Oh so familiar...

I've been in the States for 11 days now. I leave in five more. The first couple days back felt awfully surreal. Riding the L through Chicago, hearing the CTA announcements on the speakers, seeing the city bounce past me on the less-than-perfect red and brown line rails... it almost felt like watching a movie I knew well but hadn't seen in a long time. It didn't quite feel I was actually there. The most instantly obvious difference was the ambiance of being surrounded by native English speakers and the signage and advertising aimed at them (us). It all normalized quickly after meeting with more and more friends and seeing the familiar places of my not-so-distant past.

I got to visit a truly wonderful number of people, and will visit a couple more still.

Last night we went to Goshen to see a performance by Garrison Keillor. It was everything you'd hope it would be. The show started with the audience, well accustomed to his styling of Lake Wobegon, waiting breathlessly for the cue that he had begun being funny. The first few laughs were hopeful more than earnest. Normally the performer needs to warm up and relax for the show to be enjoyable. This time, it wasn't until the audience relaxed a few minutes in that we found a more natural cadence at which to laugh. You could almost hear the expectation in the pre-laugh silence - "The next line will be a good one, I'm sure of it!" His mammoth reputation preceded him, and it took a short time for the audience to get over their giddiness to truly enjoy the show. Keillor closed by saying that what our country/the world needs now is gratitude. "Gratitude is the cure." And to choose to be cheerful. Not happy (because who really knows what that means), but cheerful.

I don't know what to try to process next. So many different strains of thought have positively flown through my head during the intermittent quiet moments of this trip - thoughts of the future, the past, Midwestern sensibility and humor, motivation, biking, sickness and death... everything really. I can only hope that some portion of the ideas I'd like to mull around come back so I can spend some proper time with them and get them down on paper.

Riding bikes of carbon fiber and horses of math...

Small victories are important. They can make a difference in how I feel day-to-day. To use training language, everyone needs periodic reinforcement. Since the beginning of the spring semester, my reinforcement to work ratio was very low, particularly with several very time-consuming assignments that I never finished. The past couple months, my running and biking also fell off. I’m not training for anything in particular. (If people ask, I “joke” that I’m training for middle age. Not entirely a joke, right? It may seem far off, but it’ll come soon enough.) I’ve set no specific goals. I even figured out eating habits that maintain weight without much exercise. At this stage, my exercise has dropped enough that simply getting out is a victory. I realized this today while I spent a quick hour on the bike ride to burn off some extra energy and make it easier to mount up back onto the study horse this evening. As my Goshen physics professor Carl Helrich has been known to say, "Math is the trusty steed we ride." But now I'm back off the bike so it's time to get back on the study horse. Or maybe it's a study train, I never was sure.

These days I need to use exercise to give myself these small victories, in the absence of feedback from the academic side of things (those pots all have to simmer longer term). In several weeks I’ll get course grades from spring semester (hopefully passing), and hopefully along the way make measurable progress on my thesis. Right now I’m simply figuring out the mechanics of the data processing I do in MATLAB - what order to do things in, how to pre-process data, how to measure changes. So for every step of progress I make toward the explicit goals of the thesis, it usually means figuring out several behind-the-scenes issues. It’s not always the most fun I could imagine having ever, but I enjoy getting into the process of actually doing science, and learning what exactly that means.

Well, back to more studying so I can actually earn some positive reinforcement for all the time I’ve spent on this course in the past few months.

Edit: bikes of aluminum. I guess only the fork is carbon.

Quick as a cricket!

That's how I have to write this post. It's Tuesday, and my last exam is Thursday. It won't be a thing of beauty, but with luck (and successful studying through today and tomorrow) I should (might?) pass. Probably. Linear regression, PCA, reinforcement learning, inverse models, and Bayesian estimation theory. Fun stuff. But after that it will be the thesis full-time.

Summer's in full swing in Zurich. For a city that's supposed to average only 3 days a year above 85 degrees, we've been there (or close) for almost 3 weeks, with a few days above 90. Also, Switzerland doesn't believe in air conditioning. It does cool down at night though - often down to 70 or so. Aren't you glad you're caught up on Swiss weather now?

Beyond a couple hikes and a couple bike rides, I haven't been outside too much this summer, though the heat has driven us (and much of the city) to spend weekend days at the river and the lake, enjoying sun or shade or water however you see fit.

Rachel and Darin get here tomorrow morning, which is exciting, but for today, well, that studying isn't going to do itself! Happy August, folks.

End-of-May Day

I sit at my desk this Friday morning as it continues to rain steadily. I looked up Zurich's climate and compared it to Chicago's before moving here. On paper they're very similar, except for Zurich's less extreme temperatures. So far, though, it seems to rain or threaten to rain most days between October and June. You don't notice it now that the trees' leaves are out, but when the trees are bare, at some point you realize that they're all covered in moss. Sure sign of a wet climate. Rain's not the worst thing in the world - we can handle rain. We had a great soccer game last night in fact, playing in the mud and the rain. However, all this rain is a good deal less pleasant when, apart from a few beautiful 70-degrees-and-sunny days, it stays around 45-50 degrees. I look forward to summer, whenever it comes.

Today is the last lecture of the semester, and the last lecture my degree requirements say I need to take. That means that I now start working on the thesis, which will be with the Sensory Motor Systems lab at the ETH. Briefly, my job will be to take neural recordings ("functional near infrared spectroscopy" - fNIRS), and work on algorithms to filter noise produced by various biosignals (heart rate, blood pressure, etc.) out of the data. The filtered signal can then be used to decode whether or not a patient (presumably spinal cord injury or stroke victim) wants to move their hand or arm. It's too slow of a signal to control an artificial arm, but in these nascent stages it can at least control binary tasks.

I'm looking forward to spending next weekend in Madrid with my Leese cousins, and the weekend of the 21st in southern Germany for the Southside music festival, camping and watching bands with Gerick and Tom from my program. In August, Rachel and Darin visit, in September I join parents and aunts and uncles for biking in Italy, in October a visit the States for Celesta's wedding, and then in November there's a decent chance I'll go to South Korea for a 3 month research project.

That's a lot of exciting things to look forward to, but for now I return to studying. (Even though lectures are over, I'm still working through a number of homework assignments and probably will be for most of the summer).