Posted on 01/27/2018 10:37:03 AM PST by mairdie
Except I am regretting all the time I wasted watching TV now... :P
I am a computer geek (for a living) and if I can ever volunteer with help programming software feel free to ask!
It would be so much fun, I think.
Many of my opportunites came BECAUSE I watched TV. Someone in fandom introduced me to music videos and I was caught. Back in 1984. And I made them unceasingly. Today I have close to 800 of them. At IBM Research, our director gave a talk on pursuit of excellence and I stopped him afterwards and told him that I gave my hobbies everything and him what I had to. Could he reverse that? He did. I got an international multimedia magazine and learned industrial video production on 1” broadcast machines. When I took early retirement, I used the retraining money to learn screenplay writing and wrote movie scripts. They didn’t sell, but those two years repped by Writers & Artists were incredible! And NONE of that would have happened without the YEARS I spent watching TV. There are 2 things. Throw yourself into your passions with all your heart. And put the same effort into your passions and hobbies that you put into your work. And for computer geeks like us, put the same nitpicking attention to detail into those passions and, whether you win or lose, you’re going to have a ball!
Thanks for the offer. Right now, my husband is doing all our programming. The last group I was in at IBM Research was User Interface, so what I’ve been doing with Mac is trying to figure out how to create reports to shove to him that make results POP. Husband programs those reports from the data we’re creating.
My girlfriend was president of Computational Linguistics when I chaired programming languages and I sucked her into the problem. At a Dunkin Donuts I read to her the poetry of Henry and Moore and stopped and explained I was having trouble getting Moore’s words out, while Henry’s were flowing easily. She explained that it probably had to do with where my tongue was in my mouth as I recited and said there was a branch of study that looked at sounds of words and tongue and lip position. I ran home and wrote Mac about that. He said he knew about it but it was a massive amount of work. AND THAT’S WHERE WE COMPUTER GEEKS WIN!!!! Academics DON’T do the work when it appears in front of them. I told him Lyn and I would do it.
So Lyn and I transcribed the entire body of poetry of Henry and Moore into phonemes, and husband programmed the massive analysis of the phoneme pairs that Mac directed so that we were looking at tongue movement. And from THAT, Mac figured out what pairs actually created a statistical separation between the work of Moore and the work of Henry. Then when the same pairs were examined in Night Before Christmas, it turned out that they were smack in the middle of Henry’s averages and just at the outside edge of Moore’s.
But the lesson learned is don’t be a tool of academics. Recognize that they’re not used to doing massive amounts of calculations and work. We are! So you push and give them opportunities they don’t know are there for them, and then let them loose on the results you create.
On our black box work we tried one of the academic open source programs and the first thing we saw was that it had no useful human interface. Massive amounts of options that could create anything, but it took so much to limit it that the user used up a lot of their creative brain power just getting almost unusable results and spent all their effort figuring out what the results were. If you create a program that show all the data lower down in the results, but keeps summarizing at the top so that they can easily skim, they make decisions faster, change their algorithms faster, and come to results based on deeper thinking.
http://www.henrylivingston.com/data
http://www.henrylivingston.com/data/favoredphonemes/moore/MOORE-SUMMARY-fpp.htm
http://www.henrylivingston.com/data/favoredphonemes/henry/HENRY-SUMMARY-fpp.htm
http://www.henrylivingston.com/data/favoredphonemes/visit/VISIT-SUMMARY-fpp.htm
Right now you’re deep in your work life. But in your hobbies you’re preparing yourself for that next stage. You see problems that you realize academics aren’t prepared to solve and if you play around with things that are YOUR passion, when the time comes that you have the time to throw yourself into it heart and soul, then you go find that professor who will open the research institution doors for you, since we civilians aren’t considered deep enough to be able to get into some of them without a sign off from a university prof. I needed PERMISSION from the Vassar Prof to get into the NYPL research part!!!!!
I have a script that my DAUGHTER write that is based on the “Russian Sleep Experiment”
It was pretty amazing stuff- I was amazed at how much better she was aat writing than I was.
She even had an instinct about planning movie shots- the whole horrible views (this was a horror movie) happened off-screen and she said “Your imagination can invent much worse things than I can probably have created with make-up” - the only thing shown was a glimpse between actors in the final scenes. She said it would be much cheaper that way too..
My kids were in a movie once when they were small.
She’s your daughter. Of COURSE, she’s good!
And she’s quite right about imagination. Sounds like her instincts are excellent. I’ve struggled with that issue of writing a cheap script versus writing expensive scenes. I don’t think I have the faintest idea how the studios make that decision. I’m sure there are people looking for each type. The question is always who your agent is able to get to read.
One of my major failures is that I’m terrified of horror movies and have great trouble writing high tension because they scare me too much.
Still thinking about doing it as a project.
It would be fun
To quote a favorite figure, “Don’t think. DO!”
Projects don’t matter how they turn out. The very process of doing them teaches and refines our skills. Every project is worth it and something will exist when you’re done that never existed before. THAT’S an awesome concept.
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