What have I been up too?
Well, I seem to have broken a personal cycle (discovered in hindsight) that represents major shifts my in life. I often wonder if other people have such repeating cycles that take them in new directions. Mine seems to have been a 13 year cycle, be it marriage, education, a personal interest or hobby, or work related. I recently realized that my obsession with how the human brain works and my project had hit the 14 year mark. Project SAMI is still alive and well, and continues to dominant my life. I had initially planed the book's layout in 2 divisions; Preliminary Considerations and Designs with lots of logical subsections. I have since realized that the book requires an intermediate division to present Preprocessing to segregate incoming stimuli into different kinds of representations for different purposes. This is particularly true for Vision, Audition, and Olfaction which require tracking and combining subsets of signals. The book length presently stands at some 600+ pages and is bound to grow by at least another couple of hundred pages. Over the last year, most of my efforts have been in editing, revising, and documenting a lot of the illustrations. I discovered, while reviewing them, that I had trouble remembering how they worked. So, in essence, I reinvented the wheel and made sure to document them more extensively.
Lately, I seem to be taking a bit of a break from the project. I've been listening to a lot of audio books and work on the project has only been intermittent. I've taken up bookbinding and periodically bound up hard copies when enough changes, modifications, and new material was added. I even bought a new Canon printer that has large capacity refillable ink tanks since 600+ pages with lots of illustrations tend to go through lots of ink and 3rd party inks are far more economical.
