I suspect the majority of people who have any use for this already know about
it and use it daily, but I have only recently realized how cool this is.
You know how you always forget what the relationship between c,
λ, and ν is? Like, they give you the energy of a photon and
you’re supposed to calculate the wavelength? You know E =
h ν, but now you have to figure out how to convert the frequency to a
wavelength. Now, instead of looking the formula up on Wikipedia, how about
using dimensional analysis? You write down the unit of λ, which is m,
and then you only need to figure out how to construct that unit with a speed
and a frequency. Speed is m s–1 and frequency is
s–1, so to cancel the seconds out, you divide the speed by the frequency and get
m s–1 s = m, from which you can easily see that
λ must be c / ν. And you’re done.
Another good example is when you have an exponential function or a sine or
cosine. You know the argument for these functions must be dimensionless, so if
you’re not sure what factors you have to put into the argument, you can just
keep throwing stuff in there until all the units cancel and it’ll probably be
right.
Or if you want to sanity check your calculations you need only look at your
dimensions. When you see a sum of, say, a length and an area, you know you’ve
done something wrong.
The same applies of course to the other kind of dimension — the one in
vectors. When you try to put a three dimensional vector in an exponential
function, you have a problem. You’re probably missing another vector to form a
dot product with. Or if you’re trying to add a vector and a scalar, again, you
know you’re missing something.
It seems pretty simple, but I was surprised how useful this is once you get
the hang of it.
[I’m posting this a bit late, so if you’re confused by things like “this
year” and “next year,” imagine I posted this on Dec 31, 2014,
23:59:59.]
At the beginning of this year, the mere thought of speaking in front of a
group of people literally scared me to death. I can now present a homework
problem I have not spent a huge amount of thought on in the most sloppy way
possible, be told in front of everyone that I did everything wrong, trip over
something on the way back to my seat, and take it all without a sweat.
Finally, we’re making progress. Nino: 1, his brain: 0.
Apparently Facebook thinks my year was all about the celebration of grumpy
potatoes.
The year is coming to a close and everyone is doing yearly reviews, so I
decided to create my own. I used the
8760 hours template and ended
up with a text that is around 6,000 words long1
and contains pretty much everything that happened this past year, including
many unpublishable details. This is a much shorter version that doesn’t have
that problem and is hopefully less boring than the original for everyone who
isn’t me.
The past
While 2014 was certainly not a good year, I think I can safely say it
was the best one I’ve had, so far.
I learned a lot of new things, both about my field of study and about life in
general, and, as I described above, I made a lot of progress on improving my
mental health and confidence. I’ve managed to keep my depressive episodes to a
minimum and, in an attempt to be a bit more agenty, I even moved out of my
parents’ house and into a small place close to my university. On top of all
that, financially, I’m in as good a position as someone without an income can
hope to be.
The “not good” part of the year mostly revolved around school: In 2013 I’d
discovered for the first time, that I am able to pass exams if I study enough.
So, in 2014, I thought, I would just keep doing that and have the best grades
in the world and everything would be amazing. After four exams I barely passed
and one I postponed for another year because I was too distracted to focus,
that optimism quickly vanished.
Over the course of the year I tried several techniques I read about on the
internet to increase my productivity, and some worked for a while, which led
me to announce numerous times to my friends and family, that I’d finally
solved my productivity issues and it would all be smooth sailing from now on.
Sadly, I kept being wrong. The fact that I always tried so many new things
made my therapist very happy, but it was still frustrating that no lasting
benefit ever came from the attempts.
The present and future
Over the last few weeks, things have been getting better again. To maintain
some of that momentum, I sat down and had a good think about what I wanted to
do with my life, since, maybe, having long-term goals would help motivate me
to be more effective now. These are the main goals I came up with for
2015:
Studying
Wherever I choose to go after I finish my bachelor’s degree, better grades
would probably increase my chances, since many schools, surprisingly, won’t
accept students with bad grades. Therefore I commit to only producing grades
that start with a “1,” starting next semester (that’s like an A(±), for all my
millions of international readers). I’m not sure how hard this will be but I
feel like my brain should be capable enough to make this reasonably possible,
with some preparation.
Additionally, I will finish 10 textbooks. I don’t think I’ve ever actually
read a textbook from start to finish, but this seems like a reasonable number
to learn some new things. Also I think I read a similar number somewhere else
so I’m sure this is a good idea.
Writing
I’m not a fantastic writer, and since it seems like writing would be a good
skill to have, I’ll try to write at least 60,000 words this year and get into
a habit of doing at least one pomo of writing per day. If this works well
enough, I might even post more stuff on this site.
Miscellaneous
A few months ago I started doing mindfulness meditation and that was kind of
fun, so I’ll try to keep doing a 10–20 minute session every day.
In addition to that, I’ll go back to writing journals / daily reviews, and
weekly reviews. I did the daily reviews for a while last year and it helped my
brain stay sane, but I stopped when I figured out how to do the same without
writing. Now that I’m having a more goal-oriented year, I’d like to have more
content to base my next yearly review on, so I’ll start again. The weekly
reviews are intended to give me more of a big-picture view and track my
overall progress toward my goals. We’ll see how that goes.
Lastly, I have an extremely embarrassing habit, that I desperately need to get
rid of. It looks a bit similar to
this
(maybe don’t click that link if you’re eating), and if I still haven’t stopped
that shit by next December, I’ll give out 100 €. I’ll do a big raffle and
everything. It’ll be amazing. But seriously. Why is this so hard.
And that’s it. Let’s make 2015 the best year yet.
Fun fact: My review of 2014 is the longest document I have ever written in
my entire life, with the second place being a school report for a 2-week
internship, which was around 2,200 words. Also, the school report took me
about 2 months and help from my mother to complete, while the review took me
like 5 days. This is also the reason why I need to point out the enormous
length of the yearly review every time I talk about it.
↩
For years customers have been asking, practically begging, for hyphenation and
an option for left-aligned text. Now (a few weeks ago), Amazon has announced
the new generation of their ereader, the Kindle Voyage. And apparently it
still lacks both features. Wohoo.
Let’s talk about hyphenation first. I feel like this is the more important of
the two, because you’d really want hyphenation no matter how the text is
aligned. I do think that Amazon should implement auto-hyphenation, but on the
other hand, I am kind of puzzled why publishers don’t provide hyphenation
themselves, especially for books with lots of uncommon words, where
auto-hyphenation would fail anyway. I run every book not bought through Amazon
(because I’m too lazy to figure out how to break the DRM) through the
hyphenation plugin in Calibre, which takes like five seconds and produces
really good results that don’t interfere with search or dictionary lookups or
annotations. As hard as it is to believe, it actually works — I’ve
been reading hyphenated stuff every day for weeks now, and it’s amazing. The
obvious trade-off is that you have to store about 500kb extra in a 5mb book,
but the Kindle file format is so size-inefficient compared to epub that
that shouldn’t matter anyway.
This is at font size 4, so if you're not nearly blind, you should be
able to get even better results by turning the size down a step or two.
Now, about the left-alignment problem. I have to admit, I actually like
justified text. I’m fine with left-aligned text on the web and on home-printed
documents, but I think (for the most part) books should be justified.
Especially on the Kindle — I’m not sure why — left-aligned text looks kind of
weird. I’ve tried it with and without hyphenation, and I’ve always felt like
I’m looking at a cheap homemade document instead of an actual book. So even
now, with all the terrible, awful, hideous gaps in the text, I still kind of
prefer the status quo to the “fully-justified text needs to die”-mentality you
see on the web these days. Also, in my experience, with hyphenation, justified
text looks perfectly adequate.
That said, it’s completely baffling to me why they don’t give users the option
to choose whichever alignment they prefer. The only reason I can think of is
that non-tech-savvy authors upload their impossible-to-parse Word files to
KDP
and Amazon isn’t confident they can detect which parts of the text should be
affected by the setting and which shouldn’t. But even that doesn’t seem overly
plausible.
Humanity has figured out how to make printed books look awesome. It can’t be
that hard to make ebooks look okay.
My fanfiction/review-type-thing of the first 3 Old Man’s War
books.
Spoilers.
Old Man’s War
In the beginning there was that annoying guy, but then he died, and
the rest was just lots of explosions and it was really exciting.
The Ghost Brigades
“But it’s not what Jared wanted, is it?” Sagan said. “He knew his
consciousness had been recorded. He could have asked me to try to
save it. He didn’t.”
Then they decide to do it anyway, and Jared says, “Thank goodness you
revived me. Between all the exploding things and people dying I
totally forgot that my consciousness had been recorded. I thought I
would have to sacrifice myself, but this is so much better!”
The Last Colony
So John talks to General Rybicki, and he’s like,
“And because you didn’t survey this planet well enough to know it
has its own goddamned intelligent species, seven of my colonists
have died in the last three days.”
And then the General should have said, “Oh, yea, we noticed they were
here, but then we kinda forgot about them; that’s why we didn’t tell
you.”
And then John should have said, “Oh, well, we’ll just forget about
them, too, then,” because after that the only other occasion this
comes up is when John asks Gau what he’s going to do with them and Gau
says, “Meh, dunno,” and then forgets about it as well.
Other than that the books were pretty entertaining, though.
