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.

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).