Ground Bogo

The end of the world as I know it

It’s 4:20 in the morning. The sunrise is slowly approaching, which should normally drown the sky in a darker shade of blue. I say normally, because the volcanic ash in the stratosphere has really been fooling around with the morning sunlight lately. You can’t really see it during the day, but there is a specific moment right before the big guy pops up when the heavens really ignite in a mixture of dark red and black. Having read so much about the end of the world and beyond, I think this is what it would looks like. The perfect apocalyptic sky.

The streets are deserted. Nobody in their right mind would walk around at that hour. Hah, what does that make me in the end? I wonder…

Sometimes a cab passes by and breaks the silence, as if to remind me that I’m not in a ghost town. It achieves nothing but the opposite. Once the last echo of the engine sinks inside the concrete world around, the contrast only reinforces the odd lack of sound on the streets.

It’s easy to forget you are on the seaside when you cannot smell the sea. You don’t really need to see it to know it’s there. My mother is from a city on the seaside. It doesn’t matter if you are walking on the sand or in the other end of town. You can smell the sea everywhere. It’s a specific mixture of salt and seaweed, distinct but not exactly unpleasant. You don’t smell that here. Perhaps because of that absence, the sea gull flying above me seems to be as much of a stranger in this town as I am. It can choose to fly away whenever and wherever it wishes, while I’m stuck on the sidewalk, perfectly knowing where I’m coming from and where I’m headed. Home, but not home. The English language, as rich as it may be, is infinitely crippled by not having a distinct word for “just the place you live in.”

It’s a strange place. The sun is getting closer, and the brightness increases, but the contrast stays the same. But I suppose the lack of colors nicely matches the lack of sound. Any other combination would seem out of place. How can you not get philosophical in a world like that?

Everyone wants to be happy. That’s a universal goal that should sit above all goals. But universal does not mean constant. Sometimes you want to spend a moment alone and drift along the shades of gray in your mind. Nobody should try to take away those moments from you. The perfect lonely morning.

Good morning.

I admit that when I was a kid, my plan was never to become an engineer. I was just another stupid boy that wanted to grow up to be Batman or a policeman or any other crap like that. Luckily, I scraped those ideas when I grew up, and I decided to go for engineering. However, I also admit that being an engineer never struck me as a particularly spectacular job that concentrates an incredible amount of power in your hands. Yesterday, while reviewing for my exams, I realised how wrong I was once again. I’m rarely wrong, but when I am, I’m off by a mile.

To illustrate my point today I will directly use some of the review notes for one of my courses. Oh, and please don’t tell my professors…I’d like to graduate successfully first. Read the rest of this entry »

The following idea for a male decision making model hit me during a lazy Thursday afternoon (it’s not like I remember the day, but it must have been a Thursday since ideas such as this one can only come during that depressingly insignificant day). I was riding the bus back home, and I was thinking about the voiced speech part of a model that I had to code up for one of my ongoing projects. If you don’t care about the technical stuff or are afraid of it, skip the following text all the way until after the first diagram. Anyway, the human speechy-makie-thingy (for the lack of a better expression or the unwillingness of the author to make this post too technical or formal) basically consists of two things: the larynx, aka the “voice box” that flaps around and produces the raw sound, and the vocal tract as well as all the bunch of stuff after (tongue, lips, etc.) that shapes the raw sound into the sounds that we want to produce. The larynx flaps around like crazy with no definite pattern (pretty much like a salmon thrown on the beach of the Japanese coast by a giant tsunami caused by an earthquake which was in turn caused by a giant shield volcano eruption somewhere in the Pacific and yes I love brackets and I make them huge now go and read the first part of the sentence again since you probably forgot it and lost my train of thought) when we are using unvoices speech (letters like p, t, k, etc.), and does some periodic shit when we are using voiced speech (mostly vowels). All of this can be fit into a simple (or not so simple, I don’t know) model where the stuff that the larynx produces is simulated by either white noise (for unvoiced) or periodic impulse train (for voiced speech). Then this data is passed through a digital filter that simulates the vocal tract plus the rest of the crap after, and voila! Speech! Humanity! Evolution! I made a figure too, for those that need a kick to fire up their imagination, plus I could conveniently modify it and use it in my thesis paper one day. I just hope that nobody realises I am using the same material in my uber-official papers as well as my share-your-mental-diarrhea blog. Read the rest of this entry »