Blogosphere Icarus

Talk about a disaster this day has been... at least as far as this blog is concerned. In the beginning I couldn't decide on what to do. I used to have a few spare ideas for cases like this, when the mind goes blank. I know I haven't done everything yet but still, at times you can't think of something new. Even so, none of the spare ideas felt fitting for today. They were either not very appealing or impractical to implement.

Anyhow, after a lot of thinking (and after rejecting the idea of composing a definite list of spare ideas for novelties for today's novelty) I decided that I there was nothing better to try today than to fly upwards, towards the blogosphere. As you may be able to tell, this blog isn't very connected with other blogs. In fact, none of the blogs I have or participate in link to any other blog or are heavily commented by people from other blogs. That was not the point, however. The point was not to connect with the rest of the blog community; it was merely to get to know it.

A terrible mistake, if you ask me. Tempting as it is, I'm not referring to the terrible quality of most of the blogs. I'm referring to the fact that after one hour of reading and searching I accomplished next to nothing. I still have no clue about the feel of the general blog community. In fact, I subscribed to a few new blogs, but nothing interesting enough that I can talk about it here.

I tried very hard to find blogs that interested me, about my hobbies and the way I reason. There was nothing coming even close to that. Google Reader's recommendations wasted much time. I even looked at some of the bundles it has to no avail. I have come to question myself, after all this: Are my interests not concrete enough so I can find something I can relate to? Perhaps they are but a shadow in my mind and not real at all? Maybe my personality is so rare in humanity that I can't relate to the thoughts of other people? Or is it just the vastness of the blogosphere that prevented me of finding something really interesting so fast? I guess I'll never know.



Edit: It's amazing how one thing leads to a completely different thing, sometimes. After continuing doing whatever it was I was doing for this novelty, I ended up using the share feature of Google Reader extensively. The result? It's a little something I named my meta-blog. Enjoy!

My Fingers Hurt

Many many years ago, after my brother and I completed few years of basic musical studies, it was time for us to choose a musical instrument to learn. I chose the accordion, my main reason being to uncover the secrets of the bass-side keys. Strange as it may seem, being driven by curiosity and being indifferent to subjective aesthetic preferences is still who I am, mostly. My brother, on the other hand, chose the guitar. We experimented switching a few times but we never really cared to teach each other the intricacies of each one's musical instrument.

Funny thing is, the reason this blog was started is my brother letting me have a go at his guitar recently and jokingly daring me to outperform him in a musical duel. Even if that session was short, it was then that I had the idea of using something I had no real knowledge of as a "mental stimulant". Add regularity to that and you get this blog. It's ironic how my brother has been consistently denying to help me have a guitar lesson as a novelty for this blog.

That is, until today. He finally agreed to give me a 1-hour lesson in playing guitar and I jumped at the opportunity. So, here I am, after completing it, my left hand index finger numb and hurting with each keystroke it is used on.

First thing he did was tell me which fingers are used and how. He made me do a little exercise for a while to get used to the idea:

Next, I did a fairly similar exercise, only for the left hand:

Soon, after that, I began playing the first song I was to learn, Sur le pont d' Avignon . It took quite a bit of time but after a while I was able to play it well enough:

After that, my brother didn't seem to be certain on what we should be doing next. He tried to teach me a technique to play a note with just the left hand. After I failed again and again he decided that it was too early for that. Then, he made me do an exercise to stretch the fingers, which was somewhat painful. After I failed to make any real progress with that, he grabbed the guitar and played a song of his own. After that, he took out one of his old books and he started teaching me to play a second song, Der Weihnachtsmann. Unfortunately, the time was up long before I could play it well.

I enjoyed playing the guitar, it's a neat instrument, if a bit painful at times. I guess you get used to it. I also began to understand how the exercises and the songs made me better in playing the instrument in general, not only the specific exercise. It's one thing knowing that in theory and a completely different thing experiencing it in action. It's very difficult to notice it in higher levels of practising something. So, the fact that I was new to this helped in identifying the procedure.

Developmental Neurobiology

Staple childhood nostalgia follows: While growing up, I changed my mind about what job I wanted to do as an adult lots of times. I started with predictable choices, such as an astronaut or a robot scientist. Later on, I wanted to become a teacher. That was replaced by computer science, then by physics, biology, mathematics, until I ended up back in computer science (which is what I am currently studying). Still, I hold these sciences in high regard, especially mathematics (for which I have developed a fear over the past few years, ironically). Needless to say, I enjoy following these fields a bit even now and I would really love to dedicate myself more to them, even if it's just as a hobby.

For today's novelty, I decided to look into a science I've been neglecting. So, I was to read a scientific paper on a science I am unfamiliar with. After searching for a while, I came across developmental neurobiology, which is concerned with the process of the development of the neural system in animals, as far as I understood. I know a few things from here and there about how the brain works, mostly from Artificial Intelligence courses and a passing interest back in school. Of course, this university-level article I was to read was way above any understanding I might have, discussing very specific things, which my mind could barely grasp what abstract and general processes they were part of.

The book was Developmental neurobiology, by Marcus Jacobson, Mahendra S. Rao. At first, I started reading through chapter 9, "Guidance of Axons and Dendrites" but soon I had had enough and went back to the front cover, then started reading chapter 1. I was moderately surprised to find out that it was in not any less confusing. So, I just read.

Soon, I discovered that it discussed the initial process of the formation of neural systems in embryos. It had four case studies, which is four different animals: The xenopus (a type of frog), the chick, the mouse and... well I forget which one is the last. They had their differences but each had some different advantages in being studied, like how the mouse was easy to genetically manipulate and how the xenopus was easy to manage and observe.

There seemed to be lots of keywords, around which other concepts were explained. As time passed, I began to pick up things about these and eventually I managed to decipher what some of them meant. Still, I didn't understand much from the context about most. However, this enabled me to do something else. Since semantics were removed for the most part from my understanding, I began to clearly see the structure of the text: I slowly was able to see the objects under discussion and which their properties were. I could see processes described and how their steps worked. Since I love abstraction (you should, too!) it was rather interesting to aknowledge the structure meta-data of the text.