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Sick Ridiculopathy
(31 Jan 2018 at 22:25) |
Hey, here I am again!
I've continued up my streak of "running" every day, now passing the six month mark, although "running" now expanded to include the exercise bike. I was already counting treadmill (seems natural) and elliptical (maybe more questionable but it is clearly running-like), but the bike seems to me like a bit of a departure. Unfortunately it's for a pretty annoying reason, which is that an old malady, this herniated disc of mine, has been acting up something fierce this month. I don't know if I ever posted about this (closest I can find is Post #47, Theme from Spinal Fluid, still good), but basically two of my neck vertebrae are squishing the guts of the disc between too hard, and then the disc guts blow a hole in the disc wall and shoot out guts all over my spinal cord, which is where most of the good stuff happens in the body. It looks like this (or did, in 2012): 
Theme from Spinal Impingement
The thing at the left is a slice of the cervical vertebrae, the grey tube to its right is the spinal cord, and the big black blob at 0,0 is herniation ground zero. Anyway I had this thing for a while, mostly just a literal pain in the neck, but for the entirety of this month it's been (I presume) impinging on my arm nerve roots and giving me awful phantom arm pains ("radiculopathy"), which are exacerbated by footfalls. This has pretty much precluded real running, and made pretty much everything else pretty painful, so it's been a bummer month. This is a problem that's likely to be solvable eventually (basically worst case is surgery), so that's good, but also will likely involve weeks or months of annoying and disruptive pain. It's good that I have the exercise streak going, because otherwise it would be a very tempting excuse to just laze around.
On the other hand I have gotten some good project work done this month. One is a fairly boring house project, tearing out some old moldy fiberglass insulation in this crawlspace/closet and putting in better moisture-resistant stuff, and then building these needlessly sturdy shelves:
I cantilever not butter
It's a bit hard to tell, but they're cantilevered, which requires more work (good) and provides more space (also good) because there's no support on the front side (so for example I can still put big objects on the floor under them). There are a couple of mistakes but I'm pretty happy with it for a crawlspace kinda install. (Also they're not totally done in this photo; I need to do some finishing still.)
Then, since finishing up my last video I've been back at my old NES "AI" projects again. I've been working on it off-and-on for several years, actually, with lots to say, but this month I finally had some breakthroughs that has it performing pretty impressively my test game (namely, winning it in about 96 hours of CPU). That win isn't totally hint-free like my previous work—you could call it "cheating"—so there's more to do before I'll consider this really to be a proper v2. But here's a image from tonight's experiments:
Science
Basically this graphic shows that the 48 hours of tuning is pointless because the parameter does not affect the outcomes any more than luck (which may actually be good news?). But despite the complexity I'm beginning to put together a strategy for making videos about the new pieces, some of which are interesting, maybe targeting SIGBOVIK? And speaking of SIGBOVIK, the 2018 site and call-for-papers is up, so consider making something! |  |
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