Ideal Ebook Reader

Wheew, it’s been a while – classes and work have been keeping me busy, and I’m finally starting to feel like a normal person again. Now that I have some more free time, I want to get back into the habit of reading books again. It gets difficult though, because it is often inconvenient for me to carry a book around, particularly if I’m already bringing my computer with me. Some of the nonfiction books on my reading list are quite bulky, and end up sitting on my shelf while I work my way through the smaller fiction books more easily.

So one thing that’s been on my mind a lot is the perfect ebook reader (as evidenced by my Tumblr posts). I succeeded in turning my DS into a mini ebook reader, but the startup time is long enough to be a significant barrier. By the time I start it up, load the book, and find the right bookmark, the TA has already shown up for office hours, and I have to hurriedly put it away again.

What impresses me about Kindle is that it actually has a few significant improvements over a real book (and by “significant”, I mean that it overcomes flaws inherent in paper books). For example, being able to read while lying down without having to constantly shift weight would be a huge plus. I was also quite happy to note that the Kindle indicates where you are in the book, plus where you are in each book on your shelf. Given that I constantly feel the stack of pages left in the book with my thumb when I read (a strange quirk, I know), this is a nice substitute. It won’t feel as concrete, but it’ll be better than judging by page numbers.

I could probably ignore the ugliness, but the dealbreaker is not being able to put my own PDFs on the device easily. I end up reading papers for class quite often, or long articles from the internet, and being able to read these with high fidelity (something that HTML files would not guarantee) on the ebook reader would be great. If this limitation was removed, I would probably pay the $400 to get one.

(Note: There are supposedly methods to convert PDFs to a compatible format, but that always leads to strange formatting, particularly with papers that are formatting-intensive. I’ve had enough experience with converting things to be wary of anything less than native support for PDFs.)

The features I want, in order of importance:

1. Ease-of-use. If it feels clunky or takes too long to navigate around a book, then I’ll end up choosing a real book over it every time.
2. Appearance. That’s right, I want it to look pretty.
3. Ability to load any PDFs onto it – Most common formats can be converted easily to PDF.
4. Useful features. Things like bookmarking, writing notes, highlighting, and saving quotes with a record of the source would be nice to have.
5. Long battery life. With e-ink, this should no longer be an issue.
6. Capacity. I can live with a small capacity, by shifting books around, but it’s always nice to have a large selection available.
7. Tactile feel. There is a certain quality to books that gives reading a special feel. It’s hard to put that feeling into concrete words, but it’s a combination of the weight of the book (particularly the weight of the left half versus the right half, and how that changes as you finish reading more of the book) and the feeling of the paper. A device won’t be able to duplicate this, but it has to at least have a decent feel to it

Time Constraints

About a week ago, I was spending every minute I had on an assignment for my natural language processing class. My partner and I were already behind from starting the class a week late (we started out taking a different class), and it was a pretty long assignment. We probably each put 50 hours into it in a span of 5 days, on top of the usual course load and one day of work for me.

However, I noticed something interesting. I was really productive throughout this entire time, partly because of the time-crunch, and partly because of my rule to sleep 7 hours a night. Without the excuse of “Oh well, I’ll just slack off a little now and sleep later tonight,” I really had to focus on my work.

I’ve heard Parkinson’s Law pretty often: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. I always sort of dismissed this as true but not terribly useful. It actually is very applicable though: I now set a hard deadline of 1 AM for my day’s work (as opposed to a soft deadline of 12:30 – 3:00 AM). Everything important still gets done. The difference is that I’m getting my sleep (so I’m happier, less exhausted, etc) and I spend less time on frivolous things, so I feel less guilty.

Things have eased up by now, but I’m still seeing the positive effects of the 7-hour rule. Who knew it would have such a big impact?

Hofstede Dimensions

I went to a talk recently by a consultant from BSG, where he talked about the Hofstede dimensions. It’s basically a measure of the collective personality of a country by giving the level of importance of five things: power distance (to what degree unequal power is accepted and/or expected), individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation. I found the comparison between the Hofstede dimensions of different countries pretty fascinating.

This site gives more detailed information, including graphs for many countries (all the graphs below are from that site).

Here’s the chart for China:

Compare that to the United States:

You can sort of see how these scores apply: individuality is valued highly in the US, but very low in China, where the emphasis is on conforming. China also has a high power distance index (higher than the average in Asian countries, in fact). If you’ve ever visited China, you can see how this is reflected in real life: there are people living in extreme poverty, and then there are the rich in the cities that drive cars and have large houses. On the other hand, the difference is much less pronounced in the US, where more people fall in the middle.

Another example is Japan:

Masculinity and uncertainty avoidance are extremely high, compared to the average in Asia and the worldwide average. If you look at the rest of the charts, no other listed country has such a high masculinity index (most aren’t even close). That’s sort of in line with what I know of Japanese culture, although it’s kind of surprising that it’s so extreme. (Masculinity, in this context, is defined as the gap between men’s values and women’s values, in assertiveness and competitiveness.)

On the other hand, I would have expected China to have a higher masculinity than it actually does, since males are valued more than females, but China’s masculinity index (66) is actually fairly close to the United States’ masculinity index (62).

(Note: Keep in mind that these are all measures on the culture as a whole, not on any individual.)

One more thing to think about: immigrants not only have to deal with learning a new language, but in many cases, they also have to adjust to a huge cultural change. My parents often used the phrase “culture shock” when I was little, but I didn’t realize how much harder it was for them at the time. Seeing the huge difference between China’s graph and the United States’ graph really drives that point home.

So what do you find interesting in these numbers?

Willpower

Recently, I linked to an article on my tumblog about willpower. The idea is that in the short term, willpower is limited, but in the long term, you can strengthen your willpower. I actually feel like my willpower decreases over the course of a few months, until I spend a good week or so doing whatever I want. It didn’t make sense until I noticed this sentence:

“Task persistence is also reduced when people are stressed or tired from exertion or lack of sleep.”

So I have a resolution for this new term: I am going to try to be better about sleep. I used to rank sleep below everything (work, school, friends, and even pointless entertainment like feeds and TV shows). I end up averaging about 5 or 6 hours of sleep every night. This term, it moves to third place!

When I don’t get enough sleep, I end up falling asleep in class a lot and I generally feel pretty miserable. I’m hoping that sleeping more will solve a bunch of these problems.

So if you hear that I slept for less than 7 hours in any given night, poke me and make me sleep more.

And I guess I’ll start brushing my teeth with my left hand, just in case that helps.

The ideal camera

Someone asked this question on Ask Metafilter: why isn’t there a camera that takes a picture exactly as my eye sees it? I’ve actually wondered about this before, and was never quite satisfied with the answers that I got, so I was really happy to see this question.

Essentially, the answer is:

1. The camera only has one lens, but you have two eyes, and your eyes have specs that will beat any camera on the market by a wide margin.
2. Your brain does a lot of interpolation and post-processing.
3. You can focus much faster than a camera can.
4. Different parts of your eye can have different levels of sensitivity to light, but a camera can only have one level for the entire sensor. (That’s why you can look at a scene with both light and dark areas and still distinguish details in each area, but a camera will produce pictures with blown out areas or completely black areas.)

In one answer:

In other words, your vision can’t be replicated by a single camera because it’s essentially the result of two cameras (that are better than even the best cameras available now) taped next to each other and hooked up to a supercomputer doing real-time image interpolation and processing.

I wonder if we have the technology now (or will soon) to do that. I don’t think the technology is up to snuff on the speed side yet, but couldn’t you theoretically hook up two cameras to a computer, and do the image processing? Two cameras would give you a wider dynamic range and two focal points. I imagine the image processing part would be the hardest though, particularly combining the two images properly. I remember reading some papers where people used two side-by-side cameras to build depth maps and other interesting features, so maybe it’s in the works.

Still, even if all that was possible, the brain probably does too much stuff that a computer can’t replicate (at least not currently):

Your eyes and brain have evolved over the years to make high probability assumptions. Interestingly, when presented with a field of Gaussian noise — where every pixel was a randomly selected shade of gray — the eyes and brain do no better than a camera. Not so for any natural scene — there your highly evolved and specialized brains do far better than any camera so far produced.

I couldn’t find the study mentioned after a quick search; it would have been interesting to see how performance was measured. I can see how it could be true though. The brain does fill in a good deal of the scenery, especially in a familiar environment.

Anyway, it’s an intriguing question. I’ll have to take the Computational Photography class when it’s offered again.

Currently listening to: Why by Shattered Atom

Books

“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy.”

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

This describes me almost perfectly. I’ve loved reading since I was a kid. My parents bought me my first books when I was a little over a year old – an entire box of fat books with cardboard pages, a picture and the corresponding Chinese character on each one. Later, my parents said repeatedly “If we had known that you’d read this much, we wouldn’t have bought you so many books back then.”

I don’t read nearly as much as I used to, but I can still get through a book a month while I’m at school (more when I’m at home). I really do miss the lazy summer days where I could lay on the couch and finish an entire book in an afternoon, though.

The irony is that I don’t actually own that many books. I’m constantly torn between the desire to keep a copy of books I love, the ingrained idea that fiction books are not worth buying (which seems to be a common belief among Chinese parents), and the need to avoid accumulating too many possessions. I also find that when I do buy books, I never read them: I can read those anytime, but I have to return library books in a few weeks, so obviously I should read the library books first. Sigh.

I’m still waiting for someone to make the perfect ebook reader. Or even one that is kind of close. Please?

Currently listening to: Melpo Mene – I Adore You

Slacking off

The problem with having a week where I don’t have anything to do is that I constantly feel guilty about not doing anything useful. Instead of sitting around reading, watching tv shows, and reading feeds online, shouldn’t I be doing something productive? Instead of sleeping for 10 hours a day and napping every few hours, shouldn’t I be preparing for next term?

I guess that stuff is a little too ingrained now. It’s beneficial for me to feel guilty when I’m slacking off during the term, since that makes me get my work done, but now it’s kind of annoying. I find myself watching shows while reading feeds, which means that I’m multi-tasking even when I’m slacking off. -.-

I always thought I was slightly OCD, but I found out that I actually have OCPD to some degree. I can usually redirect the compulsive behavior to more useful things. For example, I keep a to-do list, and it works really really well because I absolutely love checking stuff off and watching it go from a long list to a short list. And I always start on assignments early, because suddenly having three new assignments makes me feel all panicky.

So I guess it has good sides and bad sides. I just need to untrain myself a little so I can actually enjoy relaxing this spring break.

A side note: I started posting the shorter things (links, quotes, etc) to my tumblog. Always good if you’re looking to waste another 5 minutes.

Sweet grapes

I’ve read a lot of articles on happiness, but this is something I haven’t seen elsewhere before that I’ve found to be true: you can be happy with a lot less if you have something to look forward to. That’s mostly how I get through taking tough classes or doing tedious work. No matter how bogged down I get, having something bright in the future really keeps me motivated. In some ways, that explains a few things about me – why I can put up with working on things that make me miserable as long as it doesn’t stretch on indefinitely, for example.

I started thinking about this after realizing that I had nothing to look forward to in the near future. The next two weeks look like a flat line from here: no major ups or downs. It’s interesting that I was probably happier slaving over the last OS assignment a week ago than right now, when I feel a lot less stressed.

My dad has a saying that people are either sour-grapes-first (先吃酸葡萄) or sweet-grapes-first (先吃甜葡萄), meaning that some people would rather take the good things first, and others would take the bad first. I’m usually a sour-grapes-first person, but this time it looks like I ate the sweet grapes first.

I’m sure I’ll drum up something to look forward to though. It usually comes in the form of dessert. *grin*

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Random thought: I read a book when I was little about a kid that could switch to different dimensions, but he would come back as a mirror image of himself. The molecules in him were all flipped, so he would taste everything backwards until he flipped back (it’s bad science, I know, but it was a kid’s book). Most things were absolutely horrible, but apparently ketchup was heavenly! So what I want to know is: what does ketchup taste like backwards?