Rambling Mumbling 4

I cannot remember listening to the Emperor Concerto before I watched The Assassination of Richard Nixon. And even then I did not know it was Ludwig Van's; yet, it had a spell on me. Now, while creating lists of favorites from Bach, Mozart, and Ludwig Van; I chanced upon Emperor, I recognized it; I had a feeling of meeting a long-unseen, beloved friend and right away it took a special place in my mind, a place shared only by Bach's air.

Rambling Mumbling 3

On my iPhone, I have Merriam-Webster and Dictionary from Farlex Inc.; both are free apps. I like Merriam-Webster better, because the word-explanation is less cluttered. Rarely I fail to find a word in Merriam-Webster and I need to look it up in Dictionary. I wish I could touch the word on the book-page and see its principal meaning there without needing to pick up and unlock the phone and then search in an app. Yet I would never want to miss the ink-on-paper feeling, the feeling of turning a page with my fingers, the pleasant feeling of weight and girth, the smell on the page, its aging; those vary from book to book, and are still missing in the e-readers.

Rambling Mumbling 2

If you get attached to an opinion too much, you could get hurt. For example, I grouped the important scientific papers on usable authentication into several categories. Then I sorted them chronologically in each category. I thought I would read one category at a time and in chronological order, so that I could specialize on a particular concept (general to that category) while getting to know the temporal order of the developments in that category. But it seems that not all papers require the same level of concentration and quiet. You could become tired and less attentive and it is better to switch to easy papers in a different category for a while, may be until you are having sleep. After you have woken and your mind is fresh again, take up the difficult papers you skipped before.

Words

• A collection of letters of note.
• Zinsser on Friday.
• A list of cliches you might want to avoid
• Few books on writing and reading
• Words worth replacing

Rambling Mumbling

I am awake for twenty hours now, without any pressing reason. For the last couple of days, I had been studying at night and sleeping by day. I discovered that night is quieter than day, so much so that the daybreak makes it very hard for me to concentrate. I am studying research articles on usable authentication. In the beginning it took between two and four hours to read one research paper and I could not finish reading more than two papers between sleeps and the sleeps were lengthy. I thought this would continue and I would not be able to read more than a small fraction of the important papers in the field. Couple of days later I found out that the related works section of the papers were mostly known to me and that there was a pattern in which they organized the papers. Even the experiments, user study, hypothesis test, and security analysis seemed to reveal some patterns. I found majority of the words in the papers do not bring any news to me. I could glean a lot of information only by looking at the pictures, graphs, and tables and just by musing about them by myself. As a result, I can read most papers rather quickly now.

Jargons

• Magnetic card skimming: Here.
• Credit card fraud
• Stuck in London scam

Effective Advices

• While solving a problem, concentrate and work vigorously on it. If stuck, leave it for now. Start working on some other problem. Hopefully the subconscious will succeed in finding a crucial connection or two in the already existing data on your brain and you will experience a eureka  moment. [Poincare]
• The best idea is to have lots of them. [Pauling]
• Never write out all the ideas before going to sleep. Save one or two, so that you have something handy to start with, tomorrow. [Hemingway]
• One moral of this story is that you should always collect more materials than you will use. Every article is strong in proportion to the surplus of details from which you can choose the few that will serve you best - if you don't go on gathering facts forever. At some point you must stop researching and start writing. [Zinsser]
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Mediocre People by Altucher