There were lots of things I wanted to write about but I just … didn’t … ahaha! It’s like that sometimes, isn’t it? Today was the first time in a long while that I worked 9 hours. Hmm, it’s not really that much, but considering how I am so used to the thought of getting work done outside of lab, it’s a lot. Dinner will always take around 2 1/2 hours now taking cooking, eating, talking, and washing into account; however, I feel like it’s going to be a really enriching experience, and it’s definitely good for the soul to enjoy dinner at an actual dinnertable. I think I’m left with something like 3 hours in the evening to myself, plus whatever down time there is during lab. Today, I actually had very minimal downtime, and that which I did have, I spent trying to learn how to make GUIs in MATLAB. Hmm, it’s easy to make something visually appealing, but it’s not intuitive how to me how they want me to assign the functions …
Tomorrow, I hope to switch my volunteering time out from Tuesday so that I can finally enjoy a normal, uninterrupted work schedule. I’m trying to adjust to summer, but it seems harder than before to do so. I finally sent out my first e-mail as MIT’s blood drive volunteer coordinator. It’s .. not exactly a taxing position, but it’s important to be timely and organized. I am planning on adding an extra task to my job, which is to keep track of how many hours everyone is volunteering. I always wanted to know, but no one kept track at all, which made me sad.
A very generous labmate is willing to give me one of her many comforters ~ I was telling her this morning how I somehow get so cold at night because my blankets are so thin, and it’s keeping me from waking up since I just keep huddling in. I’ll probably be doing my laundry tonight, anyway, so it’ll be no problem to throw a comforter in for the ride as well.
I straightened out my desktop yesterday, so now it boots more quickly and has more programs working on it. I just have to somehow transfer my listening music there so that I don’t have to listen to the same songs over and over again :).
Mm, I was thinking, and this is sort of back to the first topic again (ahaha, this post isn’t very organized, is it? Well …), sometimes I feel a little sad at the lack of tutorial help I get from teachers/peers/TAs. Hmm, maybe I just don’t ask that often? Nevertheless … . I really appreciate great manuals, but honestly most manuals suck. MATLAB’s help included. It’d be nice to actually have someone teach MATLAB (and no, 10.10 and 20.320’s weak attempts at doing this don’t count – actually, by oversimplifying things, they did a lot of damage).
You see, the fastest way for me to learn how to make GUIs is not to stare at their metric to U.S. units / density converter code which is just sitting there with incomprehensible comments. There are exactly 2 things I need to know: (1) what is the proper syntax for referring to variables and storing them (including which property in the endless list of properties is actually its “name” rather than its display name), and (2) how I make the output of one action/object affect other items on the screen. I feel like whenever I ask people (teachers, friends) for things like this, they either cite an elementary example or direct me to a help page or something. I suppose that’s why I’m reluctant to ask in the first place.
Is it that hard to make a *general* statement? If I were to explain the particular for loop in matlab to someone (assuming they know what a for loop is), I’d say “for (your counting variable)=minimum value:maximum value (jumping by 1’s, or min:max:num to jump by num) [next line] whatever you want to do, which may utilize your counting variable [last line] end.” That way, you can always construct a new for loop and not lose track of what everything means, and you don’t end up making every for loop iterate over i or go from 1 through 10.
And also, when I was taught the plot function, I was told to do plot(x,y,’b-‘,x2,y2,’c-‘). No one ever told me you could edit a plot in the figure window. No one ever told me that plot has THOUSANDS of alterable options. So for years I was doing the stupid plots that you can barely see and that can only have 8 lines ’cause there are “only 8 colors.” After chucking all that BS into the trash, I’ve relearned how to plot and I can cycle through visually appealing colors using simple colormaps and the ‘Color’ property. Who the heck wants to look at cyan, yellow, or magenta lines on white background?! I sure don’t, and I cringe every time I see a graph that has those invisible lines on them.
One entry in my memory is one entry. plot(x,y,’b-‘) and plot(vector1, vector2 (equal length to vector 1),’Color’,[R G B (0 to 1)],’MarkerType’,’name’, etc. etc.) take essentially the same time to learn (actually, the ‘b.-‘ business was confusing as HECK for me because they use the same symbols for markers and line type, so I got the orders mixed up). I’m not living in some RPG, where I have to use a paper towel roll, then a stick, then a pipe, then a bokken, then a sword. I’d rather start with a small sword, then go to a larger one, then a larger one still. That is, I need to perceive the essence first, then the details are filled in. If I’m not going to use paper towel roll techniques when I become more experienced, I have no interest in wasting my memory learning about them.
KNOWING that I can put in ANY property into the plot function is *most important* to me. Knowing that ‘Color’ is one of them is secondary – I can look those up in help at any time, but if I’m ignorant that the properties exist in the first place, why would I even look in help for them?
One of the greatest pains for me in learning anything is the fact that so many teaching approaches want you to start within the first floor. Then you go to the second. Then the third.
What I want to do is start outside, see the whole building, go to the front door, learn which floors have the same layout, know where all the bathrooms are, and then start going floor-to-floor. Doesn’t that make sense? I’ve wasted three years learning in MATLAB what should have taken only a month. Why? Because they told me to open the program and start typing math equations, line by line.
This is what I *wish* they had said.
“MATLAB, which stands for matrix laboratory because of its strength at handling very large matrices (in any number of dimensions), is a program consisting of many built-in mathematical and analytical functions such as curve-fitting, image analysis, statistics, etc. To take advantage of these capabilities, the user has the option of using command line interface, programming scripts and functions, viewing and tweaking graphs and figures, and using GUIs. All of the latter can be created through a simple text editor. There are three main types of files, .m files (MATLAB programming language text files), .fig files (figures, graphics, and GUI layouts), and .mat files (matrices). MATLAB can be used in conjunction with external devices with which it exchanges data, such as robotics or atomic force microscopes.”
I’m sure some of you could write better, but you know what, I would’ve been happy with that. More than happy. I would have LIKED MATLAB instead of avoiding it like the plague. What I got instead was basically: “MATLAB is a program that lets you approximate the integrals of ODEs to compute how much chemical comes out of a reaction over time. You can also plot things kind of like how you plot them on a graphing calculator. Oh, and you can do 2-D matrix algebra, too.”
I should not have been shocked to see 3-D and 4-D matrices. I should not have been shocked to learn that MATLAB could be applicable to biology. I should not have been shocked to learn that strings can be part of a matrix.
But I was.
Good teaching is putting together everything conceptually so that you can present a finished painting to a student and not just a corner of a pencil sketch.
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