[travel] Very unlikely coincidence

Live blogging... not so live posting:

The pre-recorded announcement one the ferry boat is speaking “In the event of an emergency [[ LOUD SMACK ]] you will hear the following sound: [[ beeping ]] and you are requested to make your way to the six evacuation points at... [[ more smacks ]]”   It's unclear if it's an actual emergency thanks to the exciting misuse of verb tense. People are looking around, confused. There are a couple more smacking sounds but the prerecorded message is continuing its cheery hypothetical instructions.

Maybe that thump is what roughly shifting gears on a 20,000hp motor feels like, or perhaps an especially large wave hitting the bow of the ship at 40kph. The timing of the first one was perfect though, down to a fraction of a second.


There was also this woman I ran into four times in different parts of various cities in Egypt. After the fourth time we decided it might actually be fun to hang out together for a day, and it was.

[travel] This is your brain on travel

I spent a couple of hours last night working out travel logistics for the next few days, and found a way to squeeze in a visit to the island of Delos, which is famed for its extensive Greek ruins. However, upon arrival I found that the schedules from the guidebook were wrong, I wasn't going to be able to visit Delos, and I would instead be spending the rest of the day taking a slow boat to Athens. (I could have stayed in Mykonos for the next few hours, but its main port felt like a giant empty city-sized tourist trap that was baited, set, and waiting to spring on the summer crowds.

The thing is, while I was pissed for a few minutes, I realized I was still having an interesting day. I was learning all about the logistics and culture of the Greek ferry system. It's all fascinating. By my 5th ferry trip I'll probably be bored of it, but for now, it's really interesting. Different people get different things out of travel (eg relaxation, bragging rights, seeing relatives, etc). Since I didn't necessarily have an explicit goal going into this aside from having fun and decompressing from long-term work stress, I'm interested to see, halfway through, what's working for me.

Here's what I feel I'm getting, in order of importance from most to least:
( What it's doing to/for me... )

Leveling up in photography

I'm spending a lot of time taking pictures. While I don't feel like I'm getting better, I'm starting to notice a lot of things I didn't before having to do with lighting, composition, framing and other such things. There are also non-useful skills like learning how to hide the dark or glare spots that appear from the scratch on my camera's lens.

 

Also, if you feel the framing is poor in photos I've been uploading, note that I've prioritized getting stuff up on Flickr for people to see over spending lots of time painstakingly using this slow computer to run GIMP for some cropping and rotating.) Other than that, feedback (good or bad) is very welcome.  I want to learn.

It's easy to obsess over getting the perfect shot but I realized that I'm not a photographer on assignment.  I don't need a perfect shot of anything in particular.  I will see enough interesting things that I should go for the best shot I can at the time and not wait for the lighting/crowd/etc to be perfect.  There's always more stuff to see.

Biased data labeling is hazardous to children (or is it?)

I'm watching what looks like a lot of shitty parenting in the boat here. Kids are consciously and unconsciously trying to sort out how the world works, and simply being told “no” and getting yanked away when they do something wrong is an inefficient way of communicating to them. They kids are just running around behavior-space like little pinballs, bumping up against “no”s every few seconds,. Kids easily pick up and imitate what the grown-ups around them do, but it's hard to figure out what grown-ups don't do since they aren't doing it.  So why not, when a kid does something wrong, stop them and show them the correct alternative so they can imitate it?  Or you could help them understand what specifically they did that was bad by pantomiming the bad action, saying “no”, then pantomiming a correct alternative and saying “yes”. Or, (depending on what the bad action is) do it to them, ask them how they feel, and then tie that back to their actions.

I'm starting to think of allusions to my knowledge of machine learning. You can't effectively train a machine learning system with a partially labeled data set where only the negative examples are labeled and many negative examples are unlabeled. I should probably stop now. Kids are way more complex than that.

For example:

“Wow... this crying thing really gets me attention from the parents but everything else doesn't. I've got to remember that!”

Is this how drama queens are born?