Posting Less Often on this Blog Going Forward

Since I started this blog in 2009, I have been almost perfectly consistent in posting at least once every month on this blog, and even at times when I didn't have much to write about, I would think of something to write about so that I could continue my streak of posting. The one exception was in 2023 January, where my personal travel that month prevented me from posting in time (and I noted that in the post in 2023 February [LINK]). However, going forward, I see myself no longer holding myself to such a strict regular schedule of posting. This is for the following several reasons.

Internal reasons

There are a few internal reasons (in me) to consider. First, when I started this blog in 2009, I was in high school. I was in college during 2010-2014. During those years, my youthful energy surrounding the things on my mind and my enthusiasm about online engagement through blogs led me to post often, even when my posts weren't that well-formed. Since then, that enthusiasm & energy dissipated, so my frequency & volume of posts correspondingly decreased.

Second, in high school & college, I posted a lot of Linux distribution reviews and my takes on news surrounding free software, and this continued to a gradually decreasing degree over the first half of graduate school. In graduate school, especially around the middle, I read many nonfiction books, so I posted reviews of those books, and my youthful energy kept me motivated to read such books quite regularly. Around the end of graduate school and throughout my previous job at UC Davis, I posted about topics from physics & math, especially surrounding functional calculus, and these posts were interspersed with more introspective posts about my life as well as posts about moving away from popular cloud service & social media platforms. In the last couple of years of my previous job at UC Davis and slightly after that, I posted about my iteratively improving understanding of the Earth's climate. Now, I feel like I have said what I want to say about those things and learned & tried those things to my satisfaction, so I don't feel motivated to go further into those things for myself or for the sake of this blog.

Third, more broadly, my greater age now compared to the early years of this blog have led to a more calm & sedate mindset that makes me less motivated to post on this blog just for the sake of doing so. I find that my motivation to try some other things has decreased too, perhaps in part because of the traumas that I have experienced over the last several years (like being hit by a car [LINK]) and because of my current opportunity to fulfill my desire to live a quieter life where I don't have to hustle or live in suboptimal conditions just for the sake of my career. I am quite content to work at my current job, which I enjoy very much, to spend time with friends & relatives in my area and stay in contact with those farther away, and to take care of myself physically by eating right & swimming and mentally through introspection.

Internet-related reasons

Separate from my own internal motivations, there are a few reasons related to the Internet to consider. First, I have seen that most popular search engines on the Internet yield less useful information these days compared to several years ago because so much textual and even video content is garbage generated by artificial intelligence (AI). This both makes it hard stay motivated to post anything on the Internet (as a human) and makes me wary to post anything if my content will be used by AI in unpredictable or even dangerous ways.

Second, I had hoped that this may be of use to people who may come across this on the Internet. However, as almost all popular use of the Internet these days seems to be through social media platforms, especially Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, blogging seems to have been an abandoned medium within the Internet for a long time. I am satisfied maintaining my own personal diaries for my own use, so I won't necessarily miss posting things on this blog for that reason.

Third, the current political situation in the US is dire. Legal residents in the US are being forced to turn over their social media activity for the federal government to review for activity that may go against the government's foreign policy stances, per the Associated Press [LINK]. Arrests by federal officials have ensnared US citizens and have become arbitrary & seemingly without accountability, also per the Associated Press [LINK]. Even though I haven't posted much political content on this blog in a long time and even though I can't avoid the possibility that the government may arbitrarily punish me for posts from long ago going against the government's stated partisan beliefs, I don't want to increase my liability further by posting more.

Going forward

I will still post reviews of books that I read after I read them, though my reading of books has become less regular over time. If there are things that I ponder about physics, math, climate, or other things that compel me to write about them in this blog, then I will do so. Finally, I may post things about current events if I feel that such events compel me to no longer be silent in public.

With all that said, this post may be the last post on this blog, and even if it is not the last post on this blog, it may be close to the last post on this blog, with whatever post ends up being the last post on this blog likely not noting the fact of it being the last post on this blog. For whoever happens to be reading this, please feel free to peruse this blog, starting with its first post nearly 16 years ago [LINK]. I know that this blog has lost almost all, if not all, of its human readers over the last decade, but I do wish to express my sincere gratitude for every person in my life and every stranger online who read these posts and expressed support or constructive criticism.

Green's Functions and Violin Making

A few years ago, a friend of mine, who is a very accomplished player of the violin & viola and who is an amateur builder of violins & violas, sent me a video on YouTube [LINK] of the violin maker Peter Westerlund showing how to create violins (and violas, by the same logic and with only slightly different overall dimensions) that consistently produce sounds that people well-versed in European classical music judge to be of high quality. Many such people have praised the consistent warm & rich aural tones of violins & violas made in Italy by Andrea Guarneri around 1650 & Antonio Stradivari around 1700, yet it has been difficult for any violin maker to replicate such warm & rich tones in the violins that they have made, in part because there is little scientific consensus about the specific acoustic spectral qualities that make those violins so highly valued. Further complicating matters, as explained in a news article by Science magazine in 2017 [LINK], is the fact that many blind & double-blind studies have left musicians & keen listeners preferring contemporary violins over those made by Stradivari or Guarneri. Even if the instruments by made by Stradivari or Guarneri aren't consistently rated the best, they are rated very highly far more consistently than those made by other violin makers (though this may reflect selection bias in such tests), so there may be merit to considering how to replicate those instruments' aural qualities.

Traditionally, violin makers have carefully studied the exact dimensions, shapes, and materials used in instruments made by Stradivari or Guarneri and done their best to replicate them. However, the resulting aural qualities have typically been judged to be unsatisfactory. This is in various parts due to the effects of aging on the material components of violins (which generally cannot be artificially accelerated), one-off differences in instances of even the same materials used, slight deviations in the craftsmanship, shapes, or dimensions, and other factors that have yet to be explained. This motivated Westerlund (who is probably not the first person to come up with this method) to develop a method to reliably create instruments with highly consistent sounds even if they don't replicate sounds from instruments made by Stradivari or Guarneri per se. The method is as follows. Each violin or viola has a top plate and a back plate, and these are initially constructed separately, joined only later on corresponding sides of the ribs. For each plate, after getting the basic shape & thickness correct, the violin maker should further adjust the shape by tapping or rubbing the plate in various locations, ideally using the same tapping or rubbing motion with the same intensity every time. The violin maker should iteratively shape (by cutting or scraping) at & around those locations of tapping or rubbing and then continue to tap or rub at all locations, until eventually, the tapping or rubbing motion produces approximately the same tone at every location. Once that has been achieved, shaping of the plate is finished.

My background in theoretical & computational nanophotonics from graduate school, even though I was already a few years removed from that even by a few years ago (having changed fields to transportation research after graduate school [LINK]) when my friend shared that video with me, made me interested in trying to mathematically & physically understand why Westerlund's process is successful in creating instruments that have strong internal tonal consistency. However, I wasn't able to come up with a satisfactory answer until much more recently. Follow the jump to see more of my thinking about this, leading to the resolution.

More Quantitatively Founded Intuitions About Climates

My last post on this blog [LINK] about my intuitions for climates was over 1 year ago, in 2024. Since then, I have continued to read more about climates of the world. Later in 2024, I was particularly more careful to look at maps of mean surface-level wind velocities. This led me to start to carefully catalog the climates of the world and attempt to explain them based on mean surface-level pressures & wind velocities along with qualitative ideas about the differences between air masses at different temperatures & humidity levels. I felt satisfied doing so for Oceania as well as for Africa in the southern hemisphere. I did so for South America at the middle latitudes (which is entirely within the southern hemisphere) too, and I thought of continuing through tropical latitudes in South America, near-equatorial latitudes in Africa, and thereafter all tropical, subtropical, middle, and subpolar latitudes in the northern hemisphere. However, as I looked more carefully at these maps and compared them to actual climate data from various locations, I started to think that my understanding of these climactic processes is too limited, especially by my focus on qualitative understanding of surface-level phenomena, to be able to come up with accurate explanations. (Even looking back at the post linked at the beginning of this paragraph and even older posts linked within that post, I can see how many things I have said in those posts that I know now to be inaccurate.) Because of that, I shelved the idea of continuing with these detailed explanations until much more recently, when I started looking more carefully at maps of sea/ocean surface temperatures and at calculations of air density at various pressure levels, humidity levels, and temperatures. This made it possible for me to reinforce my intuitions about temperatures & precipitation distributions at various locations in the aspects in which they were correct and fix them in the aspects in which they were wrong. Thus, this blog post is meant to be that originally-intended compendium of explanations for climates in various parts of each comment in tropical, subtropical, middle, and subpolar latitudes (excluding Antarctica).

The sources that I used were many relevant pages from Wikipedia, the Columbia University interactive maps of mean monthly wind velocities [LINK] & mean monthly sea/ocean surface temperatures [LINK], the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecast static global maps of mean surface-level air pressures in different astronomical seasons [LINK] (though this website has very recently started displaying a warning that the maps are now out of date), and the OmniCalc air density calculator [LINK]. Again, I am not a trained climatologist or meteorologist; I can't guarantee that this information is accurate, and I can only say that my intuitions seem through my limited understanding to align with superficial aspects of more detailed explanations. Follow the jump to see these explanations.

Book Review: "Noise" by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein

I recently read the book Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein. I will refer to it as the current book, because it was written after the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman (one of the authors of the current book); I will refer to the latter book as the previous book because many concepts from the previous book are briefly reviewed in the current book, and as I reviewed the previous book in the post just before this one on this blog [LINK], I will sometimes compare some aspects of the current book to the previous book.

The current book introduces the concepts of statistical noise & statistical bias in human judgments, discusses the psychological biases that can lead to statistical biases & noise (of which statistical noise can be clearly seen even in the absence of clear information about statistical biases), demonstrates how statistical noise can lead to uncontrolled & large variations in human judgments in fields like criminal justice, medicine, forensic science, insurance claims adjustment, corporate hiring, and college admissions, explains the sorts of systematic techniques at individual & organizational levels that can be used to reduce noise in judgments, and discusses some tradeoffs that may be encountered when implementing these noise reduction strategies. The authors' discussion of many of the psychological biases that lead to statistical noise in judgments reviews concepts from the previous book, especially Systems 1 & 2.

When reading the current book, I found myself generally agreeing with the discussions of techniques to reduce noise in domains where the presence of significant statistical noise in judgments is broadly recognized as a severe problem. These techniques include aggregating predictions or evaluations that are made independently, structuring/sequencing discussions among people judging things so that their decisions don't affect each other through emergent group-based social dynamics, carefully accounting for base rates from external information when assessing various internal probabilities, and breaking up decision processes into smaller steps that are more clearly defined in their intent and in example decisions/anchors. It helped a lot that I had read the previous book first, such that even if I didn't remember every detail of every psychological bias presented in both the previous book and the current book, those things looked familiar upon reading them in the current book.

There were also a few new things that I learned from the current book. I learned about how the process of judgment feels so satisfying and infuses confidence into the person making the judgment specifically from the psychological signal of having completed the judgment, which explains why so many people who make professional judgments in many domains are so reluctant to turn their discretion over to more systematic rules or algorithms. I also learned about how simple models of human predictive judgments, when those predictive judgments are about specific outcomes, may do a better job at predicting the outcomes that are the objects of judgment than at predicting the judgments that humans would make, simply because those models lack within-person noise pervasive in human judgments.

However, my overall opinion of the current book was shaped more by the many major and minor (the latter to an appropriately lesser extent) criticisms of it. These minor and major criticisms as well as my concluding remarks will be presented in separate sections as follows after the jump; the spoiling of my concluding remarks is simply that I do not recommend this book to others.

Book Review: "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman

I started reading the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman in early 2024. This was initially recommended to me by a friend, and I became even more motivated to read it upon hearing positive things about it from colleagues at my previous job, as many of the subtleties described in the book are extremely relevant to the appropriate design of interviews, focus groups, and surveys of human subjects in social science research. However, because it is a long book and the middle of 2024 was made busier for me by moving back to Maryland, traveling a lot, and starting a new job (some of which I have discussed in a previous post [LINK]), I could not finish reading this book until much more recently. Because of this large gap between reading the initial 60% and remaining 40% of this book, I admit that I have since forgotten many details from the initial 60% of this book. Moreover, I started making notes to myself in this post based on that initial 60% because I assumed that I would be able to finish reading the remaining 40% soon afterwards and I would therefore remember the book as a coherent whole, but because that didn't happen, many of the notes that I have made in this post that were supposed to form the skeleton of this post now no longer make as much sense to me. For these reasons, this post may seem a bit more stilted than other book review posts in this blog and will likely seem stronger/more coherent when discussing the latter 40% of the book.

The book is a lengthy exposition of novel ideas in psychology & behavioral economics that were empirically validated by the author, most often in conjunction with his longtime academic collaborator Amos Tversky. The concluding chapter does a good job of recapitulating the main ideas of the book. Most of the book explores various facets of individual & group-based human behavior based on the idea that there are effectively 2 modes through which individuals process information, which the author refers to as Systems 1 & 2. System 1 "thinks fast", making snap judgments based on limited information, heuristics, and a bit of laziness, and is the aspect of thinking that drives most day-to-day reactions & decisionmaking, while System 2 "thinks slow", making more deliberate judgments with more of an effort to gather all relevant information but must in turn be consciously engaged and ultimately disengages from mental fatigue (in favor of System 1) if engaged for too long. The book also considers how individuals' typical behaviors when faced with outcomes that are certain competing with outcomes that have known or unknown probabilities deviate from behaviors idealized by microeconomic theories of expected utility, notably that while the commonly observed behavior choosing a certain gain with a lower value than the expected value of an uncertain gain can be explained to some degree by expected utility theory, the commonly observed behavior of choosing a gamble on losing outcomes with an expected loss of larger magnitude than a different certain loss cannot be explained by expected utility theory; this partly explains the risks that people take in business and can be explained in turn by how people in their perceptions tend to overestimate probabilities that are close to but not exactly 0 and underestimate probabilities that are close to but not exactly 1. Finally, the book partly explains notions of hedonic adaptation (the idea that one's sense of well-being is generally similar in many different good or bad medium- or long-term circumstances by adapting to those circumstances) by distinguishing how people rate pleasure or pain when experiencing those things versus in hindsight and shows how people's conceptions of their identities & well-being in the past, present, and future are intimately tied to their actual memories and their abilities to form & retain memories. These aspects of self-conception as well as perceptions of probability can also be tied to Systems 1 versus 2, as many seemingly shortsighted decisions or perceptions can be explained by System 1 making snap judgments lazily & using heuristics based on incomplete information.

Especially as I read the latter 40% of the book, I came to appreciate how many of the ideas of this book had permeated into other things that I had read & heard from others and that I had internalized into my own worldview & view of myself. Professionally, I could see how so many aspects of framing could be important when designing surveys & focus groups. Personally, I could see how especially as I have aged, I have in many cases consciously chosen to not worry too much about certain details and instead make decisions based on lazier heuristics because I didn't feel that the results of spending more mental energy making a decision based on System 2 would be worth the effort. At the same time, I have become more consciously aware of how my memories of things in my own life can be affected by the passage of time and by more recent events in my own life, and I have become more consciously aware of the deep entanglement between my perceptions of my own memories and the narratives that shape my perceptions of my own life & of the world. I thus feel more proud of maintaining detailed personal diaries where I take note (using System 2 as much as possible when considering things outside of the current moment) of how I feel about various things in the moment as well as in hindsight and carefully consider how & why my thoughts & feelings about different events in or aspects of my life have evolved over time. Moreover, I have become more aware over time of when I might be vulnerable (through System 1) to the power of suggestion or to a subconscious desire to align with groupthink, though given that it is System 1, I am not necessarily aware of these things until later (thinking about these things through System 2). Finally, especially over the last several years, I have come to see many things at a very broad conceptual/philosophical level, whether the experiences in my own life, the evolution of different aspects of human society, or the expansion of human knowledge, in terms of perdurantism [LINK from Wikipedia]; although I am not philosophically sophisticated enough to be able to think through & defend all of its implications, it intuitively makes sense to me to think about personal identities, feelings, people, and other things that can be said to exist, in terms of their existence in spacetime and not just in space at specific instants of time. Because of my philosophical inclination in this way, I was particularly pleased to see the author discuss the idea of time-integrated pleasure or pain and of looking at changing identities or overall life courses in terms of spacetime.

Although this book is not technical at the level of an academic journal article, it is fairly technical compared to most nonfiction books aimed at the general public, so I would say that it is aimed at a well-educated reader. That said, I do think that it is written with reasonable clarity for non-academic audiences. Additionally, the book covers many topics, and it is recommended to bear in mind the headings of sections that comprise groups of chapters, because otherwise, it is easy to lose track of the narrative of the book, especially because the book is long enough that I suspect that it would be impossible for most readers (even those who read books, including more technical nonfiction books, relatively quickly) to finish this book in one sitting. I would say that the concluding chapter is a nice way to reinforce the main points of the book in the reader's mind and that the details of each chapter can be treated as a reference when needed as opposed to forming a perfectly coherent narrative in the progression of chapters in the book.

It is important to remember that some aspects of this book are out of date. In some cases, that is just because this book was published in 2011 and had been written over many years before that; for example, the author gives an example of estimating the likelihood of choosing a particular major in college, but that example uses base rates that seem to be quite out-of-date. In other cases, the book is out of date because it is based on academic experimental work in psychology & behavioral economics, and other studies may find contradictory (either null or opposite) results to those presented in this book. The Wikipedia article about this book [LINK] discussed how most of the results from most of the studies discussed in one chapter (as an example) have been found to be not replicable, with the author afterwards admitting to putting too much faith in those studies and therefore falling prey to the same biases as those discussed in that chapter & elsewhere in the book. As a slightly different example, later parts of the book discuss the ideas of nudge theory and its seeming successes in public policy, but the Wikipedia article about nudge theory [LINK] has pointed out that later studies & meta-analyses have found that after correcting for publication biases in favor of positive results & against null results, nudging does not yield statistically significant (non-null) effects on human behavior; in this case, one of the primary researchers (who is named in this book as a collaborator of the author & pioneer of nudge theory) has made some counterarguments that I don't find convincing.

With these caveats in mind, I would still recommend this book to anyone interested in these ideas and with the patience to carefully consider them, though this may partly reflect my own biases in how I view issues of identity & the world. Follow the jump to see my other assorted & disjointed thoughts about this book.