One MORE month passes. I don't get how hard it is to regularly update this site. I don't get why I always want to open my posts with whining as well. The mysteries of life.

To give you the idea of how mundane my life is, I spent a considerable amount of time and effort finding and buying a water bottle for myself. The water bottle I settled on can be see in the image above. I am very happy with this water bottle. I drink more water because I like this water bottle. This is about as interesting as my life gets now.

Speaking of buying things to make you happy, as a summer project I decided to buy a new EEG headset. As some of the people who know me might know, some years ago I was pretty into neuroscience and EEG. I bought a few pretty basic EEG devices and fiddled around with them. In a previous post ( 19012020) I mentioned one of the experiments I conducted where I wanted to see if flashing LED lights can induce certain kinds of brain activity that could be measured with an EEG. I was able to get some readings from it and made some charts. I did some other basic kinds of Brain-Computer Interface kinds of things with it along with some other experiments but my interest in the whole thing waned a bit and I think I took the device as far as I wanted to go.

Recently I've been slowly feeling the itch again. I was reading a review for All Lights, Everywhere in the New York Times, documentary about the power of capturing images. It seemed really interesting and I'll try to watch it whenever I have the chance. In the trailer, I noticed that they were using the Emotiv Epoc device to do some kinds of research. Out of curiosity I took a look at their website and saw that the headsets were on sale so I just thought "fuck it" and bought one.

I now have a research quality EEG headset coming to me in the mail. I thought of lots of the things I could look into. I read that they have some citizen science initiatives that you can join if you own a headset along with various suites for different applications such as BCI, neuromarketing, etc. As far as little technical projects go, this might be nice. With a better device I might be able to do more of the things I was interested in doing originally, like little research projects and some Brain/Computer interface things. Who knows when the thing will get here via mail but I'm sure I'm going to write some stuff about it once it arrives.

Speaking of stuff I've been reading, I came across piece in Wired about Trump's new blog, or rather how the whole thing died within a month. I didn't even know he had a blog before reading this thing, which illustrates the main point of the piece: social media is essential to how people find and consume things online. Where in the 90's you were pretty much on your own to find interesting things on the web, now you can lay back and have your social media feed give you all the information you want. The tendrils coming out of Facebook and Twitter slowly feed you the content you consume now, warping (or, in their words, "impressing") your worldview on behalf of anyone who is ready to pay them.

Why is this alright? Why are we all settling with this passive stance online? The internet lets us create pretty much whatever we want, you can make any kind of website you feel like. Of course some websites are going to look like garbage, like this one, but I deeply appreciate that this is MINE, this looks the way I want it to, as cheap and amateurish as it is. I spew my inane drivel on this website whenever I want, not all too worried about getting likes or attention. Even if it's only the bots that read this thing, it's all worth it. The process of creating is more rewarding than the outcome or any possible attention.

Now that summer has started, I've been able to slowly claw my way out of my corona-coma and see some people. I saw one of my dear friends yesterday. It was really nice. We had some waffles fries. My friend mentioned something a colleague had talked about called replika.ai, a chatbot that customizes itself to you. I really liked the idea and it reminded me of a Wired article about a man creating a chatbot to make his dad immortal. The appeal of chatbots has been known since ELIZA in the 1970's. Since reading that Wired article I played with the idea in my mind about creating an immortal chatbot of myself to live on as my legacy. The idea started to unsettle me more and more as I thought about it though. Do I even have an interesting enough personality that people would want to talk to me as a chatbot/ghost years, if not centuries, in the future? What kinds of human qualities would you want to see preserved forever? What would my cyber ghost be like and would anyone want to talk to it?

I should be worrying about leaving a physical legacy like an estate to my family but it just like me to care more about my imaginary chatbot ghost. :D