Polaaripyörre by Tiina Raevaara
I really enjoyed this book! I’m not a fan of generic “horror” or “thrillers,” but Raevaara’s “scientific thrillers” (this one and the previous Kaksoiskierre) have engaging characters and believable plot twists (believable both scientifically and ethically). Sometimes her characters do things that make me say “no way would anybody do that,” and the next day I read something similar about Elon Musk.
The science (even at the bleeding edge) is VERY believable, and the feeling of working in the labs her characters work in is very convincing. The boring stages, the exhaustion of workers doing mindless repetition, or even worse “mostly mindless repetition” that requires intense thought occasionally.
I don’t want to give too much away, but I LOVED the way she built, managed, and occasionally subverted expectations for the characters, especially the antagonists. This sometimes depends on character- and world-building from her previous novel. I couldn’t tell immediately how much was “planned in advance” when she wrote the earlier novel, but it always felt organic and meaningful.
Despite my intentions, I like the protagonist in both books, Erika, but I also like the world-building to create depth with the other characters in her world, especially when it doesn’t immediately pay off.
I said above that her plot twists are always scientifically believable. For me, that sometimes means that I think “Hmmm, that seems unlikely, but I’m no expert and I’m going to suspend disbelief rather than do the reading it would take for me to catch up.” The only author I can compare her “scientific thrillers” to is Michael Crichton. I find her books to be more enjoyable, and part of that is that I enjoy the way she undermines obvious superficial political or moral conclusions.
I tend to think and ponder more when I’m reading Finnish novels, and I really enjoyed thinking about this book while enjoying it.
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The Accident Where I Was Killed
[Originally posted to Facebook on February 23, 2010]
When describing the video of my accident a few months later, still in early stages of recovery from brain damage, I said in passing “This is the accident where I was killed.” Even through my brain damage I realized pretty quickly that it didn’t actually happen that way. I’ve thought over those words several times since then to figure out why they felt right to me, but haven’t completely figured it out. They still feel right, including the ridiculous melodrama of saying it that way.
On December 7, 2006, I stayed late in the Neurolab at Georgia Tech, finishing up my part of a group presentation in Hybrid Neural Microsystems laboratory class. By the end of this semester (when I had worked long hours every day for this 3-credit-hour class, and even longer for the SEVEN credit-hour Systems Neuroscience class at Emory), I was starting to question my decision to quit my job and earn a PhD. Especially since the work I did that night was not the technical work I enjoyed, but work on my LABORATORY NOTEBOOK. I’ve always hated “notebook work,” nearly failing high school because of this. I considered the notebook I kept the year before to be a useful record of my work on the project, but the instructor failed it, so I was doing excessively-detailed work this year. I had gotten an “A” for notebook work the first module this year, but the instructor for the second half was my nemesis from the year before…
I remember working on the notebook late that night. I’ve found a couple of e-mails sent around 9pm that I can remember writing. I don’t remember the last work I did that night, nor do I remember leaving the lab; everything after this is reconstructed from the (good) evidence I can find. I left some time around 11pm and walked to the Midtown MARTA station. This was the coldest night that winter so I was probably walking rapidly. I took the train to Doraville station, arriving just before midnight. I drove my silver 2000 Toyota Echo from the parking lot, went the length of Park Avenue, past City Hall and the Police Department, and got into the queue turning left onto Buford Highway.
“A” -Doraville MARTA station “C” – Entrance to our neighborhood “B” – Accident site
When the arrow turned green I entered the intersection to jog over into my neighborhood, but I was interrupted by a black pickup truck speeding south through the red light on Buford Highway. The instant of impact is hidden in the police video [LINK ABOVE] behind another police car, but you get to see an impressive shower of debris from my car. The truck struck the front driver’s side corner of my car, which slammed my car sideways into his truck to start my flight. My tiny car was enough to make the truck spin sideways, and the side of his truck hit the front of the obscuring police car at the intersection, hard enough to total the police car. I haven’t met this officer, but a lawyer claiming to represent him did call me and my lawyer a couple of times with some incorrect, unethical, and contradictory statements about what he had “seen” of the accident. More on this in another note.
All three of these vehicles continued south down the highway out of the video. The police officer in the totaled car was injured, I believe with a broken leg. The guy who hit me was unconscious. I was also unconscious, which was probably good, since I had a shattered lower leg, several broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a severe brain injury. The officers then proceeded to describe the accident among themselves in a way that even my severely damaged brain in the hospital could see was impossible: They said that my tiny (less than a ton) Toyota Echo had been speeding down Buford Highway, slammed on brakes, struck the pickup truck with enough force to cause it to strike (and total) the police car sideways, with all three cars having enough extra energy to continue sliding down the road for 30-50 feet. To make this possible in their minds, they assumed that my car was going in excess of 100 mph, which it probably couldn’t have done if dropped off of a large cliff. But to make the physics work, I think my car would have needed to be going closer to 200 mph. The actual accident report detailing this fantasy was written up by a Georgia State Patrol officer who arrived on the scene a few minutes later, and whose car video of arriving on the scene then was the only evidence entered in his support. I’m not sure whether the fact that the accident took place on a state highway, or the fact that a Doraville Police Department vehicle was destroyed and an officer injured in the accident determined that the State Patrol officer wrote the report.
The State Patrol officer called my home about two months after the accident where I was convalescing with a broken leg and severe brain damage. He called to speak to my wife about court arrangements for the charge against me of running the red light, but when I answered the phone, he asked if I had any questions. I said that we had gone to some effort to reconstruct my movements that night, and we couldn’t figure out any way that I could have been driving that direction down Buford Hwy, since we had pinned down that I was at Georgia Tech an hour before that, and had to ride the train back to get my car in Doraville. He said “Well, you must’ve gotten lost in Doraville, ’cause you were definitely going that direction. I saw the video that night.” My wife says that the “got lost” meme was in the air because I kept an Atlanta road atlas in my passenger’s seat, and it apparently flew open onto me or under my hand during the accident. But this was the first confirmation that such a video existed, and he was more generous than my car insurance case manager who suggested to Lisa that I had been up Buford Highway visiting a hooker that night. I don’t reckon those hookers are too attractive, and I don’t speak Spanish anyway, so we ruled that out pretty fast.
But all of this was weeks after the accident. That night, the perpetrator and I were rushed to Grady Hospital, where I got excellent trauma care. My brother, Eric, had worked in the ICU at Grady while training as a nurse anesthetist, so he knew a lot of the people down there. He mentioned that the perpetrator and I were in the same room for a while, and his family kept glaring at me. The doctors graded my responsiveness on the Glasgow Coma Scale at 3/15 a few hours after the accident. On that scale anything less than 9/15 is categorized as a severe brain injury, and 3/15 is called “deep coma or death.” From this they told Lisa that I might be able to learn to feed and dress myself after recovery. She said that would be an improvement over before the accident. I may have imagined that last part. After two days my score had rocketed up to 9/15, on the border between “severe brain injury” and “moderate brain injury.” 2 weeks later I was all the way up to “minor brain injury,” since I could grunt in response to questions. I could also squeeze my wife’s and mom’s hands, but I really seemed to ignore doctors. Since I quit work to return to school a few months before the accident, the minor brain injury may also have been a preexisting condition.
I just read my medical file from Grady for the first time to check those numbers out. It was an amazing story from the paramedics and the emergency room doctors. Reading it, I assume the guy didn’t survive, which takes me back to the title of this note. I’ve mentioned some of it already, but the further parts of the story will be my early treatment and rehabilitation, our investigation about the accident, our court cases, and my (ongoing) later recovery and financial trials.
Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at GaTech
Went to see the 10 finalists in the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at GaTech tonight. It was fantastic. Here’s a link to all of the semi-finalists.
I particularly enjoyed (click on the musician or instrument name for more information):
Uday Shankar – Chitravenu
Tolgahan Cogulu – Adjustable Microtonal Guitar [YouTube video of him playing the guitar] [Microtonal Spanish Love Song YouTube video]
Feng Gao – TRI-O[YouTube Video]
And my second tier:
Teenage Engineering – OP-1
nu desine – AlphaSphere
Chitravenu, in particular, was created by a biomedical engineer previously at GaTech. It was a flutish instrument with an unusual mechanism that gave it a continuous scale, and with a zither-like instrument attached to provide resonances. He played some Indian music with a drone machine as background, then later he played us some Mississippi blues.
The Microtonal Guitar was an 8-string gutar that he made, and it actually had a mechanism he had invented with movable frets to tune the guitar to different microtonal scales. He was an excellent musician, and a great thinker/engineer with his design innovations.
TRI-O was a mechanism that introduced delays and tempo changes in a midi performance of Bach’s Goldberg variations. He exaggerated it during the competition so that we would hear the effect, but even then, it produced a very cognitively appealing human-sounding performance. The mechanism was also aesthetically appealing, three little turntables on a small board, each with a bolt sticking out of it, and the parameters of delay defined by the triangle created by the three bolts as the turntables turned at different speeds.
I listened to a couple of albums we talked about last week, Yes’ “The Yes Album” on the way to the competition, and Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” hits collection on the way back. I have listened to music very differently since my accident, and in some strange way, every time I listen to an album, it feels like the first time I have listened to it. Not as much as right after the accident, but still something like that. So I appreciated the Yes Album on the way down there (I walked to MARTA), and heard elements in the music I’d never noticed before. But after the competition, which takes music apart and reassembles it in many different ways, my mind REALLY took Pink Floyd apart, and I see several different periods of their music in a different way, now, and see the way they took the blues and made little twists here and there to create something new.
Oh, I also listened to the end of the Yes Album afterwards, so I got the new perspective on Perpetual Change, The Venture, and Starship Trooper.
It was a great experience. One of my last memories before my accident is a week or two before, when Alex and I went down to GaTech to see an experimental asian drum that would learn rhythms you played on it, and play a composition with you based on your rhythms. I love the groups at Georgia Tech that work at the interfaces between art, design, and engineering.
North American Discworld Convention 3 in Baltimore
I gave two sessions at the North American Discworld Convention in Baltimore last weekend, one on Posterior Cortical Atrophy, the form of Alzheimer’s Disease that afflicts Terry Pratchett, and one on “Headology,” Sir Pterry’s term used throughout his books to refer to practical psychology combined with practical philosophy of mind. I have posted the slides and my notes on the slides here.
Please let me know if I should add any more material to the notes to clarify the presentations. I spent time in preparing the slides and I was quite familiar with the material.
Simple Complexity
This is a place for me to collect my research and ideas about complex dynamical systems. I’ve been studying and researching various types and aspects of these for over 15 years. I learned what a dynamical system is by simulating a tethered-satellite system with my MSEE advisor, Tom Denney, at Auburn.
As an engineering student, I had always thought that several areas of “study” were a complete waste of time: philosophy (despite really enjoying my Intro to Ethics class), and the “soft sciences” of biology and psychology. I have been amply repaid for my ignorant arrogance, with several (so far) unsuccessful years of research in neuroscience at Georgia Tech and Emory, where I have found some very interesting and important questions at the intersection of biology, psychology, philosophy, and computer science.
My interests are mostly concerned with the human mind, though it’s such a fantastically complex system (more specifics in a later post) that it’s helpful to look at other systems. Most of these systems are simpler, though there are also many useful examples in human social organizations.
In the next post I’ll outline the complexity of the human brain, after that we’ll look at some common organizational principles, principles that are not just a useful way to analyze complex systems, but are actually basic organizational principles for them.
I’m also planning on discussing other things of personal interest that may seem only tangentially related, but I plan on avoiding politics as much as possible. And despite the jargon I’m throwing around in this introduction, I strongly believe that you don’t understand something until you can explain it to an intelligent non-specialist, so I’m going to be speaking clear English.
I plan on reviewing the works of many people discussing complex systems, including Douglas Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach, among others), Jeff Hawkins’ On Intelligence, and works about hierarchically organized systems, such as Hierarchy Theory, edited by Howard Pattee.
