...there are so many challenges we place before ourselves in life, we give ourselves these goals and these guilt complexes over certain kinds of happinesses we can grant and certain things we must resist or ration or control, because when we succeed, when we overcome these immense obstacles, it's satisfying and it's addictive.
my own egotistical self
10.55pm
at my desk, stacks of various projects and notes around me
I may be too engrossed in recording details of my life online. Here are all the restaurants in NYC at which I've eaten, here are all the books I've read, music I've been listening to is listed along the left column, photographs I've taken along the right. I guess I'm trying to automate the process of writing about my life by having it be logged without mental effort, and naturally, this is the type of thing I am considering studying as I contemplate what type of research I'd like to do in machine learning. I very much want to work somehow with language; it is a difficult problem and a fundamental one in my opinion in the effort to make computers more useful, intelligent, fun, exciting. Bo mentioned this whitesmoke software product to me, and it seems outrageous that they are marketing the grammar checker from Microsoft Word espoused as a way to write for you-- it claims to comprehend and convey tone and eloquence, but I doubt it. I got my hands on a copy, so we'll see, I suppose. I don't know if I even approve of such a thing; and another idea I had, to work on a computer text summarizer, also irks me a little-- I hate abridged works even when they're created by a human, or even the author (do many authors abridge their works themselves, though?) so I can hardly imagine relishing the output of a computational summarizer, unless the text to read is something I would very much not enjoy. The only people I can think of who are regularly required to read things they don't enjoy are poor students.
The above hardly qualifies as any direction for the assignment (and is unbelievably closed-minded-- I'm feeling pessimistic about my possibilities), and my ambitions are equally vague; I'm grateful for the requirements of specificity, though it means I've been reading statistical natural language processing research and papers for the past two days, and where I originally felt very open to the possibility of any type of study, I now reject things out of the hat: not specific, not useful, not immediately grandiose in its prospects.
In other news, tomorrow morning, I'm teaching bright young math and computer science students (typically high school juniors and seniors) about the excitement in working on problems that they have no hopes at solving. Boy, do kids love those, though. (As do I: it is perhaps a sign that I don't know yet enough math to make me fully realize how much I don't know.)