Leibniz Clockwork

Read something on McArthur Binion, artist in Detroit, and what left me the most curious was an off-hand comment that he used to drive taxis to make ends meet.

I am no art buff and make no pretensions of expert criticism. He clearly has a lot going on upstairs. I wonder what taxi driving was like. Was his head full of ideas? Did he compartmentalize? Was every fare two more hours in the studio to accomplish something? Did he zone out and veg, or was it a constant battle of hopes, curiosity, wonder, and irritation?

Am ded

The doctor told me stop lifting weights until I blackout.

I’ll show her!

*dies*

I wish I had more time in this city.

I do; I just wish I had more.

Heading North into Georgetown. The valley north of this vantage drops significantly, and if the ground wasn’t in the way, Georgetown would be dead ahead and slightly to the right.

So I got the numbers.

The morning after in terms of leaving my computer up and running all night, btw.

The numbers exist. They’re even worse than I expected, and I half-heartedly expected fire. But that’s actually not so bad, because I can start poking at them now.

I’m using somewhere in the vicinity of 12,000 samples, each one 20,000 data points raw. I downsample by factors of 2, 3, 4 or whatever so they don’t throw memory errors, and up-and-downsample batch sizes for accuracy. I was really surprised that didn’t make a whole lot of difference.

My validation dataset may be the issue, so that’s the next setting to change. After that, I’ve got a dozen ways to manipulate GradientThreshold, batch size, weights, and momentums, etc. I can downsample by factors of 10, 100, or more and throw huge minibatches around. If nothing changes the results, I have bad data. The data doesn’t clearly indicate the stuff I’m looking to measure.

However, I know the signal is in there. That makes this somewhat easier, because I know the problem is solvable. It just takes longer than one might think.

Probably my favorite bit of the Return of the King movie.

Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!
spear shall be shaken, shield shall be splintered,
a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now, ride! Ride for ruin and the world’s ending!
Death! Death! Death!
Forth Eorlingas!

It just gets you fired up.

I thought of a better example for relationships independent of possession: inanimate objects.

These are the river’s banks. These are the banks of the river.

This is the rock’s edge.

That is the light of the dawn.

Anthropomorphizing inanimate objects and phenomena aside, a river doesn’t own anything. Neither do rocks or dawns. Yet the grammar is obviously the same between possession and relation.

Well, this was a depressing day. Good luck or God be with you as you prefer.

Basically there are three steps in a loop for algorithm development.

1) Make it work at all.

2) Make it work better.

3) Make it work faster.

Repeat while exist(time/money/energy) == TRUE

Right now the landmine detector has just worked at all. At all. Numbers come out. Those numbers are terrible, and they take forever, but they EXIST!

‘I live!’ screamed the dust speck at uncaring heavens.

So I moved on to step 2, making things work better. Notice how fast isn’t even a consideration yet. To make something work better, I need to get more numbers, so I left my machine up and running overnight. I’ll hit it with 12 hours of processing and see what happens. Maybe fire. Probably data. Maybe good data, maybe bad data, but the data will probably exist in the morning. That’s a pretty big hurdle.

The thing I like about engineering that’s different from physics or bomb disposal is I can make progress just by trying. Just by working at it for a while, I can make progress. It’s not only dumb luck. It’s not only rolls of the dice. Some of it is just grinding. Entrepreneurship and seeking funding is rolling dice, but actually solving the stupid problem, making the blinky lights on the computer blink right, that’s mostly grunts, effort, and relentlessness. The feeling of being able to accomplish something by working, that my fate is in my own hands, is immensely empowering.