to a broad audience, take special care to include enough introductory information that a layman can follow you. For a departmental or conference talk, the main focus should be your data and methods. For your dissertation or a job interview among people who already know your research well, the discussion of your results is of prime importance. Your motivations and goals for your research should be crystal clear no matter who your audience is. Remember that your papers are the main events in your research career, the presentation is just an advertisement for a single paper. The purpose of your talk should be to give your audience an intuitive feel for your idea and to engage, excite, and provoke them to read your body of work.

Mind your body language and speaking style

Speaking clearly with confidence comes easier to some than others. People who are performers in theater or music may have shed their 'stage fright' long ago, and it can certainly be intimidating to speak to a large audience regardless of experience. Rehearsing your talk in front of a mirror may help get your timing issues straight, but it's just as important to practice giving your talk to actual people who can give you feedback on grammar, style and flow even though they might not have a clue what your research is about. The most important thing is to be natural, in the moment, and know what you are doing. Remember that you know this research topic better than anyone else on the planet!

You are in control of the room when you are speaking and if you act cool, composed, and enthusiastic, your audience will follow what you're saying better and not lose interest as easily. Don't over gesticulate and whatever you do, don't overuse a (laser) pointer. A pointer should be used very sparingly to indicate trends in figures or to quickly show your audience the specific item you're talking about on a slide. It should never be used to rapidly circle anything or point to words as you're saying them like a bouncing ball on a karaoke machine. You should not read sentences off your slides, rather, the words should be a carefully-chosen guide to sum up the main ideas that you're talking about. Speak to your audience (not your slides!) and shift your focus to various people seated. Avoid saying “uh” or “um” or doing things like touching your face and yawning. Plan on using about one minute per slide. Use a professional, readable font- not comic sans!

Present your data in a clear visual manner

A picture is worth a thousand words as they say, but the art of displaying your data in figures is highly nuanced. In general, the figures you display for your audience in a talk should be of publication quality. For example, when plotting a relationship quickly between two variables in a study to discern a trend for yourself, a group member, or perhaps your advisor, it may be acceptable to plot the data in Microsoft Excel with all the default settings. However, this should never be done when presenting your research to a broader audience. The reason is that the defaults in Excel tend to obfuscate any meaningful trends in your figure by being visually distracting. There is seldom any need for any background to a figure besides a blank white background and you do not need horizontal lines that span the width of the figure. You end up needing to do a ton of pointing and clicking to arrange your data right, and unless you program a macro, your time would be better spent using a different program (Origin or the python library matplotlib come to mind). Don't forget error bars if you took several different samples and averaged them. Make sure your axes are labeled with units, your color schemes make sense and that everything is readable. Also. avoid plotting too much information in a single figure. More than four or five data series on a single plot can be visually distracting unless you have a clever way to present them, like adding them one at a time, and the same can be said for more than two figures per slide. Finally, make sure your slides are visually balanced (that is, avoid excessive whitespace) with figures and a small amount of text with a take home message.

Cite sources, peers and funding

If you use anything in your presentation that you yourself did not create, you must cite where it came from. This might be prior work by others that serves as motivation for your research, specific theoretical details that you did not derive, or any pictures, maps, or graphs that came from somewhere else. If you make your slides public, having these citations as hyperlinks at the bottom of the slide in which you reference each bit of information could be helpful. Either at the very beginning or at the very end of your talk you should acknowledge your group, your advisor, and any collaborators or technicians with their affiliations. Having pictures of everyone is a good idea to keep your audience engaged and to jog their memories. It's also critical to tell your audience where you got the funding to do your research. The individual grant ID numbers are probably too much information, but the agencies themselves are essential.

Answering questions

As sure as the dawn, you're going to have raised a few questions in your audience when you finish your talk. You may have questions during your talk and they should almost always be welcomed, so be sure to periodically scan your audience. Questions are a golden opportunity to connect with your audience and further scientific discussion. Be quick and concise when answering questions. You may have backup slides with technical details or additional data in response to some questions if you anticipate them. In the case that someone asks a question that you cannot answer, it is OK to admit your ignorance and tell the person, “I have not looked into that, perhaps we can discuss it later” or something of the sort.

Other advice

The first several sentences of your talk should be very carefully scripted. This is doubly helpful if English is not your first language.
Finish on time. Audiences get restive and essentially stop listening when your time is up. Continuing is very counter productive and, in a conference setting, rude to the other speakers in your session.
Avoid appearance animations for text and figures that are too flashy, unless it helps to illustrate a major point. Usually, the 'appear' and 'fade' settings are enough.
Any font smaller than 20-24pt is probably a mistake, unless it is a citation.
Avoid the 'wall of text' where you have several sentences typed out on a slide. In general, the fewer words, the better.
Use slide numbers on your presentation, as that will both make it easier for your audience to take notes and for you to rehearse your timings.
Walk to the other side of the room if you have space, occasionally. This one seems kind of silly, but it serves two purposes. First, it gets you to the other side of the room so that the people on that side will have you in the way of the projection (only sometimes since you'll usually be up near the screen); it is only fair to share the discomfort. Second, the sudden bright flash of light reflecting back to the audience as you break the projection beam will wake a few people up.
The title of each slide should be closer to a 'takeaway message' than to words like 'results,' 'data,' etc.
Work on your talk the night before you present it. It should absolutely be fresh in your mind, but doing it all in one day can be harrowing.
In a conference setting where you have precious little time (15 minutes or less), it is usually good practice to omit an outline of your talk. In most other circumstances, it is helpful to include it at the beginning, and, depending on your style, at later points in the presentation where your current position in the outline is emboldened. It may ease the flow of your talk and provide a clear break when you change topics.
Sometimes, the best teacher is failure. If you give a really lousy presentation to your department, your colleagues will hopefully give you targeted advice on how to improve. If you give a poor presentation at a conference, your colleagues from your own institution could be embarrassed, no one will ask any questions, remember you, or be interested in your work.

Sources:

K.A. Dunn, "How to give a better technical talk," guest lecture, CNSE Student Seminar Series (Albany, New York: College of Nanoscale Science & Engineering, University at Albany - SUNY: March 27, 2010).

http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2009/03/18/why-does-excel-suck-so-much/

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/67052/giving-a-talk-slides.pdf(although this presentation breaks a cardinal rule: use a readable,professional font)

http://www.cs.duke.edu/brd/Teaching/Giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.html

Vegan Post-Hardcore Cashew Cheese

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Salutations, everyone!

I've probably uttered the words, "I can't live without cheese! It's so good!" in my life. It's understandable- cheese is delicious. Pizza, although it's total junk food, tastes amazing and is a $40 billion industry in the US. The realities of cruelty in the dairy industry, however, tell a different story from the cows' perspective (I won't go into too much detail here but you can read about it here if you want). A deviled egg was the last non-vegan item I ate willingly, but quesadillas and pizza were such cheap, easy, and tasty staples of my diet that I wondered if I could ever do without them. Vegan cheese options aren't really terrific, either. Daiya brand cheese-style shreds are ok, but they're very oily and expensive and don't contain much nutrition. Blocks of soy cheese taste pretty bland and I'm trying to avoid soy when possible. There is even a variety of almond cheese at my co-op that lists whey powder as one of its ingredients, so that's a no-go, too (why would they do that?).

In the late summer of this year I picked up the 'cheese' issue of Veg News and worked through a bunch of the recipes in the feature article. Most of the cheeses had a cashew base. I followed the recipes exactly but my final product never looked as firm or as delicious as the ones in the picture, until I said "fuck it" to recipe-based cashew cheesemaking and decided to reinvent these recipes myself.

What follows is in this post is not a simple, step-by step recipe for a specific kind of cashew cheese. Instead, I'll be delivering the key points of the Veg News article through detailed pictures and branching points for softer/harder, milder/tangier cheeses. I'll even provide you with an estimate of exactly how much this stuff will cost as well. I rarely cook with a recipe anyway, and I feel like I enjoy experimenting with cashew cheese enough to make it a little different each time, and it always comes out super-tasty. However, it still doesn't melt like regular cruelty-cheese, but you can make it softer and more liquidy according to your preference.

Before we even get to the ingredients, you will need:

A food processor or high-powered blender (I use a vitamix)
Pasta strainer
Medium-large mixing bowl
Medium/large size Tupperware/plastic containers to store the cheese once you're finished
Measuring cups (1 cup size is most important)
Plastic Wrap / waxed paper / parchment paper
A stereo system capable of playing "Yank Crime" by Drive Like Jehu

Here are the typical ingredients from which I draw:

Cashews (unsalted, unroasted pieces)
Tapioca starch
Salt
Nutritional yeast
Unflavored, unsweetened soy yogurt
Agar (Seaweed gelatin - available at Asian groceries on the cheap)

One cool thing about making your own cheese this way is the savings you get when you buy in bulk. Cashews are a fairly expensive nut if you're buying them out of a Planters can, but it's much more economical to buy multiple pounds from a co-op where you have a member discount or online through a wholesaler (if you're feeling ambitious). Because I am often teetering on the edge of brokedom (and maybe you are, too), economy matters a great deal. This recipe should be able to fit into your food budget, provided you already have access to a food processor.

Anyway, onto some visual cues. What does this recipe look like, anyway?

2 cups of cashews weighs approximately 0.6 lbs @ $8.49/lb = $5.09

1 cup of tapioca starch weighs approximately 0.28 lbs @ $2.39/lb = $0.67

1 cup of nutritional yeast weighs approximately 0.13 lbs @ $9.19/lb = $1.19

Total cost of ingredients: $6.96, yields over 1 pound of cashew cheese.

Above I've pictured the ingredients for a soft, yellow 'paneer-type cheese' without any agar to thicken it. This kind of cheese can be sliced to put on a sandwich, sliced and served with tomatoes, avocado and herb for a caprese salad or stirred into hot, cooked pasta for a very convincing mac n' cheese.

The first step in cashew cheesemaking recipes is to soak the 2 cups of cashew in a medium bowl filled with warm water for 3 hours:

The amount of water you use to soak the cashews doesn't have to be measured, but you should use enough water to completely cover the cashew plus about a half an inch. Alternatively, if you'd like a slightly more viscous and less creamy cashew cheese (it's also easier to scrape out of your blender/food processor), you can boil the cashews in a small pot on low heat for 45 minutes to an hour:

Afterwards, drain the cashews of any water used to soak them:

Draining cashews in a strainer

Load them into your blender or food processor and add a teaspoon of salt (or more, if you want). Using a tamper if necessary, grind them until you get a smooth paste.

If you'd like, you can add 1 cup of unsweetened, unflavored soy yogurt (24 oz = $3.49) to make the product even softer, creamier and have a slightly more sour taste:

Scrape the cream out of the blender and into a medium-sized bowl with a knife or spatula. FEED ON THE EXCESS. You can cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a non-airtight lid and leave it at room temperature for 8-48 hours somewhere safe in your house to let it develop flavor. You don't have to do this, though. The longer you leave it out at room temperature, the more sour and developed the taste will be, and I'd advise you to taste a little bit at certain intervals to check on the flavor. I also wouldn't recommend leaving it out like this for more than two days. You might forget about it, and it could spoil, especially if you're using soy yogurt and if it's hot at your place.

If you want to make a simple cream cheese, congratulations! You're finished and don't have to do anything else. If you want to flavor your cream cheese with herbs like chives and rosemary, just mix them in and transfer the mixture to a sealable container. It should keep its freshness for two to four weeks. One of my favorite things to add to cashew cream made this way is roasted red peppers and kalamata olives. You can dice those ingredients and just stir them in to make it chunky, or load everything back into your food processor to grind it all up smoothly. Another tasty option is to add some crumbled nori leaves and a few drops of liquid smoke to make 'faux lox.'

If you want to make a more solid cheese, then don't use soy yogurt. Instead, when you reach this step (after letting it develop flavor at room temperature, if desired), stir in a cup of nutritional yeast and a cup of tapioca starch to your cashew blob and mix well. You may certainly opt to use less nutritional yeast or tapioca starch if you'd like. Sometimes, I add one or two teaspoons of turmeric to give it a brighter yellow color:

Mix it up for several minutes until it becomes doughy and smooth in color:

Lay a 18-inch long sheet of plastic wrap or paper material of your choice on a counter or cutting board, then spoon the cashew mixture onto it.

Using the plastic wrap, shape the cashew cheese mixture into a log with your hands. Try a piece. It will be fucking delicious. You can also sprinkle a few tablespoons of mixed herbs and seasonings on the plastic wrap so that when you roll it, it encrusts the cashew cheese loaf with delightful, delightful flavors. Put it into an airtight container and let it chill in the fridge, as it will become slightly harder with decreasing temperature.

If you have access to agar (agar-agar, whatever), you can make an even thicker, heftier cheese by boiling a cup of water and adding about 10 grams, or about 1/6 to 1/4 the package of agar, as obtained from a local Asian market, to the boiling water. Mix it up a little to evenly melt it, then stir it into the mixture with the nutritional yeast and tapioca. It will harden when you cool it.

Agar-agar, $1.59

1 cup boiling water + agar-agar

My co-op also sells agar in flake form, but...

I'm currently experimenting with cashew cheeses with massive amounts of agar-agar in hopes of creating a "deli-slice-able" cashew cheese. No luck so far, though. In the meantime, here's a couple pictures of some food I prepared with these 'recipes:'

Suggestions and recipes of your own are welcomed in the comments.

New Yellow Bike

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Got this puppy from the Troy Bike Rescue. A lovely ten-speed road bike with swell aluminum tires. IVERSON model. They hooked me up! One thing, though... it needs some #SWAG (and probably different handlebars).

Tensor Tympani

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Greetings all! _11:34 brings some good news your way:

It gives me great pleasure to announce the completion of my new double-length album, TENSOR TYMPANI! A formal record release with physical copies of the album, complete with album art by my friend Walter Sutin, will be forthcoming in the early months of 2013 but for now, as I always do, I've made it available online free of charge. This album has been many years in the making and I was inspired to finally finish it this past summer, completing some musical ideas that I've been working on for at least four years, and creating some new ones. I'll avoid an in-depth interpretation of my own work here for now, but I will say that one of the main themes in the album regards the challenges involved in growing into an ethically-consistent and world-wise being (I confess that I'm neither of those things but hopefully I'm getting closer every day).

A .zip file of V0 .mp3's was previously hosted on my site but is no longer available. The album is still on Internet Archive.

I also uploaded Tensor Tympani to the internet archive here, with a short description of the work. There is a streaming player on the right-hand side if you want to listen before downloading.

Lyrics are available here.

Enjoy! Feedback is welcomed.

Condensed Matter Order of Magnitude Higher Power Hour 12/11/2012 & 12/18/2012

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

These two playlists were good ones. The first is more or less "normal-themed" and the second contains somewhat of a best-of-the-year-wrap-up and then an "apocalypse-themed" playlist Right to it:

CMOOMHPH_tue_12_11_2012 (audio file no longer available)

CMOOMHPH_tue_12_18_2012 (audio file no longer available)

12/11/12

DAN DEACON	GUILFORD AVENUE BRIDGE
ANDREW BIRD	THREE WHITE HORSES
EL TEN ELEVEN	THANKS BILL
PRINCE RAMA	THOSE WHO LIVE FOR LOVE WILL LIVE FOREVER
GRMLN	RELAX YOURSELF (DOLPHIN CRY)
UNNATURAL HELPER	STIFF WIND
THE BABIES	ALLIGATOR
NO	BIG WAVES
HUME	SEASON
THE FLAMING LIPS	CAN'T STOP THE SPRING
LUNGFISH	THIS WORLD
THE NEW BOMB TURKS	BORN TOULOUISE LAUTREC
UNWOUND	TREACHERY
ERASE ERRATA	BEACON
NEU!	NEUSCHNEE
MAGAZINE	PARADE
END OF A YEAR	BELEADERS
WIPERS	RETURN OF THE RAT
THE OBSESSED	TOMBSTONE HIGHWAY
WIRE	IN THE ART OF STOPPING
FUGAZI	CLOSED CAPTIONED
BEE ELVY	ALPINE3
DISAPPEARS	REPLICATE
FLIPPER	SOMEDAY
X	IN THE TIME IT TAKES
THE CLASH	OVERPOWERED BY FUNK
JUNIQUE FOIS PI	PETIT CRAQUE
THE EX	HURIYET
DIOS	NO SE
DIE KREUZEN	SICK PEOPLE
THE CATALYST	PANIC DON'T PANIC
DRIVE LIKE JEHU	HERE COME THE ROME PLOWS

12/18/12

PRINCE RAMA	BLADE OF AUSTERITY
MAIA VIDAL	GOD IS MY BIKE
EL TEN ELEVEN	TIGER TIGER
LUNGFISH	ARMAGEDDON
LIGHTNING BOLT	FLY FUCKER FLY
YOUNG MEN	CULT OF CHILDREN
OFFICE OF FUTURE PLANS	FEMA COFFINS
MATH THE BAND	POSITIVE STRESS
SELF DEFENSE FAMILY	WORLD VIRGINS
EX-CULT	SHADE OF RED
LUNGFISH	SCREAMS OF JOY
MAYANS	BUEN PROVECHO
THE CATALYST	42012
_11:34	FISTFULLA VITAMINS
X	SOME OTHER TIME
WIPERS	DOOM TOWN
SONIC EXTRUSION DIES	EIDOLON DON'T CRY
UNDEFINED AUGUMENTS	LA CUENTALARGA
DISCHARGE	DOOMSDAY
THE CLASH	STRAIGHT TO HELL
RUDIMENTARY PENI	ONLY DEATH
DANIEL HIGGS	LIVING IN THE KINGDOM OF DEATH
THE CHANNELS	LITTLE EMPIRES
STINKING LIZAVEDA	CAUGHT BETWEEN WORLDS
THE EVENS	KING OF KINGS

Condensed Matter Order of Magnitude Higher Power Hour 12/4/2012

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Here's my radio show from this past Tuesday. I called it twofer-Tuesday becasue I played some good shit in sets of two. I got a little lazy with it though. You'll see: CMOOMHPH_tue_12_4_2012 (audio file no longer available)

EL TEN ELEVEN	TRANSITIONS
SEAPONY	BE ALONE
PARLOURS	STAY WITH YOU
VCMG	LOWLY
PRINCE RAMA	BLADE OF AUSTERITY
BRAINSTORM	FLAT EARTH
NO	ANOTHER LIFE
ANTELOPE	MIRRORING
ANTELOPE	REFLECTOR
DIOS	UNA VUELTA DE TUERCA
DIOS	SUBIENDO LA CUESTA
LUNGFISH	INDIVISIBLE
LUNGFISH	FILL THE DAYS
WIRE	TWO PEOPLE IN A ROOM
WIRE	ONCE IS ENOUGH
THE EVENS	IF IT'S WATER
THE EVENS	WONDER WHY
YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS	EATING NODDEMIX
YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS	CHOCI LOCI
KILLING JOKE	WARDANCE
KILLING JOKE	REQUIEM
FRENCH TOAST	FLOAT AWAY
FRENCH TOAST	WHAT I SEE
BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW	JUMP INTO MY MOUTH AND BREATHE IN THE STARDUST
BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW	DRIPPY EYE
JOE LALLY	LIDIA'S SONG
JOE LALLY	WHAT MAKES YOU
KEROSENE 454	HEROES
KEROSENE 454	CLOSING IN
VERTEBRATES	ASTEROIDS
VERTEBRATES	EXPERTS MIND

Place Position in the Publication Process Powerpoint

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Today I gave a seminar at CNSE at UAlbany about some basic information useful to graduate students about peer-reviewed science publication and the various tools that one can use to navigate and facilitate the process. Advice on writing style, figure creation, LaTeX, and responding to reviewer comments is given to a general science audience with links to online resources.

Journal Publication Seminar (file no longer available)

Grant-Writing for Graduate Students: A Recap of the FFLC's Fall Event

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Grant-Writing for Graduate Students: A Recap of the FFLC's Fall Event

By Abraham Hmiel

On Thursday, October 25th, the FFLC at UAlbany hosted a grant writing panel for graduate students. The panelists included some faculty who had earned substantial funding through grants in their careers and others that have sat on grant review committees. Several questions were asked of the panelists and their responses are summarized below. The panelists included: Allison Houston, a PhD Candidate in Sociology and a GSO Grant Reviewer; Beth Large, a representative of from the Research Foundation; Dr. Marlene Belfort, a distinguished professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Sciences; Dr. Melinda Larsen, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences; and Dr. Mark Muraven, an associate professor in the Psychology Department.

What did you do your first time you wrote a grant? Probably the best way to learn how to write a good grant is to use a well-structured, successfully-funded grant as a template. The project's aims and details could be different, and the agency funding the grant that you seek may be as well, but you can use it emulate the style and flow of the document and make all the changes that are necessary. It is possible to request funded grants from the federal govt under FOIA through the sponsored programs office, although there could be a small charge for document.

What do you wish you knew in advance when writing your first grant? Knowing what the grant reviewers are looking for in advance is very helpful – you can contact contact the programs officer at the funding agency and talk to them about what they're seeking. Keep in mind that to them, It's not aboutjust the grant, it's the whole package, including training opportunities and career-building for the person seeking the grant as well. Additionally, it is very important to read the application carefully and do what is asked. Grant reviewers are exhausted; make their jobs easier any way you can because in all likelihood, they will be reading your application at 2:00 AM. Understand that reviewers may not be fluent in your field. In fact, they may know nothing, so translate it into applied research. The whole process is different than peer-review, so treat it as such.

What kinds of strategies are helpful? The application should be proofread by many colleagues who have different subfields and who might be looking for different facets to improve. Send your application to friends or family who don't have any training in your field whatsoever, since grant reviewers may not either. Keep in mind that they need time to review it and make corrections and comments. Time constraint could be an ally, not an enemy. If you take your time and let ideas come to you, the grant application will be more comprehensive. Time management is a good skill to use, as it's best not to write the whole document the month before it's due. Aim for 6 months as a timeline to make a grant renewal.

What are some red flags that might cause a review committee to reject a grant outright? Everything needs to be done with care and good organization. Format the CV properly and proofread all the materials that you're going to submit. Have a cover letter that grabs attention. Don't be careless and follow directions. If you can't get it together on paper, how can you get it together in a lab? Hand-written grant applications are a red flag, even for small ones. Writing a grant at the last minute may show itself to reviewers. For travel grants at UAlbany, redact information that is not required on copies by blotting it out.

What are some common mistakes people make when writing grants? The question, ”why is this grant important?”, if not addressed, could be very problematic. Be clear on this- write specific aims in bold, and don't bury them. Make sure there's whitespace, figures, diagrams, and the overall style of the printed pages should be easy on the eyes. Readable fonts are also very important, serifs should not be used.

How can a grant be used by the recipient? The solicitation guidelines outline the uses for the grant money. Sometimes, a project is awarded a grant over a multiple-year period, but the submission of a yearly progress report is required. Some grants are only 1-year- it depends what you're doing or what money is available. Being late on these renewal deadlines could be problematic for continuing your funds. Generally, your work needs to stay within the dates allotted within the terms of the grant. An extension of time may be requested, but it is always a good idea to stay close to your contact at the funding agency and notify them of any difficulties you may have meeting deadlines, for example, in a family emergency or things of that nature.

What do you, as a grant reviewer, look for most when deciding which grants to fund? Saying why you are worthy of this grant, in clear terms is important. Having deliverable goals that are creative and will make significant progress on your research career, but not too lofty as to not be attainable is crucial as well. Eligibility restrictions may disqualify graduate students and post-docs from large-valued grants. There is typically a hierarchical system of earning grants at different points of one's career through NIH, NSF and others. The question may turn to, “how many publications will this grant ultimately be responsible for? Could the deliverables funded by this grant make the nightly news? Will this grant spur a new experimental technique or shed light on a mechanism of fundamental science?”

When should you, on your long-term career horizon, be looking for larger grants? Be mindful of your own track record. Reviewers need to know that you'll be able to conduct small projects, to trust you with a lot of money. Agencies tend to have a progression of increasing grant awards. Early career academics or investigators have special grants for them. When progress is made and deliverables achieved, other larger projects can be funded, provided that they have produced fruit like publications and funded students attaining degrees. Substantial grants, especially currently-funded ones, have a very positive effect on your ability to be hired as a faculty member.

How much preliminary data do you need to apply in the first place?

This depends on the study; in truth, one can never have enough data. It is not true that your thesis needs to be in a nearly-complete state, but you should be able to convince others that you can do the work required to complete the project.

What is the process like for graduate students to seek external grants at SUNY Albany? To seek external grants, your advisor needs to work with the sponsored programs office. The faculty member needs to act as a liaison between the researchers (graduate students), the sponsored programs personnel, and the funding agency. A lengthy, but not comprehensive, list of funding opportunities for graduate students at UAlbany can be found at:http://www.albany.edu/research/GradStudentFunding.htm

Condensed Matter Order of Magnitude Higher Power Hour 11/27/2012

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Here's my last radio show where I played DIOS by DIOS (Argentina, 2000) in its entirety and most of "The Odds" by The Evens

tue_nov_27_2012_DJ_Nanobot (audio file no longer available)

Dios begins at about 31:50

The tracklist:

TRC	SWEATBOX
MUTTS	WASHINGTON (STILL) OWNS PEOPLE
STATE RADIO	BIG MAN
THE OYSTER MURDERS	THE WATER IN YOUR BLOOD
EL TEN ELEVEN	TRANSITIONS
DIOS	NO SE
DIOS	UNA VUELTA DE TUERCA
DIOS	EL CAMPEON
DIOS	LA COMPARISA FUGUTIVA DE LA NOCHE
DIOS	EL MAL
DIOS	CAPITAN FIEBRE
DIOS	SUBIENDO LA CUESTA
DIOS	CHOQUEMOS
DIOS	CARNAVAL
DIOS	SALIR DE NOCHE
DIOS	CUANDO EL AMOR NACE
DIOS	NUCLEO DURO
DIOS	LOS CAMPESINOS
DIOS	DULCINEA
DIOS	APRENDIDO A COMER VIDRIERAS
DIOS	LA PRINCESA
DIOS	LAS RANITAS
DIOS	EN EL RIO
THE EVENS	KING OF KINGS
THE EVENS	WANTED CRIMINALS
THE EVENS	I DO MYSELF
THE EVENS	WARBLE FACTOR
THE EVENS	SOONER OR LATER
THE EVENS	WONDER WHY
THE EVENS	COMPETING WITH THE TILL
THE EVENS	BROKEN FINGER
THE EVENS	ARCHITECTS SLEEP
THE EVENS	TIMOTHY WRIGHT

Condensed Matter Order of Magnitude Higher Power Hour Shows June-November

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Here's a selection of some of my recorded radio shows off the WCDB archive. They're each two hours long. Have at:

CMOOMHPH shows from June–November 2012 (audio files no longer available)

Track listing (1st 3 shows are in reverse order, rock rotation is usually the 1st half hour): 6/19: LUNGFISH THIS WORLD JOE LALLY ALL MUST PAY ERASE ERRATA MARATHON SONIC YOUTH THE WORLD LOOKS RED BRIEF BOUTS OF SPIMES ROB OFFE SHOULD OUTDOOR MINER JHMH SKY THE FALL R.O.D. PEOPLE ON PAUSE DIRTY DOV SISTER SUVI THE LOT S PRCSS YOUR MOTIVATION IS LESS LIKE THIS ERIN TOBEY I GROW LIKE A PLANT PWRFL POWER IT'S OKAY THE EVENS SHELTER TWO EL GUAPO SPACE TOURIST SUICIDE GHOST RIDER THE FAINT YOUR RETRO CAREER MELTED SUPERSYSTEM THE PINNACLE OF EXPERIENCE MS. JOHN SODA NO. ONE BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW JUMP INTO MY MOUTH AND BREATHE IN THE STARDUST AIR ANOTHER DAY GANG OF FOUR A FRUITFLY IN THE BEEHIVE EGG HUNT WE ALL FALL DOWN FUGAZI STACKS LUNGFISH UNTITLED M. WARD PURE JOY M. WARD WILD GOOSE M. WARD CRAWL AFTER YOU M. WARD THERE'S A KEY M. WARD WATCH THE SHOW M. WARD A WASTELAND COMPANION M. WARD THE FIRST TIME I RAN AWAY M. WARD I GET IDEAS M. WARD SWEETHEART M. WARD ME AND MY SHADOW M. WARD PRIMITIVE GIRL M. WARD CLEAN SLATE

7/31: WOODY GUTHRIE UNION BURYING GROUND WIPERS OVER THE EDGE VERTEBRATES ASTEROIDS _11:34 90'S VEGAN POST-HARDCORE THREESOME P.K.14 A LOT OF CHINESE CHARACTERS THE OBSESSED TOMBSTONE HIGHWAY LUNGFISH SEARCHLIGHT BLONDE REDHEAD SUIMASEN END OF A YEAR W/CAROLINE CORRIGAN MARISSA WENDOLOVSKE OFFICE OF FUTURE PLANS THE LOYAL OPPOSITION SLEATER-KINNEY HOLLYWOOD ENDING RUDIMENTARY PENI SUBDUED VIOLENCE SCREAM SOLIDARITY NEW BRUTALISM 053 FUGAZI BED FOR THE SCRAPING KEROSENE 454 ANTI-MAGNET X-RAY SPEX I AM A CLICHE X (FROM AUSTRALIA) THE FEEL MAGAZINE PARADE YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS CONSTANTLY CHANGING _11:34 I'M SO SICK OF ALL-WHITE-DUDE-20-SOMETHINGS-BANDS MADNESS DECEIVES THE EYE SPIDER AND THE WEBS FROZEN ROSES SONIC YOUTH SKIP TRACER TALL BIRDS INTERNALIZE S PRCSS DISINGRATIFY MY _11:34 ON THE EDGE OF COMPOSURE 2:54 REVOLVING K-HOLES ACID DIRTY GHOSTS ROPES THAT WAY HOT CHIP HOW DO YOU DO? DEBO BAND TENESH KELBE LAY GUIDED BY VOICES KEEP IT IN MOTION JED DAVIS RIDE THE PARTY BUS PEAKING LIGHTS BEAUTIFUL SON

8/14: WOODS WIND WAS THE WINE HOT CHIP HOW DO YOU DO? NEU! NEUSCHNEE CHUMBAWAMBA HEY! YOU! OUTSIDE NOW! LUNGFISH SCREAMS OF JOY SELF DEFENSE FAMILY WORLD VIRGINS SELF DEFENSE FAMILY SELF IMMOLATION FAMILY CALVARY RELUCTANCE - INSERTION - REGRET BIG BLACK KEROSENE DOPE BODY FORCE FIELD MEDICATIONS TWINE TIME REPTILE HOUSE SLEESTAK WEATHER GANG OF FOUR TO HELL WITH POVERTY KILLING JOKE VICTORY MARNIE STERN THE CRIPPLED JAZZER DRIVE LIKE JEHU HERE COME THE ROME PLOWS THE 1985 STRINGS ATTACHED THE LOW BUDGETS RIPPED OFF FUGAZI DEAR JUSTICE LETTER P.K.14 CHINESE CHARACTERS PUSSY RIOT KILL THE SEXIST PUSSY RIOT DEATH OF JAIL, FREEDOM OF PROTEST PUSSY RIOT PUTIN ZASSAL PUSSY RIOT MOTHER OF GOD, PUTIN PUT! PUSSY RIOT KROPOTKIN-VODKA PUSSY RIOT DELIVER PAVEMENT 2:54 YOU'RE EARLY CEREMONY HYSTERIA MAPS AND ATLASES BUGS WOODS SLEEP PEAKING LIGHTS BEAUTIFUL SON

11/13: SCISSOR SISTERS ONLY THE HORSES WILD BELLE KEEP YOU BLADE OF AUSTERITY PRINCE RAMA SIETTA WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO? DEERHOOF THERE'S THAT GRIN EL TEN ELEVEN TRANSITIONS BRAINSTORM UPWARD FELA KUTI WATER NO GET ENEMY NEU! SEELAND THE NUDGE REMOVE YA HELLA BIBLICAL VIOLENCE LUNGFISH SANDS OF TIME THE CATALYST SONG WITH NO WORDS THE 1985 STRINGS ATTACHED HAPPY GO LICKY SUZUKI TRANSISTOR TRANSISTOR AND THE BODY WILL DIE KEROSENE 454 CONTINUED MEDICATIONS SAFE AND SORRY HUSH ARBORS FOLLOW CLOSELY MAGAZINE PARADE ANTELOPE GAME OVER DISAPPEARS MINOR PATTERNS JOE LALLY SCAVENGER'S GARDEN JOE LALLY NOTHING TO LOSE OMEGA TRIBE MAN MADE ONE LAST WISH SHADOW END OF A YEAR BO DIAZ IRON MAIDEN RAINMAKER

Screams of Joy

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Here's a link to a live Lungfish song I found on the internet today. It's "Screams of Joy" which was released on A.C.R. 1999 earlier this spring. The live version hits hard and it it's one of my favorite songs I've heard all year. The first time I listened to this song (on the A.C.R. session), I was on my bike riding home from work and I literally had to pull off the road and pause and let the damn thing finish playing. Sometimes when I go running for a quick 3 mile run I'll just put it on repeat and let it play 6,7 times.

05 Screams of Joy [live 12.11.99] (file no longer available)

"Screams of joy can be heard within the perimeter of our open-air facility"

And how.

Crack Elbow, Confront Ableism

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Last Friday, on my way to do errands and my produce-room shift at the co-op, I had a totally uncharacteristic accident on my bike and went over the handlebars after braking to stop at a red light. It turns out I had cracked my elbow and I don't have a lot of rotation-movement in my left wrist. A closed fracture of the radius, it is. Maybe 500 microns long. I'm in a sling right now.

It's really just an inconvenience, though. I'm lucky that I'm not a construction worker or server or any of the thousands of jobs where this kind of injury would render me useless. It also makes me realize how ableist I usually am and how normal cognitive function kind of assumes able-bodiedness in everyone. I mean, it's tough to use a zipper with one hand, wash dishes, operate a motor vehicle, etc., but people do it anyway. In a way, I kind of feel spoiled and guilty for bowing out of tasks due to this super-minor injury. I hope it affects my normal mindset, when I'm healed, to consider how I can be less ableist in the future. I've broken both my clavicles at different times when I was much younger, but at those times I hadn't developed the ability to think in terms of privilege and so everything just went back to normal as I healed.

One of my roommates was in a major bike accident over the summer where she was bed-ridden for weeks. Another friend, a long time ago, was in a car accident where a highway girder was lodged inside one of her legs. I'll be fine in 6 weeks. Meanwhile, I'll think about ways that I can use my able-bodied privilege for the common good of those who don't have that luxury.

In other news, I've finished tracking for the (double) album that's been in the works for at least three years: Tensor Tympani! The time spent at home convalescing over the weekend enabled me to finish lyrics and vocals for the two remaining songs, and now all that's left is some final touch-ups and mastering.