I’ve just wasted spent a few hours looking through the open source options for software that allows you to run cognitive psychology experiments. This is one of those realms where open source/free software really shines, I think.

One big reason for this is that most of the available proprietary options suck, because its never going to reach mass appeal or distribution. There are probably only a few thousand people who migh ever need software like this, so between competition and obsolete homegrown solutions that use hypercard or something. On the other hand, the faculty member reports that they “wrote their own experimental environments in QuickBasic,” which is a product of the late 80s, and she went to grad school in the late 90s. Maybe she meant visual basic and misspoke, in any case, it’s frightening. I’m frightened.

I think we should all just sigh at this point.

Ok, so open source is made for this kind of situation. Not only do the proprietary options lack a certian grace and flexibility, but there’s a lot of polish that we don’t need and on the whole we’re talking about a really rather simple program. It also helps that a good percentage of “cognitive scientists” are trained a computer scientists, not psychologists, alhough the literature doesn’t cross over as much as you’d think¹: despite this project, it’s not really my field, so I’m not completely “up” on the literature. In any case, computer scientists generally have the knowledge to write these kinds of programs, and because they work for universities…

Anyway so I found one of these programs called WebExp, that uses XML to define the experiments, and outputs data in a pure XML file. The only disappointing factor is that it runs in java. I’m not a java fan, because installing all the frameworks and what not has always seemed less than desirable for me. But what? I’m a fearless OS X user. I open up my terminal window, and on a lark, I type:

$ java -version

This was the response:

Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_07-164)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_07-87, mixed mode, sharing)

Which is good enough for this program. I love OS X. Now all I have to do is unzip, run, and set up the XML file to design the experiment. It will even automatically counterbalance or randomly order stimuli! While I think the intention of this program is to let people do experiments at home, there’s nothing to stop you from running them locally on your own system. How cool is that?

The best things in life are free.

Even though I know it’s out of vogue and comments on a cultural moment that’s past, a little bit of my heart still belongs to the “great empires” breed of science fiction novels. Like the Foundation books, like Dune (though I’ve not gotten to them quite yet, I’m sort of hoarding them I guess.) Actually as I think about this, there are a number of “great series” in science fiction that I haven’t read year, probably for this reason.

While not a universal--I think Dune breaks this rule--most of these “great empire” series, aren’t really about a character or group of characters in the way that I think is more common these days. There are characters, of course, and they’re important, but they don’t stick around for a long time in the way that character driven fiction tends to be. And there isn’t really anything wrong with character driven fiction, it just leads to a different kind of perspective, and type of story, and to be fair, I think it’s the prevailing trend.

It seems that this “galactic empire,” style of story telling is really rooted in a sort of “cold war” framework and with the end of the cold war, the idea of “top down” superpowers isn’t something that’s omnipresent. I suppose that some of the late-cyberpunk writing that deals with corporations of increased size and unchallenged single powers, is the present day product of this tradition, but it takes a different tone, and a much more “bottom up” type approach.

I guess the question that’s hanging in my mind is can we get away with writing this kind of “big picture” story in today’s context? I think the cold war is an easier issue to resolve for contemporary writers than is the character-centrism, but I’m open to ideas.

Ok, so some of you probably won’t find this that helpful, but here’s something I think is rather cool.

All of you should know that in OS X that the terminal command:

$ mdfind *******

where the ******* is your search term (and yes, you can constrain the results using a specific directory, or wildcards) will use the spotlight framework in OS X to find files that contain your search term. That’s pretty nifty, and it’s fast, significantly faster than the GUI.

The next part of this hack uses a very basic shell scripting thing, that most shell fiends know…

$ mdfind ******* > search.results.txt

Will preform your search just as above, but it will put the results into whatever file you say, and make a new file if it doesn’t already exist. That’s kind of cool.

Once it’s in the file I open the new file in TextMate. With some quick find and replace I escape out the spaces in the file names, and prefix all of the lines with an “open” command, I could probably write a macro that would do this, but I’m lazy, and the opportunity to write a regexp every now and then makes me feel smart.

Then, because TextMate is so awesome, if you just hit ^R (control-R) when you’ve found a line that mentions a line you’re interested in, it will execute the line, and open the file.

As I think about it, you could omit the “open the terminal and enter the command” step and just sort of use TextMate as a sort of de-facto shell, but I have a terminal window triggered to a hot-key that’s easy to work from so that seems like the way to go.

Anyway, I think it’s fun, and I definatly recomend using spotlight from the command line, rather than the GUI, because it’s faster, and I find that having the information about where the file is located is helpful for sorting out files that I know can’t possibly be the right ones.

Good searching!

This is just my inner space opera lover voice coming out. A huge part of the story I’m thinking about takes place during outbound flights out of our solar system, likely to Epsilon Eridani, because it’s close and has planets.

Epsilon Eridani. Is like what? 10 Light years away? And it has planets? So assuming we only are able to make half light speed, round trip we’re talking about 40 or 50 years, which would be less in subjective time because of relativistic effects. Ok, so it’s still hard. You’d have to send people who were twenty, and they’d get back 40 years later, though though the subjective time is only about 5-10 years. The faster you go, the shorter it seems to take, relative to how long it actually takes.

This is all based on the supposition that extraterrestrial colonization at a certain point, doesn’t need to be based upon finding Earth-Like planets, but rather be based on finding places where we can build reasonably self-sustaining domes, or really just landed spaceships. Planets are nice, and they mean that you don’t have to expend energy to maintain a course, and that hopefully you have resources that you can mine near by that are accessible. If you build/design the habitats right, it right it’d work fine or at least fine enough for a novel.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

As you may have guessed I’m not that good with respecting traditional boundaries. It took me a long time to find an academic field that addressed the issues I’m interested in on the scope that I’m interested in. I’m interested in the identity vis a vis the cultural construction of memory, and because identity is a subject that is so often addressed by personality and social psychologists, I thought, of course that’s where I should be working. Wrong. Turns out, all the cool work on the subject is being done by developmentalists who work sort of at the confluence of linguistics and anthropology, more or less. That’s not something they teach you in Psych 100, alas--it might be something I would teach you in Psych 100, however.

Similarly, in my (science) fiction writing, I often say that I write pretty straightforward and unabashed space opera, much in the same way that I used to say that I wanted to be a social or personality psychologist. But as I’m planning out this new book, I’m realizing that that’s not strictly true.

The novella, was probably about half way between cyber-punk and space opera, except that all of the story is set on Mars and Earth, which is about the extent of human occupation, and it still takes 6-12 months to get between Mars and Earth. Not exactly star trek, even though it’s theoretically set a few hundred years after Captain Kirk.

The project I’m working on now, is more in space, and while I’m going to be playing with a few cyberpunk ideas/settings, it’s still not very Captain Kirk-ish. Earth to Saturn takes about 3 weeks, and for interstellar flights, figure pretty damn close to lightspeed, but not there. While this sounds more like a space opera, I think my general tone is much less… romantic. I think I’d generally agree with Debra Doyle’s assertion that SF is a genre of romances, I’m just less, bright and shiny about.

Maybe someday I’ll find a happy home for the fiction projects. In the mean time. I have things I should be doing. eek.

cheers, t.

Sorry I’ve been (more) absent these past few days. I remain well.

A lot of my writing time has been going to the novel project. I have a pretty good story-board level outline of the first act. Andy sent me a great link about writing narrative computer games which I’m going to be reading in more depth as I plan the second part. I can feel it starting to get together, so that’s good. I’ve talked before about my trials with “research” in the context of my writing, and I think I’m doing better with this, and won’t bore you with the details.

The funny thing is that I predict that at this pace I might be ready to start the draft during november, which means despite my crankyness about NaNoWriMo, I might actually start with the rest of folk around November 1. I have a lot of other projects that are going to be coming due about that time, so I don’t expect that I’ll actually get it done, and wouldn’t think of trying, but that’s cool.

I also am getting preliminary feedback on the novella. I’m encouraged.

Cheers!

There was an art fair next to an local-artisan fair today, this morning, that I’ve gone to a lot when I’m in town. It’s sort of near where we used to live, though I don’t think we ever lived there while this was going on. I don’t tend to get things at art fairs, which is fine. It’s fun to watch people, and I like looking at art; having said that, I did get a bracelet and a necklace: two things which I’ve idly been looking for for a long time. The bracelet is a brushed stainless steel, very solid, and quite nice: I have a tendency to erode any metal that’s on my skin for any period of time. Call it my super power. The necklace, is just a blue and black glass pendant, square and black, with a blue thing in it. The cord is a thin black rubber thing, and I suspect I’ll move over to a black leather strap at some point, but for now it’s fine.

I’ve been reading through the novella, and making a few minor changes. I was inconsistent in my spelling of a character’s name. Don’t worry I’m not a weird SF namer, the name was Gus, I just thought it needed two s’s sometimes. I’m worried that the beginning and the end aren’t consistent with each-other in terms of tone and style, but this is a neurosis that I need to deal with. I want to sift through it so that I can catch the worst problems, but I’m not changing anything big, because I want to see how it all plays. I have a list of first readers that I want to get it out to really quick, so that I can take a break from it in earnest.

I’m still planning out the novel. This ones, sort of tracks some of the questions that I’m interested in playing with in my academic work, and I think the story is pretty interesting to boot. I’m still working on developing various elements and parts of the story. Every so often I take a page of the moleskine and say, “here’s what I know about this part of the story,” and I’m finding that there are fewer places where I sort of draw a box and say… “something happens big” each time. So I’m getting there, but I need to get clearer with the fact that this planning is really crucial to the writing process, and should count as writing. I think I get pretty caught up in the word-count as a marker of progress that I forget all of the “work in a generous sense” (yuck it up guys) that goes into this process.

One of the things that I’m struggling with is that I want part of a section to “feel” like a computer/video game. There are a number of reasons for this, which I think would require too much explanation, but I think it works. My issue? Never played a video game with a plot. Sure, I had some fun in some of the flight-simulator-esque games, where you fly around and blow things up, but I never payed attention to the story. I’ve come to understand that there are a lot of these games which are quite like novels in the way that they tell stories and what not. So I need to pick the creative mind of some game designer (is that the right word or does that mean the folks who write the programs?) Those of you with writing podcasts, cough Mur and Matt, take note.

And other than that, things are chugging along. I have an office that’s great, I have furniture in my room that you can actually sit on. I’m busy, which is a little stressful, but really I like it this way.

Be well, and I’ll be around more in the coming days.

I have to admit--with some amount of shame--that I have such a library of articles on my computer that I can basically write short little papers of the kind that I have to this semester, based entirely on articles I already have on my computer. This isn’t to say that I’m not reading new articles, just that I collect them, and don’t read them immediately.

Part of my paper today, on linguistic relativism, involved--as my dearest friends will surely not be surprised--a brief reading of Samuel Delany’s science fiction novel Babel-17, which uses the Saphir-Whorf Hypothesis to great effect.

So in doing so I did a search of my computer and found a great interview with Delany that I downloaded, but didn’t read, 3.5 years ago for a paper I was writing on Delany then. I also, as happenstance, didn’t read the interview for another paper I was writing on Delany a year later. Alas. Anyway, I found the following quote, which I think is priceless. I hope you enjoy!

My life partner of nine years, Dennis, who, by his own admission has read only a single book cover to cover (Cavel’s Shogun, which he picked entirely on the criterion of size: When, after he met me, he decided he better read at least one, he figured he’d best make it a big one), walked through the living room just this morning, as I was talking on the phone with a long-time journalist friend, enthusing over some structurally serendipitous discovery I’d made in a recent reading of the incomplete draft of my current novel. Dennis gave a wonderfully generous laugh and declared: “You guys are crazy . . . !” before, with a grin, he left to meet a friend of his and go walking in the Sunday morning street fair out on Broadway.