The Toilet Door

So when I started my attempt to blog regularly a little over a month and a half ago, I had an overly ambitious goal of adding one meaningful entry per day. Obviously that requires a significant time investment and whilst I managed it for a week, I've fallen off. This wasn't unexpected however, as with all habit building/breaking it's unlikely to change the first time you try. I reaslied it follows the trend of dieting or the gym that most people have. They are pretty vigilant for the first week or two, then they miss a day because of a work function, or they are sick. Then they miss another for a different reason. The routine is then broken and they stop going, they might have spurts of activity where they regain or rediscover their original motivation but the routine always gets interrupted or broken.

What I've realised is that isn't a bad thing, it'd be ideal if we could robotically acquire and discard habits at will. I'd program myself to wake at 6, go running, work efficiently, not eat crap and so on. It's not a bad thing to have routines broken because then the feeling of achievement and progress towards self improvement is much greater for all the obstacles we face. My goal of not having any soft drink has failed fairly miserably, but that's always going to be one of the hardest things to break, but at least I'm noting every day I do or don't have it. There's a few days a month where I don't have any, if I can slowly build on that, that's progress.

So back to this blog, I wanted to update every day, but that hasn't happened, but I have been updating about once every 9 days or so, which is a lot more than I used to do. So I may have failed at my original stated goal, but I set that knowing that I'd likely not be able to keep it up, but if it gets me in the habit of thinking about making blog posts more often, then it's working. So all up, it's been relatively successful. In 90 days or so I've transformed from making one blog post a year maybe to probably an average of 30 or 40 a year at this current rate.

So I've been playing around a bit with LaTeX because I like the idea of what it can do. It sorts out all the tricky formatting depending on how you want to present your work. It's not ideal for collaborative editing though. Microsoft Word wins in that department with comments and tracking changes.

One of the ways I'm going to investigate using LaTeX is with some custom tags. This xkcd comic illustrates which characters interact with each other as a function of time over a story. Now that was produced by reading the books, and manually going through and making note of which characters are where and with who at each time. Ideally though, if that information is put into custom tags at various chapters or at points in the story it can be invisible to the reader, but a simple program or script could extract the information and produce a plot like that. Similarly, if we could generate one for characters, we can also do it for action, or emotional content.

Having the ability to produce graphs to demonstrate the action during a story or comedy say gives an author new tools with which to view the overall story. Is the front action heavy? Is it too dry? Is there enough story progression? Humans are visual creatures, so I'm hoping I can make something to produce these graphs, so that when I begin writing, I have a large number of tools available to guide my story.

As part of writing, and being a social creature in general I'm often thinking about communication and how it actually works. There's a number of categories and ways to categorise communication. Do we split it up between verbal and nonverbal? Or do we sort it by the number and roles of the participants, one to one, one to many, many to many, many to one. Or can we sort it by the time delay between the sending and receiving of messages, from symmetric real time to asymmetric with a long delay. We can even split it up by ephemeral or non-ephemeral

I'll start with the one to one communications as they are the type that most people have, and can comfortably understand already. Within this classification, we can have several sub classifcations

• In person - verbal and non verbal
• Verbal only (phone or skype)
• Written only (texting, chatting)

We can also add the non realtime symmetric communications

• Verbal only (voice mail)
• Written only (email, letters)
• Video messages (contains verbal and nonverbal information)

Lastly, we have the non realtime, asymmetric communications

• Written only (Books, blog posts, documents)
• Verbal only (audio instructions, audio books)
• Video only (movies, tv shows, instructional videos)

Now I'm a bit skeptical of including movies and tv shows, as they wouldn't solely fall under a definition of a one to one conversation. They also can be one to many. It's hard to call them a conversation, but it can be classed as a one to one communication, except one party is delivering information, and the other party is receiving it. Anyway, there's far too many to cover in one post, but I'll focus on the first one, in person communication.

One to one conversations in person are probably the most important thing to get right, but the way we are taught in schools to communicate represents an idealised way we should communicate compared with the way we actually communicate. Typically, we spend a good deal of time learning about nouns, verbs, adjectives, sentence structure. The purpose of this is to develop mastery of the language. Now I can only write about Australian English, but I imagine most of what I'm about to discuss is relevant as well. We are taught to communicate using our words, since if everyone can agree on their definitions, then all ambiguity should be removed.

For the most part, this is correct, communication with words is what we should aim for, but where things get complicated is in all the non lexical communication. The tone, the pacing, the emphasis on certain syllables all delivers additional information. Additionally, the body language communicates information about the state people are in, opening up, making yourself appear larger communicates confidence, where as crossing arms, crouching, or making yourself smaller communicates insecurity and fear. The distance placed between people, the angle between them, the amount of eye contact all communicate information about how the two people perceive each other.

Now all this information is a lot to consciously consider, for the vast majority of people, it's mostly subconscious. If you had to actively manage your body language, your tone, your posture as well as choosing the correct words to say to effectively communicate your message, your brain would be fairly overloaded. This is where the ambiguity comes into one to one conversations in person. The words someone is saying might be what you want to hear, but the rest of what they communicate adds significant weight about whether or not you can trust those words. It is especially difficult when the words and the body language are communicating different messages, which one are you to believe? Is the person actively controlling their body language or is a result of their subconscious.

Over the years I've been doing a lot of reading about communication, body language, posture, non verbal cues and various other topics. One of the things I try to do now, is to simply make conscious observations during conversations about these things. What is my posture, what is theirs? Am I fidgeting or am I engaged with what they are saying? I view it as trying to peak into my subconscious to see what it is I like or dislike about someone. I also view as a challenge to peak into their subconscious/conscious to see how they feel about me and what I'm saying.

I'll definitely come back to this topic at some point, but that's all for now.

Well 2 days in a row followed by a long break isn't too bad. At least I remembered enough to feel guilty about not doing it.

Can't think of anything great to discuss at the moment. I'm finishing off my next paper to be published. It's a different kind of writing, significantly more restricted and a whole lot of editing to ensure the correct meaning comes across. I guess it's the same as any writing and communication though, you may have the ideas in your head, but unless you can communicate them clearly, efficiently they are worth nothing. Scientific writing requires one to be explicitly precise and at the same time, concise. This limitation poses significant challenges. Typically one could do the following for example.

The machine was left on overnight and there was a spill. It was fixed by turning it off in the morning.

With a sense of context, it is obvious the spill was not turned off. It, is referring to the machine. We could make this sentence more ambiguous by removing a part

The machine was left on overnight and there was a spill. It was fixed in the morning.

Here, we are left unsure if the machine being left on is the problem, or the spill is the problem, or both. Obviously avoiding ambiguity is what good writing should always aim to achieve. However, it can quickly become very verbose, especially when describing unnamed objects.

The brown machine was left on overnight and there was a spill that affected the black machine. The black machine was fixed, the brown machine was turned off and the spill was cleaned up in the morning.

In scientific writing however, items don't have simple or small names such as the brown machine or the black machine, they often have long, awkward names. This is partly due to the nomenclature used to describe molecules. It is insufficient to simply write glucose, there are two isomers, so we write D-glucose, but even then, there are two forms, so we write α-D-glucose. In regular writing, it would be sufficient to simply introduce it as α-D-glucose and then refer to it as glucose from that point on, only adding clarification if you later introduced a different form. As science papers are rarely read by scientists in order, it is a necessity to ensure that if a reader picks up the paper and starts reading from a given figure, that it remains unambiguous.

It is taking me a while to get used to writing in a style where each sentence I write must be able to stand on its own, such that a reader with some scientific knowledge can make sense of it without being confused by attempts to reduce the number of words on a page. Basically, nomenclature is really important. I'm definitely looking forward to being able to write freely

So. Anyone that's come across this blog before has probably seen how infrequently I update it. Part of that is due to Facebook serving as an adequate outlet for microblogging. So basically what happens is I have some random thought or something interesting worth sharing. I share it on Facebook, get a handful of comments and 'likes' and then I never consider it again. In rare cases some discussion is had.

Part of my unending quest towards self improvement is to force myself to develop new habits. With some help from some software on my phone aptly named Hab-it! One of those habits is obviously blogging & journalling my thoughts and life. I see three immediate benefits to this.

1) I can clear my mind by writing stuff down, rather than bouncing around an idea in my head indefinitely until I get a chance to discuss it with someone or work it on more.
2) I'll get more practice writing and putting my thoughts and ideas into structured essays. Which should aid with my aspirations of writing a book one day.
3) I'll get a chance to document some of my life. I watched a TED talk recently about a guy, Cesar, who made a 1 second video every day for the past year of his life. He was doing it so he'd never forget a day.

So expanding on #3, a 1 second video doesn't mean much to an outside observer, but to him it serves as an anchor point for his memories of that day. It winds up being an ordered system of remembering things. One of the benefits he mentioned was that he was making his days more valuable, so he'd try and do something worth remembering each day. Now I'm unlikely to be able to make a 1 second video each day just yet. I'd certainly try it if there was a convenient application to remind me to take one my phone each day. At least writing something each day is a start.

I've got plenty of ideas for things to write about for the next couple of weeks. So we'll see how this goes.