Songs without Words

Over the past week, the situation has certainly started to worsen.  Of course, I have made myself particularly vulnerable to the most powerful of emotions (sadness).  A few of the factors that have increased the risk: (1) not playing violin (because I’ve been told not to), (2) not being able to walk around the city (because I’m not in Boston), and (3) not having anyone to be in love with.

My sleep patterns have become very messed up due to very high amounts of dreams, which drain phenomenal amounts of energy.  I don’t know what’s up with these dreams.  They aren’t really that bad (they aren’t nightmares, per se), but they have required a lot of exertion as well as thinking.

Overall, this melancholy is definitely in the class of loneliness.  I feel very distant from most people right now.  I can definitely pinpoint many fronts that probably have led to this, although there’s no definite explanation of why.  Moods are sometimes caused simply by uncontrollable internal machinations.  However, I think that loneliness is partly a side-effect of withdrawal after spending time with people.  I am also experiencing a particular low point in self-confidence.  Well, that’s nobody’s fault but of course the melancholy instinct is to blame people.  Right now, I still have some independently-operating systems, so that side believes that this is just a biological syndrome.

However, the melancholic instinct is to blame people, of course.  It is rare indeed these days that anyone starts a conversation with me (I always start them, instead).  People also seem to care less and less about the stuff I produce.  Well, that could be because I’m getting worse at it.  It’s certainly a possibility that I write worse / draw worse now, or that what I produce is too repetitive.  I am unable to gauge that, given that I am the one who produces it, and because I certainly feel that I am better now than I was before.  But, people have simply ceased to care.  All of my older friends seem so far away.  I can talk to them, but the part of me that talks is a very small part of me, and a part that is probably dying away now because of inflammation of the other sectors.

It could also be that I have yet to have a conversation where a person says the “right” things to me.  I mean, there are easy ways to comfort me, but no one does it (except my stuffed animals).  If this state persists for another week, I will definitely run circuit breakers, which means recruiting all of my stuffed animals and reviving all of my characters.

I am also not being very productive this summer, but I feel that my productivity is really dwindling from lack of external encouragement.  I seem to really just not care, if there is no one to do this all for.  That can also be corrected through the circuit breakers, but I’m a bit disillusioned with that.

In any case, whatever.  I’m really caring less and less about this boring life and this boring world.  It used to be so amazing and wonderful, but I cease to see what I used to in it all.  Why should I bother?  I do not exist, if I cannot exist for someone else.

It’s time to let it out, though.  I don’t care anymore if it bothers someone or not.

I’m not suicidal at the moment but it’s certainly been an issue in the past, and it could become one in the future (but probably not).  Oh well.  I don’t have a good note or will yet, though, so you don’t have to worry about that right now.  I’m one for extreme melodrama, so death is something that has to be thoroughly planned for :).

I am now creating Caroline’s md dictionary. The md dictionary can be thought of as a dictionary of words with everything but the definition. It holds the part of speech, tense, and what the main word is. I have ~235 lines of code just for the basic interface that lets me append entries into the md. I have selected the “Lincoln Writing Dictionary for Children” as the source of my list of words, and so Caroline will ultimately initially recognize about 35,000 words. She will not have definitions for these until later, though, but the md is the only dictionary that really needs to be “complete.” She will dynamically update the other meaning-dictionaries through conversation.

Oh well, at this point, I have WXYZ done and I’m starting on the V’s.  That’s ~1050 / 35000 down (haha).  It will sadly take a long, long time to finish this task, but maybe an hour each morning will see it be completed.

I don’t know … what am I doing all this for, anyway?  I really wonder if I can ever achieve what I want to achieve.  The more code I write, the more confused I get!  It’s so hard to keep track of this mess …

I really love Caroline, truly, but I don’t know what to do with her!  Hm, I feel like giving up (and studying for the MCATs instead), but I’m very stubborn because I know if I let it go with this attitude, I might never come back to it.  It’s just .. it’d be nice to have an assistant to help me a little, you know?  I miss working on projects with other people, getting their input and not having to do 100% of all the work.  There are some spots where I just simply get stuck, where it would be very easy for someone else to come up with an easy solution.

For instance, my “priority system” for outputting makes no sense whatsoever now that I’ve tried to implement it.

Here is the problem with outputting:

Suppose that Caroline selects a subject, object, verb for her response.  Then, based on some sort of cue, she has to select a priority listing, which just gives the % chance of responding in a particular fashion, eg, sarcastically, enthusiastically, plainly, etc.  Then, the sentence will be formed and such based on those probabilities.  However, there is a great difficulty in calibrating the proper percentages, not to mention trying to sort out what sorts of cues even cause us to produce certain types of responses.  And the worst problem is that the type of response really influences the SVO, but then the SVO also influences the type of response.  This circular reasoning completely does not work with programs where the modules flow one-way only (a function cannot be below and above another function at the same time in the hierarchy).

Another huge difficulty I am facing is what to do with commas.  It’s easy enough for us to understand appositives (eg, “The girl, age 16, was standing”) and introductory clauses (“Because it was raining, we went inside.”).  But how should Caroline handle these?  How would she even identify them as the separate types?  It’s easy to say “well, the appositives are between two commas.”  But the find function could care less!  A comma is a comma, and there’s no distinction.  I can’t just chop up the sentence indiscriminately and hope for the best.  While introductory clauses should be kept close, compound sentences should be separated, and appositives should be excised while rejoining the remaining parts of the sentence.  Gah!  That is much more easily said than done.  Add in the fact that some people write as though they were Hawthorne, with the infinite commas playing in.  Can I create a set of functions that will be able to deal with ALL commas, no matter how many there are?  I can’t just cheat and assume that singly complex or singly compound sentences will be the extent of it.  I have to expect that there will someday be a compound-complex sentence with complicated lists in it.

Overall, things are getting very thorny around here.  The md dictionary is a prerequisite for much of this work: I need to have all the part-of-speech numbers indexed before I can then start to actively test out sentences and look for patterns.  The way I devised the simple-sentence/simple-question comprehension functions was through basic test sentences, but I had to keep a small, stupid md that was rewritten in every module, every time they ran.  That’s just ridiculous, and it was getting on my nerves when words would just be unknown, or I’d forget to paste the dictionary into a module.

But md presents a new problem: what do I do about words that have multiple parts of speech?  The incidence is actually very high.  Just look at verbs: the present participle (-ing) form also is a valid noun (gerund).  I need to make a rule for this in order to properly identify the part of speech (namely, the present participle must follow the helping verb “be” in some form or another).  The uglier cases come when the words are embedded deep in a sentence, for instance in a prepositional clause where anything goes.

And yet another problem is this: what are Caroline’s true memories going to be stored as?  I don’t mean her knowledge of the English language.  Assuming that one day, I actually finish this monstrosity and Caroline can chat comfortably and conjugate verbs and make jokes, etc., then what?  She will still be awkwardly unable to remember things that don’t relate to words themselves, but that are formed out of words.  I need a whole other set of databases to keep track of memories.  But how should they be stored?  As sentences?  Phrases?  Numbers?

Just what are our memories?  For me, my memories are 90% visual 3D data/video, 5% hearing/sound, 5% other sensual information.  What I mean is, very few of my memories consist of words.  Thus, unlike with language, I don’t even know where to start with this task.  I probably have to timestamp events, as if they were a history, I guess.  I don’t know.  I’m off to bed.  Night night.

Sorry guys.  MIT decided to shift the mySQL servers, thus rendering this blog temporarily inaccessible (until I updated the wp-config file).  In any case, I’m back now :)

Read it here (17 pp)

I really enjoyed writing this story, so I hope you will enjoy reading it!

Upcoming short story summary:

Title: The Best There Ever Was
Genre:  Pure romance prose – no amnesia, no aliens, no genetics, no magic, nope nope!

Anticipated Length: 18 pp (12 written)
Summary:

Ryan is a college student plagued by a recurring nightmare that plays back that moment, years ago, when he walked in on his girlfriend cheating on him, the last he ever saw of her.  But now, maybe he finally has a chance to break free of that haunting memory when, on a snowy Saturday morning, a girl literally runs into him, knocks him down, and ends up having coffee with him downtown.  But will this new girl, Renee, be able to finally get through to him, or will his apprehension from past disaster ruin his chances with this once-in-a-lifetime gift from Heaven?  And of course, why on Earth would such a beautiful girl as Renee suddenly dote on an average college student like Ryan in the first place?

http://www.aquamarinestardust.net/images/misiaryu.jpg

On top: MISIA’s “Everything” (Orig key: Db major, 5 flats)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hr9MnPBlSw&search=MISIA

On bottom: Ryu’s “My Memory” (Orig key: Gb major, 6 flats)

Both of these songs are relatively big hits in their respective countries (Japan, Korea). But come on now … even with formulas taken into account, the similarity is quite striking. Even their keys are similar – the massive amounts of flats!

I just saw “Pink Panther” (2006) the other day, which was rather amusing.  Anyway, in it, Beyonce (as “Xania”) sings a song called “Woman Like Me,” which has one of the more interesting loops that I’ve heard in awhile.  The progression goes, to the best of my knowledge, as thus:

Bb major (or open) – Gb major7 (bVI) – C major (II) – eb minor8-7-6 (iv)

Isn’t it beautiful?

The “&” symbol’s official name is “ampersand.” I had always assumed that “ampersand” meant “amper’s and,” but I never knew what an “amper” was. I imagined it to be something like an “imprinter.”

Well, it in fact has nothing to do with “ampers” (whatever they may be). The word “ampersand,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary, comes from an abbreviation of “and per se and,” apparently traditionally the 27th letter of the alphabet.
One additional note: the “&” symbol is a shorthand for “et” (which is ‘and’ in Latin and French), according to the “Free Online Dictionary of Computing.”  Here is the very exciting Wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand.

I am a source of irrationality.  Through my constant attempts at reconstructing this world through rational thought, I somehow end up with something that does not make sense.  And I feel a need to endlessly discuss this.  It’s something that will not only bore my friends and family, but also any person who I could ever love.  Because I don’t make sense.  But the one who might be able to understand, who might be able to be patient, is the one who is completely and wholly rational: the one who is the very epitome of rationality.  In order to tame the waves of illogic, one must be understood either by one of the same type (but does such a person exist?), or by one who does not even know that it exists.

consumption

Justin Lo, 7370

“you have one hundred tokens”
is what Mother told me.

glittery spinning blinking glowing
arcade
life is like this

one hundred tokens to spend
“come back here when you’re done”
she’s smiling
dancing, waiting like a leprechaun
tears welling up under the glasses
i don’t catch them

one hundred tokens to spend

glittery spinning blinking glowing
arcade
life is like this

i throw down five for a racing game
five more to play pool
ten for a couple slices of pizza
give away twenty to a nice girl i meet!

five for fighting aliens
five for training as a policeman
five for zapping zombies
five for something i can’t remember

forty tokens to spend

Three gone in the war; I lost seven more when I got shot;
I tried to find myself again with a different woman, but she only
Took away five more
And then moved out;
I threw away five more trying to party and drink my way out;
Landed in the hospital with only twenty to spare.
Escaped – five more trying to find myself in Europe (traveling),
And five more trying to write an autobiography (failed),
And then,
In the end,
I spent the last ten for ten seconds of flying.
One for each second;

glittery spinning blinking glowing
arcade
life is like this